People are different and the Earth is not flat

When’s the last time you have visited a masjid mostly attended by African American doctors and engineers? 

According to a survey by CAIR, African Americans make up about 14% of the North American Muslim population. Accepting these numbers as true (I have no reason to disbelieve them) do African Americans represent a 14% proportion of the business owners, doctors, engineers and other professionals in the Muslim community? Have any of you ever wondered why we, relative to the numbers, see so few of the African Americans owning the halal meat markets, clothing stores and restaurants? Why are so few African American Muslims in professional fields?  (Outside of W Deen Mohammed’s community that is)

Even some non-Muslims have begun to take note of the massive have/have-not gap between the Immigrants and the African American Muslims.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ report called “America’s Other Muslims” by Boston
College political science professor Peter Skerry said:

“Relations between African-American and immigrant Muslims are strained at worst, wary at best,” he wrote. “Aside from differences of language, culture and national origin, tensions have long been fueled by class disparities. Immigrant Muslims tend to be university-educated and comfortably situated. . . . African-American Muslims are likely to be neither.”

As much as the cultural differences are often stressed by many, I think that this educational divide could the one that makes the most tangible difference. 

Much of this educational divide has to do with the fact that many of those from the immigrant Muslim population, especially those from South East Asia, are chosen to come to America specifically because of their brains. Hence a large number of them proportionately will be higher educated, make a lot more money and be able to contribute much more financially to the development of Islamic Centers, Islamic Schools and other Islamic infrastructure. 

Although this is right in front of our eyes, we hardly ever think or ponder as to why this is the case and where this may lead to. Ignoring how social class characteristics in a stratified community like ours may actually influence the future generations as well, and could potentially lead to a permanent underclass of African American Muslims. Particularly those outside of W Deen Mohammed’s community, whose community tends to do much better than other African American Muslim communities in education and economics. So much of what I write here does not apply to them. 

While it may be true that things such as skin color or social class don’t completely impede things like academic achievement, the collection of characteristics that define social class differences can and do influence the level of that achievement. 

For example, parents of different social classes often have different styles of childbearing, different ways of discipline and even different ways of reading to their children. Obviously these differences aren’t consistent or in every single family, but they influence the average tendencies of families from different social classes. And this is no different with the Muslims. 

In other words, if an upper class family has a job where they are expected to collaborate with fellow employees, come up with new solutions to new problems, or wonder how to improve their contributions, they are more likely to talk to their children in ways that differ from the ways of the lower class parents whose jobs simply require them to follow instructions.  

So children that are raised by parents who are both professionals, and/or business owners will, on average, have more inquisitive attitudes toward any material presented by their teachers at school than the children of working class parents.  

As a result of this, the academic achievement of the working class children will, on average, be less than that of middle and upper class children. Then combine that, in the context of African American Muslim children, with the fact that many have poorer health care, and a host of other problems we have already discussed that are all likely to have a palpable effect on them, and when all factors are combined, the differences become huge. 

So what does all this mean? It basically means that the children of two Pakistani doctors (for example) are more likely to enter a professional field than the average African American Muslim child, who (culturally) will only be expected to maybe graduate high school.  

Then the question becomes…once class is thrown out, why do immigrant children of similar social class consistently out-perform the African Americans in general, much less the Muslim children?  

This is where culture comes in. Many of the immigrant groups have a long history of being a tight knit family unit with a culture of achievement, while the African American community has no family unit and a culture of underachievement. That is why we must recognize that these traits are being brought into Islam by the African Americans and take steps to change this trend. 

But can culture be changed that easily? What about when the cultures clash?

Should we accept that a certain group of people are going to be more enterprising than others?  

A program may fail, not because it is inherently flawed, but because allowances aren’t made for how much people vary. We must frame our programs so that they are based on a realistic appraisal of the responses they will get from people who think differently and come from different social classes, cultures and have different histories.

The condition of a people must be taken into account when we develop our programs. That goes for African American Muslims and any other group and this has been the history of Islam in different countries…except here in America. We cannot continue to import Cairo, Riyadh or Karachi and superimpose it upon people who grew up here and have their own history, their own problems and their own experiences. 

The dour and aloof “flat earth” approach that many African American Muslim groups have adopted, as alluded to in the Woodrow Wilson report, has been a disastrous failure. Instead of focusing on things that an African American convert would need to hear and that would lead to lasting and long term changes in their life, this approach focused on things that made their condition in many cases worse or made no improvement at all.

It is not an accident that the more dour and aloof movements tend to draw more ex-convicts and very few college educated professionals. Even when a person does happen to come along who is in college, he is quickly advised to quit, because they are resolutely against higher secular education. Hence is it no surprise that a high number of those in these movements are unemployed/barely employed and/or even on welfare. 

Unfortunately, few of them have the vision to see that this methodology has inhibited them, and by extension (whether they recognize it or not) the African American Muslim community as a whole.  

So, sadly, we hear stories about how those in these movements notoriously burn out very quickly (some even leave Islam) because these movements have no long term value for a complete Islamic way of life in terms of family and community building. 

In other words, while a level of asceticism (for example) is from Islam, it is probably a better idea to preach the virtues of it to people who are inclined to be work-a-holics and not to stress it to people that are chronic underachievers and who, more importantly, need to hear Islam’s message of hard work and perfecting a thing one is working on. 

The good news is that it seems that, alhamdulillah, more and more African American Muslims are seeing now that the “flat earth” approach has failed and are reaching out and getting to know their neighbors, reconnecting with their non-Muslim family members and becoming involved in other social and civic activities in the larger Muslim community and the community at large.  

Dr. Sherman Jackson in an article said regarding this subject: 

From the outset, the enterprise of Muslim self-definition is complicated by the fact of the heterogeneous make-up of the Muslim community in America. American-born converts (the majority of whom are African-Americans) are a product of American history, as are their hopes, fears, fantasies and proper ambition. They are both repelled by the American experience, by virtue of their history as a marginalized minority, and attracted to it, by the virtue of their connection to a uniquely rich Afro-American historical and cultural tradition. Their search for a boa fide Muslim identity is still in its exploratory stage. To this point, however, the record of successive turns and turnabouts has proved one thing if nothing else: Whatever this Afro-American-Muslim identity turns out to be as a final product, if it is to be life-affirming as opposed to a paralyzing agent, it will have to embrace, however discriminately, rather than ignore the reality and history of African-Americans, just as effectively as it fortifies for them the boundaries between Islam and non-Islam.

Until we start to recognize and become realistic about these problems, the anger, the hurt and animosities will continue to grow. And the African American Muslims will continue to suffer the most.