Suhaib Webb – Ramadn Reflections Part 2 Agitations, Privilege, Faith and Commitments

At the age of 14,

I was given this assignment by an English

teacher

to do a book report. So I went

to the library, and I found this book

called Malcolm x. And I thought I had

no idea who Malcolm x was. This is

way before the movie and the whole kind

of iconic rebirth of Malcolm

took place.

You know, when I started reading Malcolm,

that was the first time that I've ever

had to negotiate my whiteness.

I thought it was a cool name because

it rhymed.

Malcolm x,

you know,

rocking the deck, cashing checks, breaking necks, fools

I wreck. You know? It was like

an infinite number of potential rhymes you could

do with that name, so I chose that

book. I remember reading him and thinking, man,

this dude is crazy, man.

Like how the heck is he going to

call someone a white devil, and you know,

the the way he talked about white people

was something I had never seen before, or

heard before.

That, for me, was an awakening in my

life

about white and whiteness, the meaning of whiteness,

white male privilege, even though I was young.

And it wasn't easy. Like, Malcolm and I

would spar, you know,

and eventually I found myself

really moved by his story. And

I would say that really I had left,

Christianity

probably when I was around that age,

because I found a number of

what I felt were unanswered questions and then

contradictions

within that that tradition.

And I would say really in in the

shadow of Malcolm, even though I'm a blonde

haired, blue eyed white guy, I think

we are moved by people who are so

committed

to universal causes

that they have a universal outcome and a

universal impact.

March 3, 1991

is really what caused me to start to

look for the truth. That's the day

where

Rodney King

was brutalized,

and the collective

conscious of America for the first time was

exposed

to

firsthand treatment

of black America at the hands of a

power structure. People heard about

it up until that time, and people

had maybe read about it.

But to actually see those agitating moments,

that make us uncomfortable, we have

really 2 ways to go. Either we're going

to conform to

the easy way,

or we're going to stand up and address

ourselves and be honest with ourselves.

I was

motivated by Malcolm,

pushed,

I would say head first by what happened

with Rodney King.

And I was reading the Quran at that

time in the restroom

of my home, scared that my mother would

find it.

And I found that in Islam. I mean,

the first or second verse

of the first chapter says, praise be to

Allah, the lord of all things.

You know? And god is not white or

black or any color.

And then in the back of the Quran,

the last chapter is, say I seek refuge

in the lord of humanity.

So the source of removing

oppression

was the lord of all things, of all

human beings.

I never did hate anybody hard. I do

know that when I wrote that letter saying

that there were white people in Mecca, it

shook up a lot of Muslims because

most of the Muslims who follow mister Muhammad

absolutely believed that it was impossible,

physically impossible, I should say, divinely impossible for

a white person to go to Mecca.

And my trip there,

shattered that image or that this concept.