Should
Black People
Be Salafist?
and Competing Visions for Black America
For generations, Black Muslims were known for discipline, courage, institution building, and an uncompromising commitment to the uplift of their people. Islam was not simply believed. It was lived as a force for moral repair, social transformation, and collective dignity.
Should Black People Be Salafist? argues that this tradition has been disrupted by the rise of modern Salafism, a movement that too often detached Black Muslims from the very conditions Islam once empowered them to confront.
Drawing on history, sociology, political thought, and Islamic intellectual tradition, Shareef Muhammad and Hakeem Muhammad, Esq. trace a struggle between two visions of Islam: one rooted in the Black Muslim legacy of Malcolm X, communal responsibility, and self-determination, and another shaped by quietism, imported religious authority, and hostility toward Black political consciousness.
This book asks a question Black Muslims can no longer avoid: will Islam in Black America remain a force for discipline, dignity, and liberation, or will it be reduced to a creed of withdrawal, suspicion, and silence in the face of Black suffering?
The question is whether Islam in Black America will remain a force for discipline, dignity, and liberation.
Chains and Pseudo-Fatwas: How Salafi Quietism Became the Theology of the Modern Plantation
The year is 1855. Black people are being brutally enslaved in America. Forced to labor from before sunrise until long after dark, their bodies are treated as tools to be worked until they break. They are fed just enough to keep working. At any moment, without warning, without appeal, a family can be destroyed. A husband watches his wife dragged to the auction block and sold to a man he will never find. A mother holds her infant knowing that the child may be ripped from her arms before it learns to walk.
Into this hell, now meet Yusuf. His hands are calloused beyond feeling. His back carries scars that have scars on top of them. He sleeps on a dirt floor in a structure with no real walls, wakes before the sun, and is in the field before he is fully conscious. He wants to read. He wants to think. He wants to raise his children with his own hands and watch them grow into something. He does not want to simply survive. He wants to live. And every morning the plantation reminds him that wanting that is itself considered an act of rebellion.
Then he learns Harriet Tubman is coming tomorrow night. Word has traveled the way word travels among people who have learned to communicate in ways their captors cannot hear. She has made this journey before. She has never lost a passenger. Yusuf has made his decision.
He approaches the Salafi imam, his voice low, his eyes carrying everything he has already lost and everything he is still willing to risk.
The Black Salafi imam looks horrified.
Now imagine it is 1963. You are a Black Muslim in America. Jim Crow is the law of the land. Your people are being firehosed, bombed, and lynched. Medgar Evers had just been murdered in his driveway. Four little Black girls were blown up in a church in Birmingham — and one of those girls was your niece. Some members of your neighborhood who are organizing to protest, to put pressure on the local and federal government to pass anti-lynching legislation, approach you for your support.
But wait — you can't. The reason is you follow Abu Khadeejah's The Salafi Da'wah: Creed and Methodology to the letter.
You tell the organizers that it is against your religion to struggle for justice in this way. Confused, the organizers request that you explain. You do not quote the Quran or the ahadith — instead you quote Abu Khadeejah's The Salafi Da'wah. You tell them: Point 47 says demonstrations, protests, and sit-ins are bid'ah — innovations in the religion, an imitation of the disbelievers. Point 88 says you cannot publicly rebuke the tyrannical ruler.
So what if Bull Connor is turning firehoses on children and tearing your mother's clothes off with the water's pressure? You cannot speak against this publicly, because that would go against Point 88. Governor George Wallace is standing in the schoolhouse door blocking Black children from entering, and you hold your tongue. Police dogs are being sicced on your people. J. Edgar Hoover is running COINTELPRO, infiltrating and destroying Black organizations and assassinating Black leaders — and your position is to just make dua.
The organizers are confused and disheartened. In their last-ditch effort to shake this Black man out of his hypnotic state, they remind him that it was his own niece who was killed in that church bombing. And just when they thought it couldn't get any worse, the proud Black Salafist responds —
This is the crisis in Black American Salafi da'wah. For the first time, Islam and pro-Blackness are being positioned as antagonistic.
Our aim is not to cancel — but to understand. Not to silence — but to evaluate.
- Extensive endnotes & sources
- History, sociology & Islamic thought
- Scholarly yet accessible
- Ideal for study circles, mosques & classrooms
