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Contenuto fornito da Becoming Muslim - The Spiritual Edge. Tutti i contenuti dei podcast, inclusi episodi, grafica e descrizioni dei podcast, vengono caricati e forniti direttamente da Becoming Muslim - The Spiritual Edge o dal partner della piattaforma podcast. Se ritieni che qualcuno stia utilizzando la tua opera protetta da copyright senza la tua autorizzazione, puoi seguire la procedura descritta qui https://it.player.fm/legal.
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Episode Notes [03:47] Seth's Early Understanding of Questions [04:33] The Power of Questions [05:25] Building Relationships Through Questions [06:41] This is Strategy: Focus on Questions [10:21] Gamifying Questions [11:34] Conversations as Infinite Games [15:32] Creating Tension with Questions [20:46] Effective Questioning Techniques [23:21] Empathy and Engagement [34:33] Strategy and Culture [35:22] Microsoft's Transformation [36:00] Global Perspectives on Questions [39:39] Caring in a Challenging World Resources Mentioned The Dip by Seth Godin Linchpin by Seth Godin Purple Cow by Seth Godin Tribes by Seth Godin This Is Marketing by Seth Godin The Carbon Almanac This is Strategy by Seth Godin Seth's Blog What Does it Sound Like When You Change Your Mind? by Seth Godin Value Creation Masterclass by Seth Godin on Udemy The Strategy Deck by Seth Godin Taylor Swift Jimmy Smith Jimmy Smith Curated Questions Episode Supercuts Priya Parker Techstars Satya Nadella Microsoft Steve Ballmer Acumen Jerry Colonna Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin Tim Ferriss podcast with Seth Godin Seth Godin website Beauty Pill Producer Ben Ford Questions Asked When did you first understand the power of questions? What do you do to get under the layer to really get down to those lower levels? Is it just follow-up questions, mindset, worldview, and how that works for you? How'd you get this job anyway? What are things like around here? What did your boss do before they were your boss? Wow did you end up with this job? Why are questions such a big part of This is Strategy? If you had to charge ten times as much as you charge now, what would you do differently? If it had to be free, what would you do differently? Who's it for, and what's it for? What is the change we seek to make? How did you choose the questions for The Strategy Deck? How big is our circle of us? How many people do I care about? Is the change we're making contagious? Are there other ways to gamify the use of questions? Any other thoughts on how questions might be gamified? How do we play games with other people where we're aware of what it would be for them to win and for us to win? What is it that you're challenged by? What is it that you want to share? What is it that you're afraid of? If there isn't a change, then why are we wasting our time? Can you define tension? What kind of haircut do you want? How long has it been since your last haircut? How might one think about intentionally creating that question? What factors should someone think about as they use questions to create tension? How was school today? What is the kind of interaction I'm hoping for over time? How do I ask a different sort of question that over time will be answered with how was school today? Were there any easy questions on your math homework? Did anything good happen at school today? What tension am I here to create? What wrong questions continue to be asked? What temperature is it outside? When the person you could have been meets the person you are becoming, is it going to be a cause for celebration or heartbreak? What are the questions we're going to ask each other? What was life like at the dinner table when you were growing up? What are we really trying to accomplish? How do you have this cogent two sentence explanation of what you do? How many clicks can we get per visit? What would happen if there was a webpage that was designed to get you to leave? What were the questions that were being asked by people in authority at Yahoo in 1999? How did the stock do today? Is anything broken? What can you do today that will make the stock go up tomorrow? What are risks worth taking? What are we doing that might not work but that supports our mission? What was the last thing you did that didn't work, and what did we learn from it? What have we done to so delight our core customers that they're telling other people? How has your international circle informed your life of questions? What do I believe that other people don't believe? What do I see that other people don't see? What do I take for granted that other people don't take for granted? What would blank do? What would Bob do? What would Jill do? What would Susan do? What happened to them? What system are they in that made them decide that that was the right thing to do? And then how do we change the system? How given the state of the world, do you manage to continue to care as much as you do? Do you walk to school or take your lunch? If you all can only care if things are going well, then what does that mean about caring? Should I have spent the last 50 years curled up in a ball? How do we go to the foundation and create community action?…
Contenuto fornito da Becoming Muslim - The Spiritual Edge. Tutti i contenuti dei podcast, inclusi episodi, grafica e descrizioni dei podcast, vengono caricati e forniti direttamente da Becoming Muslim - The Spiritual Edge o dal partner della piattaforma podcast. Se ritieni che qualcuno stia utilizzando la tua opera protetta da copyright senza la tua autorizzazione, puoi seguire la procedura descritta qui https://it.player.fm/legal.
Contenuto fornito da Becoming Muslim - The Spiritual Edge. Tutti i contenuti dei podcast, inclusi episodi, grafica e descrizioni dei podcast, vengono caricati e forniti direttamente da Becoming Muslim - The Spiritual Edge o dal partner della piattaforma podcast. Se ritieni che qualcuno stia utilizzando la tua opera protetta da copyright senza la tua autorizzazione, puoi seguire la procedura descritta qui https://it.player.fm/legal.
Four distinct stories of Becoming Muslim Sofie Lovern, Raul Gonzalez, Abdul Raoof Nasir, Aarón Seibert-Llera Photo credits: Tom Levy, Michelle Kanaar Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . 60 minutes of Becoming Muslim A week from now Muslims all around the world will begin observing the holy month of Ramadan. We thought this was a good time to share our one-hour documentary version of Becoming Muslim with you. You could say it's our latest season in distilled form. We tell the stories of some unlikely converts to Islam and what happens to them after. In case you missed the full 8-episode series this is another way you can listen. In the documentary, Hana Baba walks us through the stories of four Americans who have chosen Islam and the joys and challenges of their lives after conversion. A basketball player in California joins the Nation of Islam. A seeker in Chicago is intrigued by the one-sided narrative about Islam after 9/11. A former gang member finds the spiritual family he was looking for. A comedian's search for a new beginning leads to many. *** The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Hana Baba and Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV explore Islam in America Historian Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV and Becoming Muslim host Hana Baba. Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . Becoming Muslim: A history of Islam in America How did Islam first arrive on the North American continent? Did enslaved West Africans bring it to America? Or did Muslims sail with Christopher Columbus first? Later, Islam spread in the United States, among various communities. How did that happen? In this BONUS conversation that's part of the Becoming Muslim series, host Hana Baba dives into the history of Islam in America with Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV, a scholar of Muslim American, African American and Arab American history and life. “African-Americans in the 1920s, just like African-Americans in the 1800s, never thought of themselves as completely cut off from Africa and its history and its heritage. And so by converting to Islam, they were indeed laying claim to a spiritual, historical, political, social resource that they that they knew had been part of their people’s history for a long, long time.” — Edward E. Curtis IV *** The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Being Latinx and Muslim Raul Gonzalez pictured outside of the Al-Nahda Center on March 14, 2021 in Worth, Ill. The mosque is five minutes from Gonzalez's house. Photo credit: Michelle Kanaar Aarón Seibert-Llera pictured outside his home in Bridgeview, Ill. on March 14, 2021. Seibert-Llera converted to Islam about twenty years ago. Michelle Kanaar Raul Gonzalez pictured outside of the Al-Nahda Center on March 14, 2021 in Worth, Ill. The mosque is five minutes from Gonzalez's house. Photo credit: Michelle Kanaar Raul Gonzalez holds a version of the Quran with Spanish translation in front of the Al-Nahda Center on March 14, 2021 in Worth, Ill. Photo credit: Michelle Kanaar Aarón Seibert-Llera pictured outside his home in Bridgeview, Ill. on March 14, 2021. Seibert-Llera converted to Islam about twenty years ago. Photo credit: Michelle Kanaar Raul Gonzalez pictured outside of the Al-Nahda Center on March 14, 2021 in Worth, Ill. The mosque is five minutes from Gonzalez's house Photo credit: Michelle Kanaar Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Natasha Haverty “We’re completely used to breaking our fast alone, like this is something that’s not foreign to a lot of us who have come to the religion, because we don’t have Muslim families.” Latinx Americans make up one of the fastest-growing groups of Muslim Converts in the U.S.. In 2010, Latinx Muslims made up one percent of all Muslims in the U.S.—they now make up eight percent, according to a Gallup poll. One reason more Latinos are converting has to do with the mass exodus from the Catholic church. For others, it’s tracing heritage back 800 years to Andalusia, and the Muslim kingdom that ruled the Iberian peninsula. A lot of Latinx converts call themselves “reverts.” In this episode, we follow the journeys of Aaron Siebert-Llera and Raul Gonzalez, both living in the Chicago area and who both converted to Islam twenty years and half their lifetimes ago. Both have been trying to answer the question of how to reconcile their identity as Latinos—with their identity as Muslims, ever since. But while one has dedicated his life to helping the Latino Muslim community in his city find itself, the other still isn’t even sure being in a community as a Latino Muslim is possible. *** Natasha Haverty is an independent journalist whose work has appeared on NPR, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the New York Times. More at her website: www.natashahaverty.com The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Keeping the faith and humor through hard times Sofie Lavern Photo credit: Tom Levy Sofie Lavern Photo credit: Tom Levy Sofie Lovern on the TED stage Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Hana Baba “I say, ‘I can’t bomb on stage cuz I’m one bad joke from Guantanamo.’” Sofie Lovern says Islam was probably the last religion she would have ever seen herself converting to. She says she had this image, “of these women who were who were so oppressed and covered up.” Sofie is a stand-up comedian from Oakland, California. She's a 46-year-old divorced mother of three. She has these pink cheeks that turn red when she’s giggling. She laughs a lot and is constantly cracking jokes. She jokes about her life and all the parts that make up who she is. She jokes: “I'm actually half Hispanic, half Mexican, half white, and 100 percent Muslim. And it does cause a little cultural confusion from time to time. “ Sofie frequents an Oakland comedy club called Copper Spoon. She tries to come every Tuesday night. She says it feels like home. She says there aren’t many Muslim women comedians who wear the hijab. In fact, there aren’t many Muslim standup comedians period. “I mean, they're out there,” she says. “But most of them joke about just regular people stuff, like a guy named Muhammed…But then I get up there and make jokes about being a Muslim comedian.” She’s had plenty of material to work with in a post 9/11 America. “I say, ‘I can’t bomb on stage cuz I’m one bad joke from Guantanamo.’” Curious in California Sofie grew up in Southern California. Her family was Catholic, but they were not too religious. Her family life was unstable. Her dad left when she was 18. She and her mom struggled to make ends meet. She had to drop out of college to make money. Things got so bad she became homeless and moved north to stay with family in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spent a lot of time with her cousin. They had something big in common. They were both questioning the Christianity they grew up with. They talked about God, and together, they started researching other religions. “I went to Pegasus Books in Berkeley and I got a used Quran and I got a used biography of the Prophet Muhammad,” she says. “I started reading up and realized, ‘Wow, this is exactly what I think.’” As Sofie read more and more, she says things started to fall into place. “And if it makes sense, if it's logical, then I can accept it. You know what I mean? Even if it was completely new and foreign to me.” As she contemplated Islam internally, things on the outside weren’t going so well. Sofie got pregnant and things were rocky with her boyfriend. “My son's father left me and he ran back to Mexico,” she says. “I didn't know how I was going to tell him that I was planning on becoming Muslim. And then he left and so he made that part easy because he took off on me.” Now Sofie was on her own, pregnant, and going to school. Her life was hard and it was busy. And that internal, spiritual search was happening at the same time. Then her cousin—the one who was studying religions with her—got to the point where she was converting to Islam. Sofie went to her ceremony at the mosque. She says by that point, “I was pretty ready to be Muslim, but I waited because like I said, I was reading the biography of the Prophet’s life. And I wanted to finish that. And because I don't jump into things, I felt like it was a very serious decision.” Sofie did more reading and sat with herself a lot. Then Sofie went to the mosque where her cousin had converted. Surrounded by the congregation, she gave her Shahada, the testimony of faith that makes you a Muslim. Nothing had prepared her for how intense that moment would be. She says in that moment she thought about her unborn son, about his dad, her financial struggles—her whole life. She chokes up emotionally as she recalls it. “I felt like I had messed up, up to that point. You know, they say that when you convert, when you take your Shahada, that all your sins are forgiven. If I could tell you, that at that moment you can feel it. You can feel it happening. It's like being washed— not with water, but with light.” Sofie was immediately surrounded by people in the room. “I got hugs from all the ladies and they all welcomed me into Islam,” she says. “It was a beautiful moment. I had seen my cousin go through it and it was beautiful for her as well. First comes conversion, then comes marriage? Sofie admired her cousin’s experience. She wanted that for herself. But her cousin had also gone through something else. Right after she converted she got married to another convert. Sofie wanted to get married, too. In her new mosque community that was the expectation. So within a few weeks of becoming Muslim the Imam told her, since she was single and pregnant, she should get married. He said that he would help her to find a husband. Sofie went along with it. She had a baby son on the way and marriage didn’t sound like a bad idea. The Imam was from Morocco and regularly made trips home. On one trip, Sofie says, “He had brought back some photos and little bios for guys that he wanted to find wives for. And there were several choices, I guess.” The Imam recommended a man from his old neighborhood in Morocco. He spoke Spanish and Sofie did, too. They started corresponding and very quickly, the man made an offer to Sofie. “‘Come to Morocco. Visit, and if you like me then we'll get married,’ is kind of what his offer was,” she recalls. “And that seemed okay. I didn't have anyone warning me not to do it and it just seemed like a great opportunity. I could go there and learn about Islam and learn how to speak Arabic. Maybe find, a nice, romantic relationship with someone.” She adds, “That was not really the reality.” Post conversion weddings People who work in Muslim marriage spaces say it’s not uncommon to hear about mosque leaders finding matches for new convert women who are single. In some cases as soon as they become Muslims. Jenny and Rufus Triplett are a marriage counselor couple who have worked with Muslim American communities for decades. Jenny Triplette chides the practice, saying, “You're a convert. Why is somebody automatically bringing you someone to marry? Why is that like the first thing?” “I would never, ever suggest that a sister go get married right off the bat,” emphasizes her husband Rufus. “Learn what the religion is,” Jenny says. “Learn what your rights are. Learn all that you need to do. There's no need to rush into marriage.” Jenny says people sometimes put too much trust in mosque leaders to manage their personal affairs. She says, “Islam definitely tells you not to put faith in man. You're putting all your faith in this man that you don't know because he’s a sheikh, an Imam. He's still just a man.” Likewise, she says, putting all the blame on the Imams is misguided, too. “How much research are you doing?,” she asks. “ I don't care how new you are. You’re putting so much on the Imam, but what didn't you do?” Sofie admits that at the time, she was starry-eyed and maybe naive. Juliette Galonnier researches converts to Islam. She’s a political science professor at Sciences Po in Paris. She says vulnerability is a big issue for converts like Sofie. Especially, she says, “For those who try to convert by themselves. Those who did their own personal research in books on the internet, but who didn't really have a strong network of Muslim friends. So these people talk a lot in interviews about their vulnerability as new Muslims.” Galonnier says vulnerability comes from that experience of loneliness. Married in Morocco Sofie was in a vulnerable place. She continued corresponding with the man in Morocco and traveled there with her eight-week-old son. “The day after I got there,” she says, “He's like, ‘I love you and I want to marry you.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, everything seems good.’” Soon things were far from good. They got married, but Morocco was a total culture shock, and Sofie started to struggle. “I mean, moving into an environment where you don't speak the language. They have a completely different culture,” she adds. For example, she had to learn how to use a squat toilet. At first, the couple communicated in Spanish. “Because I speak Spanish, and he spoke French, Spanish, and Arabic. And we used Spanish until we learned enough of each other's languages to communicate a little bit better,” she says. Sofie says she tried to get used to the culture, the people, the mannerisms. She thought she was in Morocco for the long haul, that this was going to be her new home. But, her husband had other plans. He wanted to live in the U.S. “Within three weeks, he was pushing me to come back here,” Sofie says. “We did go try to get him a visa. We went to the American consulate and we were denied. We found out later that I could come here and apply. So once he figured that out, he sent me back here.” American culture clash Sofie came back to the U.S. and filed for permanent residency for her husband. He joined her nine months later. But she says it soon became an unhappy marriage. “He would say things like women aren't supposed to talk. They're supposed to cook and clean and never sit down,” she says. “He was very threatened if I was resting. He didn't even like me to sit and crochet. ”He said that was being lazy.” There was another big thing that had to do with a core part of who Sofie was. She loved comedy. She cracked jokes wherever she went. She’s a big laugher, finding humor all around her. She says her husband just didn’t get any of it. “He had no sense of humor, you know? One day I asked him, I said, ‘How long was the surgery?’ He said, ‘What surgery? I said, you know, the one where they removed your sense of humor.’ But he didn't laugh. He never laughed.” Comedy was a big part of what she wanted to do with her life. She says he discouraged her from pursuing it at all. “It was torture living with someone who didn't get any of my jokes, didn't laugh at any of my jokes,” she says. “He's always like, ‘Moroccan ladies don't do that.’ Okay, well then marry a Moroccan. I don't know what to tell you. You didn't marry a Moroccan lady. I'm not gonna be like one, whatever that means.” “He spent 10 years telling me who to be, but he never found out who I was,” she says. “Why? Why are you so dead set on changing me as a human?” The Tripletts, the marriage counselors, have seen this scenario many times. “There's a lot of questions that you need to ask before marriage,” says Jenny, “If you are expecting me to learn your culture, and live with your culture, gravitate to your culture, there has to be some mutual respect.” There's a lot of questions that you need to ask before marriage, but if you're entertaining someone who is an immigrant foreign born: what are your ideas? Do you know American culture? Do you, do you respect American culture?” Sofie eventually filed for divorce. The Imam who connected Sofie with her husband all those years ago is Imam Yassir Chadly. He confirms many of the details of Sofie’s story, including that he introduced her to her ex-husband in the first place. “He didn't have any bad things like drugs or drunk or something,” Chadly says, “And he wanted to raise this boy as a father to him. That was my essential connection that I wished for her. That was what I wanted.” Chadly says his intention was to help Sofie. He hasn’t had much contact with her since the wedding 26 years ago, but he did hear about her struggles with her husband—and her divorce. “I have felt bad about it because that was not my wish that this will happen,” he says. “Of course, when you meet people to be together, you wish for them the best thing.” Now he says, he wishes he’d been more present. “I never sat with her to ask her how is this man? How is he treating you?,” he says. “And I never sat between them and continued to groom them to become good. I just expected that they will do good to each other.” Thinking back, Chadly says he suspects that maybe the man he thought was such a good match for Sofie really just wanted to marry her so he could come to the US. Over the years, Chadly has seen a lot, and he says he’s changed his mind altogether about these kinds of marriages. “I think most of it doesn't work. Ninety-nine percent I would say it doesn't work,” he says. It certainly didn’t work for Sofie. She ended up alone with three children, cut off from her mosque community and starting to question why she chose Islam in the first place. “I just had to come full circle again,” Sofie says. “And remember why I converted. And remember that it had nothing to do with Moroccan culture. It had nothing to do with him. And his misogyny. I had to stop and separate myself from that cultural bullcrap and what the religion says. Because a lot of it is absolutely in contradiction to what the religion says.” Healing through comedy Sofie needed to heal. And to rediscover herself. There was a time right before she left her husband, she says, that she had almost given up. “I was kind of a shell of myself,” she says. “But what I found is after I left, it was like a rubber band that had been stretched. It just went right back because I had spent so long bending over backwards and trying to be everything that he told me I should be. It just snapped right back.” Rediscovery for Sofie meant getting back to who she was and a big part of that was humor and comedy. Sofie laughs, “I have a weird brain. I have this sort of constant stream of hilarity running through my brain. I'm never bored. I'm rarely lonely. And my brain keeps me entertained.” She knew comedy for her wasn’t just funny thoughts in her head. It was more. She was raised on comedy. She grew up watching comedy greats like Robin Williams, Steven Wright, and George Carlin. She knew she had a talent. A couple of years after her divorce, she felt she was ready to go on stage. She started going to open mics. She was a featured comedian at Oakland’s 2019 TEDx event. She joked about being a Muslim woman in a post 9/11 America. “So I never get greeted at Walmart,” she jokes. “Every time I go in there's like those twin greeters. And they're looking at each other like, ‘I'm not gonna greet her. You gonna greet her?’” “With CVS on the other hand, they have excellent customer service. By customer service I mean surveillance.” On this day, just before the first Covid lockdown, she brings her two now-teenaged daughters to comedy night at Oakland’s Copper Spoon Club where she’s a regular. She jokes about being divorced. “They say that having a sense of humor is like a coping mechanism, but it doesn't feel like coping,” she says. “Everyone has to look at life through some kind of lens. If you can look through the lens that makes you laugh, that makes you a lot happier as a person.” *** Hana Baba is the host of Becoming Muslim. She also hosts KALW's award-winning newsmagazine, Crosscurrents, and The Stoop podcast: stories from across the Black diaspora. The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Reclaiming a lost heritage Tyson Amir Photo credit: Tom Levy Tyson asked to be photographed in front of a West Oakland mural depicting Huey P. Newton, a famous Black Panther. Photo credit: Tom Levy Tyson asked to be photographed in front of a West Oakland mural depicting Huey P. Newton, a famous Black Panther. Photo credit: Tom Levy Tyson sits on a hydrant at the corner of 14th and Peralta streets where the mural is painted on the side of a corner grocery store. Photo credit: Tom Levy Black Panther inspired mural in Oakland, CA. Photo credit: Tom Levy Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Imran Ali Malik “In my young mind, the most powerful image or representation that I saw of blackness and an unapologetic revolutionary approach was that of Malcolm, and Malcolm was amazing. And still is to this day. And so the calculus in my mind was whatever produced him, I need to be connected to.” From a young age, Tyson Amir’s family knew he would become Muslim. He’s been determined to follow the revolutionary example of Malcolm X since he was 10 years old. Islam for Tyson is about walking in the footsteps of Black Revolutionaries, beginning for him with his great-great-great-grandfather, an enslaved man who, according to family lore, was Muslim. “I don't focus a lot on what might or might not happen. We all go and die. It's just the reality of the situation, but how are we going to live? That is something that we do have some control over.” This is Tyson Amir, an Oakland-based rapper, writer, and teacher. His path to Islam came out of the Black American experience. “Although I didn't have what people would consider traditional religion in my home, I'm surrounded by religious practices. The black experience. There's a spirituality to that.” Tyson is talking about the Black American revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, but also, his ancestors. The book that is a family treasure Tyson is carefully handling a large book. It’s a family treasure. “This is the book that chronicles my family history on my father's side. So the title of it is History and Genealogy of Bartlett and Rhoena Flemister.” Bartlett and Rhoena were Tyson’s great great great grandparents. The bulk of what Tyson knows about his family history comes from the book he’s holding. It was put together by his extended family in the early 1980s. Hundreds of people are listed in this book, all of whom trace their lineage back to this couple. It’s hardbound with green leather and embossed with gold letters. There’s a subheading in quotations that reads “I want my blood there on judgment day.” That’s was they say Tyson’s great, great, great grandfather would always say. It was his tagline. Tyson believes these words expressed his ancestor’s longing to see justice for the crimes of slavery. The book is full of pictures and archival documents, and it begins with the harrowing tale of how Bartlett and Rhoena Flemister, survived slavery. "This is a very important story to me,” he says and then recounts the history of his ancestors. “In the late 1850s Dr. Sweet, a calculating enterprising businessman as well as a doctor, realizing a war between the States was an eventuality, begin to sell his slaves. He sold Rhoena and their oldest son, Charlie for $1,500 to a plantation owner from Alabama.” “Charlie is my great, great grandfather,” he tells me. “So he separates my family right before the start of the Civil War.” For years Charlie and Rhoena remained separated from Bartlett and the rest of the family. When they were all eventually freed in 1863, Rhowena and her son walked from Alabama back to Georgia, and by asking directions to the Flemister plantation, found their family again. “So then as the pages of the book go, here's the ancestry of Charlie Flemister,” Tyson says. “So he had 13 children. I am a descendant of him through his eighth child, Henry Luther Flemister So this is my great grandfather.” We sit for about an hour looking through the green book. I start to wonder how knowing this much about your ancestors’ struggles would affect you as a person. “I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in this book,” Tyson says. “Because it meant, and still means, that much to me.” “I am waiting to be able to take this book from my father. This is my book.” Bartlett and Rhoena's story survives because they lived to see emancipation and were able to prosper as free men and women. And their story continues to inspire Tyson and the rest of his family. They acquired land. They fought to protect other people in the community. They were soldiers, bro. I come from that. That’s dope, that’s deep. And then there’s the detail in the book that is part of the reason we’re telling you this story. By the family’s account, Bartlett Flemister was a muslim. This is remarkable. There were no mosques in the US until the 20th century. It’s only recently that historians have begun to uncover the history of Islam among enslaved Africans here. And yet Tyson’s family book shows that Islam, at least as an idea, did pass down through the generations. “I come from that and that's such an important thing,” he says. “There's no way for us to really verify that, but that is the way that the story has been passed down to us,” Tyson says. “The fact that my family has maintained that my great, great, great grandfather practiced Islam, that is important. I'm inspired by that.” Tyson and I are both part of a larger Oakland Muslim community, but before this story, we hadn’t met personally. I called him up and told him I wanted to do a story about his conversion to Islam. He warned me that his wasn’t a typical convert story. I guess he meant the kind where there’s a single moment when everything changes. That’s exactly why I was interested, I told him. Unlike Tyson, I was raised in Islam, the son of Pakistani immigrants. It wasn’t till later in my life that I decided to formally study the faith. As I met a diverse group of Muslims, I grew fascinated by the many paths people take to get to Islam and started investigating convert stories for my own podcast. A lot of times, those stories reflected my own; a personal, individualistic spiritual path. But Tyson’s journey tells a different story entirely. One that has everything to do with the experience of being black in America. Sinbad Avenue in San Jose “Sinbad Avenue. This is where it started,” he tells me. He takes me to the neighborhood in San Jose that his parents moved to in the late seventies, just before he was born. It’s also where Tyson first encountered hip hop as a kid. “This is where all of that began,” Tyson says. “This was where I started rapping, break dancing, all that out here.” Tyson is wearing his usual outfit. Black pants, black shirt, black beanie. And his custom varsity jacket. The street is lined with modest bungalows with short driveways. “I remember seeing folks with linoleum out, like putting that on the ground and then pop — locking, breakdancing, back-spinning, all of that right here.” “And then the older cats here, they rapping and breakdancing. So we got it all from what we saw around us. And then we doing our little kids stuff too, running around playing,” he says. Before they moved here, his parents were activists in Oakland. San Jose was where they chose to raise Tyson and his older sister. They were one of the only black families in a mostly Latino neighborhood. His father taught at the local school and his mother worked at a dentist office. Tyson and his sister spent a lot of time with the elderly neighbor across the street. It was pretty idyllic until the crack epidemic hit. “We didn't ask for it,” Tyson says. “This stuff came and it came into the places that we lived in. And some of us made decisions that we felt were best to survive.” Some of the older kids and fathers started disappearing. They were recruited by gangs, lost to violence, addiction or life in prison. And even young kids like Tyson experienced traumas that would change them forever. He tells me about one of them: “I had a friend, I'm 10 years old.” The friend was 10 years old too. One night he started drinking with his older siblings and ended up dead. “That hit me, bro,” he says. “I'm a kid. You feel me? The end of this person has just happened. I didn't understand that. And I remember that vividly is a moment where whatever I thought was my childhood, that ending, and then having to step into a deeper understanding of the world and the consequences of decisions, and all of that.” Tyson remembers this as the first moment when he started to ask the bigger questions. Religious understanding, higher power, heaven, hell conversation, what's going to happen after this life. Not long afterwards Tyson’s parents decided to sell their home in the Storybook neighborhood and moved across town to a two story home in a cul de-sac. His parents still live there. The Black room Walking through the foyer I immediately notice a theme of African cultural artifacts. Tribal masks and woven farmer hats with intricate patterns hanging on the wall. His mom tells, “Here in San Jose, it's not that many African-American people. And the few that we knew, we all felt the same way. Like our kids aren't getting their information. So we would have Sunday classes and we would have lessons. We take them on field trips. And that's how they got to understand who they were as people.” We sit at the kitchen table, and talk about her upbringing in the South, how she came to Oakland and met her husband. He was a member of the Black Panther Party, the famous group founded there in response to police violence in 1966. She volunteered for their free breakfast program, feeding kids in black neighborhoods before school. Her stories reminded me of something Tyson had mentioned about the house. A special room called The Black Room. She asks Tyson, “You want to take him to the black room?” Tyson takes me upstairs. When they moved into the house, they had this extra bedroom. Tyson’s parents filled it with posters of black icons. Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, A picture of the famous 1968 Olympics black power salute . For Tyson, this room, similar to the book about his enslaved ancestors, had a huge impact. “I'm seeing history and people in revolutionary struggles from all over the world in my very home,” he says. It’s also where his journey to Islam began. He became fascinated by the life of Malcolm X. “I decided I wanted to follow the path of Malcolm very, very early on,” Tyson says. “So whatever I can learn about his path, what helped build him, became part of me. I remember deciding, probably like around the age of 10 or 11, I'm like, ‘Oh, Malcolm was in the nation of Islam. I know in the Nation. They don't eat pork. I won't eat any more pork.’ Simple as that.” His mother remembers how intense he was even at that age. She remembers one time they were at a sports banquet. “He was getting this award, um, before we got ready to eat. You know, the pastor wanted to do the blessing and everybody bows their heads. But my son... “ She cups her hands to simulate the way Muslims pray. “I told my husband, oh look, there's our little Muslim. And I said, that's who he is.” “So in my young mind, the most powerful image or representation that I saw of blackness and an unapologetic revolutionary approach was that of Malcolm,” Tyson says. “Malcolm was amazing and still is to this day. And so the calculus in my mind was whatever produced him, I need to be connected to.” And that included Malcolm’s faith. Still, it would be years before Tyson took his Shahada and officially became Muslim. I asked about that moment many times. And every time I asked, Tyson deflected. It was clear he was trying to steer me away from telling his story that way. His conversion didn’t come from a period of spiritual searching - the way it does for many converts. From the beginning this was about joining the ranks of black Muslim freedom fighters that came before him. Tyson wanted me to understand that his conversion wasn’t about soul-searching. It was about placing himself in the struggle. Your spirituality can be part of your political activism. They're not, they don't have to be separate boxes. It's like, all right, almost step into my political activist, organizing revolutionary box, and that means I'm not in my spiritual box anymore. It's not that. So in what I have experienced as part of the black experience, the spiritual, the political, the revolutionary, the artistic, the creative. It's all intertwined. When Tyson went to college at San Jose State University, he started writing poetry and rapping. He’d always been quiet and introverted but on the mic he let out a huge personality. He started meeting other Muslims at the mosque and at cultural events. There was a burgeoning scene of Muslim hip hop artists in the Bay Area at the time. And they were determined to not rely on the commercial music industry for their success. Tyson joined forces with a DJ and another rapper to form a group called 11:59. Their lyrics reflected a strong sense of Islamic spirituality while being true to their own experiences as Black Americans. “We just passing through / Life is but a test / Come on let’s get free y’all / Die before your death” The group traveled around the United States and to Muslim lands abroad. Tyson’s travels broadened his understanding of the world and his faith, as he met all kinds of people that claim a relationship to Islam. “We thought that with this is this unifying tool of Islam that people would be able to see beyond some of the things that colonization, imperialism, just the global system of racism have thrown into each of us, regardless of where we are in the planet, he says.” He and his band mates felt that the Black American struggle held lessons for Muslims all over the world. They toured for years. But eventually, the band dissolved. And Tyson’s focus turned back home. His relationship to religion shifted. He became less concerned with connecting with Muslims abroad and more attuned to the struggle that brought him into the faith to begin with. A visit to Panther territory In February 2020, just a month before things closed down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Tyson and I driving around West Oakland, visiting old Black Panther landmarks in Oakland. He asks me, “Have you been to West Oakland like this?” I tell him, not with a tour guide. “I don't know if I'm a tour guide, but I'll point out a few things,” he tells me. “So right now, we're at 14th and Peralta. So West Oakland is the official home of the Black Panther party.” I had passed these streets countless times but hadn’t known the history. I began to sense the enormity of the struggle that weighs on Tyson. 50 years ago, young black people organized on these streets to stand up to police brutality. What we driving through. These are the streets that those brothers and sisters were on. This is where they was pulling their first recruits, and this is what produced that which produced a movement that had an impact all throughout the United States and beyond. That's powerful man. Teaching as revolution These days, Tyson spends his time trying to live up to this history. He’s writing, teaching, and organizing in the black community. In a classroom where he’s teaching, the desks are arranged in a circle. The students watch him intensely. “We're going to break it down,” he tells them. So we gonna take this line by line. Y'all good. Y'all ready? So this is Between Huey and Malcolm.” Tyson starts to read one of his poems. “The doctor Huey P Newton had an epiphany once. And then he said, I don't expect the white media to create positive black male images. So he wouldn't be surprised to see how evening networks accumulate their net worth of billions off assassinating the character of our children.” It’s from a book he published called Black Boy Poems. He uses it in a curriculum he’s developed. It’s designed to teach black students the revolutionary history of the 1960’s. “Ain't no revolutionary curriculum that people are being exposed to that is put out by the state of California or any other state that we're talking about,” says Tyson. “They're not doing it and not going to give you information that's going to lead you to fighting for your freedom and liberation.” He wants the students to see themselves in that history, the way the green book about his ancestors and the black room in his house did for him as a kid. This is how Tyson described himself in our first interview. I had asked him to tell me his name and what he does. “Some people call me an author. Some people call me an emcee,” he said. “Some people call me a poet. Some people call me educator and activist and organizer, so many different things. Freedom fighter is first. “ He was raised seeing himself as part of the continuation of the struggle. The struggle began with the ancestors of his ancestors, who were brought in bondage and forced to labor on these lands. They lost their languages. Their traditions. And of course their religious knowledge. Everything Tyson does today is about his connection to this community. To his forebears. To fallen leaders. It’s what informs his music. His writing. His teaching. It’s why today, if he’s not working, he’s volunteering and organizing. This is what Tyson wants me to understand. that his choice to be Muslim is at the heart of his revolutionary stand against a history of oppression. “I want to live a life that's principled that reflects the conditions that we're in,” he says. “And being true to those principles. And having a purpose in the way that I live my life and serving the people in the community that I come from. And standing up for the things that need to be addressed in this moment in time because that's what my ancestors did before me. Tyson continues. “I'm going to honor them and I'm going to carry that on because it's the right thing to do. If you put all those pieces together, that's what's at the heart of what I stand on in terms of faith and spirituality and practice.” *** Imran Ali Malik is a freelance writer and audio producer, currently pursuing a master’s at Berkeley Journalism. He is the producer of the Submitter podcast . The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Finding freedom in prison Wendell El-Amin James photographed in the Fairfield group home for formerly incarcerated men that he manages. Photo credit: Tom Levy Wendell El-Amin James fingers Muslim prayer beads. Photo credit: Tom Levy Wendell El-Amin James holds his favorite Qur'an. Its cover was made by another incarcerated man he knew when he was in prison. Photo credit: Tom Levy Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Hana Baba "Malcolm X said it himself. He said there is no audience that is more primed to hear the message of Islam than the black man in prison." An important part of the Black Muslim story in America has to do with incarceration. Scholar SpearIt is a professor at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University and author of “American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam.” “Starting in the 1970s, we started on this turn to mass incarceration. And so the sitting demographic of people was large groups of African American men. And so they are literally a captive audience for the message,” SpearIt says. Thirty to forty thousand prison inmates convert to Islam every year, according to SpearIt. He argues that the Black Muslim story can’t be told without looking at what’s happened in American prisons. Harlem of the West Wendell El-Amin James grew up in San Francisco during the 1960s. It was a time of cultural revolution and radical ideas. For the city’s Black communities it was also a time when the jazz scene flourished in the Fillmore district, known as the Harlem of the West. As a kid of just 11 or 12, Wendell James saw a lot on the city’s streets —pimps, drugs, clubs. Wendell didn’t learn how to read. He was classified as special ed for a speech impediment. As a teen, he would hang out in the neighborhood. He’d be in the city on Saturdays and church on Sundays. And then there was an unexpected turn of events. His girlfriend got pregnant. He got married at age 18. “My mom wasn't going for that,” Wendell says. “She said, ‘You be responsible. You get a job and you make sure this girl is taken care of.’ I got me a job in a shipyard at a young age. But then I became part of the street as well. And I had friends that were selling marijuana, weed.” He started dealing. He needed money to keep a house and support his new family. Weed led him to cocaine and heroin. “I became a dope dealer in San Francisco,” Wendell says. This was also a time of activism and social change. It was the height of the free speech movement in Berkeley. The Black Panthers were in Oakland. Plus, the Nation of Islam had a strong presence in the lives of Black people in the Bay Area. Wendell’s older brother was a member. “I used to go to the temple with him,” Wendell says. “And I used to like it because they marched in the drills and it was structured. You know, I liked that. I loved it!” Wendell admired the Nation, but he was still young and he had the responsibility to care for a family before the age of 20. He dealt drugs for years. The money was rolling in. But by the late 1970s, he wasn’t just dealing heroin and cocaine, he was also using. He and his wife were addicts. One day he was in San Jose and was arrested. He ended up serving six months in the county jail. That was Wendell’s first involvement with incarceration. After he left jail, he went back to his old drug life on the outside. It was the same for a lot of people. At the time, recidivism rates were notoriously high. In 1987, he was charged with another crime — a much more serious crime: first-degree murder. “I was scared to death.” Going to prison Wendell maintains his innocence to this day. But he was convicted and sent to prison for 27 years. While awaiting his sentence in county jail, the men inside with him gave him a reality check about what would come next. “I went into a holding tank with people that were older than I was,” he says. “Old Gs, so to speak. And he was telling me, ‘Youngster, you goin’ into prison. You charged with murder. You're going to prison man.’” “A lot of Old G's had been to prison and at that time it was a war going on in prison,” Wendell says. “You know, Blacks and whites and Mexicans. People were dying every day. So they said, ‘You going to old Folsom.’ And that's where it's really bad. I said, ‘Whoa.’” This was the height of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs in the 1980s that led to prison populations swelling. A 1985 report on violence at Folsom State prison counted 120 stabbings in just six months that year. A prison guard was killed the same year Wendell was going in. So the older men Wendell was getting advice from had a big tip for him. They told him that when he got to prison he should find the Muslims. Wendell recalls that conversation. “‘They said, ‘You hang out with the Muslims, you’ll be okay.’ I said, ’What do you mean by that?’” “He said, ‘Nothing will happen to the Muslims.’’ “‘What you mean about that?’” “He said, ‘Muslims don't play. So you hang out with the Muslims, you'll be straight.’” The Muslims. Like his brother back in the 60s. However between that time and now, much had changed with Black Muslims. That change included charismatic leader Malcolm X. Malcolm X was assassinated after splitting from the Nation of Islam. Its leader Elijah Muhammad died in 1975 and his son Warith Deen took over, moving the movement towards mainstream Sunni Islam. By the time Wendell went to prison in the late 1980s there were a number of different Black Muslim groups on the inside, and they were all reaching out to incarcerated men more than ever. “The Muslim groups are the most sophisticated and organized outreach effort groups in prison that prisons ever known,” says SpearIt, the scholar who studies Islam in prisons. Malcolm X famously converted to Islam in prison. Like it was for Malcolm X, prison for many is a time of personal reflection, SpearIt says. “For many, it's the first time they've ever been able to sit down and concentrate on something away from the chaos of the hood and the streets and all of that,” he says. “And we have to remember, in prison, it's traumatic. And there's other research that suggests that trauma, the trauma of having to go to prison, and then finally getting there and having to live that experience, these are precursors to conversion as well.” Wendell gets to Folsom, and on the first day he’s there, he sees somebody get killed. That day, his new cell mate gave him different advice from what he heard from those county jail men. This man said, “You have to be part of the war happening in the prison. You have to pick a side and be loyal to it.” “He said, ‘You want to survive,’” Wendell says. “You got to be part of this, man,” he tells Wendell. “If you don't want to be part of this, you're gonna die.” Wendell had a choice to make. A choice that could mean the difference between life and death. Should he listen to this man inside prison and get involved with the gangs? Or take the advice from the men he met in the county jail? He was new, and he was conflicted with the mixed messages. But he knew he had to choose. Finding the Muslims Wendell asked where the Muslims hung out. Someone pointed him in the direction of the multi-faith chapel. “So I went over and then went inside. And it was like, wow! This is cool. I saw the brothers all together. At one section were brothers learning the prayer. And one section, they learn Arabic. And one section, they got a whiteboard where they learned stuff. And it was like, it was cool. It was quiet. Out there was the yard. A lot of noise. Inside, it was quiet. Everybody respectful.” One of the men introduced Wendell to the others and he felt that familiar draw that he experienced as a kid going with his brother to the Nation temple. “You know, they glow,” he remembers. “It's a different look. Different from people in prison. You got that shine, you know?. You’re serious about what you're doing. You know, you've been educated. You’ve been transformed. Everything you're doing is different.” And that protection the Old G’s told him about? That first day, he stayed in the chapel as long as he could. And when it was time to leave, the Muslim men walked him back to his cell. In the morning, someone would be there to get him. He was accompanied at all times. He felt safe. He felt he was with productive people. He listened as they read from the Quran. He watched their prayers. When Ramadan came along, he fasted with them. He remembers how impressed he was. “I wasn’t a Muslim then. But to see how you fast. That you don't eat. You don't drink. You don't do nothing. No swearing, no cursing, no nothing.” Wendell enjoyed hanging out with the Muslims. Scholar SpearIt says these feelings are part of the reason why Islam is such a powerful draw for men like him in prison. This strong sense of connection, the discipline. And he says there are other reasons, too. “People just look at their existential situation and associate that with Christianity,” SpearIt says. “This is a Christian country. These were Christians who did this to me. And I'm sitting in prison because of this system that, you know — that basically Christianity has authorized. So there is that sense that by being Muslim, you are joining something that has had a glorious past of standing up to Christianity, having glorious victories. So there is this sense that Christianity is something to get away from." Spearit says many Black American Muslims see themselves as reverts rather than converts. Going back to the past and reclaiming powerful lost Muslim identities linked to the history of Islam in Africa and even Spain. For Wendell, after fasting that Ramadan in 1988, he went to the Muslims and said: “I want to become Muslim. It's cool.” “He said, ‘Why do I say it's cool?’ I say, ‘Because the way that you guys are doing things is different.’” “You know, we got dope dealers and you got dope fiends. You got everything in prison that you got on the street. You had people doing the same things they did on the streets, they’re doing in prison.” “I said, ‘This is cool.’” “If I'm gonna be in prison for some time. This what I want to be. I want to be a Muslim.” He remembers the day vividly. “When I took my shahada,” he says, “it was like a weight was lifted off me. It was like, ‘Okay, you got this. You can do this, right?’” “'‘You don't have to worry about nothing. You can do this.' Whatever time they give, you can do this. You know, you just keep doing what you're doing. You know, just keep reading this book. And the book is gonna give you direction outta this.’” A difficult transition Wendell was now Muslim, but he started going back to his old habit of dealing drugs again. He ended up in solitary confinement — the hole. He says the Islamic concept of God watching you at all times is what helped him through it. “So when I got in the hole, I realized, hey, wait a minute. Allah is watching me, everything I do. Everything that I do, I’m being watched. So I got to make a promise to myself…I make a promise that: you can’t do this. You have to take control of your life and know that you’re not the only one in this.” Scholar SpearIt says being in solitary can be instrumental for conversion and for commitment to the faith. Again, he points to the story of Malcolm X. “His time in solitary is what really got him inspired,” he says. “And was the trigger for his conversion. Because when you've got nowhere else to turn and you're at rock bottom, you can only turn to God and only go upward from there.” Wendell left the hole with a new vision for himself. He cut ties with the guys who were dealing and got back in with the Muslim guys. He started going to the Friday services. And he studied. A lot. Over the years, he slowly worked to turn his vision into reality. He spent most of his time in the chapel or in the library. He taught himself how to read and got his GED. He got a clerkship with the Muslim chaplain and earned a certificate in drug and alcohol counseling. New religion, new life, new goals Wendell got out on July 2, 2015. He had been in prison for nearly 3 decades. His son and the Muslim chaplain he’d known inside were there to greet him. “My first thing that I did,” he says, “I hooked up with some people that was doing constructive things on the street, that had been in the system.” “A lot of people would be going back into prison speaking to people in prison. I wanted to do that.” When he got out, Wendell was 63 years old. It’s a dangerous phase of life to be returning to society. Older people are more vulnerable to being un-housed, unemployed, chronically sick and lonely. But Wendell had a plan. He stayed with family. And he got to work. He started a reentry support circle as part of Taleef, a Muslim collective that works with converts and formerly incarcerated people. It’s a casual monthly gettogether where folks can just talk. Even during the pandemic, they were held — on Zoom. People open up about their lives transitioning back into society, their relationships and their challenges. Wendell’s former coworker, Alaa Suliman, used to run circles with him. “His very open and accepting personality and energy,” she says. “He just attracts people to him to be able to just share and connect. He just has a very nonjudgmental, like all is welcome. We're in this together.” This kind of work is critical for rehabilitation, according to scholar SpearIt. He says the Muslim version of it has a good track record. “There's an entire discussion about Islam’s contribution to rehabilitation,” he says. “When you look at all the religions — and they've done numbers on this — Muslims have lower recidivism numbers than all the other religious groups.” It doesn’t work for everyone though. SpearIt says sometimes people will start hanging with the Muslims out of a need for protection or to get out of the cell for extra perks. “And so that's one of the tests to determine if someone is a sincere convert,” he says. “ Is whether they keep the faith once they leave prison. And many don't. I mean, that's just a fact. And so, you know, when we talk about converts as a whole, we have to recognize that there's a chunk of converts who weren't converts at all seriously, but were just kind of there for the ride. And once they get out or get in a better situation, they don't really stick with it.” For Wendell, there was no question. He was committed to staying Muslim. He says he’s doing exactly what he thinks he was meant to do. He still tells his story: “I tell people that I lived in a cesspool before going to prison. I was a dope dealer. I was one of the worst of the worst. I sold poison to everybody that wanted it. I sold it to them. The women having babies. I did that. I live with that every day. Then Allah took me from the cesspool and sent me to hell. I went into hell, literally. Literally, I've seen people get killed. I've seen grown men get raped. I've seen some stuff that people are not supposed to see.” Wendell says he felt God was giving him a choice. Go back to the cesspool or do his work. “And I chose to come back and do his work. I do his work today. I don't do my work, because it's not mine. I'm just a tool being worked.” He wipes a tear. “It gives me a chill,” he says. “I get teary-eyed with this stuff. I know that Allah allowed me to come home for a reason.” And the reason is to be of service. “It means that I can get up every morning with a purpose.” *** Hana Baba is the host of Becoming Muslim. She also hosts KALW's award-winning newsmagazine, Crosscurrents, and The Stoop podcast: stories from across the Black diaspora. The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Living the story of the Nation of Islam Abdul Raoof Nasir Photo credit: Tom Levy Abdul Raoof Nasir Photo credit: Tom Levy Abdul Raoof Nasir Photo credit: Tom Levy Abdul reads the Quran while sitting on the floor of the mosque he attends in Oakland. Photo credit: Tom Levy Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Hana Baba “At the end of that meeting, they asked who believes what you heard is the truth? And you stand up and they said, ‘If you want to get more information, follow that guy, right there.’” You can’t tell the story of Islam in America without telling the story of Black Muslims. Scholar Edward Curtis, Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, says African-Americans in the 1920s — just like African-Americans in the 1800s — never thought of themselves as completely cut off from Africa or its history and heritage. “By converting to Islam, they were indeed laying claim to a spiritual, historical, political and social resource that they that they knew had been part of their people’s history for a long, long time,” says Curtis, who is the author of several books about Islam in America. He says there’s one period in particular that’s key to understanding how Islam took off as a religion of converts among people of African descent. Curtis says in the 1920s a variety of groups which called themselves Muslim became important parts of Black society. In some cases, they were inspired by Muslim missionaries, in particular from Sudan. And sometimes they were inspired simply by people who had created new denominations and completely new interpretations of Islam. “They began to take root in Black America in particular,” he says. “And those organizations, even though they never supplanted the supremacy of African-American churches, they became very important parts of Black society.” These are organizations like the Moorish Science Temple founded by Noble Drew Ali or the Black Sunni movement of Satti Magid. Curtis says one movement after World War Two became so important and so pronounced that it seemed to have eclipsed all the other denominations. And that was the Nation of Islam. A different civil rights message Abdul Raoof Nasir was a basketball player at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s. “We played cards a lot. We gambled. I was a gambler,” he says. “And there was a guy who used to come to the gambling table that was in a Student Union Building and he was a member of the Nation of Islam.” By this time, the Nation of Islam was almost 40 years old and recruitment on campuses was well established. Abdul Raoof says the man would sell them a newspaper called Mohamed Speaks. “He wouldn't leave until we bought some,” he says. “So we would always buy the paper. It was the news of the day. News that was relevant to African American people at the time. It was defining the African American civil rights struggle in a different way than what was popular in the media. Because they were talking about separating from America rather than integrating, and they were talking about doing for self.” This was a different message than Martin Luther King Jr’s whose rhetoric of nonviolence dominated the narrative around Black civil rights at the time. “Many of the younger people were looking for a stronger way or a different way, a more, a more aggressive way to advance the struggle,” says Abdul Raoof. “They were pushing the older generation to do more. You know, to protect ourselves, not to follow the nonviolent path.” At the same time, students all around Abdul Raoof were demanding change. His Black teammates were threatening to strike when one of them was suspended for allegedly wearing an afro. On the academic side, students were demanding to be taught Black Studies. He was intrigued by all of it. “There were many, many groups that were proposing, ‘We have a better solution to advancing our cause toward dignity, self-respect, and equality,’” says Abdul Raoof. “All these things that became more important to me as I got older. The Nation of Islam began to grab more of my attention than all those other groups.” The Nation of Islam The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930, by a man named Wallace D. Fard, or Master Fard Muhammad, a dynamic preacher who claimed he was the manifestation of God on earth. He gave his closest follower, Elijah Poole, the title of messenger of God, renaming him The Honorable Elijah Muhammad . It was Elijah Muhammad who led and grew the Nation over the next decades till his death in 1975. His teachings were based on Afro-centric ideas that preached Black Nationalism, economic independence, and complete separation from white people. From a religious standpoint, they called themselves Muslims, a hearkening back, they say, to the original religion of their enslaved ancestors. They shunned Christianity as the white slavemaster’s religion. They followed the Quran though their version of Muslim teachings has been called a heterodoxy from Islamic principles, especially when it comes to the idea that God can come to earth in human form. Elijah Muhammad claimed that he was a messenger from God. Elijah Muhammad grew the Nation from a group of fewer than two hundred followers in Detroit and Chicago in the 1930s to a nationwide network of temples. By the 1960s, the membership had grown to 100,000 . The Nation advocated self-sufficiency, owning retail and wholesale businesses, schools, housing complexes, banks and thousands of acres of farmland. Brother Malcolm During this time, Malcolm X had emerged as a charismatic minister and spokesman for the Nation. Malcolm was a gifted communicator, but he also clashed with its leader Elijah Muhammad. They eventually fell out over stories about Elijah’s affairs with young women. Malcolm also began to have experiences that pulled him away from the central teachings of the organization. In the spring of 1964, he left the Nation. That same year, he traveled overseas on a trip to Mecca to perform the Hajj. It was a life-changing experience, according to professor Kayla Wheeler of Xavier University in Cincinnati and an expert on Black Muslims in the U.S. “Traveling abroad, being able to go to Egypt, having connections with non-Black Muslims—when he goes to the Hajj and he is praying next to blond-haired, blue-eyed men who he had been taught were the devil” — Wheeler says Malcom saw they were his brothers in faith. It changed Malcolm’s ideology. After the hajj, he denounced Black supremacy and the more militant talk of racial segregation he had engaged in. He embraced Sunni Islam, the more mainstream Islam that preached racial equality. After that, tensions between Malcolm and the Nation escalated. In 1965, he was assassinated. The following year, three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of his killing. A message that resonated By the time Abdul Raoof got to UC Berkeley in 1967, Malcolm had been dead for two years. But his presence was still prominent. Abdul Raoof began to read Malcolm’s writings and learn about his role in helping to grow the Nation alongside leader Elijah Muhammed. “He was energetic,” Abdul Raoof says. “He was brilliant and he was full of energy to spread those teachings.” Abdul Raoof was just one of many young people who were drawn to the Nation during this period. Its message was simple and effective: that Christianity was the religion of the white man, forced onto them by slavery. And that they needed to return to Islam as the original faith of their African ancestors. The message was instrumental to converting generations of African Americans to Islam. At this point in his life, Abdul Raoof was watching as friends were starting to join. “One sister, who was a good friend of mine, we used to do a lot of stuff together. She was active in student work in the movements,” he recalls. “One day, I go to her house and she's got on this white dress. I was going there to do some of the illegal stuff we used to do together and she said she no longer did that. So that really impressed me.” One afternoon in 1969 he decided to go to his first Nation meeting across the Bay in San Francisco. “I went there and saw some of my other neighborhood friends,” he says. “In fact, there was a guy who was a janitor at Berkeley High School. A couple of athletes from other schools. They had converted.” The message was appealing to a wide range of people. “Nation of Islam was a self-help organization,” Abdul Raoof explains. “So they were saying that we had the responsibility to do these things for ourselves that we allow, that we're asking white people to do for us. This is what I've been reading in the paper. But now I'm hearing it live, from one of their representatives. They are very, very effective speakers.” Abdul Raoof was entranced. He was primed and ready to join. “At the end of that meeting, they asked, ‘Who believes what you heard is the truth?’ And you stand up and they said, ‘If you want to get more information, follow that guy, right there.’ So you follow the guy in the back, one of the representatives in the back. And then they give out these letters.” “And so it's a letter that says, ‘I want to get a name. I want to give back the slavemaster’s name.’” He is given the name Abdul Raoof Nasir. And he won’t tell me his former name. He feels very strongly about what happened that day, the day he became a member of the Nation of Islam. He started coming to the meetings and learning the teachings and prayers. His transition was smooth, but some things were hard to deal with. He recalls, “One of the key things, and one of the things that was emphasized at the time, was not eating pork. My problem was when I would go home and my mother would cook.” He wouldn’t eat and he’d tell his mother she shouldn’t eat it either. ”I want to throw her pork out of her house and so that's where the difficulty came in. ‘Boy, you lost your mind? You crazy? I raised you on that. You were eating it yesterday.’” A big part of being a member was being part of the independent economy. And that newspaper? Abdul Raoof was also selling that now, helping the Nation achieve incredible sales numbers. He says they sold a million copies a week. “Because all the men were required to sell the paper. We bought farmland, imported products. We started importing fish, millions of pounds of fish and we would take them door to door along with our other products: the bean pie.” The iconic Black Muslim bean pies, still sold to this day outside mosques around the country. Changes in The Nation, a time to choose Years later, Abdul Raoof graduated with a degree in social science. In the coming years, he would witness the Nation going through a huge transformation, one that would force him to make a critical decision about what he believed. It had to do with tensions in the Nation. This time between Elijah Muhammad and his son Wallace, known as Warith Deen Muhammad. Warith Deen rejected Elijah’s idea of the nature of God. “He rejected believing that white people have some inherent evilness to them,” says scholar Kayla Wheeler. “So he took a different, more universal approach to what race and racism could be like. It was not saying that white people were incapable of being racist, or that racism did not exist. It was rather saying that it's a social structure. It's not anything that is inherent in an individual.” These ideological struggles were at the heart of the Nation’s transformation. When Elijah Muhammad died in February of 1975, Warith Deen took over, and he started to change the organization immediately. Like many at the time, Abdul Raoof was a young graduate, following all this closely. “So Wallace Mohammed came in,” Abdul Raoof remembers. “He began to name this part of the journey to Islam as the second resurrection. That the first part of his father's work was the first resurrection. And that this was the second resurrection. And he began to immediately make changes in the thinking. He said, ‘What The Nation of Islam was doing that agrees with what he found in the Quran, he would keep.’ What he found that was in disagreement with the Holy Quran, he will eliminate.” Warith Deen abandoned the name Nation of Islam and began to call his organization World Community of Islam. Kayla Wheeler says he very quickly started to move away from some of the Black nationalist principles and towards a more global perspective. And that was a big change. Wheeler describes those times. “People are kind of confused about what's going on. They give him the benefit of the doubt for a while,” she says. Eventually the group splits. This is where a familiar name enters the story. Louis Farrakhan , who was a minister in the Nation. He decides to break away from Warith Deen and revive the Nation of Islam. Wheeler says this is when families had to make decisions. “You do see some families picking, which side do they want to go to?” Wheeler says. “Do they want to stay with Mr. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad? Or do they want to go with Louis Farrakhan, who claims that he's really keeping Elijah Muhammad's ideas and messages together?” Everybody had to make a choice, but for Abdul Raoof, he knew where his heart was. It was clear to him what Warith Deen was saying made sense to him, especially when it came to the concept of God pushed by the Nation. “It was so unclear what that meant,” he says. “God came in the person of somebody?” The idea that God could come down to earth in the form of a man, Abdul Raoof never believed that. He also liked the idea of moving towards a more global and traditional Islam. He started traveling. He went to Africa and Europe. He met Muslims in different countries and when he got back home in 1977 things had changed. “They had selected a new leader in our local mosque here. He was the first non-African American. He was the first Pakistani-American and so he began to institute Jumah prayer and Arabic classes.” Most Nation members made the same choice as Abdul Raoof, to stick with Warith Deen and his move to a more traditional Islam. A much smaller group broke off with Farrakhan. Today, Black Muslims make up about a fifth of American Muslims. As the decades pass, many of them are now born into the faith. The majority identify as Sunni Muslim or “just Muslim.” Only two percent have stayed with the Nation, led by Louis Farrakhan. No matter which Black Muslim group you’re talking about, scholar Kayla Wheeler says they all share something deep. “I think the number one thing is a love of Blackness. You can't go into an Imam Warith Deen Mohammed masjid (mosque) and not feel how Black it is in terms of what the khutba (sermon) would be, hearing call and response. Somebody is yelling, ‘takbeer’ giving you an ‘Ameeen.’ There's just this sense of Blackness and this distinct Black Americanness that transcends that divide between Imam Warith Deen Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.” Wheeler adds, “I think also what both organizations have been able to keep is connecting to the past, recognizing that they stand on the shoulders of so many Black Muslims and Black revolutionaries.” As for Abdul Raoof, he worked as a social worker for many years, earning degrees in Islamic Leadership and Islamic studies. Then he found his calling in prison chaplaincy, working 20 years in California prisons as a Muslim chaplain. He’s retired now, but he advises people on parole and holds classes at his local mosque in Oakland. He may not identify with the Nation of Islam today, but he says without it, there may have not been an American Islam at all. “The Nation of Islam should get credit—sometimes it doesn’t—for having introduced Islam to America in a major way,” he says. *** Hana Baba is the host of Becoming Muslim. She also hosts KALW's award-winning newsmagazine, Crosscurrents, and The Stoop podcast: stories from across the Black diaspora. The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Who says women can’t lead prayer? Rabi'a Keeble Photo credit: Tom Levy Rabi'a Keeble Photo credit: Tom Levy Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Hana Baba “We need to have a different setup for worshipping,” Rabi’a Keeble says. “One that makes it clear that women are not second class citizens, that women are equal to men.” As far back as Rabi’a Keeble can remember, she was interested in religion and the Bible. She laughs as she tells a story her mother told her from her childhood. ‘‘A repairman was in the house doing something. And he was flirting with my mother because my mother's very pretty. And I heard it. I was in the other room and I came out and I said, ‘You're not supposed to covet. You’re coveting my mother. You're not supposed to covet your ox, your ass, your neighbor's wife.’” “That's as much as I could remember of what I read,” she says. “And they both just cracked up. They were like rolling on the floor that I'm standing there like some prophet, you know? ‘You're not supposed to flirt with my mom.’” It’s a funny story, but it also shows Rabi’a’s early sense of rebelliousness, and her tendency to think for herself. That same spirit emerged decades later when she was becoming Muslim. She was going to Friday prayers in Oakland back in the 1990s. Early on, she started noticing something that bothered her. Usually after the prayer, there’s a time for the Imam to talk to congregants and answer their questions. But there was a problem. “I couldn't talk to the Imam in the mosque,” she said. “It's like, men could talk. Men talk to him all the time. He'd be standing up there. They'd be laughing at some joke. Men would talk to him. Women? No.” Like in many mosques, the Imam was at the front of the prayer hall. The men were right behind him. And the women sat behind the men. Men, she says, were allowed much more openness and leeway to grow their understanding of Islam. “If I can ask a question and I can get an answer then I can grow that much more,” she says. Rabi'a was new to Islam and was thirsty to learn from the Imam. Her frustration built. This lack of access to the Imam, it irked her. She felt her access to God was being limited, too. “I just got very frustrated with it. The idea that because I'm a female, I can't talk in God's house. Because I'm a female, I have to sit back here where even if I did speak, no one's going to really hear me.” “The whole thing implies I'm not worthy. We're going to sit you in back with all the squalling babies and all the gossiping aunties because we know you're not paying attention—because you're a woman.” A question turns into action Rabi'a grew more and more discontented with the mosque. A thought started to form. “I just started to conceive of a learning space, of a worship space that was absolutely friendly to women, that would give women the advantages of growth. Spiritual growth. Intellectual growth.” So Rabi’a made a plan, got a little grant and in 2017, she launched a women-led mosque in Berkeley. She welcomed anyone who wanted to join, no matter their gender. A local seminary gave her a room where her first service was held. Her plan was to teach her congregation how to do Juma (the Friday prayer); how to lead prayer; how to call the Athaan (the call to prayer). How to give a khutba (the sermon) and all the liturgies of Islam. “So we started getting to the point where some ladies went and studied at home, and came back and were able to lead prayer. They had never done it before and they did it beautifully.” After the first service, Friday prayers were held every week with the sermons given by women. Guest speakers were women and the Imams were all women. She named the mosque Qalbu Maryam, In Arabic, it means the heart of Mary. It’s in reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus, who’s held in such high regard by Islam that she is the only woman mentioned by name in the Qur’an. Hind Makki is an interfaith educator with the Institute on Social Policy and Understanding in Chicago, which commissioned a study on mosques called Reimagining Muslim Spaces. She says in the last 15 to 20 years many convert communities started to create their own mosques and their own ‘third spaces’. She says third spaces are not necessarily mosques, but they’re centers for Muslim community building. Makki and her team consult with mosques on how to be more welcoming to women. She says converts tend to launch new spaces based on what they’re missing in mainstream mosques- whether it has to do with gender, or language, access to learning, or just belonging. And one of Rabi'a’s biggest issues- access to learning from the Imam— Hind Makki says it wasn’t a problem in the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque 1,400 years ago, and it shouldn’t be a problem today. Makki says the Prophet Muhammad would give lessons before and after prayers, and women would be there. “Women would talk and engage with him, and ask him questions,” she says. There was even a time when some women thought that the men were hogging him and hogging his time. They complained, Makki says, and he responded by setting aside an entire day for them.” Ironically, in 21st century Berkeley, California, Rabi'a’s challenge to the mainstream didn’t go over well. She likens it to being in labor with a child. “One part of me didn't want to do it. Because I knew what was going to happen. I knew I was gonna be attacked. I knew that people who were not comfortable with themselves would feel uncomfortable with me, and judge me and critique me and attack me. And it happened just like that.” Always curious, always questioning Rabi'a was born to a Black Christian family in the midwest. She grew up in St Louis, Chicago, and Ohio. Though her parents weren’t really religious, she was surrounded by Christianity through her extended family and community. And there was that Bible in the house. Rabia especially had this curiosity about who Jesus was. “Black people have this thing about kind of elbowing God to the side. But Jesus, you know, becomes like everything. And I was like, ‘Well, who is this Jesus?’” “That is kind of a hallmark of who I am,” she says. “I don't buy stuff just because somebody's selling it…I'll look at it. Then I'll figure it out.” There were a couple of things that especially bothered her. She says the whiteness of Jesus, and the maleness of the Christian God didn’t sit well with her. That skepticism makes sense when you consider what Rabi'a would have faced as a young Black woman making her way in the world. During college, she joined friends on a road trip to California and ended up staying in Berkeley where she found a job at a law firm. “I remember being so immature, so green,” she says. She recalls a particular experience. “I was working in this office and all these Caucasian ladies are there and they're the legal secretaries. They have their certificates and legal secretaryness.” “And I'm just this little Black kid in the front, you know, doing my thing.” Even though this was California, and this was Berkeley— a place famous for progressive politics and supposed racial harmony— Rabi’a got a rude awakening. Those legal secretaries gave her a hard time. “They said I smelled bad. They would put bars of soap on my desk. They would do all sorts of horrible things to me.” Those racist experiences planted a seed in Rabi’a, the seed that would grow into a career involving civil rights and social justice work. She left that law firm, went through a number of other jobs and ended up in nursing, which she practiced for years. But throughout, the one constant was her love of the Bible. And she was still pondering and wondering about God. She thought ‘Well, the larger part of the Bible is the Torah. I need to study with a rabbi. I want to really understand what's in this Bible from top to bottom.’ Rabi’a did end up studying with a Rabbi and eventually converted to Judaism. At the time, she was spending a lot of time at the library in Berkeley, reading about social justice, history and spirituality. One day at the library she saw a flyer for Sufi healing. A Sufi spark Sufis are Muslims who follow Sufism, a mystical movement within Islam. Its dedicated followers are members of certain fellowships called Sufi orders. Sufism focuses on inward reflection with the goal being forging a direct relationship with the Divine. Being Sufi can overlap with being Sunni or Shia Muslim. They follow a leader—a sheikh—study under them, and engage in mystical worship practices like deep meditation, trances, and dhikr, repeated melodic chanting the name of God. Dhikr means remembrance of God in Arabic. Many people may know about Sufism from the poetry of Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi and from images of the whirling dervishes of Turkey. Rabi’a knew none of this. All she knew was that she was curious about this “Sufi healing.” The class on the flyer was held at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and she went. In this religious group there was an idea of God that was new to Rabi'a. “I began to learn and understand that there is this other approach to God, of loving God like you would love a lover. I never heard of that before,” she says. Rabi’a was enamored by the concept. “I thought, yes, yes, that's how we're supposed to love God. We're supposed to love God like we love a lover. Longing, you know. Like, ‘Oh, I want to talk to you so bad. I want to hold you so much. I can't eat. I can't sleep unless I have you.’ That's how we're supposed to love God. And I thought this is wonderful. This is what I've been looking for.” But Rabi’a was Jewish now. What did that mean? Wasn’t this a conflict? Did she have to renounce Judaism? She thought to herself, “Essentially, Judaism has laid the foundation for me to understand and enjoy and love Islam because Islam and Judaism are not miles apart. They are inches apart. Just as Christianity informs a lot of what is in Islam. So I didn't feel like I had gone really anywhere. I had just stepped through a doorway and that was it.” Rabi’a knew she wanted to learn more about Islam from this Sheikh’s teachings. One day after class she asked her friend to take her up to him. His name was Sheikh Hisham with the Naqshbandi Sufi order. What came next was a mystical experience. She says, ‘‘She took me up to him. And I'm standing in front of him and I'm looking at this man. Now I believe in mysticism. I've seen a lot of things. I walked up to this man and he had like a glow around him. I didn't know him. I didn't know anything about him, but I saw this as I was standing there. I wasn't impressed as much as I was mystified.” He asked her if anyone had put her up to this, or if she indeed came on her own. “I said, ‘Yes.’’ He said, ‘Then take my cane.’ And I held it. And he started to pray. He started to pray. And he prayed a long time. To the point where everybody was looking around and going, ‘Well, when is he going to give her shahada?’” Shahada is the attestation of faith for a Muslim. “He says, ‘You repeat it after me.’” Rabi’a was now Muslim. And one of her favorite parts of Islam was that ritual— dhikr. Dhikrs were held every Saturday night at the seminary. “I never missed one. You commit this time to simply sitting and chanting and remembering God's name, The parts of God, and just like letting your heart explode in love and worship of God for hours with other folks. And it's wonderful. It changed me. It mellowed me. It did all kinds of things to me. This is a mystery. It's a mystery.” Rabi’a would start coming to the mosque for services—Friday prayers and dhikr. She met lots of new friends, but something bothered her. That lack of access to the Imam and having to sit in the back of the prayer hall. “The one thing I had a problem with was: we need to have a different setup for worshipping,” she says. “One that makes it clear that women are not second class citizens, that women are equal to men.” A drive to seek truth Rabi’a began studying Islamic theology at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. That’s where she first met the sheikh. She immersed herself in the religion and to her, the texts she was studying at school didn’t jibe with what was happening at the mosque. In many verses, the Quran asserts or alludes to the notion that men and women are spiritual equals, but it seemed that Muslim practice had often veered from that. To Rabi’a, what was happening was something that often happens to religions where a faith is practiced differently by different cultures. A Muslim in an Arabian village will probably practice some things differently than one on the South Side of Chicago. And like at her mosque, many mosques in the U.S. are led by immigrant Imams, people who are born, raised, and taught in societies where gender segregation is the norm in religious settings. “I understand that some people see modesty and chastity and preserving the feminine Muslimah in a certain…encased in amber. And she must be this way. No, no, no. There's many different ways to be a Muslim woman.” Qalbu Maryam, the heart of Mary Rabi'a founded her women-led mosque Qalbu Maryam in April 2017. It was a big deal. The Mayor of Berkeley showed up. Local media turned out. A woman, Soraya Deen, a Muslim lawyer and activist, gave the first sermon. Deed does interfaith and women empowerment work in Muslim communities. She met Rabi’a on Facebook, and they hit it off. “Like me, she (Rabi’a) was sick of the patriarchy. She was sick of men telling us what to do, what to believe, what to wear. So then this was burning in her and we were talking about this…You have the agency with your God. You have a right to talk with him.” Deen remembers that first day excitedly. The night before, she went to Rabi'a’s to stay the night. They talked all night. “it was very, very exciting. And there were so many people who came— men and women together. And we created a sacred hallowed space and Rabi'a just worked so hard for that,” Deen says. Rabi’a was on the news, in the papers with images of women in headscarves leading prayer. This was the second women-led mosque in the country, but it was the first that also welcomed men. Rabia says a lot of women came because they thought it was just a women's mosque. “And I let them know”, she says, that, “I cannot repeat the mistake that patriarchy has taught us. We separate nobody here. That's segregation. Just like the civil rights movement. Segregation means that I think I'm better than you.” Some women did eventually leave as men were also joining the congregation. “A lot of the men I spoke to believe a hundred percent that men and women should worship together.” “One man told me, he said, ‘I like this idea. I don't ever want my daughter to feel that she's subservient to any man’. And he was bringing his daughter.” Rabi’a’s congregation was also culturally diverse, a hallmark of those third spaces Muslim converts can create. Mosque researcher Hind Makki talked about it. “These mosques are as diverse as the Muslim population is in the US,” Makki says. “If you go into a mosque in most cities or small towns in the U.S., you don't actually see that racial diversity, except for a very few, a handful of mosques that really reflect the racial diversity of the national community. But in these women-led spaces, whether it's an all-woman space or mixed-gender space, you see that racial diversity. And so the first thing I gleaned from that is that people from all different backgrounds are wanting something different from what the mosques are providing them.” For Rabi'a, that ‘something different’ was the mysticism, the thoughtfulness. But there was something else. When Islam came in the 7th century, it brought with it new ideas. It shook things up. At the time, it was daring and disruptive to the status quo. Prophet Muhammad came with new social rules that were challenging to the traditions of the tribes of Arabia. He was persecuted so badly he eventually had to flee his hometown. Rabi'a was shaking things up too— and had to face the consequences. Challenging times Some Muslim groups and scholars were quoted as saying that Qalbu Maryam wasn’t a real mosque. That it was blasphemous because men and women shouldn’t be praying together. Or that it’s un-Islamic for a woman to lead prayer when men are present. One Berkeley scholar accused her of being ‘provocative’ and ‘antagonistic.’ Then in July 2018, Rab’ia received a notice from the seminary that they needed the room for classes. She was asked to leave after just a year and a half. She was devastated. The seminary— known as the Starr King school— says it was a resources issue. But innovative reform mosques like Rabi'a’s have had a hard time finding and keeping spaces. The same has happened to mixed-gender mosques in Europe. Oftentimes, Muslim leaders speak out against them. They struggle to grow their congregations. Funds dry up, and they end up shrinking to small operations just like Rabi'a’s experience with Qalbu Mariam. In Rabi’a’s case, there is also another thing to consider, according to Kayla Wheeler, a scholar who studies Black Muslims in America. “When I heard a Black woman founded it, I wasn't surprised at all,” Wheeler says. “I think even when a Black Muslim woman breathes, she's going to face criticism. We're constantly policed in the United States regardless of what we do. But when you decide to threaten the status quo. Yeah, it's going to be met with resistance and sometimes a lack of support from the very people you're helping or supporting.” Wheeler argues that being a Black Muslim woman has a lot to do with Rabi'a’s shunning by mainstream Muslim leaders. She says you can't disconnect that push back from anti-Black racism, and the unique misogyny that Black women experience. “I think there's special vitriol that is reserved for Black women who dare to speak out. And I think that just has to reflect the anti-Blackness that you see in a lot of Muslim communities.” Wheeler says there's often an attempt to create a unified image of what Islam should look like, and who should represent Islam. “And if we're keeping it real, that's usually brown straight men and or white straight men. And so when you have women challenging that, you're challenging those men's authority. And people who are interested in power are going to resist that.” Wheeler is reminded by the case of Muslim feminist scholar Amina Wadud who made headlines in 2005 for leading the first mixed-gender prayer in America. Wadud was met with threats. Plus, Wheeler says, the role Black women played in growing American Islam needs to be remembered and revered. “If you look at how Islam was re-established in the United States in the 1900s. It would not have been possible without Black women who took on public leadership roles,” she says. She points to the women of the Nation of Islam, once led by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. Wheeler says, “Claire Muhammed, we oftentimes think of her as just Elijah Muhammed's wife, but she helped run the organization while he was in prison. She was the de facto leader. She helped build the religious schooling. You look at Ella Little Collins, Malcolm X's older half-sister, she helped fund Muslim education. Dr. Betty Shabazz and her role in education, and how those things for them were rooted in Islam. And rooted in this idea that women have the right to take up public space and be leaders and help guide the community.” She says people are doing a disservice to the very women who made Islam in the United States a possibility when they reject women leaders such as Rabi'a Keeble or Amina Wadud. Reinvention Rabi’a ended up leaving the seminary and did lose some of her congregation. She gathered the ones she still had and did another innovative thing: a pop-up mosque. She would book spots and rooms in various places and hold services there. The next year, a church in Oakland invited her to use a room for her Friday services. But at this point, Rabi’a’s finances were suffering. Her grant money ran out. Years later, when I ask Rabi’a where she goes for Friday prayers, she says, “Nowhere.” “I don't go anywhere. I don't go for Juma. I can pray anywhere. I don't go to juma because I refuse to sit behind men.” She did go once, to an Oakland mosque when a rabbi friend invited her to sit in solidarity after the 2019 shootings in New Zealand. She went and sat in the front row. “I wasn't protesting anything. I just felt like I sit wherever I want to sit. And the Imam who I actually know, who I admire…When it came time for prayer, he walked up to me and he said, ‘Sister.’ And he said it really loud. The room was full of people. ‘Sister for prayer, you're going to have to move.’” “I'm not moving anywhere.”, she told the imam. “I'm a Muslim. I can sit wherever I want.” He turned around, he walked away. “I sat there and prayed in the front row,” she says. She says the men on either side of her didn’t move. They stayed there and prayed. Today, Rabi’a Keeble continues her work. She’s a scholar of Islamic theology and leadership, social justice and Black religions. Her life is full of speaking engagements, sermon requests and interviews. She’s an author, artist and poet. Rabi’a story is one of constant reinvention. The Qalbu Maryam story didn’t end with the mosque. She now calls her organization Qalbu Maryam Women’s Justice Center, labeling it a “sacred space for social justice.” She has also launched a group called Muslims for Black Lives Matter. They’ve join marches and solidarity actions around the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds her sermons online. She doesn’t have a mosque, but Rabi’a says she doesn’t need one to do God’s work. When I ask her if any of what she went through made her think about leaving Islam, she says, “I'm like these people who are married for like fifty years. They'll never be divorced. I'm not leaving Islam. I love Islam. And God allows me to weather this storm. God never said there wouldn't be storms. But God promises to get us through it. And never once did I think about giving up. I just believe God will bring you through. He will bring you through.” *** Hana Baba is the host of Becoming Muslim. She also hosts KALW's award-winning newsmagazine, Crosscurrents, and The Stoop podcast: stories from across the Black diaspora. The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Searching for the “real” Islam Diana Demchenko, a Muslim convert, photographed in Barcelona last year, now lives in Orange County, California. Photo courtesy of Diana Demchenko Diana Demchenko, a Muslim convert, photographed in Barcelona last year, now lives in Orange County, California. Photo courtesy of Diana Demchenko Diana Demchenko, a Muslim convert, photographed in Barcelona last year, now lives in Orange County, California. Photo courtesy of Diana Demchenko Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . By Jahd Khalil “I really have to understand that I'm not going to get closer to God just because I'm in Damascus. I have to be able to feel close to God in Detroit, too.” Diana Demchenko converted to Islam as a college sophomore. But since she didn’t grow up around the religion, she had to learn what the real Islam is and searched - online, in local mosques, and eventually abroad. Thousands of American students used to travel to Egypt to study religion and Quranic Arabic, and Diana was one of them. Diana grew up always interested in religion, but her immigrant family was more traditional than religious, which gave her a degree of separation from the Christianity that dominated their new home in Michigan. Even she though went to multiple churches, read scripture, and interrogated clergy, it never really sat with her right. After a series of emails, texts, and conversations with a Saudi student in Michigan, Diana converted via text message in the college library hyped up on coffee. Becoming Muslim was the easier part. Being Muslim was harder. Diana tried to find spiritual leaders she liked and to study scripture in translation, all while navigating the not-exactly welcoming American cultural landscape, which sometimes extended to her family. In Mosques in southern California, she found what she thought was a more authentic Islam, practiced by immigrant Muslims. Eventually, she found herself in Cairo with other students who came to study Arabic and the Quran. While there she found Islam to be a much more normal, daily thing in people’s lives, and less of an identity to fulfill. When she was forced to come back to the US because of the COVID pandemic, she took that new perspective with her and kept her old convictions to keep looking for answers. “I texted him and I'm like, ‘Okay, I'll be Muslim!’ And we weren't even talking or anything. Like it was just me randomly texting this guy…at like 2:00 a.m. or something... And he basically just like e-mails me the Shehada.” *** Jahd Khalil covers Richmond and state politics for Radio IQ and Virginia Public Radio. He was based in Cairo for seven years, where he co-founded Mada Masr. The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for the Becoming Muslim series comes from the Templeton Religion Trust .…
Stories about Americans who choose a new religion and the dynamics and conflicts they face. Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts - Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts . The Spiritual Edge introduces Becoming Muslim In Becoming Muslim, we explore the motivations and challenges of converts, as they carve out a uniquely American path for being Muslim in the United States. Over seven episodes, we profile eight individuals from various cultural backgrounds. Each offers a different window into this diverse and complex religion. A spiritual seeker travels to Cairo to find the “real” Islam.. A prison inmate hangs with the Muslim brothers to stay safe. A UC Berkeley basketball player is introduced to the Nation of Islam. And more. In a religion that’s often partitioned by nationality and culture, how do these new Muslims fit in? The series begins November 12.…
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