CULTURAL DAKWAH AND MUSLIM MOVEMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

There have been Muslims in what is now the United States since tens of thousands were brought as slaves in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Very few maintained their Muslim identities because the harsh conditions of slavery. Revitalization movements relying on Muslim symbolism emerged in the early 20th century. They were primarily concerned with the struggle against racism and oppression. The Moorish Science Temple of American and the Nation of Islam are the two most important of these movement. The haj was a transformative experience for Nation of Islam leaders Malcom X and Muhammad Ali. Realization that Islam is an inclusive faith that does not condone racism led both of them towards mainstream Sunni Islam and for Muhammad Ali to Sufi religious pluralism.Keywords: Nation of Islam, Moorish Science Temple, Revitalization Movement, Malcom X, Muhammad Ali. Abstract: Sejarah Islam di Amerika sudah berakar sejak abad ke 18 dan awal 19, ketika belasan ribu budak dari Afrika dibawa ke wilayah yang sekarang bernama Amerika Serikat. Sangat sedikit di antara mereka yang mempertahankan identitasnya sebagai Muslim mengingat kondisi perbudakan yang sangat kejam dan tidak memungkinkan. Di awal abad 20, muncul-lah gerakan revitalisasi Islam. Utamanya, mereka berkonsentrasi pada gerakan perlawanan terhadap rasisme dan penindasan. The Moorish Science Temple of American dan the Nation of Islam adalah dua kelompok terpenting gerakan perlawanan tersebut. Perjalanan ibadah haji memberikan pengalaman transformatif bagi pimpinan kedua kelompok gerakan tersebut, yaitu Malcom X dan Muhammad Ali. Pemahaman Islam yang inklusif yang tidak sejalan dengan rasisme mendekatkan mereka dengan ajaran-ajaran mainstream Islam sunni, dan (terutama) Muhamad Ali yang condong ke pluralisme ajaran kaum Sufi.Kata Kunci: Nation of islam, Moorish Science Temple, Gerakan revitalisasi, Malcom X, Muhammad Ali.

Red Squads and Black Radicals: Reading Agency in the Archive

Scholarly accounts of racial formation have regularly focused on the role of state actors or non-state oppressive subjects administering racial systems against a dominated population. Challenges or resistance to state racialization practices by dissenting communities, on the other hand, have not received commensurate engagement, particularly at the level of race-making. Judith Weisenfeld demonstrates in New World A-Coming that African American religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Peace Mission were not merely protesting a racial system but also inventing new racial subjectivities. This account of Black radical agency is deeply consequential for understanding the religious dimensions of Black radical politics and the agential architecture of racialization. In this article, I apply Weisenfeld’s method of mapping radical agency from the underside of state archives. The focus is on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Chicago campaign of 1966 and the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) that culminated in the summer of 1968. I argue that Black radical activists, despite being targeted by counterintelligence operations of law enforcement, nevertheless transformed the politics of race and power with lasting consequences by exceeding in specific ways the efforts of state actors to destroy Black liberation projects. The archival records of state entities themselves render the import of Black agency. This implies, among other things, that scholarship on Black religion and racialization broadly must shift significantly to account for a central argument of Weisenfeld’s book: dominated peoples have been agents of racial histories and not merely objects of racial governance.

Individualist and Community-Oriented Mind Cure

This chapter surveys the rise of the Mind Cure movements that spread outward from the teachings of Quimby, including Christian Science and New Thought. Like most histories of these movements, it discusses the contributions of Warren Felt Evans, Mary Baker Eddy, the Dresser family, and Emma Curtis Hopkins, as well as the major religious organizations inspired by Hopkins’s teaching. Unlike most histories of New Thought, however, it distinguishes between two forms, community-oriented and individualist, which had different trajectories. Community-oriented New Thought was led largely by white women and centered in religious communities. Individualist New Thought stressed personal prosperity and business success. This chapter also devotes attention to community-oriented African American movements inspired by New Thought, particularly the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine but also Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Moorish Science, the Nation of Islam, and Black Hebrew Israelism.

Race and New Religious Movements in the USA

Organized in chronological order of the founding of each movement, this documentary reader brings to life new religious movements from the 18th to 20th century. Engaging with religious studies theory and method and critical race theory, students are provided with the tools needed in order to understand questions of race, religion, and American religious history. Each chapter has: An introduction to the movement, including the context of its foundingTwo to four primary source documents about or from the movementSuggestions for further reading. Movements covered include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism), the Native American Church, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Nation of Islam. The voices included come from both men and women. Showing that religio-racial movements have been a perennial aspect of American history from the colonial period to the present, this reader provides a history of innovative social groups in America. A timeline of movements is included, and discussion and study questions can be found in the book’s online resources.

Islam and Race in American History

American Muslims are often seen as either unassimilable immigrants or as African Americans who only “adopted” Islam as rebellion against Christian-sanctioned racist exclusion. This chapter brings into meaningful conversation these two often divided arenas of definition, agency, and political space by focusing on the categories of “Islam” and “race” and how they have been negotiated, applied, rejected, and forced by and onto various people since the eighteenth century. It shows how Muslims in the United States are both American and transnational, since the relationship between race and religion is globally negotiated. It also considers the intersections of religion and race with gender and sexuality, surveying research on Muslim slaves, naturalization cases in the early twentieth century, Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, the racialization of Muslims after 9/11, and the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative.

African American Religious Identities in the Twentieth Century

This chapter analyzes African American religious identity and practice in the twentieth century. Shaped by the Great Migration and the rise of mass culture, modern African American religious practice was both inventive and entrepreneurial. Although mainline denominations continued to dominate, Pentecostal and Holiness churches gained popularity through the rise of storefront churches, a refuge for southern migrants in the urban North. In addition, new religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement offered followers the opportunity to create entirely new religious and ethnic identities for themselves. The rise of radio and television transformed African American evangelism and eventually produced the era of the megachurch exemplified by the careers of Reverend Ike and T. D. Jakes. Modern African American religions competed in a spiritual marketplace that cultivated imaginative faith practices and met the material needs of their followers.

The FBI and the Moorish Science Temple of America, 1926–1960

This chapter explains how the FBI’s interaction with Muslims predates 9/11 by many decades, going back to the early history of the FBI. It examines the FBI's efforts to surveil and infiltrate the Moorish Science Temple of America, from the 1930s until 1960. Racial assumptions shaped the FBI’s response to this group, particularly following their refusal to conform to the Selective Service Act during the Second World War. The chapter demonstrates how the FBI’s attitudes to race and religion intersected to produce a clear pattern of hostility toward this religious group despite the FBI’s repeated findings that the group was not a threat to national security.