African-Americans and Immigrants in Muslim America

Tommorrow's NYT has this fascinating piece about the relationship between African-American and immigrant Muslims in the United States, focusing on two particular communities in Harlem and Long Island, respectively. As the story points out, there has traditionally been a fairly large rift between the two segments of American Islamic society, and there is a stark contrast between run-down inner-city mosques populated by African-Americans and well-to-do suburban South Asian/Arab mosque complexes, mirroring a similar divide between Christian churches in those respective areas. But the socio-economic disparity is exarcerbated by a difference in outlook that can be said to go deeper, which are explored in the article. I want to make a couple of quick points in this regard, but I am barely scratching the surface here, given that this is a topic that can be mined for a great deal more.

The article doesn't point out that the early history of the American Muslim community is quite interesting. Islam was first introduced properly to the United States by missionaries of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, who brought a translation of the Holy Qur'an in 1920, and for the first several decades of Islam's existence in America, the vast majority of Muslim Americans were African-American. However, around the same time as the great strides in civil rights in the United States, immmigrant Muslims, from Arab nations, Iran, and in even greater numbers, from South Asia, began arriving. Significant numbers of these immmigrants were able to get ahead in the professional world, and have since made significant contributions, and reaped the rewards thereof. Today, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and Arabs are extremely common in the professional world, especially in the medical and technological communities. (It is worth noting that while the first wave of immigrants were all professionals, later waves have also brought many working-class individuals, and even some professionals ended up working in the blue-collar service sector, which is why if you quiz your NYC cabdriver about his level of education, don't be surprised if he was a doctor back in Pakistan).

Here is where things get complicated. The reason so many immigrants arrived on our shores in the 1970's and onward has to do with the loosening of restrictions on immigration that had been in place for the better part of a century. Originally, those restrictions were imposed as a response to increased Chinese immigration, and in the wake of World War I, a general impulse toward isolationism. The undertones were clearly racist, and it is quite reasonable to draw a connection between the liberalization of immigration policy in the 1960's-1970's and the general background of more enlightened attitudes toward people of non-European origin. In a very real sense, then, the struggles of African Americans for equal rights paved the way for the prosperity of South Asian and Arab immmigrants. However, when one looks at the history of these groups (Muslim as well as non-Muslim), they could hardly be more divergent. South Asians/Arabs have enjoyed tremedous success over the past four decades, whereas black Americans have made progress much more slowly. As a result, the attitude of the respective consituencies toward American society, and especially towards the caucasian elite, are quite different. South Asian and Arab immigrants, accustomed to hardship from their own lands, practice and preach a creed of getting ahead, no matter the obstacles. To them, the response to discrimination is to work harder until the discriminators are left with no choice but to admit that the "brown" man cannot be dismissed. This narrative rejects any notion of victimhood emphatically, warning that considering onself to be a victim is just self-defeating. By contrast, African-Americans in the wake of the civil rights revolution have arguably moved in the opposite direction. The leadership in the African-American community has emphasized the institutional hurdles that have been put in place by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Affirmative action policies have been created in an attempt to overcome those institutional hurdles, to level the playing field so to speak. In recent years, prominent commentators such as John McWhorter have pointed out that a culture of anti-intellectualism and victimization pervades significant portions of the African-American community. McWhorter, and others, point out that African-Americans have in fact made tremendous advances since the 60's, and that racism no longer constitutes a significant institutional hurdle to progress for African-Americans. Of course, many books and articles have been written in response to McWhorter et al. accusing them of neglecting persisting institutional racism. Leaving the merits of this debate aside for now, let's move to 9/11, a watershed in American Muslim history, to say the least.

On one view, all Muslim Americans were finally rendered equal on 9/11. Prior to that, the immigrant Muslims had thought, erroneously, that they had fully assimilated into the caucasian elite. They had become doctors and engineers, moved to Potomac, Long Island, McLean, and Short Hills. Their children attended the same private preparator y academies, and the same elite collegiate insitutions as Johnson, O'Connell, and Goldstein. But now, reality came to haunt them. They were singled out for criticism, profiled at airports, told they were "extremists." Their neighbors were picked up in the middle of the night, their mosques were bugged, their kids were teased at school, their charities raided and shut down. Muslim Americans are still dealing with the reprecussions of 9/11. Some African-Americans, like Imam Talib in the story, think that finally immigrant Muslims have woken up to the reality that there is a caucasian elite in this country, and that no matter how much a Pakistani thinks that he has managed to assimilate, in truth he/she is an outsider. On this view, Muslims can now unite around the calls for fundamental structural reform that have been emanating from pulpits in African-American worship houses (both mosques and churches). What seems like a nightmare to Muslims, namely the erosion of hard-won progress, is seen as a long-overdue wake-up call by others.

Who is right? What does this mean for the future of Muslim Americans? Stay tuned for Part II of this post.