“how do we reconcile Islam in America’s constitutive blackness and the cultural legacies of this history to the inexorably multiethnic and multiracial landscape of post-9/11 America?”

I would ask, rhetorically, how else can Islam be reconciled in America without blackness and its cultural legacy? In my opinion, there is no other “space” to which Islam can be placed in regarding the American context, where it is “safe” other than blackness. This isn’t an attempt to claim blackness as some sort of superiority to non-black expressions of Islam, but to simply recognize [and push for that recognition in the public sphere] that blackness remains to this day the only conduit by which Islam can express itself and is not seen by the broad [read “white”] public to having committed, to quote Dr. Sherman Jackson again, cultural apostasy. And under no uncertain terms, this insulation is not itself immune to falling by the waste side, as it is in danger of doing, especially as more and more Blackamerican Muslims embrace Islam through the lens of racial agonsia in this so-called post-racial America.

What I have been searching for and continue to search for is a way and method of bringing this reality [as you put it, “American orientalist ideology that relegates an authentic Islam to South Asia and the Middle East”] to the attention of Muslim and non-Muslim Americans. It is much a dilemma within the Muslim-American community as it is within American orientalist circles.

I look forward to more of your engaging work. Thank you again.

Thanks so much for your eloquent and thoughtful reply. As an ethnic studies scholar who studies religion, specifically Islam, one of the central contentions of my work is that we (in particular, scholars, the media, and community members themselves) have to try to understand Islam’s longstanding cultural—and deeply racialized—presence in America as deeply constitutive of current trajectories of Muslim American identity, community, and cultural formation. In other words, despite the theological arguments about what constitutes a “real” Islam, “Islam” in some form has been present in the US since the first slaves began arriving in the American from West Africa, and its racialized cultural presence—through the blues, jazz, the Black Arts movement, hip hop, etc.—has fundamentally shaped the contours of the national imaginary (both how Americans think about Islam and how Muslim Americans think about themselves). This is something that not only the media and the academic intelligentsia must acknowledge however, but a reality the Muslim American community must also engage and grapple with itself. In other words, how do we reconcile Islam in America’s constitutive blackness and the cultural legacies of this history to the inexorably multiethnic and multiracial landscape of post-9/11 America?

So I guess to (rather insufficiently) answer your question, I would say that since an American orientalist ideology that relegates an authentic Islam to South Asia and the Middle East is a deeply racialized discourse that has been actively shaped by rejecting the cultural force of Islam’s racialized (Black) historical presence in the US, Muslim American activists and thinkers and intellectuals must begin by actively reclaiming this cultural history, and actively rejecting media portrayals such as Lepeska’s that seek to reinforce these antiquated divisions. We must address the “black”-”immigrant” issues in Muslim American communities by exposing long histories of comparative racial formation(both conflict and coalition) that are crucial to understanding how such dynamics are playing our on the contemporary landscape. For me, I am also trying to create a cultural narrative of Islam’s racial presence in the US that shows scholars of race and ethnicity in the US that it is crucial for them to engage with issues of religion or spirituality to understand and fully engage with some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Again, thanks for your comment. Hope the conversation continues.

Thank you for writing the thoughtful and observant article. What you are describing here is in essence, the unheard battle cry from amongst a small but growing group of indigenous American Muslims. While this group is mostly composed of Blackamericans [such as myself], it also includes an even smaller minority of Whiteamericans who see this dichotomy of Good/non-racialized Muslim and Bad/racialized Muslim a major obstacle in the maturation process of Muslims in America.
The observations by Payne and more recently, Lepeska, continue to illustrate the unwillingness on the part of American intelligentsia [from journalists to scholars] to depart from an essentialized interpretation of Islam: no matter where Islam may go, it and Muslims, if they wish to be considered authentic [a double for your ‘orthodoxy’], then they and Islam must be connected with an innate foreignness, be it Arab or South-Asian, in order for “true Islam” to remain intact. As a scholar in the academy yourself, you must be all too familiar with this view. Just look at how Islam is studied in the Academy: if one wishes to study African-American Muslims, you are immediately relegated to the Black Studies department; if one wishes to study Arab-Americans, one can still do so under the umbrella of the Middle-Eastern studies department or something akin to this. Until the Academy also relinquishes its grasp on orthodoxy/authenticity, it will be hard to appreciate the rhetoric of the NOI in any other light than that of “race-based hatred.”

And to address that directly, there is an unwillingness to concede, on the part of immigrant Muslims as well as Blackamerican Muslims who have given up on race in the hopes of expressing a more authentic Islam, that the “cosmic no” that Dr. Sherman Jackson speaks of can, at the moment, only be effectively articulated by the practitioners of “Black Religion” [see Jackson’s Islam and the Blackamerican]. This “cosmic protest” seeks to bring white values back down to earth, removing the transcendent qualities they are unquestionably given in the modern context. Sadly, as you have noted, such attempts are perceived by journalists, scholars and even elements within the Muslim community that fear such critiques will jeopardize their commitment to an authentic Islam to be nothing other than the rhetoric of a morally bankrupt cult, whose leader is making a last-ditch effort to rejuvenate their constituents.

As a scholar who is working closely with this subject, do you see, if at all, any means of moving beyond this road block?