African and Black Orientalism

Sherman Jackson's article on "Black Orientalism" helps one to see Orientalism in the context of the African-American experience. Jackson detected a major shift in black American responses to Islam and the immigrant Muslim community in America. Prior to the wave of Muslim immigration to America in the 1970s, Islam was by and large perceived in the black community as an authentic expression of African-American spirituality and identity. The gains of Islam that resulted from this perception constituted a loss to other African-American religious denominations and movements.

Then the new immigrants came with historical Islam from the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world. The center of Islamic religious authority started shifting away from its erstwhile black core to new forms of orthodoxy that did not always manifest an understanding of African-American religious and ideological aspirations. "Real Islam" came to be perceived in segments of the African-American community as the religion of Arabs and foreigners, and black Americans who professed Islam increasingly faced the criticism of being cultural heretics, "self-hating 'wannabees' who had simply moved from the back of the bus to the back of the camel" (Jackson, p. 22).

Jackson makes a distinction between a critique of Islam, Arabs, and Muslim societies based on experience and sound knowledge and criticism based on imagination, ideology, and projection. It is the latter that can be called Orientalist. Black Orientalism seeks to undermine the popularity of Islam among African-Americans by highlighting the alleged race prejudice of the Muslim world. Jackson singles out for particular criticism the Afrocentric movement as it is best articulated in the writings of Professor Molefi Kete Asante, notably in Afrocentricity and The Afrocentric Idea. While Jackson reveals the problems in Black Orientalism, he also cautions immigrant Muslims to be sensitive to African-American Muslims' historical experience and to be active in building bridges with indigenous American Muslim communities. A failure to do so will alienate African-American Muslims and provide evidence to Black Orientalists, who are all too eager to portray Islam as a foreign and racist religion.

Jackson's study indicates that Black Orientalists are critical of Islam mainly on racial grounds. It would have been more helpful had it addressed the interlocking issue of Islam and the black American Muslim woman's experience. After all, Islam is more commonly perceived as holding women in subordination. This perception is, however, at odds with the enduring attractiveness of Islam to many accomplished black American women. The illustrious life of the late Betty Shabazz is worth citing, and so are the endeavors of other African-American Muslim women such as the professors Aminah McCloud and Carolyn Moxley Rouse, as well as many others, who are making their mark in different spheres of life.

Incidentally, Rouse's book Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004) seeks precisely to clarify what Islam may mean to some black American women who have accepted it as their faith.