Enslaved African Muslims to America: the untold story
My thought-provoking podcast conversation with Hakeem Muhammad on enslaved African Muslims to America revealed some unsettling truths.
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This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first British ship carrying enslaved African’s to America. The vast majority of whom had lived free lives until their world collided with the cruelty and profiteering of Europeans that believed black Africans represented a sub-human species, that were placed on the earth as chattel. This system of slavery lasted until the 19th century after having displaced some 10 million people.
In history lessons, in America and Europe, slavery in recent years has entered the curriculum in an era of liberal contrition. However, my guest this week argues that an orientalist narrative is often forwarded, depicting African’s as backwards and devoid of culture. At the heart of this ‘black orientalism’ is the notion that these slaves did not come from a culture rooted in civilisation and importantly there is a scant attention given to the fact that many of these Africans came from Islamic communities and were devout Muslims.
My guest this week is Hakeem Muhammad, he argues that narratives about the slave trade barely mention the Muslim origin of many African’s that were enslaved, their courageous attempts to remain Muslim despite severe repression and indeed the role Islam played as a basis of defiance and the driver behind many of the slave rebellions on plantations. Hakeem charts the role of Christianity in legitimising slavery but also how forcible conversions were used to pacify slaves. For Hakeem, the advent of liberalism did little to reverse this racialised world view, he suggests early liberal philosophers like Locke and Kant were proponents of slavery and talked openly about subjugating African’s in pursuit of economic gain. Controversially, he argues liberalism remains interlinked with the notion of ‘white supremacy’ and as such can never resolve the structural racism inherent in American and European society.
I must say I found many of his assertions though-provoking and probed him on his view that white supremacy remains a dominant feature of modern liberal democracies. In my view what is clear is that liberalism may profess to be an ideology that looks to create an egalitarian society, in reality, it has never managed to remove racialism as a way of thinking and indeed even progressive liberals all too often replace racial hierarchies with cultural ones, professing on the one hand equality but reducing foreign cultures and religions as inferior. This is pronounced in the way liberals continue to see Islam as backwards and the only ‘good Muslim’ are those that justify Islamic practice through the prism of liberalism.
Hakeem Muhammad is from the Southside of Chicago and is the founder and president of the Black Dawah Network. He has lectured and taught in the areas of Black Political Thought and Critical Race Theory at Berkeley and Harvard University. He has a bachelor’s in political science and is currently a law student at Northeastern University School of Law, where he is a public interest scholar. Hakeem has worked as a student attorney in the areas of Prisoner’s Rights and Criminal Defense of indigent clients. He was selected for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers fellowship that pairs students to work under top criminal defense practitioners in the country.
We also discuss his thoughts on afro-centrism, his views on the Black Lives Matter movement, the role Malcolm X plays in his outreach and I ask him about a recent debate doing the rounds on Muslim Twitter on Critical Race Theory.
