By Anthony Hardy

Photo: Lisa Ouellette

“My father always complains about how Islam has broad acceptance in the African-American community but not in the White American one,” said a Pakistani friend of mine as he handed me a cup of chai. “He doesn’t like how many African-American brothers come to Islam through the prisons and stuff like that. He wished more middle class White Americans were Muslims. He disdains Islam being associate with the lower class in this country.”

I shouted, “Wait? What? Is he serious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Hasn’t he read the seerah [biography of the Prophet]? Hasn’t he read the Qur’ān? The people most receptive to the message are the exploited and downtrodden. That’s how it usually works. In America, that means Blacks, Latinos, and women!”

✻✻✻

“It must be nice,” I told a White Muslimah friend of mine, “to have people approach you for marriage so frequently in the masjid. I mean, your beauty is a constantly being reinforced, unlike Black beauty. I’m sure it helps with your self-esteem.”

“Yeah, it was nice,” she admitted.

“Was? What do you mean by was?

“Well, it was nice…until I realized why they were asking me. The aunties and Arabs were only approaching me because I was White and because they wanted lily-white children. Once I figured that out, I just stopped entertaining their request. That’s one reason why I stopped going to the masjid altogether. I didn’t want to be put on a pedestal.”

✻✻✻

While shopping for naan and daal in an Indian store with some Pakistani friends, I happened to browse the cosmetic section. I found a package of “Fair & Lovely: MAX Fairness for Men.” I had heard about this cream from my Indian and Pakistani friends, but I didn’t know it was sold in America or even that it could be sold here.

I read the label:

“…fight [the] darkening of your skin due to your active lifestyle.”

I laughed aloud. No amount of cream was going to lighten my melanin-enriched skin. My friends joined in my laughter when they saw what I had found. Afterwards I put it back on the shelf.

My laughing spell continued in the car ride home. One of my friends asked me, “What’s so funny man?”

I answered, “Because it’s all so darkly comical: White people here destroy their bodies to look like Brown people and Brown people there destroy their bodies to look like White people. Everyone wants to be something other than what Allāh has made them, and they all make themselves sick in the process.”

✻✻✻

A wise Muslim woman, who happened to be a White convert, once told me that my skin color, despite the hardships attached to it, is actually a blessing in disguise: she described it as a filter which would sift through those individuals who are not serious about their commitment to higher religious or moral principles, whereas she and her family, all of whom are White, will always have to worry about people dissembling their commitment to those principles for her and her family’s Whiteness. She said my dark skin was a test for them, one many of whom are failing miserably.

✻✻✻

“So an auntie was trying to find a wife for me,” a Latino Muslim friend of mine told me, “but when they saw my pictures, they said I looked ‘too Mexican.”

I laughed a little on the outside—died a little on the inside. He is handsome in his own right, a Mexican man with German heritage. The German traits dominate his physical appearance.

I replied, “Just exactly how are you suppose to look?”

“I don’t know bro. ‘Too Mexican’? What does that even mean?”

“It means you’re the right skin color – White or White-looking in your case – but you come from the wrong culture.”

He nodded. “That’s Jahiliyya [ignorance] man.”

I continued, “I know. But cheer up. You’re better off than me: at least you’re on the right side of the color line. I’m both the wrong skin color, and I come from the wrong culture.”

✻✻✻

Midway into my nine-year tenure as a Muslim, I returned to my hometown to visit the religious community of my upbringing. Standing there in the middle of a giant cathedral, gazing at the beautiful stained glass renditions of New Testament scenes, I began to reflect on my experiences as a Black Muslim convert in America. The Muslims I had chanced upon who hailed from abroad or whose parents hailed from abroad were in fact beneficiaries both of the injustices perpetrated against Blacks and of the “universal” franchise that resulted from the struggles against those selfsame injustices; and yet, this stark reality was seldom if ever brought to the fore at conferences, masjids, Muslim Student Associations, or Islamic centers, or what have you: rather, what I saw and heard was a community by and large preoccupied with the preservation of culture – some of which contain elements of anti-Black or anti-dark-skin bias – or obsessed with producing fair-skinned progeny or enamored with prospects of making Islam more palpable to the palates of the White middle class in America – itself a byproduct of anti-Black racism – while at the same time both relegating and denigrating the very community so instrumental in their success and indeed their very existence in America in the first instance.

To employ sacred history, by way of metaphor: the Muhajir (Immigrant), when he arrived in Medina, kicked sand into the eyes of the Ansari (Helper) man; and when the Ansari was doubled over in pain, trying to remove the sand from his eyes, the Muhajir climbed on his back, to elevate himself to a higher plane and then proceeded to disparage him for his state.

This monumental incongruity made me realize many self-proclaimed and perhaps well-intentioned Muslims do in fact worship multiple gods, and one of the modern deities that has caused many others, including myself, so much difficulty within large segments of the Muslim community and around the world happens to be – for lack of a better word – a White god or a god of Whiteness whereby the standards, sensibilities, sensitivities, and suspicions of certain classes of people become not just normalized but something for which to appease and sacrifice. The only difference I could gather that day is that whereas other communities tended to be more open, honest, and straightforward in their personifications and anthropomorphizations of this god, the Prophetic directives in Sunni Islam not to depict God or His Prophets and even the racial, ethnic, and tribal egalitarianism promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) tended to obscure the historic and contemporary reality of bias against darker bodies and of predilection for fairer ones.

By my estimation, many Muslims are racially agnostic at best: the tragic irony in this racial agnosticism or the unwillingness to deal with the issue is that it perpetuates and exacerbates racism within the community, creating a staggering dissonance of nonsensical proportions. Moreover, the inability to discuss the issue effectively means it does not exist and raises it beyond critique. One can quote the Prophet ﷺ and say “No White man is better than a Black man” or recite the popular platitude “There is no racism in Islam” or appeal to the racially progressive nature of the Prophet’s career or even name his children after prominent Black Companions of the Prophet and yet be rubbing “Fair and Lovely” on her skin to “beautify herself” or requesting “fair” women for marriage in public matrimonial advertisements or telling their children to “avoid too much exposure to the sun lest you become dark and therefore unattractive” or assert something seemingly innocuous as “Blacks are scary” or Black converts are “a dime a dozen.” Very few would be the wiser.

The irony of this glaring dissonance reminded me of Al-Lāt, Al-‘Uzza, and Manat, the mighty triumvirate of the pagan Arabian pantheon, and how the capricious conclusions drawn from idolatry and polytheism are often illogical, inconsistent, and, to be blunt, asinine. Our sacred history informs us the Prophet ﷺ had these stone effigies smashed to smithereens after the conquest of Mecca. I contend, however, these idols were never really destroyed; they merely took more imperceptible, incorporeal forms: instead of sacrificing for a god or goddess fashioned from stone, wood, or date pit, now sacrifices made for modern deities are intended to placate false, arbitrary ideals of what it means to be beautiful, intelligent, pure, civilized, rich, honorable, valuable, successful, wise, and – most of important of all – human; instead of sacrificing for and finding nobility within the aegis of an inviolable set of transcendent principles dictated by Allāh, subhanahu wa ta`ala (exalted is He), Himself and His Prophets, modern Muslims are content to destroy their bodies, their communities, their families, their children, their religion, and maybe even the integrity of their hearts and souls to achieve an empty, ephemeral sense of honor and worth.

“So have you considered al-Lat and al-‘Uzza? And Manat, the third – the other one?” (Qur’ān, 53:19-20)

“Those who take disbelievers as allies instead of the believers. Do they seek with them honor [through power]? But indeed, honor belongs to Allah entirely.” (Qur’ān, 4:139)

Yes Allāh, honor it is they seek in something other than You. I finally understood my mother’s fear of “becoming White”: shirk à la modernity.

✻✻✻

These words are not written with sorrow. I’ve shed far too many tears already for this community, enough to fill a suburban pool thrice over.

Nor are these words are not written with anguish. I’ve spent the better part of my tenure as a Muslim being angry to the point where I resided in such deep and dark nadirs that I existed in a state of oblivion regarding the blessings of my Lord.

Nor are these words written with pain. I’ve become desensitized in many respects to my own pain out of psychological necessity.

Nor are these the words of another Black convert to Islam who has faced insurmountable difficulties within the community for petty, superficial reasons. The Internet is inundated with such tales. Communities are filled with them as well. I therefore see absolutely no need to contribute to this sphere. If Muslims were so inclined to our struggles, they could sadly find those stories with minimal effort. Besides, imitation is the highest form of flattery: if the sacrifices and privations of converts were as inspiring as the community would have us believe then I would expect to see many others attempting to follow in our paths and make the sacrifices we are willing to make for the sake of the faith. Unfortunately, I don’t find this to be the case.

These are the ruminations of a detached wayfarer, one without a home who is just passing through trying to reach his destination: it’s far better not to have a home if having one means residing in the septic tank. The usage of this metaphor is, for me, quite literal, since, as I mentioned, in the wake of Jim Crow and the White Flight, the powers that be in my hometown decided to erect a sewage and water treatment in the Black neighborhood where God Himself chose to place me. This depiction is all too familiar for what awaits many converts after they declare shahadah (the testimony of faith), especially if they happen to be Black, even more so if they happen to be Black women. The way I see it, my ancestors had to endure this relegation for fear of violent reprisal. I, however, do not have to nor will I, especially at the hands of Muslims whose hues are often just as brown, if not darker, as mine own flesh and who are just as much victims of the same oppressive discrimination and just as susceptible to the caustic regimes of thought as I am.

These are the words of a young Muslim man who sincerely suspects many of his fellow co-religionists may be guilty of committing the worst sin in Islam, the only unforgivable one. And what’s worse: they may not even be aware of it.

These are the words of a soul attempting to cut the world asunder and peer at its core in an attempt to see what has gone awry.

I don’t expect my words will be heeded or taken seriously. I find many Muslims lack the sagacity and internal fortitude needed to rise to the occasion and confront the issues plaguing this community, whether it’s racism, colorism, tribalism, sexism or whatever the case may be. And if they are received, I doubt they will be received kindly. In “post-racial, colorblind” America, no one wants to have honest dialogue about race, including many Muslims, who are just as hypersensitive about color privilege and predilection in their own communities as many Whites are about White privilege in America. And even if they are received kindly, I seldom doubt the presence of the necessary courage needed to induce substantive change exists. Muslims excel at paying lip service and empty rhetoric; when it comes to walking-the-walk I find them languid.

Still, the inevitable pushback notwithstanding, I write these words in the spirit of the Prophet who informed us that religion is sound advice and who said that to change something with the tongue or words is the second tier of iman (faith). I am locked into this second tier because what afflicts Muslims and indeed much of the world cannot be changed with actions, the first tier, as the malaise is lodged both in the mind and the heart; and not even the Prophet ﷺ, best example of creation, could modify the hearts of his contemporaries.

I therefore would like to say this to my fellow Muslims who may chance upon what I’ve written here: it is our duty before our Lord to challenge idols of our times with due diligence and vigilance, whatever they may be, wherever they may be. The Prophet’s destruction of the idols in the Ka’bāh is symbolic to what we should be doing for the rest of our lives, for the remainder of time itself. The idolatry of olden times is far too crass to exist within the Muslim community today. Ancient, physical idols have been supplanted with ideological ones; the effects upon society, however, remain the same.

To be clear, what I’m writing about has little to do with White or fair skinned people per se: if anything, the false ideals to which I’m referring have the capacity to be just as damaging to White and fairer-skinned people. I’m sure my words will vibe with those people. I’m talking about a pernicious constellation of ideas that goes unchallenged because of cowardice, because of ignorance, and because of a degree of buy-in on the part of many people, Muslims especially.

I present this to the community with the hopes to commencing serious, heart-felt conversations about what ails us. I realize the gravity of my claims and I do not take them lightly. It is my solemn prayer that those who read this won’t take them lightly either.

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren’t you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two —

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

— Langston Hughes, “Tired”

Photo: Anshu

Reflections of a Black Convert: Part I – A House in the World | Part II | Part III

By Anthony Hardy

“Remember – no matter what you achieve in life,” my mother told me when I was an eight-year-old child, “you will always be nothin’ but a nigger to them.” She looked at me with the piercing eyes only a mother has, the ones that see past your face and penetrate your soul. “When I brought you into this world, you already had three strikes against you: you’re Black, you’re a male, and you’re poor. You ain’t gonna get the same kinda leeway these White folks get.”

It’s the same admonishment all Black parents in America give their children at some point, though maybe not as candidly as my mother did. Above all else, she was a pragmatist and a martinet. Being a poor, single, Black woman in the American South will fashion a pragmatist; the desire to protect your three children from the negative influences of the environment will harden even the softest of hands. When my mother spoke these immortal words to me, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 had been the law of the land for some thirty-nine years; the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education had been so for forty-five years; and the Civil Rights Act of 1968 – deemed the Fair Housing Act – had been law for thirty-six. Adequate instruction was still a necessity for survival in an ostensibly “integrated” world, particularly for Black males.

My Sustainer saw it fit to fashion me Black and to place me in a poor, deeply rooted Black Catholic community located in a portion of the Bible Belt South. The cathedral serving the community was originally constructed in the late 1800s to serve the ecclesiastic needs of German, Italian and Irish immigrants. A group of nuns opened a school for Blacks and Creoles a few years after the completion of the cathedral. The descendants of emancipated slaves flocked to Roman Catholicism from Protestantism searching for education for their children, as back in those days, Catholics were known for their stellar parochial educational institution. My great grandfather, so my mother told me, was among those individuals who converted seeking something better for his progeny. I would like to think some of those Blacks even shared the pews with their fellow White Catholics.

If so, not for long: the ninety years of Jim Crow laws and the deceptive fallacy of “separate but equal” bifurcated the community. Many of the recent European immigrants who were maligned for being Catholic were able to purchase Whiteness at a fairly cheap price. And then there was the White Flight, the embodiment of discriminatory housing legislation, urban planning, government subsidies, social engineering, predatory economic exploitation, and even physical violence that gave genesis to the coveted suburbs and exurbs, the culmination of the illusionary confluence of separation and equality. These were Jim Crow at its finest—the holy grail of the ever-elusive American Dream, built off the backs of Blacks through savagery, thievery, and connivery.

Long before my mother came into the world in the early 1960s, only Blacks attended the church. Most of the Whites in the surrounding area had long disappeared. In their absence, the powers that be erected in the center of what would become the community of my birth a sewage and water treatment plant. The house of my grandmother, the house in which I was to be raised, was juxtaposed with the cesspool. The cathedral where I was to be baptized was a ten-minute walk down street from the plant; the elementary school where I was to be educated was a fifteen-minute walk from it. For decades, everyone in the vicinity woke up, worked, and laid down to the putrid stench of excrement and chemicals. Some people would even die with the fumes in their breast, said my grandmother.

The smell had not abated when I came into the picture. Sometimes, it was so bad I remember my mother and grandmother praying for God to command the winds to take the fumes. At times, those prayers were answered; other times, we just had to bear it. Allāh subhanahu wa ta`ala (exalted is He), in His Infinite Wisdom, had coined for me a parable using my own childhood as to what I should expect from my existence as a Black man in America.

Said Moses to his people, “Seek help through Allah and be patient. Indeed, the earth belongs to Allah. He causes to inherit it whom He wills of His servants. And the [best] outcome is for the righteous,” (Qur’ān, 7:128).

“Ain’t much else you can do,” both my mother and grandmother would say, “but suffer it and go on.”

✻✻✻

Muslims often ask me what brought me to Islam. By way of preamble, I inform people of the obvious – that I’m a Black man – and the not so obvious – that I hail from the South. I then ask them to couple these facts with their own imagination as to why a man in my position from this part of America would accept the message of the unlettered, gentile Prophet ﷺ. Most of my interlocutors, at this point, have inklings as to some of the reasons—a sign, I hope, that people at the very least comprehend the connection between the social and historical realities and the theological consequences of those realities.

I then proceed to tell them this. In fifth grade, at a private Catholic school attended predominantly by White middle and upper class children, a fourth grader, a White kid, said, “All you Black people should still be slaves!” after I bested him in a game of basketball. Were it not for some childhood friends restraining me, I surely would have beaten him to Hell and back.

When I got home that evening, I started thinking about certain aspects of Christianity, at least as I understood them at the time. It possibly had something to do with the imagery often used in Catholic churches, chiefly pictures of a European Jesus and his equally European mother and disciples, and how inconsistent I thought it was for Blacks in America to be worshipping someone or something that so closely resembled our debasers. This kid and his parents believed that in accepting a certain theological interpretation of a historical event – the supposed crucifixion and resurrection of Christ – they were somehow absolved of their sins and thus would not have to answer for them. Yet I believed, even back then, people should be held accountable before God for their actions. I never told my mother what happened. She might have razed the school and maybe even the church.

Two years later, I found myself in an under-funded, dilapidated public middle school, an institution befitting of the low property taxes in its proximity, surrounded by teenagers who were more my peers, mostly poor Blacks and a few poor Whites. My mother withdrew me from the Catholic school because she could no longer afford the expensive tuition and because she was afraid I would “become White.” Back then I lacked the insight as to how one could “become White” and was unsure what that meant. I was sure, though, the strange white substance hanging exposed from the ceiling of the school was asbestos and that neighboring the school were a liquor store and a scrap metal yard. I was sure many of the teachers were not qualified for their positions, and those that were had to deal with sparse resources. I was sure many didn’t care at all: they were paid just to show up and leave.

The altercation with the fourth grader haunted me still, and because of it, I spent many nights wandering the streets of my neighborhood, agonizing over both social and theological issues as best I could. Although I believed in Him and although I was starting to challenge foundational Christian beliefs such as the Trinity and Vicarious Atonement, I also thought He was totally indifferent to our suffering or to the suffering of others. I never entertained the question of whether God existed; my concern was, rather, did God care? I wrestled with the wisdom of God putting my family in the position He did. I thought we denizens of ghettos and trailer parks were God’s bastard children, His “mistakes” in the way parents in our society often refer to their children, the ones He created by accident. Like our own derelict fathers, I figured He just left us to rot in the dirty armpits of America. I began to consider maybe there was something inherent to our nature that warranted our condition; or maybe we were guilty of some unknown transgression against Him that necessitated our status in society as just recompense. He seemed to prefer Whites, wealthy ones at that—they were made in His image after all. Why wouldn’t one want to “become White” in that case? Maybe, I reasoned, some element of their being was more favorable to the Almighty. Maybe He played favorites with His creation, the Whiter the better in His eyes. As such, I found myself wishing I looked more like them: wishing my skin color was just a little lighter, my hair was less coarse and kinky, my butt and legs were not as big. I was coming into tauhīd (belief in the oneness of God) in one sense but not in others.

I encountered my first Muslim a few months before I started college. She was a Black woman in her mid-fifties, a former member of the Nation of Islam in her youth who had embraced Sunni Islam later in life. She in many ways reminded of my mother, religious yet down-to-earth, profane yet wise. In fact, had my mother been Muslim, she would have resembled this woman. She elucidated the basic tenets of Islam, which I was eager to accept. I claim if one is predisposed to believing in God and prophets, the message of Islam will inevitably reverberate at a recognizable frequency; however, that being said, this woman, because of her background, possessed a manner of relaying the message that resonated with me on a personal level. Had someone else been placed in my path, I might not have been as receptive to the message. Allāhu `Alim (God is All-Knowing).

✻✻✻

Muslims often do not ask what happened after my conversion. In my experience, this appears to be less concerning to them, seeing as how the question seldom surfaces, which is a sad turn of affairs since that response is I think more beneficial and instructive.

Even after I declared shahadah (the declaration of faith in Islam), it took me many years of thinking, soul searching, reading the Qur’ān, considering the life of the Prophet (s), along with a hefty dose of Malcolm X, to reach conclusions about God that were more in line with Islam. I gave much thought to Allāh and how He relates to the suffering and downtrodden in societies, particularly Blacks in America: certain ideas about Blackness in the American context had to be challenged within my own being; ideas about Whiteness had to be jettisoned; old worldviews needed to be dismantled and new ones assembled. The psycho-spiritual furniture and psychological hardwiring in my mind and in my heart needed to be rearranged. The existential angst all humans experience borne of the paradox of infinite potential and mortal finitude needed to be directed towards a different qibla (direction Muslims face in prayer). It’s taken for granted that conversion is a process, not an event.

Not too much time elapsed following my conversion before I became acquainted with how the Muslim community actually functions in terms of race, color, class, and culture. Growing up in ghettos and trailer parks grants one amazing powers of perception. In addition to seeking God, I suppose I was also longing for a haven in the houses of Allāh against the monumental tribulation of being Black in America, a place of brief reprieve. I figured if anyone could understand us Blacks it would be the Muslims, who not only possessed a sizeable Black contingency, but who also by this point, post 9/11, were just as much the objects of unjust scrutiny as we were. I was, as it turned out, quickly disabused of this naïve notion: I went from Whites calling me “slave” to Arabs calling me ‘abd (literally, Arabic for “slave”, sometimes used in a derogatory manner to refer to Black individuals), I went from getting leery looks from Whites to getting them from South Asians, I went from Whites calling me “nigger” to Turks calling me zenci (Adopted from the Arabic “zanji”, meaning “one from the land of the Blacks”; more colloquially, the term means “nigger”), I went from hearing from Whites say, “You people can’t marry our children,” to hearing this from Africans, and I went from Whites saying, “You’re scary and uncivilized” to hearing this from non-Black Muslims in general. Not even the fanes of God were exempt, churches and mosques alike.

I remember, some time after my initial run-ins with the Muslim community, I visited my grandfather who was then eighty-two years old. He is from rustic regions of southern Alabama and had survived Jim Crow, portions of World War II, the Korean War, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Civil Rights Movement. On a whim, I asked my grandfather what he thought about race and if he thought the issue was ameliorating. Given his life experience, I figured his perspective would be valuable.

He gave me this response: “Nowadays, if someone wants to call you ‘nigger,’ they won’t do it your face. There ain’t no more ‘Whites Only’ drinking fountains and pools, ya see. There ain’t no more ‘Whites Only’ neighborhood. But what they do is they say make it so you can’t get a house or a job or they cheat you. They don’t say ‘You can’t live here!’ no mo’ but they make it hard to get a house! The Klan don’t do the lynchings. The police do it now. Ain’t no mo’ poll taxes but they still don’t want us voting! They call you ‘nigger’ but they hide it better. Don’t let them fool ‘bout what they say ‘bout progress. Things is really just the same as they always was.”

When I had this conservation with him, Trayvon Martin hadn’t been killed yet, nor had Jordan Davis, or Oscar Grant or Renisha McBride or John Crawford or Mike Brown. Richard Sherman, I imagine, was probably still in high school, so he wasn’t yet the brash “thug” he would become. And no one was asking for Barack Obama’s birth certificate or questioning his American citizenship.

At least not yet, anyway. I guess the old adage is true: the more things change, the more they remain the same. There is as much literal and figurative ‘nigger’ calling amongst the Muslims in America today as there is in American society at large. Like my great-grandfather before me, I sought something better. As my mother would say though, six in one hand, half a dozen in the other.

I’m looking for a house

In the world

Where the white shadows

Will not fall.

There is no such house,

Dark brothers,

No such house

At all.

—Langston Hughes, “House in the World”