There is a YouTube channel run by a brother named Rashaad Abdur-Rahman.. He is doing something that the Salafi movement has spent decades trying to make impossible. He is thinking seriously and publicly about what Islam means for Black people in America. He questions about whose interests a particular brand of Islam actually serves. Questions about why a theology that emerged from the sands of 18th-century Najd is being presented to the descendants of enslaved West African Muslims as the one true, decontextualized, ahistorical expression of the deen.
Anwar Wright noticed. And so he made a video. Part 2 of his series titled “Choosing Black Nationalism Over Sound Creed” is framed as a response to Rashaad. It tells you everything about the Salafi intellectual crisis in twenty minutes.
Here’s what Anwar Wright said that reveals the entire problem. He says: “Rashad desires to mold Islam based upon the experience of the Black man in America. This is falsehood. Islam is not practiced by experience or molded to fit the trauma of a certain people. Islam is practiced according to revelation.”
Let’s deal with this honestly. Clearly brother Rashad is When a Black Muslim says Islam should speak to the condition of Black people in America, he is not asking you to change the revelation. He’s asking you to apply it. There is a difference and the fact that Anwar can’t see that difference is the whole problem.
Meanwhile, Anwar Wright spends twenty minutes of this same video defending the alliance between Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud a scholar aligning with a ruler to spread a specific interpretation of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula in service of a political project. That’s not molding Islam to fit the interests of a certain people? That’s not Islam shaped by the specific conditions of 18th-century Najd?
When Saudi Arabia applies Islam to serve the political consolidation of the Saudi state that’s pure religion. But when a Black Muslim wants Islam to address mass incarceration that’s nationalism. Was Ibn Taymiyyah “molding Islam to fit the trauma of a certain people”?
Because that’s exactly what he did. The Mongols invaded the Muslim world. They sacked Baghdad. They destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate. They slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Arabs, Persians, and Turks across the Muslim lands. The ummah was in a state of civilizational trauma. And Ibn Taymiyyah of the Harrani people, displaced from his homeland as a child when the Mongols pushed his family to flee to Damascus responded by producing scholarship that directly addressed that crisis. He issued fatwas about fighting the Mongols. He developed legal rulings about dealing with rulers who claimed to be Muslim but ruled by the Yasa instead of the Shari’ah.
Was that “molding Islam to fit trauma,” Anwar? Was Ibn Taymiyyah a displaced refugee responding to the devastation of his people guilty of letting his ethnic experience compromise the deen? Or was that what a real scholar does take the eternal principles of revelation and apply them to the specific conditions facing the people of his time and place?
But when a Black Muslim says “Islam should speak to the experience of Black people under American racial oppression” suddenly that’s falsehood. Suddenly that’s nationalism.
Suddenly that’s molding Islam to fit trauma.
The Mongol devastation of Arab, Persian, and Turkish Muslim communities was a legitimate crisis that demanded Islamic intellectual engagement. But four hundred years of the kidnapping, enslavement, and systematic oppression of African people in America? That’s just “trauma” that shouldn’t influence how Black Muslims understand and implement the deen?
West Africa had a thriving Islamic civilization. Timbuktu was one of the great centers of Islamic learning in the world. The empires of Mali, Songhai, and Sokoto produced scholars, jurists, and institutions that were the pride of the Muslim ummah. Islam was deeply rooted in West African life in its universities, its legal systems, its trade networks, its families.
Then the transatlantic slave trade happened.
Millions of West African Muslims were kidnapped from their homeland, chained in the belly of slave ships, transported across the Atlantic, and sold into bondage in the Americas. And when they arrived, their Islam was systematically stripped from them. They were forbidden to pray. Forbidden to fast. Forbidden to speak Arabic. Forbidden to practice their deen. They were forced at the whip, at the auction block, at gunpoint to accept Christianity. Their Islamic names were replaced with slave names. Their children were raised in a religion imposed by the people who owned them.
Islam was not just disrupted in this population. It was erased. Deliberately, methodically, violently erased over generations. An entire Muslim people millions of them m had their deen ripped from their hands and replaced with the religion of their oppressors.
The Mongols sacked Baghdad and destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate. That was devastating. But the Muslims of the Middle East retained their Islam. They rebuilt. The deen survived. Within a generation, the Mongol rulers themselves were converting to Islam.
The transatlantic slave trade didn’t just destroy Muslim political structures. It destroyed Muslim identity itself. It severed an entire people from their deen for centuries. It turned millions of Muslims into Christians by force. And the descendants of those Muslims Black people in America are still living with the consequences. Still trying to find their way back to the Islam that was stolen from their ancestors.
That is the context in which a Black Muslim says “Islam should speak to our condition.” That is not bid’ah. That is a people trying to reclaim a deen that was taken from them by one of the greatest crimes in human history. And the idea that this reclamation this return should not be informed by the specific experience of how Islam was lost and what it means to rebuild it in a hostile land is not just intellectually bankrupt. It is an insult to every West African Muslim who was dragged onto a slave ship with La ilaha illallah on their lips and had it beaten out of them.
Ibn Taymiyyah produced scholarship shaped by the Mongol invasion and you call him a giant. But a Black Muslim produces thought shaped by a crime that was arguably greater one that didn’t just destroy a caliphate but erased an entire people’s Islam for generations and you call it falsehood.
The Mongol invasion demanded an Islamic intellectual response. Ibn Taymiyyah provided it. The transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath demand an Islamic intellectual response. And the Salafi movement’s contribution to that response is: “don’t mold Islam to fit your trauma.” That’s not creed. That’s cruelty.
Does Salafism Have Anything to Offer Black America?
Let me run a thought experiment. It’s 1963. You’re a Black Muslim in America. Jim Crow is the law of the land. Your people are being beaten, firehosed, bombed, and lynched. Medgar Evers was just murdered in his driveway. Four little girls were just blown up in a church in Birmingham.
Now imagine you are following Abu Khadeejah’s The Salafi Da’wah: Creed & Methodology to the letter.
Point 47 says demonstrations, protests, and sit-ins are bid’ah — innovations in the religion, imitation of the disbelievers. So the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Bid’ah. Can’t participate. The lunch counter sit-ins? Innovation. Stay home. The March on Washington where Dr. King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech in front of 250,000 people? Chaos and disorder. Rebellion against those in authority. You sit in your apartment and read about the correct methodology of refuting the Ash’aris while your people are getting dogs sicced on them in the streets of Birmingham.
Point 88 says you cannot publicly rebuke the tyrannical ruler. So Bull Connor is turning firehoses on children and you can’t speak on it publicly because that would be rebuking those in authority. Governor George Wallace is standing in the schoolhouse door blocking Black children from entering and you hold your tongue because the scholars of Medina said so. J. Edgar Hoover is running COINTELPRO, infiltrating and destroying Black organizations, and your position is: we don’t publicly criticize the ruler.
But wait — Point 88 also says you CAN publicly rebuke the people of innovation and desires. So you can’t say a word about the governor who is siccing dogs on your children, but if a brother at the masjid you are allowed to refute the Ashari interoperation of Allah’s names and attributes. NOW you’ve got energy. That’s when the refutations start flowing.
And don’t think this is just a historical exercise. The conditions that existed in Malcolm X’s time haven’t disappeared — they’ve evolved. The same system that bombed churches and sicced dogs on children now operates through mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, predatory policing, algorithmic discrimination, redlining’s generational aftermath, and a prison-industrial complex that has turned Black bodies into a commodity. America didn’t stop oppressing Black people. It updated the software.
And what is the Salafi movement doing right now in the face of all of this? I’ll tell you exactly what they’re doing.They are attacking Muslims such as Rashad Abdur-Rahman for attempting to develop an Islamic framework to address Black suffering and accusing them of being deviants. They’re writing treatises on the methodology of warning against innovators.
A single mother in the community is working two jobs, can’t afford childcare, her son is being recruited by a gang on the corner, and she comes to the masjid looking for help. What does she get? A khutbah about the danger of free-mixing. This is Salafism.
The. Salafi movement looked at four hundred years of enslavement, the deliberate erasure of an entire people’s deen, the ongoing mass incarceration of Black men, the poverty, the predatory policing, the generational destruction and the best they could produce was, ‘don’t mold Islam to fit your trauma.”
But there’s something even deeper going on beneath Anwar’s argument that deserves to be named directly. When Anwar holds up Ibn Taymiyyah as the gold standard of pure, uncontaminated Islamic scholarship while simultaneously dismissing Rashaad Abdur-Rahman’s thought as Islam diluted by Black trauma, he is revealing his own self-hatred.
Ibn Taymiyyah watched the Mongols dismantle his entire civilization. According to Salafis, he was just a scholar implementing pure Islam and returning the ummah to pure Islam. However, a Black Muslim watching his people warehoused in prisons and stripped of their history is letting his emotions compromise the deen and Islam. One context is invisible because it has been laundered into tradition. The other context is hypervisible because it belongs to Black people.
Anwar doesn’t see this. And the reason he doesn’t see it is the most uncomfortable part of this entire conversation. This is not just an intellectual error. This is internalized self-hatred doing theological work. When a Black man looks at another Black man trying to make Islam speak to Black suffering and sees deviance while looking at Arab scholars doing the exact same thing for Arab suffering and seeing giants- he has not escaped the racial hierarchy of the world he lives in
The Salafi movement has nothing to offer Black people.
