Nadim Ali – Achieving United Ummah

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.