The Washington Times reported a couple of years ago on an annual gathering of Muslims in Chicago:
American blacks and immigrant Muslims are holding separate conventions just three miles apart - underscoring the divide between the two groups that Muslim leaders have been struggling to bridge for years. ... “We’re different culturally and we’re different ethnically and that creates some difficulties in terms of communication and understanding,” said Imam Earl Abdulmalik Mohammed, a national representative of black Muslim leader Imam W. Deen Mohammed of the American Society of Muslims.
Black Americans comprise 30% of the American Muslim population, so it’s not as though their existence can be ignored. Mohammed’s reference to differences of culture and ethnicity is surely the reason for the division, but shouldn’t it also be beside the point? No one would object to the existence of groups where Muslims from similar ethnic and national backgrounds associate together — for example a group of Indonesian Muslims, another of Iranian Muslims, and so forth. This, however, doesn’t justify a failure of all of them to come together as Muslims since it is part of Islam’s basic ideology that all believers are equal.
Divisions among Muslims in America could lead to greater divisions in Islam generally - and that worries many Muslims. What is it about the United States that seems to encourage religious factionism? Perhaps it’s not religion which is dividing people, but class and race:
Immigrant Muslims tend to be wealthier professionals who live and worship in the suburbs, while mosques affiliated with W. Deen Mohammed are mainly urban, serving middle-class or lower-income blacks. Black Muslims, who tend to vote Democrat, said they felt alienated in 2000 when leaders of the immigrant community made their first unified endorsement of a presidential candidate, Republican George W. Bush.
Racism has been another obstacle. Many immigrants arrived in the United States with a warped view of blacks as unsophisticated and even dangerous, and failed to understand the discrimination they faced, leaders for both groups say. “People in the immigrant community just discovered racial profiling,” said Mahdi Bray, a black civil rights activist who is Muslim and works for the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, which was created by immigrants. “For African Americans, we’ve known it for quite a while.”
It sounds as though Islam doesn’t do as much to unite different races and ethnicities as its adherents would like it to. Culture plays a tremendous role in the lives of Muslims, not only dividing and uniting them in various ways but also providing a tremendous (yet unseen) influence on just how Muslims understand, live, and transmit their religion. This shouldn’t be a surprise — consider, for example, just how much influence American culture has on American Christianity. Still, it may not be entirely recognized as true by Muslims themselves.
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