“We Can No Longer Live On An Island”

Blacks Muslims confronting ​“a tsunami of hate” in America need to take positive steps to tell their side of the story.

Three local African-Americans who happen to be Muslim offered that take, and personal insight, on the rising Islamophobia stemming from the Dec. 4 mass shooting in San Bernandino, California, during a discussion aired on WNHH radio’s ​“Urban Talk Radio” program.

The airwaves and Internet have been full of calls by non-Muslims — most prominently presidential candidate Donald Trump — to place restrictions on Muslims as a result of that shooting. Unlike in the majority of American mass shootings, where the killers have been white, male and occasionally claimed to be Christian, the alleged perpetrators in this attack, who killed 14 people and injured 21, were a Muslim husband and wife. The voices of Muslims — particularly African-American Muslims — have been relegated to the sidelines in much of the national discussion.

In the ​“Urban Talk Radio” discussion, the three black, American-born Muslims added their voices to that discussion. They spoke about what it means to be Muslim in the U.S. versus what people think it means; the special challenges of being perceived to be ​“visibly” Muslim, especially for women; and what if any responsibility the Muslim community has to combat violence and terrorism. They didn’t always agree.

The discussion featured ​“Urban Talk Radio” host Shafiq Abdussabur, WNHH ​“Mornings with Mubarakah” host Mubarakah Ibrahim (who is married to Abdussabur), and Imam Kashif Abdul-Karim.

Abdussabur opened the conversation by suggesting that Muslims across the country have been quietly playing a dreaded ​“what if” game over how their lives would change if the next mass shooting in the U.S. was carried out by a Muslim.

“This is, right now, most Muslims’ nightmare,” he said.

The full discussion can be heard in an audio file at the bottom of this story. An edited and condensed transcript of part of the program follows.

Refusing To Hide

Abdussabur: Imam Kashif, in the wake of what happened in San Bernadino, California, there have been no visible statements, interviews or comments from African-American Muslim leaders. My question to you is: Does that help or does that hurt and why?

Imam Kashif Abdul-Karim: There have been some statements put out by African-American leaders, Congressman [Keith] Ellison [the first Muslim elected to the federal government] gave many comments regarding that. And I know that locally, many African-American leaders throughout the country have been giving responses as well. So the African-American community isn’t being silent on the issues. It is being talked about by the African-American Muslims.

Abdussabur: So if that’s happening and people are not seeing it, do we think it’s happening because they’re being silenced? Or left out purposely on the national scale, in terms of the media so that it can stay one-sided?

Abdul-Karim: I think the media is looking for people who look like or can be framed in the agenda of what a terrorist is. And how they’re going to respond is by what they think basically a terrorist looks like. So quite often they’re leaning toward immigrant Muslims as being that particular image. And that’s why they’re choosing them to be the ones quite often to speak. It’s quite often that they think that these particular immigrant Muslims are the ones who are going to apologize, or see something wrong with it as though it were partially their fault. Many of the African-American Muslims in America, we clearly do not identify with any of those things being Muslims, and sometimes I think this is other people doing it. It’s a common problem that we all have because we’re now falling into the same problems.

Abdussabur: So, Mubarakah. let me ask you this. You’re a Muslim female, adult woman now, born Muslim, of African-American descent. You would be considered dressing traditional. Now we have what appears to be the first ever to be documented Muslim female terrorist [on American soil]. What are your thoughts about this?

Ibrahim: I think that one, I have some reservations about the fact that in America we have this innocent until proven guilty, but we just automatically accept it when they say, ​“OK, these two people did it.” I think that her being a female, or them identifying somebody as female as one of the suspects — I think what it does is that it really puts Muslim women at risk. Since the incident in San Bernadino, we know that most of the attacks on Muslims have been to Muslim women, particularly women who wear hijab — that is the head covering — because we are identified as Muslim.

When a man walks down the street, generally he has very little outside appearance of being Muslim. But Muslim women are very easily identified. I think that, in addition to the inflammatory things that Donald Trump [is] saying, Muslim women are actually on the front line now. Whereas before, we were not necessarily pointed out. But now Muslim women are really on the front line. We’ve had several reports of attacks on Muslim women, and as a response, unfortunately, I’ve actually been reading a lot of stuff online about Muslim women wanting to either remove their hijab, or they are covering it up with baseball caps.

I personally am not doing that. I have no intentions of doing that. I don’t judge anybody who feels any type of fear and feels like that is the necessary steps they need to take in order to do that.

But I think that it’s really sad in America, where we were founded on the freedom of religion, that now people feel they can’t be freely religious. I think that is a really sad thing that we have come to that point in America. So, her being a female, it has definitely changed the game. It has changed the game for Muslim women in particular. In terms of the African-American versus the immigrant community, now that Muslim women are being targeted, it’s really not a difference between being African-American or being foreign, or whatever.

They see a hijab, they see a Muslim. They don’t care if you’re black, white, Puerto Rican, Pakistani, Saudi Arabian. They have not identified that. What they see is, they see Islam. So this a time, more than any other time, for all Muslims to really come together with a common cause of helping to advocate for Muslims, helping to counter all the falsehoods going on about Islam. It is a very serious time. It is a very dangerous time for Muslim women right now.

Abdussabur: Mubarakah brought up a really good point about Muslim by sight. The fact that you can easily identify Muslim women — and I would also add to the point that the secondary group that seems to be attacked are foreigners, or people who appear to be Middle Eastern. We know after 9/11 the Sikh community had experienced a significant amount of attacks because people assumed that they were actually Muslim when in fact they’re not, they’re Sikhs. Even Indians, who are Hindu, have received these random types of attacks.

You have Mubarak saying, ​“Hey look, you can tell that I’m Muslim.” The immigrant community is saying, ​“Hey look, you can tell by my accent, you can tell by the way I look. I look like I could be Muslim from another country.” But for African-American men, it’s a lot different. You and me can put on a pair of jeans and a T‑shirt and go out in the community and no one will know on sight that we are Muslim, even though we’re dealing with another issue.

Abdul-Karim: African-American Muslim men for the most part can disguise their identity, just as an immigrant person can disguise their identity as well. I’ve been dealing with a lot of immigrant Muslims who have decided to simply shave their beards. I’ve dealt with many Bosnian Muslims who just have tried to assimilate into white American society because they can’t be seen. But the issue that I think, in terms of our identifier, is that people don’t really care about our identifier, like what Mubarak was saying. For example, my masjid is in Hartford. My community is under attack, not me personally, or a person who’s African-American directly, but I’ll get a call, I’ve gotten calls calling me pedophiles. I’ve gotten calls telling me that they’ve been in direct conversation with Allah and that Allah don’t like us and all this kind of stuff threatening us. So they’re calling and directly attacking the community, and it’s making the community of Muslims unsafe. So it’s not like they’re saying, ​‘I’m going to go after the black Muslims, or the immigrant Muslims.’ They’re just going after the community of Islam with a broad brush and that’s because Trump has painted the problem with a broad brush. It doesn’t matter if you’re African-American, Latino or white, or anything. That broad brush stroke is attacking all of us.

Ibrahim: If I can chime, in I think that we talk about Donald Trump a lot but I think that this issue of painting Muslims with a broad brush is so beyond Donald Trump. It’s the media. The media has a large responsibility. We were talking before the show about how the first six or eight hours of the San Bernadino shooting they didn’t know who the suspects were. People were saying they were white males. They said, ​‘We’re not sure its a terrorist attack.’ No they were not sure if the [suspects] were white, which they would not call a terrorist attack. If they were Muslim they would call it a terrorist attack. That is directly the media. The media painting that when an extremist, Christian terrorist shoots up Planned Parenthood it’s not terrorism. But when a Muslim shoots up San Bernadino, its terrorism. So this has been happening before Donald Trump was running for president. So the media has a huge responsibility. And I think that is one of the reasons why we do these shows. In the media, we need a new voice, we need to start standing up and being a voice. And that is what this is. We have to really hold the media accountable for what their responsibility is. What they’re doing is they are aggravating the problem. They are advocating for the same thing that Donald Trump just happened to be bold enough to say straight outright. The media has been doing this before Donald Trump. They’ve just been doing it in a side-way.

Abdussabur suggested that something more sinister might be at work in the heart of America than a flame-fanning Big Media and Republican presidential candidate and leading advocate of barring Muslims from entering the country, Donald Trump. He said just two nights ago, he was trolled on Twitter by people accusing him of being a pedophile and a terrorist.

“The reality is I don’t believe Donald Trump has as much power and influence to create this much reaction of hate in America from individuals,” he said. ​“AndI wasn’t being pro or negative about anything. I think the atmosphere always existed here. It reminds me a lot of even watching Roots. As a little kid, when I watched Roots and I remember a part when the Ku Klux Klan came as the slaves had just became free and it was this kind of thing. What’s even scarier right now is that we actually do have the Ku Klux Klan, and we do have known white supremacist groups. And their numbers have increased. So the hate part, I believe is already here.”

Define ​“Radicalized”

Abdussabur: But, question to both of you is, just because the hate is here it doesn’t absolve the Muslim community from the responsibility of people who may be perpetrating this kind of behavior because now in a sense, and I’ll go to you Imam Kashif Abdul-Karim, Muslims are starting to sound a lot like black people around urban gun violence. ​“It’s the police’s fault.” So what are we going to do? What are we going to do as Muslims to address this issue? Were not totally absolved. Pew [research center] actually says, African-American Muslims they polled were more open to pro-radical type ideas.

Abdul-Karim: First of all we don’t agree with that research…

Ibrahim: And what is ​“radicalized” anyway? That is the problem. When you use that word it means a different thing to a different person. I pray five times a day. To some people, that’s radical. I wear a hijab; to some people, that’s radical. I read Quran, I fast during the month of Ramadan. To some people, that’s radical. So when you say, ​“They’re radicalized,” what does that exactly mean? That’s a very general statement that you can’t even use with any type of certainty in defining a person.

Abdul-Karim: The very intelligent people in America, you know what they call that? Observant. This is the whole issue of radicalization that I keep having to deal with. Radicalization is being called that now when it’s dealing with the Muslims. People have been dealing with radicalization in this country for hundreds of years. Look, the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan was radicalizing Americans, Christians into thinking like them.

Ibrahim: And Fox News radicalizes people now…

Abdul-Karim: Yes. Hitler was radicalizing Germany to think the things that they think. Radicalization has always been around, but now it’s being targeted for Muslims and it’s radicalizing people to think that the prophet is radicalizing people, and that is not true at all.

Abdussabur: But the question becomes: What is the Muslim community going to do? What is the responsibility of the Muslim community because there are people in America that are Muslim that are still really practicing their own Islam. They have a distorted concept about Islam. What are the Muslims going to do to rein them in?

Abdul-Karim: We’re trying to prepare a conference or an educational forum to try to put together, like an anti-radicalization program for the Muslim Student Association for Muslims in the community

Abdussabur: But what is anti-radicalization? Because you just said it is ambiguous.

Abdul-Karim: There are people intentionally trying to quote-unquote radicalize Muslims in America and throughout the world right? But there needs to be a counter action to that particular behavior. The Letter to Baghdadi that came out that was put together from the Islamic scholars explaining what ISIS was doing is not correct. We need to get that information out to our community. We need to teach people about being an American patriot.

What does that mean? And is there a conflict with that with Sharia? We need to teach people about the civil rights movement and the oppression of Muslims and what can we learn from each other.

Those are different things that we need to teach and need to be a part of our agenda. And that’s one of the projects that we’re working on right now to do for the general Muslim community, because a lot of negative stuff is being put out there toward Muslims, allegedly, but we need to put out there the other side.

Ibrahim: I have an issue with the type of question that you asked. When you ask Muslims, ​“hat are they doing about these terrorists?,” then you are some how indicating that it’s our fault, that we should some how be apologizing. No one goes and asks Catholics what are they doing about all these white guys shooting up the Planned Parenthood clinic because they’re anti-abortion. So how is it that it is our responsibility as Muslims?

Abdussabur: But here’s the thing Mubarakah …

Ibrahim: It’s America’s responsibility…

Abdussabur: So if there is a large number, of African-Americans, born in America such as yourself, Mubarakah, converted, or reverted as it is often said, that are right here in America that have been a part of the struggle for black people, who understand the issue of how America progresses and degresses around that issue, and you’re here in a sovereign land, and you have an immigration population that just might be getting here now, some Syrian, some Ethiopian, whatever the case might be, who may not understand the culture of America well — Isn’t it the Muslims’ here responsibility to help them acclimate?

Ibrahim: That is the other problem I have with your question. There is an assumption that something is not being done in the Muslim community. We have Muslim scholars who are constantly talking to college students, to high school students to other Muslims all about what our response to ISIS should be. One of my personally beloved scholars, Yassir Morsi, he talks anti-ISIS so much that ISIS literally put a hit out on him because he was talking anti-ISIS. So we talk about it.

Abdussabur: I’m saying it’s about education — that the programs are not out there. That’s my point…

Ibrahim: The programs are out there and people are speaking about it. And this becomes another issue of he so-called moderate voice, the so-called voice that is anti-ISIS. It says, ​“Why aren’t Muslims speaking out?” Muslims are speaking out. Muslim scholars are speaking out. Muslim communities are speaking out. Muslim individuals are speaking out. And people are not hearing them. You’re not listening if you don’t hear it. So it’s not that Muslims aren’t saying anything, or doing anything. People just don’t want to focus on those Muslims who are.

Abdussabur: Is there bias in the Islamic community? Because there is the question: Where as African-American Muslims…

Ibrahim: Why do you keep making this an African-American/immigrant thing? It is not an African American/immigrant thing. It is a Muslim community thing. People who are anti-Muslim, they don’t care that I descended from slaves. When I put on my hijab they don’t see that part of it. They don’t care that my grandfather was literally on the front line on Normandy beach. They erase that part when he fought on behalf of America to free the Jews from Germany. They don’t see that. What they see is Muslims. They don’t care that we’re black. They don’t care that we’re Arab. They don’t care that we’re Pakistani. They see Muslims. And so as Muslims, we have to approach this as a collective.

Abdul-Karim: And I agree. The question is who takes the lead in trying to put together the priorities and the way that we resolve the problems. Do we look at people who are experienced with dealing with oppression in this particular country, America, for all this time and taking the lead and giving ideas and resolutions to how to fix it? Or do we let other people who have no experience? I agree that we have to work together. I really feel that we have a lot of experiences here as African-American Muslims to help try to resolve these problems. And if the immigrant community won’t open the door and say, “‘Listen to what we have to say?,” it’s going to take a long time to get the problems resolved.

Abdussabur: Everybody has to work on the same page. And what you said Mubarakah that was really enlightening is: Here you sit as Muslim woman, full hijab in all things you do. But behind that, people may not understand all the contributions that were put up by your family that led up to that point. Here is my question: How will they know if we don’t tell them? How will we tell them if we don’t have a platform?

Abdul-Karim: That’s the whole difficulty, Shafiq. We’re so diverse as a community. The Pakistanis have a different agenda. The Indonesians have a different agenda. The African-Americans have a different agenda. Everybody has a different agenda, a different platform. We have some common things that we need to deal with yes, particularly with all these issues of terrorism, radicalization all this kind of stuff. We have so much diversity in our community that it is hard to come together with a common solution. Just like the African-American community, not just talking about Muslims, why do we have so much difficulty in working together? Because we are so diverse in our thinking.

The same thing is true in the Muslim community. We are so diverse in our thinking, it’s hard to come together and say, ​“This is the common platform that we’re all going to work on together.” It’s just so hard.

“Righting” The Story

Abdussabur: What solutions can you offer? 

Ibrahim: I think the solution to it is really creating a diverse voice in media, [and] holding the media accountable for what they are saying and what they are doing to promote these issues and for them to take personal accountability. And as Muslims we have to realize that this is an issue that we have to approach unified. Immigrants can have a perspective and African-American Muslims can have a perspective, jointly together creating a solution for the problem.

Abdul-Karim: I think we have to develop our own narratives. We have to develop a propaganda machine that’s for ourselves to get out our story and right the narrative that’s out there. Too many other people are defining what jihad is. Too many other people are defining what other things are for Islam, other than the Muslims themselves, and the Muslims are being impacted. We have to find a way to right our own narrative and get our opinions and our views out there.

CAIR [the Council on Islamic-American Relations] did a study and Hartford seminary did a study. They found most Muslims are not involved with journalism. They aren’t involved in filmmaking. They’re not involved with communications, media at all. We need to be in that particular area so that we can right the narrative.

And when I say right the narrative, I’m saying r‑i-g-h‑t, not w‑r-i-t‑e. We need to right the narrative. We need to make that connection. We need to fix that propaganda machine that’s out there and make sure that the word is getting put out there correctly. And [hold the media] accountable without giving Trump supporters all this free publicity.

Abdussabur: I think there are two solutions. Every Muslim in America needs to register to vote. Register as a Democrat. Do not vote Republican. That’s number one.

Number two: Raise your children to go get into jobs like the police department, the fire department and all these other aspects of society. [Be] teachers, journalists, and be visible in the community as Muslims helping solve Americas issues. There’s homelessness, gun violence, domestic violence; we need to be involved and engaged more in society.

We can no longer live on the island. It’s a tsunami of hate now taking over Muslims in America. It time for us to step up to the plate.

Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the entire episode of ​“Urban Talk Radio.”