Nadim Ali – Achieving United Ummah
AI: Summary ©
The transcript discusses the impact of slavery on culture and the ensuing confusion among cultures. It mentions the rise of slavery and the deception of Muslims, including the Mahdi's teachings and the importance of learning traditional Islam. The segment also touches on the struggles of the African American Muslim community and the challenges faced by their community, including oppression, police brutality, and racism. The importance of learning from Mahdi's teachings and practicing Islam as a means of deception and Islam is emphasized.
AI: Summary ©
Snatched from
mother Africa's womb, placed in a floating tomb,
the slave cried out from perdition. How can I pray in this
condition.
And that's a poem that I wrote many years ago when I was
reflecting on how the enslaved Africans who came across from the
Middle Passage, you know, as Muslims, we try to engage in
levels of cleanliness. And imagine spending days lying in your own
waist, and wrote the poem called, How can I pray in this condition?
And so we have to recognize that
the people who were in captivity, they weren't slaves. They were
enslaved people. It's just like if slavery was reinstituted today. We
would bring certain skills. We would bring medical professionals.
We would bring IT professionals. We would bring counseling
professionals. We would bring laborers and all sorts of people.
So again, we have to look at it and start having a paradigm shift
that these were people who were enslaved, they were not slaves,
and some of the tribes that were represented were from the Akan,
the Yoruba, the Igbo, the Mandinka, and also the wall off
the Fulani and the Bundi and the shamba and u Naga and the ibobul
people. And again, it impact. It impacted everyone on many
different levels. And when Islam arrived, or many of the people who
came to to to this country, they recognized that the fact that they
had many cultural traditions. And so Islam was one of the cultural
traditions. Some of the scholars say that the enslaved people, some
they were 10 to 30% Muslim, you know, some say 10% on the low end,
30% on the high end. And so there were many people who continued to
try to practice Islam even while they were, you know, enslaved.
Some of the names that we remember, we recall Omar ibn
Saeed, Abdul, Rahman, Ayub, Suleiman, bilali Mohammed. And, in
fact, bilali Mohammed, there's a manuscript in the University of
Georgia written in Arabic that he put, put together, and it's based
on, you know, to get traditional Islamic scholarship. So you had
Muslim scholars enslaved. And it is always, it is also said that
many of us who are of African descent, and again, my family,
came here on the middle passage in the 1700s and again, you had
Yoruba on one side, and you had, you know, the the mandiko on the
other side. And so many of them were largely Muslim tribes. And so
it is said that the Muslims, who of African descent, are the
answers to the prayers of the enslaved people of the past, the
courts of balali Muhammad. He again practiced Islam in
captivity. And then, even if you're familiar with sapolo
Island, he was there on Sapelo Island. And in fact, there's a
Muslim graveyard there that exists to this day. And if you look in
the book from the Senegalese scholar Sylvain Nadiya, again, is
African Muslims among American slaves. She basically documents
the number of slaves who were in captivity in the United States
again,
and there were also many families that continued to practice Islam
while they were enslaved, and then even after slavery. But there was
also forced conversions, forced conversions, and at one point,
some of the enslavers basically stated that we have to stop
bringing Muslim slaves over to the continent, because they have a
firm belief it is harder for them to basically Christianize them.
They use that term, Christianize them. In other words, force them
into Christianity. And so, you know, we have to understand that a
part of the the the slave trade, or the colonialism, which was the
manifestation of slavery in the Middle Passage, was the colonial,
the manifestation of colonialism in this part of the world. And so
what happened is that they wanted, they saw Islam was spreading in
Africa, and that was one of the ways that they tried to break the
growth of Islam in on the continent of Africa, and again,
after slavery, people try to basically come back to Islam, or
find manifestations of Islam. And we're going to mention the
different groups. One of the groups was the Moors Science
Temple, founded by.
Overdraw Ali, and, of course, the Nation of Islam. One of the
founders, he was Fard Muhammad, but one of his main students was
Elijah Muhammad. And so he was a part of the the more science
temple for a minute. And also the one of the great students of
Elijah Muhammad was El Hajj, Malik Shabazz, Malcolm X, his father was
also a part of what's a group called the Unia, the universal
* Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey. Why do
we mention again the universal Improvement Association? The one
of the main mentors of Marcus Garvey was this man named MDU say
Muhammad Ali. And he was a Sudanese Egyptian Muslim scholar.
And he, and if you look at the the the the theme for the universal
* Improvement Association, there was one God, one destiny.
One God, one destiny. And so then after that, you had different
groups, variations of different groups. There was the Ahmadiyya
did a lot of work in the African American community. And you had a
group
led by a gentleman by his name was Sheik as a dean, and he was a part
of the Moore Science Temple. And then he was out of New Jersey. In
fact, in fact, if you look at the group, the Bureau of indigenous
Muslim affairs. They are direct descendants from the movement
started by Sheikha zadin. He basically traveled to Egypt to
learn traditional Islam, and then he came back and they had a major
conference in Philadelphia. And there's a picture you'll see
online, a major conference of uniting the Muslims in America in
1943 you know. And so as trying to get across that Islam in the
African American community is not a new thing. It didn't start in
the 80s and 90s. It started again when the first slave came. The
first enslaved came over here, who said Allah, because, again, they
were Muslim scholars. And so we have to look at that fact and and
know that is a continuum. And so what we have to understand is that
when we look at the work that El * Malik al Shabazz did prior to
His coming to Islam, because you have to understand, he only
practiced Islam, traditional Islam, for about one year. You
know, he made the Hajj, and then, you know, hamdullah gave him the
jihad prior to him making the Hajj, you know. So it's important
that we recognize he was not practicing or promoting Islam for
the years. I think he joined the Nation of Islam around 1952
he was martyred in 1965
and so he was teaching a variation in what Dr Sherman Jackson calls a
heterodoxical Islam, basically aspects of Islam being presented.
And so they taught something that was basically different from what
traditional Islam was, and so once he basically came to Islam. The
rest of his short life, he worked to undo the work that he had done.
And there's a speech that he gave the week before he was martyred.
It was called, it's called the last message, and it's online.
It's available online. He talks about his his growth in the Nation
of Islam to the point that he came to traditional Islam. And so his
journey was just one of one journey of one man. And always
teach that he, he still gives dawah from the grave, because the
book, his book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex
Haley, you know, he, he basically taught about, you know, what Islam
was and what Islam wasn't. And from that fact, I've, there's,
there's countless people that I've ran into that said that I, once I
read that book, I came to Islam, you know, once I read that book, I
had a better understanding of Islam. And so we have to
recognize, again, even in death, he's given dawah. And so what we
have to also look at the fact that there have been other groups. And
in fact, when el Hajj, Malik al Shabazz came back to America from
the hajj, he went to what is now known as the Cooper Institute. And
it was Sheik Nafi. And he used to call them, those sheep wearing
Negroes, if this is what is the name he used to call them. He had
to go back and apologize, you know, to some of the people who
were continuously practicing the Sunnah for many years, and so they
were in direct contradiction to what the Nation of Islam was
teaching. So he came back and apologized specifically because he
was in Philadelphia as a minister for many years. And so when he
came back, you know, he that was one of the things he had to do to
try to straighten that out. But I would encourage you to listen to
the last message of Malcolm X, and then you'll see the message. And
if anybody is confused about.
His message and his mission. Give him that speech, and he shuts them
down from the grave. And again, if I've said anything that's
inconsistent with what Allah would have me say and what the Prophet
peace be upon him, has real modeled for us, I take full
responsibility for that. And if I have said anything and what you
have gained some new insight on Al Hajj, Al Shabazz and the growth of
Islam in this country, as always, All praise belongs to
Allah Imam Nadim Ali mashaAllah. We have a lot of inspiration that
we can get from understanding the history and the challenges that
the African American Muslim community has faced in this
country, one question I'll ask you.
You know, as we think about the challenges that you know, the
African American Muslim community has faced, and we get a lot of
inspiration from that, what is one lesson that you would like the
audience today to take away and actually start practicing in their
lives, especially as we see a lot of oppression going around going
on around us in the world today. What's one lesson that each of us
can take away and try and implement in our lives?
There's probably many lessons, but one of the main things we have to
recognize that we have been struggling in this country, you
know, since inception, since the inception, you know, of this
country for the most part, and so an African American community,
many of us, I came through
civil rights movement, black nationalism and pan Africanism
into Islam and so, and that's been in my generation. I'm 69, years
old. When Al Haj Malik al Shabazz died, he was I was 10 years old.
And
when, when they presented it in the media. They presented it as if
it was a bad person that passed away. Three years later, I had a
teacher come into class. She Diane palms. She lives in Texas, Dallas,
Texas now, and I had to had the opportunity to visit her, you
know, again, after 30 years, she came in one day and said, I'm
tired of all this blank and use some profanity. We in eighth
grade, and we just said,
Oh, Ms, palm is mad. And she put on ballots of bullets. One of the
speeches of Malcolm. This was science class. She put on ballots
of bullets one day the next day, she put on message to the
grassroots. And I always tell people, I haven't been the same
since, you know. So I was 13 years old at that time. And again, I
came to Islam, you know, in 1978 on my 23rd birthday. And so we see
Islam as a tool for struggle. One of my teachers, Imam Jamil al
Amin, and may Allah preserve him and release him. He basically used
to say that we were struggling without a book. We were struggling
without a book in the civil rights movement, in the pan Africanist
movement, in the African in the black struggle movement. But Islam
gives us the tools for struggle in the Quran and in the life of the
prophet Muhammad. Peace be upon him. And so we have to stop
practicing Islam as a religion and practice Islam as a dean, and
that's one of the lessons I wanted to give. And a dean is a way of
life. Religion is just a set of rituals, a.