Blacks and Islam

When you become Muslim, what do you really become anyway? It seems that a lot of African-Americans (Blacks) in America sought refuge in Islam during the conscious movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These people were looking for a way to connect to their own culture. Most of these people were interested in eradicating European (White) influences in their lives and got involved in Islam because they mistakingly believed that Islam was of African origin. Again, in the 1980s and 1990s more blacks fled the ways of White America, which they considered racist and oppressive, in favor of Islam and what they knew to be a different way of doing things. These individuals now pray in Arabic (if they are “good Muslims”), [Black] women wear their hair covered in a Middle-Eastern manner [hijab, burqa], must prescribe to the thought that Mecca is the Holy Land, and use traditional (more stoic) Arabic culture to define etiquette and ethics within their households. While we can say that Muslims are less likely to be drinkers and drug abusers can we say that they are expressing their pride in being Black? Are they any closer to the freedom that they desired when they left Christianity and White-American values? Maybe they are living more clean lives, but they can’t say they arrived at their original objective of knowing themselves better. Or are they simply trading one master for another?

Trading One Master for Another?