BLACK MUSLIM MOVEMENT

Black Muslim Movement

Contents

INTRODUCTION3

BELIEFS AND PRACTICES6

MUSLIMS IN AMERICA--IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES13

AFRICAN-AMERICAN ISLAM21

CONCLUSION22

REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY/WORKS CITED24

Black Muslim Movement

Introduction

The 1990s may be the last ten years in which Islam is examined as a "non-mainstream" religious tradition in America. At its present rate of development, by the year 2015 Islam will be the second biggest religion in the United States, following Christianity. There are roughly four million Muslims in the United States and 650 mosques. Foreign-born Muslims and their descendants constitute about two thirds of those numbers; indigenous Americans (born in America), mostly African Americans, constitute the other third.

Islam is currently the world's second biggest religion, with 900 million members--about one sixth of the world's population--living in geographic districts that encompass, but continue far after, the Middle East. Islam is either the foremost religion or has large populations in such varied cultural environments as Africa, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the previous Soviet Union, Turkey, India and Pakistan, northwestern China and Europe.

Yet there is amazingly little perception or comprehending of Islam in the American consciousness. What Americans manage believe about Islam tends to be formed by newspapers pictures, expressly by the occurrence of one-sided contradictory imagery on the one hand ("Arab terrorists," "Islamic fundamentalists"), and by the nonattendance of affirmative, or even neutral pictures on the other. American Muslims often express frustration over a position that appears to be the last bastion of endured stereotyping. Clearly, the poor relationship between Islam and the "Christian West" has its origins in the confrontational and comparable history which Christianity and Islam have distributed since Islam originated as a religious and political challenge to Christianity in the seventh century.

The origins of confrontation furthermore lie in the remembered history of the Crusades, in the relationship established throughout the colonial and the post-colonial periods (including the decrease of Palestinian lands to Israel) and, now, in the intensified rhetoric and mistrust conceived by Muslims and "Westerners" alike, who would present Islam and "secular democracy" as polar opposites. Ideologues on both edges would like to present a likeness of a monolithic "Islam" with a unified agenda and clear leaders.

The truth is that the position of Islam worldwide and in the United States, in specific, is exceedingly convoluted and shifting. Islam evolved its types of orthodoxy in the early history of the community. There were, of course, distinct interpretations of rudimentary values drawn from sacred scripture which directed to several contending discourses in Islam (theological, juridical, philosophical, mystical, popular, political) as well as differing "styles" of Islam counting on the cultural milieu into which Islam was introduced. This convoluted truth is furthermore the "process" of Islam in America. There have currently been several phases in the development of an "American" Islam as well as several distinct assemblies and methods that constitute the Muslims of America.

There are three foremost constituents of Islam in America: immigrants, who convey Islam from their homelands; African-American converts to Islam; and the Sufi assemblies, the "spiritual confraternities" of Islam. This section will insert the book reader first to the central tenets of ...