NY students hold conference on black Muslims marginalization

'People don't see Black Muslims as trailblazers. We are here to change that'

Hawzah News Agency (New York, US) – A group of New York university undergraduate students held a landmark conference this weekend in New York, focusing on the erasure and marginalization of Black Muslims in the United States.

“People don’t see Black Muslims as trailblazers. We are here to change that,” Raphia Ngoutane, chair of Black Muslim Initiative (BMI), said during the event.

Organized by the Black Muslim Initiative (BMI), the symposium titled “History, Legacies, and Experiences” was an attempt to reclaim the narrative about the role played by Black Muslims in the story of America.

“There is a great lack of awareness of the role of Muslims of African descent in the origin and establishment of Islam in America,” Imam Talib Abdur Rashid, from The Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in New York, said in a keynote attended by academics, community leaders and students.

“This lack of awareness is amongst all people in America, those who have been here for generations and those who just came here … [and] one of the reasons there is this lack of knowledge of Muslim history in America is because it is rooted in African-American history.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t hear that America is a nation of immigrants. But it negates the history of the Native Americans and Americans of African descent. We too, aren’t immigrants. We didn’t pack a suitcase and come here. The idea of Islam in America is rooted in the history of African people.”

African American Muslim history extends from the enslavement of Muslim Africans and into the Twentieth-Century Black Muslim Movement.

White Christian slaveowners stripped African Muslims of their faith and forced mass conversions. During the Black Muslim Movement, numerous African Americans reembraced the religion of their forefathers.

Seeking to preserve the legacy of the African American Muslim experience Sapelo Square partnered with Paper in February, 2018, and launched Preserving the Legacy, a portrait and interview series, to capture and conserve Black Muslim Life in the US.

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