Some Thoughts on African American Muslims and the Black Freedom Struggle

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Mar 3, 2014 United States
[African Americans gather in “Harlem Square,” Seventh Ave and 125th St. in New York, and listen to James Thornhill, organizer of the African Nationals in America Inc. on 13 April 1963. Image via Associated Press] [African Americans gather in “Harlem Square,” Seventh Ave and 125th St. in New York, and listen to James Thornhill, organizer of the African Nationals in America Inc. on 13 April 1963. Image via Associated Press]

Some Thoughts on African American Muslims and the Black Freedom Struggle

By : Aminah B. McCloud

[This article is part of a six-person roundtable entitled “African American Muslims and the Black Freedom Struggle.” Click here for the introduction by Lindsey Stephenson and links to responses by Zareena Grewal, Abbas Barzegar, Mansa Bilal Mark King, Aminah B. McCloud, and Sohail Daulatzai. The initial question posed to the roundtable participants was: African American Muslims have been involved in the black freedom struggle for over a century, however their participation is often overlooked or generalized. How have they engaged with some of the important questions of the movement such as: the extent to which the black freedom struggle was a national or an international one; whether the struggle is ultimately about civil or human rights; and the means by which freedom was to be achieved? Is religion in fact a relevant cleavage within the black freedom struggle? Have African American Muslims represented a unified block? Finally, what African American Muslim experiences contribute to the ongoing debate about civil rights and human rights in the United States and abroad?]

I think that the question needs some reframing. The African American struggle for freedom continues and thus, while the Civil Rights Era is continuously singled out as the only event by which all others are to be measured, it was a movement of limited and sometimes recoil effects. Since this era is definitely not a post-racial society and is one that has regressed, the struggle continues or perhaps has been abandoned. Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Movement was definitely, at its heart, an accommodationist model of social reform. It sought to get whites to accommodate blacks in some social and political arenas – persuade the man who can kill you on a whim to let you eat next to him in a diner. This reeks of a power play, which permits the perpetrator of violence to remain firmly in control and outside of the borders of justice. It also fits nicely into another theme, that of America’s story of self-redemption and self-reform against the odds.

Since the first slave ship left the shores of West Africa, Muslims and others committed suicide in order to not be enslaved. Others found themselves engaged in life long struggles for freedom. Black assistance in back to Africa movements in numbers demonstrated that freedom was thought of as something that could only be found at home in the motherland. Slaves who refused plantation life founded life underground as maroons with the help of those enslaved, preferable with the freedom it conferred. By the 19th century, these strategies were joined by ‘self-help’ stratagems, the most famous of which are the fraternal twin thoughts of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Back to Africa notions continued for over two hundred years and made the history books with the biographies of Marcus Garvey. At the turn of the 20th century, White America dealt deathblows to black self-help programs on large scales with the burning of Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) and Rosewood, Florida (1923). Not yet finished, the idea of self-help whether to be accepted by whites or more reasonably to get a taste of the American Dream, did then and does now command favor in the black community.

African American Muslim leaders such as Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Wali Akram, Daoud Faisal, Nasir Ahmed, all had financial schemes for family and communal savings (banks did not serve blacks) and community co-ops for foods and other goods in their communities to facilitate the notion of self-help. Later in the 20th century, though self-help was not abandoned, it was assisted by protection as the Deacons of Defense and the Black Panther Party added their voices and guns to the picture. As Fannie Lou Hammer famously asserted, ‘you can pray until you faint but if you don’t get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.’

Degrees of participation in and thoughts about the Civil Rights era are divided. Some, of course older, Muslims participated in the Civil Rights Movement in its major venue under Martin Luther King as college students and have since raised their children to believe in the ‘Dream.’ Others joined a Civil Rights Movement offshoot, SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) which under the guidance of Ella Baker was more about getting black people the political rights they were entitled to, such as voting rights. Still others, more international in outlook, saw and continue to see, the oppression and repression of people of color around the world in the socialist sense as an imperialist, capitalist venture. For them the freedom struggle could not and will not achieve any success unless there is an assessment of the academic, economic, social and political contributors around the world. Some others were attracted to various streams of thought mentioned at various times or made a soup of all to suit what they thought they could underwrite. Lastly, many, if not most went about just surviving.

Any struggle must be a reciprocal struggle. Just as this prompt speaks of a black freedom struggle, where is the white struggle to freedom and how has that struggle been framed? Civil Rights leadership has always been, for the benefit of commemoration, male and this is a real problem since some of women are rarely mentioned such as Fannie Lou Hammer, Eslanda Robeson and Ella Baker. Additionally, leaders such as Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael or Charles V. Hamilton are neglected because of the ‘radical’ challenges they presented for change.

African American Muslims thought that they could both embrace change and make that change a model for communities. Various quietist influences from the Muslim world caused a veritable silence from those whose voices had been loud and clear. Prior to these influences, Muslims who were activists were activists who were Muslim. Blackness was the controlling factor. Being religious, as Muslims did not carry an ethical weight beyond what they could not participate in such as parties or conferences with alcohol, drugs or pork products as entrees. At the same time, some Muslims continued with food programs, teaching literacy and about surveillance issues but found their co-religionists disdainful and they then largely disconnected with the black community for a while. I think many have recently reconnected with their activist roots as they engage on an international level in human rights forums.

Most African American Muslims have found their co-religionist focused on the trappings of class and improving their status by whatever means with ethnic intensives on their ‘homelands’. The issues of civil rights in the Muslim community are limited to discriminations mainly of immigrant Muslims under the umbrella of Islamophobia, not the concerns of civil rights for Americans of color. This is definitely a result of the onslaught against immigrant Muslims and their children. All immigrant groups have had to ‘seat themselves’ in this society first before they can really take on societal issues beyond those that are centered on them. African Americans had hoped to find a ‘color-blind’ Muslim community acting as a model for the whole society regarding issues of race and class.

Needless to say, the Civil Rights Movement just like the anti-apartheid movements have become over-arching symbols for strategies and rhetoric for many social and political movements across the world. Putting women and children in front of white police with dogs is captivating as is nonviolence in the face of brutal unrelenting violence. As one scholar put it, ‘tell them it does not work. They have to hate you, in order to exist.’

Rejoinder

These responses to questions asked are quite insightful and indeed provocative. There has always been the question of why Martin and not Malcolm as representative of black leadership. One answer is clearly in resources. Malcolm had few to none. Most Muslims as we know did not want any association with him and quite a few hold that position today.

I continue to be perplexed by the concept of ‘radical’ as a description applied to black leaders who recognize their humanity and act on it. Perhaps that is radical in America! But not in Malcolm’s and many other’s lives. We have not discussed his spiritual understandings as a framework for his activism. Perhaps the various lenses used in these responses will change the way Malcolm is viewed in his annual appearance.

Malcolm’s legacy has only been superficially researched. Most young people know the name but are not sure what he did while they can recite the many achievements of Martin because it is taught and memorialized in video. The number of texts around the theme of protest in Malcolm’s life continues to grow.

I love the placement of the black freedom struggles, on the global stage with other Islamic political (and spiritual) movements and within the framework of an alternative universal humanism. This is where it should be rather than limited to just black protest with radicalism as its main feature.
 

[This article is part of a six-person roundtable entitled “African American Muslims and the Black Freedom Struggle.” Click here for the introduction by Lindsey Stephenson and links to responses by Zareena Grewal,Abbas Barzegar, Mansa Bilal Mark King, Aminah B. McCloud, and Sohail Daulatzai.]
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]