In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of
Blackness, Simone Brown mentions how scholars of surveillance studies have
noted that there is an absence of academic discourse on surveillance prior to 9/11.
Thus, she “seeks to make an intervention in the literature by naming the ‘absented
presence’ of Blackness.”[1] Similarly, much discourse
on the surveillance of Muslims in the post-9/11 environment has often failed to
account for the intersections of Islam and Blackness in this phenomenon. As
Browne makes various connections to surveillance and the transatlantic slave
trade, the African-American religious experience has been characterized by issues
of surveillance from the beginning. In a discussion on African-American
religious practices in the Georgia lowcountry during American chattel slavery,
historian Michael Gomez shares accounts of the enslaved retreating to the woods
and other secret places to engage in religious practices while escaping the
surveillance of masters.[2] These types of practices
functioned as an act of protest that operated in a similar fashion as bell hooks’s
oppositional gaze in which practitioners gaze and critique the brutality and oppression inflicted on their bodies. According to Sherman Jackson, Black Religion,
which is a religious orientation that lacks particular texts or central figures
but is rooted in the act of protest and liberation, served as a key frame
through which some Black Americans interpreted religion.[3] In describing an early “marriage”
and later divorce between Black Religion and Protestantism, Jackson cites
revolts led by Black radical activists and revolutionaries such as Denmark
Vesey and David Walker.[4]
Michael Gomez and
Samory Rashid elaborate on how these secret spiritual practices led to some
slave revolts and the building of maroons based on a highly complex Senegambian
warrior traditions, possibly creating the context from which White society’s
surveillance Black expressions of spirituality emerged.[5]
It
is within this context that surveillance at the intersections of Islam and
Blackness in American society must be explored. Interestingly, in many
discourses on surveillance and Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11, Black
narratives are often deemphasized, rendering an “absented presence” on
discourses surrounding the surveillance of Blackness, Black activism, and Black
Religion. In an historical overview on the impact of Islamophobia on African-American
Muslims in the early to mid-twentieth century, Edward Curtis IV discusses how
Black Muslims were surveilled by the FBI who framed them as possessing “anti-American
ideologies.”[6]
A diverse array of Muslim groups with a large African American following, such
as the original Nation of Islam (NOI), the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the Islamic
Mission of America, among others, were targeted.
The
below article is about Luqman Abdullah, a Detroit-based imam, who was murdered
by the FBI in 2009 by agents who fired twenty bullets into his body. As noted
in the article, various civil rights activists have attributed his death to
anti-Black and Islamophobic sentiments stemming from post-9/11 surveillance and
hysteria. Comedian Omar Regan referred to Luqman Abdullah’s death as “‘unfinished
business’ from the days of COINTELPRO.”[7] Abdullah’s case is the
subject of the documentary The Death of
an Imam (2011), which contains the details leading up to his assassination.
As
noted in the article, Luqman Abdullah was part of an African-American Muslim group
that was once spearheaded by Jamil Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown). In
the 1960s, H. Rap Brown was the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and a member of the Black Panther Party. During this time, the FBI, under
the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, expressed a desire to “neutralize” Brown.
Ultimately, he was imprisoned in 1971, where he converted to Islam as a result
of the efforts of the Dar ul-Islam Movement (DAR).[8] While the DAR was the largest
Black Sunni group in the United States from the early 1960s to 1975 (when Warith Deen Mohammed moved the original Nation of Islam [NOI] into Sunnism after the death
of Elijah Muhammad), the Movement was comprised of many former Black Panthers
and activists of the Black Power Movement.[9] As noted by R.M. Mukhtar
Curtis, the Movement grew out of discontentment with a group headquartered in
Brooklyn called the Islamic Mission of America, headed by Daoud Ahmed Faisal,
an Afro-Trinidadian immigrant[10] whose political philosophy
regarding anticolonial violence resembled that of Fanon.[11]
Largely
inspired by institutions such as the Black Panther Party and the Fruit of Islam
([FOI] although the DAR strongly rejected the NOI’s doctrine), the DAR formed a
similar paramilitary defense unit called Ra’d.
Since its inception, the DAR was strongly targeted by the FBI, as one of the
Muslim group’s leaders (Yahya Abdul-Kareem) wrote an article in their newspaper,
Al-Jihadul Akbar, critiquing the anti-Black
AND anti-Muslim sentiment that produced an FBI raid of the group's main masjid during
the group’s early days.[12]
In
1980, the DAR broke into two movements—the National Ummah (based on the original
DAR, once headed by Al-Amin) and Muslims of the Americas (Qadiriyya Sufism)—both
of which were heavily surveilled/harassed by the FBI and the online rightwing blogosphere. Islamberg, which was almost the victim of a violent attack by a White former congressional candidate from Tennessee (see my previous post for more information), is part of the Muslims of America.
In
the late 1970s, Al-Amin (formerly Brown) opened a masjid in the West End of
Atlanta. As I used to live in the West End of Atlanta, I am personally familiar with
this community as described in the below blog memoir. Interestingly, Al-Amin
(affectionally known as “Imam Jamil”) as portrayed in this article resembles the
work of the character Olinga from Michael Campus’s Blaxploitation film The Mack (1973), which is interesting
given the portrayal of the Muslim Third World in a separate genre of Black radical
cinema in the 1970s, as described by Sohail Daulatzai.[13]
Omar
Regan’s statement that the FBI was still handling unfinished business of COINTELPRO
was proven correct, as they maintained a 44,000 page file on Al-Amin and placed
informants in his West End community. Like many Black radical activists of the
1960s, Al-Amin was imprisoned for allegedly shooting a police officer, despite disputed
(and lack of) evidence regarding physical appearance, weapons,
motives, etc.[14]
There
are very clear connections direct connections between surveillance, anti-Blackness,
and Islamophobia that has been avoided in much of the literature, due to
longstanding images of “who” is Muslim, a dilemma discussed by many scholars
including Sherman Jackson, Edward Curtis IV, and others. Hopefully this
absented presence of Blackness will be addressed in a way that takes the
surveillance of Black Religion during slavery into consideration in future
discourse on the intersections of Islamophobia and surveillance.
--Kam
[1] Simone Browne, Dark Matters : On
the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, [North Carolina] ; Duke University
Press, 2015), 12–13.
[2] Michael A. Gomez, “Africans,
Culture, and Islam in the Lowcountry,” in African American Life in the
Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, ed. Phillip
Morgan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 112.
[3] Sherman Jackson, Islam and the
Blackamerican: Looking toward the Third Resurrection (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 31–32.
[5] Gomez highlights the role of the
fusion of Black Religion, Protestantism, and the conjure tradition of hoodoo in
Denmark Vesey’s planned rebellion in Charleston. Moreover, he highlights the earlier
influence of the warrior tradition among Senegambian ethnic groups.
Interestingly, Samory Rashid’s article focuses on Islamic traditions, alongside
the aide of Black Religion and the conjure tradition in certain slave rebellions
fueled by warrior traditions throughout the Americas. See Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging
Our Country Marks : The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial
and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998); Samory Rashid, “Blacks and the Law of Resistance in Islam,” The
Journal of Islamic Law 4 (1999): 87–124.
[6] Edward E. Curtis IV, “The Black
Muslim Scare of the Twentieth Century: The History of State Islamophobia and
Its Post-9/11 Variations,” in Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of
Intolerance, ed. Carl W. Ernst (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 75–106.
[7] https://www.thenation.com/article/how-one-man-refused-spy-fellow-muslims-fbi-and-then-lost-everything/
[8] The Dar ul-Islam Movement had a
strong prison committee. See https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft2s2004p0&chunk.id=ch7&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch7&brand=ucpress
[10] R.M. Mukhtar Curtis, “Urban
Muslims: The Formation of the Dar Ul-Islam Movement,” in Muslim Communities
in North America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Smith (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1994), 51–74.
[13] Sohail Daulatzai, “To the East,
Blackwards: Black Power, Radical Cinema, and the Muslim Third World,” in Black
Star, Crescent Moon : The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America,
by Sohail Daulatzai (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 45–87.
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