Growth of Islamic Movement in the U.S.
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The astronomical growth of the Islamic Movement among African Americans can be attributed to sociological rather than religious phenomena. Among the most salient ones are the need to look beyond the Western tradition that was responsible for their slavery, to their African origins. There is a hint of rebellion involved in the mix as well; the example of controversial Islamic leaders such as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan are strong draws for young blacks searching for communal voices to look up to. In the U.S., the language of the black Islamic movement has been a revolutionary one, and revolutionary words are bound to elicit a response from an oppressed populace. As this paper will demonstrate, the growth of Islam among African Americans has as more to do with sociology than with religion. In fact, the Orthodox Islamic faith has gone so far as to denounce the Black Muslim movement as being anathematic to the true tenets of Islam. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Black Muslims are included in all surveys of the growth of Islam in the United States. Thus, this paper will explore the Black Muslim movement's growth in the U.S., their conflict with the Orthodox Islamic faith, and the future of the movement. The general growth of the Islamic movement in the United States will be examined first. In the year 1900, there were 100,000 Muslims in the U.S. In the next seventy years, this number grew eight fold to 800,000 (1996 Britannica Book of the Year 781-785). Howeve
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y would use clippings from newspapers showing blacks being turned away from white churches or of white Christian ministers openly advocating segregation (Gudel 9). Thus an established tenet of the Black Muslim movement was the recruitment of Christians under the pretense that the Christian church was dominated by whites and therefore hostile to the black cause. Muhammed went so far as to say "There is no hope for us in Christianity; it is a religion organized by the enemies (the white race) of the Black Nation to enslave us to the white race's rule" (Muhammed 221). Taken as part of the larger whole, this phrase is representative of the "jihad of words" that has helped to galvanize the African American community, and which has been almost exclusively linked to the Islamic movement in the ghetto. For Malcolm X, "the jihad of words was not just defensive rhetoric on behalf of Islam, but also a potent intellectual tool for spiritual and political consciousness-raising in African-American Islam" (Turner 22-23). In a sense the "jihad of words" has allowed black America to talk back to white America, to vent some of their collective rage at the inequities of the system.
These angry words also draw an implicit contrast to the tr
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Approximate Word count = 3024
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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