Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection

Jackson notes that no one has offered a convincing explanation of why Islam spread among Blackamericans a coinage he explains and defends but not among white Americans or Hispanics. The assumption has been that there is an African connection. In fact, Jackson shows, none of the distinctive features of African Islam appear in the proto-Islamic, black nationalist movements of the early 20th century. Instead, he argues, Islam owes its momentum to the distinctively American phenomenon of "Black Religion," a God-centered holy protest against anti-black racism. Islam in Black America begins as part of a communal search for tools with which to combat racism and redefine American blackness.

The repeal of the National Origins Quota System led to a massive influx of foreign Muslims, who soon greatly outnumbered the blacks whom they found here practicing an indigenous form of Islam. Immigrant Muslims would come to exercise a virtual monopoly over the definition of a properly constituted Islamic life in America.

Islam and the Blackamerican

For these Muslims, the nemesis was not white supremacy, but "the West. American blacks soon learned that opposition to the West and opposition to white supremacy were not synonymous. Indeed, says Jackson, one cannot be anti-Western without also being on some level anti-Blackamerican. Like the Black Christians of an earlier era struggling to find their voice in the context of Western Christianity, Black Muslims now began to strive to find their black, American voice in the context of the super-tradition of historical Islam.

Jackson argues that Muslim tradition itself contains the resources to reconcile blackness, American-ness, and adherence to Islam.

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Jun 05, Hafsa rated it really liked it Shelves: I loved this book. Jackson is really brillianthis writing style is very academic but the subject matter is really interesting so it's not too bad. He talks about Islam and the Blackamerican communitytouching on topics like Black religion, spirituality, and relations with the immigrant community. He says that the proto-Islamic movements earlier in the century such as Nation of Islam , "authenticated" Islam for the Blackamerican context in Americathus, playing a role for allowing for the I loved this book. He says that the proto-Islamic movements earlier in the century such as Nation of Islam , "authenticated" Islam for the Blackamerican context in Americathus, playing a role for allowing for the gradual adoption of orthodox Sunni Islam.

In this way, Islam was considered acceptable to Black religion, in ways that Christianity perhaps never wasesp. This book touched upon so muchrace, spirituality, history, etc, but it was definitely missing something I wish he would have also addressedthe issue of gender. Being Black and Muslim and female introduces a whole new set of issues that would have further improved his book. Apr 01, Abood rated it really liked it.

Sep 22, Barnaby Thieme rated it really liked it Shelves: Sherman Jackson's provocative and fascinating book offers a historical and critical engagement with Blackamerican Islam, to use his preferred term. As a reader who is neither black nor Muslim, I can say that I learned a great deal, and in many ways I found this to be an extremely valuable model for the study of the expression of religious ideas in new cultural idioms. In that sense, at least, it should be of deep interest to the comparativist. He begins by tracing the rise of Islam among blacks Sherman Jackson's provocative and fascinating book offers a historical and critical engagement with Blackamerican Islam, to use his preferred term.

He begins by tracing the rise of Islam among blacks in urban North America in the formative days of the Nation of Islam in the early 20th century. In that idiom, exotic concept of Islam was essentially used by Blackamericans as a structure for clearing space to conceive and express unique religious needs and beliefs. Because there were nearly no actual Muslims in the US, Islam was a free space for the imagination, where anything could be said without fear of contradiction.

Many of the early views of Nation of Islam were concurrently bizarre, and, to my sensibility, archaic, such as the belief that white people were essentially created by an evil black scientist. An interesting problem occurred with the influx of millions of "immigrant Mulsims" later in the 20th century, who were often shocked at how Islam was characterized by Black Muslims in the US, and set about rectifying the religious understanding of the indigenous tradition that been in place for several decades.

In this time, far more attention has been given by Blackamericans to the Qu'ran, the study of Arabic, and indigenous laws and texts deriving from the traditional heartland of Muslim belief.

Today, the majority of Blackamericans are Sunni. This process of assimilation and accommodation led to an interesting conflict, because, on the one hand, the Nation of Islam did indeed generate a number of religious ideas that were distinctly un-Islamic. On the other hand, the religious structures that were expressed were in many ways unique expressions of the spiritual needs of Blackamericans and constituted a part of a larger phenomenon that Jackson refers to as "Black Religion" in the United States - a general religious paradigm that is opposed on all levels to white supremacy and its destructive effects.

The solution that Jackson advocates in this rather partisan book is that the fundamental tools and beliefs of traditional Islam should be "appropriated" to serve the spiritual and social needs and Blackamericans, without uncritically accepting all that it has to offer. For traditional Islam is often represented by its immigrant advocates as dialectically opposed to the culture of Europe and America, which may be conceived by conservative scholars such as Sayid Qutb as a form of "Jahiliyyah," a polemical term describing the state of depraved ignorance that characterized pagan Arabia in pre-Muslim times.

Blackamericans cannot accept this critique of their own culture for a number of reasons, not least of which being that it entails a rejection of the unique cultural heritage and legacy and has been built at great cost, and with great reward, by millions of Blackamericans over the long centuries. Nor is traditional Islam particularly well-suited to address the social and psychological need for emancipation from white supremacy - not because it is incompatible with this imperative indeed, Jackson argues that a proper understanding of Islam demands confronting white supremacy , but because the problem of white supremacy has simply not been formative for Middle Eastern, Asian, and African forms of Islam with the same effect.

Jackson persuasively rejects what he terms the "false universals" of immigrant Islam - the belief that contemporary forms of religious life that are affirmed, say, in Saudi Arabia, are the "right ones," and are the valid forms of Islam for all times and all places. I fully agree that the tendency to project one's own conclusions and sympathies as if they had no history is an extremely pernicious and destructive belief. Jackson takes contemporary Islam to task for its tendency to espouse a false universalism that is tied to a mythologized sense of history and self-serving political ideology, and argues at length that Islam has always expressed its fundamentals in terms of the specific circumstances of each historical time and place.

I agree with that, but I do not think Jackson is particularly consistent on this point. One of my chief criticisms of this book is that I found his critique of universals to be underdeveloped, and I think his application of this critique was selective and incoherent. For this book, as I mentioned, is a strongly partisan work, arguing for a particular vision of history and Islam, and where Jackson uses his critique of universals to assail the positions of others, his own conclusions are frequently presented as normative and binding, without any qualification.

One must be self-critical to at least the degree one is critical of other beliefs and views, and here I think Jackson is at his weakest. He has a tendency toward what I experience as a kind of covert authoritarianism. In my opinion, Jackson is also a somewhat stronger social critic than philosopher or theologian, and a bit at sea when he engages in philosophical critique.

The final pages of the book are dedicated to his vision of Islam, founded on a conception of Allah as completely transcendent, in the sense that God is in no way defined by any external fact or relationship, but is entirely self-constitutive. Man, on the other hand, is a creature of contingency, and our religious duty is to discover and obey the law of God.

Islam and the Blackamerican : looking toward the third resurrection

I don't find that strong dualistic stance persuasive or useful, and I don't think he really gets nondualism. His response to the self-abandonment taught by Sufism, practices that William Chittick strikingly rendered as "naughting the self," is to argue, in essence, that because the ego of Blackamericans have been so battered by social abuse, they need to strengthen the self, not weaken it. This argument rests on a very deep misunderstanding of what self-abnegation means in most apophatic traditions, including Sufism.

Surrender of the self doesn't mean you break the ladder apart with an ax, it means that you climb the ladder and then let go of it. In the final pages of the book, on the one hand we're warned against the tendency by humans to impute their own provisional desires to the will of the creator, and to turn religion into a self-serving farce. Perhaps two pages later, he writes that Blackamerican Muslims must "not be afraid to ignore what they deem to be irrelevant or harmful and add what they deem to be useful or necessary.

Finally, I found Jackson's gender politics off-putting. It is my belief that the function of social criticism, such as Jackson engages in here, is to serve the self-emancipation of communities by thought. Apparently in Jackson's conception, it is to serve the self-emancipation of men.

Women occupy precisely zero of his attention, other than a baffling and somewhat offputing statement in the introduction that amounts, as far as I can follow it, as a statement that treating the "gendered" aspect of Islam is tantamount to acceding to the "soft" and "feminized" destabilization of traditional gender binaries that have "weakened" Black Christianity. This view gives me significant pause.

Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection by Sherman A. Jackson

If the form by which white supremacy is expressed is to render blacks as "other," "lesser," and "not fully human," the form by which male supremacy is expressed is to keep silent with respect to women, and to affirm the unspoken premise that when we're talking about history, we're talking about male history. With his obvious courage, intellect, and experience, Jackson should know better than to play into it. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal of value from this book, and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in either Blackamerican history, or Muslim history, or both, with the aforementioned caveats kept in mind.

View all 3 comments. Aug 16, Sameer rated it really liked it. Focuses on how the 'new' Muslim integrates himself in current American culture.

The focus is on African American, but highlights immigrant muslims and the concept for white flight. Apr 09, Lumumba Shakur rated it it was amazing Shelves: This has to be hands down one of the best and most insightful books that I have read in the past ten years. It is a must-read for every Muslim living in the United States, as he has something to say to each member of our vast community. Though some will not agree with everything he has to say including myself , he nonetheless needs to be heard.

Just for his poignant critique of what he terms "Black Orientalism" alone, this book deserves to be on the shelf of every "Black Studies" section in eve This has to be hands down one of the best and most insightful books that I have read in the past ten years.

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Just for his poignant critique of what he terms "Black Orientalism" alone, this book deserves to be on the shelf of every "Black Studies" section in every university library and Barnes and Nobles. Please enter recipient e-mail address es. The E-mail Address es you entered is are not in a valid format. Please re-enter recipient e-mail address es. You may send this item to up to five recipients. The name field is required. Please enter your name. The E-mail message field is required. Please enter the message.

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Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item. Islam and the Blackamerican: Sherman A Jackson Publisher: Oxford ; New York: English View all editions and formats Summary: Thus far, no one has offered a convincing answer to this question. The assumption has been that there is an African connection, but the historical record does not bear this out.

In Islam and the Blackamerican, Sherman Jackson offers a trenchant examination of the career of Islam among Blackamericans.

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