The central impetus for Payne’s essay, however, was not to introduce an unfamiliar religion to the American public but to clarify the “truth” of Islam’s Sunni orthodoxy in the face of “the rise of the black Muslim sect” in the U.S. The teachings of the black Muslims of the Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, the author emphasized, “are directly opposed to the teachings of Islam”—in particular, their stance on “race hatred” against whites. Payne closed the piece by unequivocally placing the NOI and its adherents beyond the pale of an authentic Islam, saying that the organization’s beliefs were “unthinkable” to “the true Moslem” (italics added).

In the almost half-century since, the Times appears to have done little to shift the Good (Orthodox) Muslim-Bad (Black) Muslim paradigm asserted in Payne’s article, which paints stark dividing lines between the “good” racial universalism of a “global” Sunni Islam and the “bad” racialized parochialisms of the NOI, and of African American Islam more broadly. Indeed, this very same logic was at the heart of David Lepeska’s April 10 article regarding current NOI leader Louis Farrakhan’s recent support of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. Leading with the unsubstantiated claim that Farrakhan was championing Qaddafi to bolster the dwindling ranks of his organization, Lepeska stated that the NOI had lost its appeal in black America, and that African American converts were now more “likely to join traditional sects led by Arab and South Asian immigrants.” Like Payne five decades ago, Lepeska and the Times found it necessary to situate black Muslims beyond the pale of Islamic orthodoxy, this time via a quote from Islamic studies scholar Ihsan Bagby, who stated, categorically: “The theology of the Nation contradicts the basic tenets of Islam.”

In his response to Lepeska’s piece, Edward Curtis aptly addresses many of the article’s shortcomings, pointing out the sharp racial divisions between black, Arab, and South Asian communities in the nation’s mosques, and thus contradicting Lepeska’s notion that most African American Muslims join through immigrant congregations. In addition, he contextualizes Farrakhan’s support of Qaddafi within a long history of Pan-Africanist politics and activism, which have always been at the heart of African American Islam, thus refuting the idea that Farrakhan is suddenly pandering to the black masses to regain his limelight (as well as the almost laughable notion that support of Qaddafi would somehow galvanize black Americans to join the NOI). Finally, he rightfully emphasizes how the NOI has always been, not simply a political, but a deeply religious organization and criticizes the media’s attempts to “shape and constrain what constitutes legitimate Islam.”

As a scholar who studies the intersections of race and Islam in the contemporary U.S. cultural imaginary, my concern with media narratives such as Payne’s and Lepeska’s is not so much how they portray the teachings of the NOI as contradictory to Islam’s Sunni orthodoxy (which they are), but how charges of the group’s lack of compliance with this orthodoxy are somehow linked to acts of racial betrayal, an equivalence used to diffuse and discredit the NOI’s (or any other offending organization’s) critiques of state-sponsored racism and/or U.S. military aggression and intervention. In the 1963 piece, the NOI’s black nationalist position is summed up as “race hatred” of whites, a stance that must be exposed as anathema, not only to the integrationist rhetoric of the civil rights movement, but to what Payne portrays as the universalist and egalitarian ethos of orthodox Sunni Islam, whose teachings, interestingly enough, dovetail nicely with the fundamental tenets of U.S. liberal democracy.

Lepeska merely updates this formula for the post-9/11 era; Farrakhan’s support of Qaddafi is dismissed as the ego-driven ranting of a fringe religious figure, as have been his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and calls for slavery reparations over the course of the last decade. Indeed, the bulk of the article is spent discussing Farrakhan’s and the NOI’s fading relevance, as opposed to addressing the NOI leader’s specific objections to the U.S. intervention in Libya, including his concerns over our “meddling in another country’s internal affairs and calling for regime change” and his indication of America’s failure to intervene in other conflicts between a state and armed groups, such as in Israel-Palestine, or in the other democratic uprisings in the Middle East—e.g. Yemen, Egypt, Syria, etc.

It’s an interesting discursive strategy for the Times to dredge up during a time when Islamophobic rhetoric is at an all-time high, to champion the “orthodox” Islam of “traditional sects led by Arab and South Asian immigrants” in order to delegitimize the internationalist and antiracist spirit of black protest that has long been the hallmark of African American Islam. Whether Farrakhan’s teachings are legitimately “Islamic,” or whether the NOI is an “authentic” Muslim organization, is not the issue here—let’s leave that to the theologians, as opposed to a media establishment that continues to exhibit a stunning ignorance of the intertwined histories of race and Islam in America. A more productive question might be: why is the NOI’s “unorthodoxy” still news?

More than anything, the Good (Orthodox) Muslim-Bad (Black) Muslim paradigm reveals the media’s seemingly willful ignorance of the longstanding diversity of Islamic practices within black America and of the consistently worldly, heterodox, and syncretic legacies of African American Islam. The contemporary landscapes of Muslim America have been inexorably formed through processes of cultural interaction and exchange, both between black and “immigrant” Muslims and amongst various African American Islamic organizations themselves, since “Islam,” in its many forms, began its spread through African American communities in the urban landscapes of the post-Reconstruction North. Since the early twentieth century, in places like Detroit and New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Milwaukee, both “orthodox” and “heterodox” Islamic organizations such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, the NOI, Darul Islam, the Hanafis, Ansaru Allah, the Five Percent Nation, the American Society of Muslims (founded by Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad, after he assumed leadership of the NOI, in 1975), and many others, have all been a part of the making of a distinctly African American—and thus, distinctly American—Islam. Each of these organizations, one can safely argue, has in one way or another advanced its Islamic engagements through discourses of black liberation and the spiritual quest for black humanity—what African American Sunni Muslim scholar Sherman Jackson has called the “cosmic no” of black Religion.

This “cosmic no” to the U.S. intervention in Libya was also expressed by African American Sunni Muslim leader Imam Zaid Shakir. Shakir (along with Shaikh Hamza Yusuf) is among the most prominent Muslim American leaders in the contemporary U.S. and seeks to revive in the West the “traditional” study methods and sciences of the classical Sunni tradition. (The two, along with scholar Hatem Bazian, recently founded Zatyuna College in Berkeley, which is seeking become the nation’s first accredited Islamic college.)  On March 24, Shakir posted a widely-circulated essay on his blog, New Islamic Directions, entitled “Why I Oppose the US-Led Intervention in Libya.” In it, he stated that while he knew that his position “may be perceived as an unpopular one, not least because the Libyan rebels themselves called for—and have received military assistance from the West,” he nonetheless warned against the dangers of “a US-led invasion of another Muslim country,” predicting that U.S. intervention “will likely lead to far more civilian deaths than would have occurred [in] a strictly Libyan affair.” He also pointed out, as had Farrakhan, that the ouster of Qaddafi was likely a high priority for the U.S. due to how Qaddafi had long been “leading a Pan-African movement under the auspices of the African Union,” in which Libya’s oil revenues were being used toward Africa’s economic empowerment. In his concluding remarks, Shakir wrote: “I do not believe western intervention is solely motivated by humanitarian concerns, nor do I believe it will succeed. I cannot support it.”

Unsurprisingly, Shakir’s views received no coverage in the mainstream media.

A bright, talented, and charismatic, but provocative and controversial, speaker, Farrakhan denounced the many causes of racism and poverty, and gave voice to the grievances of African Americans and other minorities, enhancing his stature even among those who chose not to join his organization. His Million Man March in 1995 appealed to a broad cross-section of Americans, including both Christian and Muslim leaders and organizations. At the same time, he remained controversial for his strident, separatist message, his anti-Semitism, and his international connections with militant leaders, such as those of Libya and Iran.

Farrakhan’s ability to make front page headlines, including the cover of Time Magazine, obscured the extent to which he and the NOI were a fringe, rather than mainstream, movement in the world of Islam in general and in the American Muslim community in particular. Although the Nation of Islam had far fewer members than Warith Deen Muhammad’s American Muslim Mission, Farrakhan’s persona and actions gave him and the Nation a disproportionate amount of name recognition and visibility. For many Americans, he was the voice of Islam as well as of specifically African American Islam. In the Q & A following a keynote address that I delivered at the launch of one of the first endowed Islamic Studies chairs in America, a Muslim American of South Asian background complained that media fascination with Farrakhan had led many Americans to believe that this aberrant sect represented orthodox Islam. A short time later, when a PBS program did a show on Muslim Americans, the lead reporter in a pre-interview was stunned when I pointed out to her that solely covering Farrakhan in her segment on African American Muslims was grossly misleading. She neither knew Warith Deen Muhammad nor was she aware that his following was exponentially greater than that of Farrakhan. Even though she reluctantly agreed to include coverage of Warith Deen, on the day of my interview she again asked for assurances of his importance.

In recent years, in terms of both numbers and recognition, Farrakhan and the NOI have become a marginal movement with little following or attraction among most Muslims globally as well as in the U.S., where the vast majority of African American or black American Muslims follows mainstream Islam. Although Farrakhan has signaled a desire to situate the NOI within mainstream Islam, and though he has introduced some changes to that end, the NOI’s belief system still contradicts many basic tenets of Islam.

Recently, Farrakhan has been almost invisible and silent, struggling with health problems and with a sharp decrease in the membership of the NOI. Given his past tendency, if not compulsion, to speak out on national and international issues and his success in capturing media attention, his recent endorsement of Muammar Qaddafi should come as no great surprise. For many years, he developed and emphasized connections with Africa and enjoyed Qaddafi’s friendship and financial support. His statement—“What kind of brother would I be if a man has been that way to me, and to us, and when he’s in trouble I refuse to raise my voice in his defense?”—may win the respect of die-hard supporters. However, many others, including past admirers, nationally and internationally, in the Muslim community and elsewhere, will see him as a man who has lost his moral compass by supporting and defending a tyrant who is slaughtering his people—women, children, and men.

I was a source for the story, but an exchange of twenty-three emails seems largely to have failed to convince the reporter of my analysis of the phenomenon as an example of pan-African politics. The article is organized instead around the supposition that, because there has been a decline in membership in the Nation of Islam since the mid-1990s, Farrakhan needs to regain the spotlight. Though the Times mentions that Farrakhan “sounded sincere in his efforts to come to the aid of the embattled Libyan leader,” its headline proclaimed: “Farrakhan Using Libyan Crisis to Bolster His Nation of Islam.” Black Americans interested in Islam, it claims, “are likely to join traditional sects led by South Asians and Arabs.”

This statement is most likely incorrect, since most black Muslims seem to follow black Muslim leaders. Mosques, like churches, are divided by race in the United States. Precious few numbers exist on the racial composition of American mosques and other Muslim American institutions, but a 2001 report on American mosques sponsored by the Council of American-Islamic Relations indicated racial division in the mosqueing of America. The reporting of the Times’ own Andrea Elliott has also revealed the importance of black Sunni leaders, such as the late W.D. Mohammed and Siraj Wahhaj, to the growth of “traditional” Sunni Islam among black Americans. To these well-known names, you can add those of African American imams who are Sunni in every major city around the country.

African American Muslim academics, such as Aminah McCloud, have frequently pointed out that the mainstream media largely ignore the presence of African American Muslims in defining what constitutes American Islam in the post-9/11 era, and this recent piece is further evidence that their complaints have a basis in fact. The brown, “foreign” Muslim is the media face of American Islam now, a sharp reversal from the 1960s, when Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X were America’s “Moozlims.”

But perhaps what is most important here are the ways in which the article sets the limits of “true” Islam. Minister Farrakhan, the analysis says, is as much a “nationalist leader as a religious one.” Religion is never defined, but it is constructed as something other than politics by insisting that Minister Farrakhan is really motivated by black liberation. The idea that black liberation could also be religious is never considered, ignoring the claim that black religion, or at least a part of it, has been politically radical.

Instead, the article continues the long and troubling tradition, which began with sociological and FBI explanations of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, of denying the movement its legitimately religious elements. Such reductionism is a stunning dismissal of the religion right at the surface of the Nation of Islam’s activities. Farrakhan’s comments in the speech about Qaddafi indicate just how much his vision is simultaneously religious and political: In the speech he reiterated his own importance as a prophet meant to warn America about the impending apocalyptic doom due to its hypocritical foreign policies. It doesn’t get more religious than that.

Another example of the article’s delimiting of legitimate American Islam is its claim that the Nation of Islam’s theology “spurns traditional Islam,” whatever that is. Ihsan Bagby, a professor at the University of Kentucky, is quoted as saying that the “theology of the Nation of Islam contradicts the basic tenets of Islam.” No mention is made that Bagby has served as the secretary general of the Muslim Alliance in North America, a rival group to the Nation of Islam. His decades-long career as an African American Sunni leader is omitted in favor of stressing his authority as a “professor of Islam.”

Invoking the myth of a monolithic traditional Islam, this framing of Farrakhan as black nationalist leader erases the memory of indigenous forms of Islam. Minister Farrakhan’s jeremiads are classic expressions of American religion; their roots can be found in a long tradition of American prophecy and particularly the tradition of black messiahs. But Farrakhan is not just another American prophet; he is a Muslim American prophet in the tradition of Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Muhammad.

There is yet another effect of the article’s dismissal of the Islamic dimension of Farrakhan’s politics. The portrayal of the Nation of Islam as an exclusively nationalist movement led by a charismatic leader obscures the historical links between African American Islam and Muslims abroad. The ties of the Nation of Islam to foreign countries and groups have always expressed a larger identification of African Americans with foreign Muslim leaders, Afro-Asian anti-colonialism, and the non-aligned movement. Minister Farrakhan is pro-Qaddafi because he believes that Qaddafi is an ally in the struggle against global racism. Qaddafi has given millions to the Nation of Islam just as he has given significant aid to Sub-Saharan African states. Failing to see Farrakhan’s support for Qaddafi as pan-African Islamic politics seems almost a wish to ignore the questions that American interventionism poses for the continent and those in the African diaspora who associate themselves with it. The U.S. entrance into this fight may affect racial politics at home more than we can currently imagine, especially if African American Muslims come to see U.S. intervention as unjust.

At the same time, Minister Farrakhan’s support for Qaddafi has been criticized on various African and African American blogs, another aspect of the story that the Times missed. Such criticism is an effort to convince other African Americans to reject Farrakhan’s support of Qaddafi. Critics have pointed to Qaddafi’s racist views and his support of fellow African dictators. Libya itself has a long history of racial discrimination, and this current crisis creates possibilities for further abuse of its most vulnerable populations.

Whether Farrakhan is right or wrong about Qaddafi, his questioning of U.S. support for the no-fly zone over Libya raises an important question: what impact will U.S. aid to rebels have on racial politics in Africa and the African diaspora? Though Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi has tackled the issue of Middle Eastern and North African racism in a post on Al-Jazeera, the question of racial politics elsewhere has yet to be adequately considered by mainstream media and academic analysts. Maybe we should forget who brought up the question and just try to answer it.