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Zaid Shakir on Islam and the UDHR |
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Written by Zaid Shakir
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Monday, 31 October 2005 |
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Page 2 of 4
Part Two: The Relevance of Human Rights for Islam in America
Islam in America has
historically been characterized by a strong advocacy of human rights
and social justice issues. This is so because it has been primarily
associated with people who would be identified as ethnic minorities.
The first significant Muslim population in this country, the enslaved
believers of African origin, would certainly fit that
description.7 The various Islamic movements, which arose amongst
their descendents, appeared in a social and political context
characterized by severe oppression. That socio-political context shaped
the way Islam was understood by the people embracing it. It was a
religion, in of all its variant understandings, which was seen as a
source of liberation, justice, and redemption.8
When the ethnic composition
of the Muslim community began to change due to immigration in the
1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s, the minority composition of the
Muslim community remained. These newly arriving non-European immigrant
Muslims were generally upwardly mobile. However, their brown and olive
complexions, along with their accents, and the vestiges of their
original cultures, served to reinforce the reality of their minority
status. This fact, combined with the fact that the most religiously
active among them were affiliated with Islamic movements in the Muslim
World, movements whose agenda were dominated by strong human rights and
social justice concerns, affected the nature of the Islamic call in
this country, keeping human rights concerns to the fore.
Illustrative of this human
rights imperative is the stated mission of the Ahmadiyya Movement when
it began active propagation in America. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, the first
significant Ahmadi missionary to America, consciously called to a
multicultural view of Islam, which challenged the entrenched racism
prevalent in early 20th Century American society.9 This message
presented Islam as a just social force, capable of extending to the
racial minorities of this country their full human rights. However,
there were strong anti-white overtones of the Ahmadi message, shaped by
Mufti Muhammad Sadiq’s personal experience, and the widespread
persecution of people of Indian descent (so-called Hindoos) in America,
which dampened the broader appeal of the Ahmadi message. Those
overtones were subsequently replaced by the overtly racist
proclamations of the Nation of Islam, which declared whites to be
devils. In the formulation of the Nation of Islam, Islam came to be
viewed as a means for the restoration of the lost preeminence of the
“Asiatic” Blackman. This restoration would be effected by a just
religion, Islam, which addressed the social, economic and psychological
vestiges of American race-based slavery. In other words, Islam was the agent
that would grant the Muslims their long denied human rights.10
The pivotal figure who was
able to synthesize these various formulations into a tangible,
well-defined human rights agenda was Malcolm X.11 By continuing to
emphasize the failure of American society to effectively eliminate the
vestiges of slavery; he was an implicit advocate of the justice-driven
agenda of the Nation of Islam, even after departing from that movement.
His biting criticism of the racist nature of American society, which he
often contrasted with the perceived racial harmony of Islam,
highlighted by his famous letter from Mecca in which he
envisioned Islam as a possible cure for this country’s inherent racism,
was the continuation of the original multi-cultural message of the
Ahmadiyya Movement.12 Finally, his evolving thinking on the true nature
of the struggle of the African American people, and his situating that
struggle in the context of the Third World human rights struggle,
reflected the human rights imperative which figured so prominently in
the call of Middle Eastern groups such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,
and the Indian Subcontinent’s Jamaat Islami, groups which had a strong
influence on the founders of this country’s Muslim Students Association
(MSA) in 1963.13
These various groupings,
along with the Dar al-Islam Movement, the Islamic Party of North
America, and Sheikh Tawfiq’s Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood,14 which
would develop in many urban centers during the 1960s and 1970s as the
purveyors of an emerging African American “Sunni” tradition, a
tradition consolidated by the conversion of Malcolm X to the
orthodox faith, represented in their various agendas, the
crystallization of the sort of human rights agenda which Malcolm was
hammering out during the last phase of his life. These groups all saw
Islam as the key to liberation from the stultifying weight of racial,
social, and economic inequality in America.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 further strengthened this human
rights imperative. The revolution was presented by its advocates in
America, who were quite influential at the time, as an uprising of the
oppressed Muslim masses [mustad’afin], to secure their usurped rights
from the Shah, an oppressive tyrant [Taghut]. This message, conveyed
strongly and forcefully through the call of the Muslim Students
Association: Persian Speaking Group (MSA-PSG), was extremely
influential in shaping the human rights imperative in American Islam,
not only because of its direct influence, but also because of the
vernacular of struggle it introduced into the conceptual universe of
many America Muslims, and the way it shaped the message of contending
“Sunni” groups. The combined influence of these forces worked to insure
that human rights issues were prominent in the call of Islamic
organizations and individuals prior to the tragic events of September
11, 2001.
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