Islam, Muslims and the wages of racial agnosia in America

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Notes

¹The concept itself seems to be far more diffused throughout various writings than it is treated in works devoted specifically to its explication; however, see A Bû‘ûd, Fiqh al-wâqi‘: us˙ûl wa d˙awâbit˙ (Dâr al-Salâm li al-T˙ibâ‘ah wa al-Nashr wa al-Tawzî‘ wa al-Tarjamah, Cairo 1426/2006). See also Yûsuf al-Qarad˙âwî, Awlawîyât al-h˙arakah al-islâmîyah fî al-marh˙alah al-qâdimah (Maktabat Wahbah, Cairo 1411/1991) 26, where “fiqh wâqi‘î” is said to be “based on a comprehensive, precise study of lived reality.” Meanwhile, fiqh al-wâqi‘ has another, much more politicized, meaning unrelated to what has been described here. On this version, see, for example, S˙âlih˙ b. Fawzân, al-Ajwibah al-mufîdah ‘an as'ilat al-manâhij al-jadîdah (Dâr al-Salaf, Riyadh 1418/1998) 5–6, where he criticizes what some label as “fiqh al-wâqi‘” as “a preoccupation with politics, political agitation and directing all of one's time and concern towards this.” He singles out Sayyid Qut˙b as the progenitor and “imâm” of this approach.

²For example, istih˙sân (equity), mas˙lah˙ah mursalah (public interest), sadd al-dharâ’i‘ (blocking the legal means to illicit ends) all entail explicitly factual assessments as opposed to an exclusive reliance upon scriptural deduction. To borrow the phraseology of the seventh/thirteenth century Mâlikî, Shihâb al-Dîn al-Qarâfî (d. 684/1285), they involve an ontological determination of the “wuqû‘ al-sabab” (i.e., the actual occurrence of a legal cause) as opposed simply to identifying the scripturally determined identity of a legal cause, i.e., “sababîyat al-sabab.”; Shihâb al-Dîn al-Qarâfî, al-Furûq (4 vols, ‘Âlam al-Kitâb, Beirut n.d.) 1: 11.

³As occurred, in fact, in the centuries following the death of the Prophet, when all kinds of ideas and artifacts from the pre-Islamic Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Persian wâqi‘ were appropriated and parlayed into a new “Islamic” order. The difference there, however, was that rather than seeing themselves as being forced to acquiesce and adjust to impositions of non-Muslim origin, the early Muslims freely appropriated theretofore novel elements as a matter of choice and from a position of power. Indeed, their marginal power greatly assisted them in maintaining the distinction between “non-Muslim” and “un-Islamic.”

⁴As Faye Harrison put it, “racism is characterized by an international hierarchy in which wealth, power and advanced development are associated with whiteness or ‘honorary whiteness’”; cited in A Jamal and Nadine Naber, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 (Syracuse University Press, New York, NY 2008) 27.

⁵One thinks, for example, of some of the early twentieth-century writers, such as the Anglo-American Randolph Bourne or the Jewish-American Horace Kalen, who challenged what they depicted as the predatory attempts by Anglo-Americans to homogenize American culture and national identity; e.g. R Bourne, ‘Trans-National America’ in DA Hollinger and C Capper (eds) The American Intellectual Tradition (Oxford University Press, New York, NY 1997) 171. Meanwhile, Matthew Frye Jacobson describes a similar movement among “Ellis Island whites,” in the second half of the twentieth century, in resisting the cultural dominance of ‘Plymouth Rock whites”; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2006) 1–10.

⁶To my mind, the jury is still out on whether an America denuded of racial hierarchy would still be America. In contemplating this question it might noted, however, that racial hierarchy may be grounded in sheer numbers, chronological precedent or historical accident and does not necessarily have to entail racism, at least not as a consciously indulged attempt to subjugate.

⁷Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, New York, NY 1993) 47.

⁸Indeed, throughout his mission in Mecca, it was the ties and sentiments of ‘as˙abîyah, first of his largely non-Muslim clan of Banû Hâshim, led by his pagan uncle Abû T˙âlib, and then of the likes of the Banû Nawfal represented by Mut˙‘im b. ‘Adî, that enabled him to survive. In Medina, recognition of the prevailing tribal order, as reflected, for example, in the so-called “Constitution of Medina,” clearly informed the success of his mission there. In fact, when Abû Haytham b. al-Tayyihân of the Medinese tribe of Aws explained at the second meeting at ‘Aqabah that, in order to fulfill their commitment to the Prophet, they might have to sever ties with certain Jewish tribes of Medina, the Prophet is reported to have responded, “Your blood is my blood, and your destruction is my destruction” (al-damu al-dam wa al-hadmu al-hadm), clearly indicating his recognition of the tribal calculus of his new home. See for example, Ibn Hishâm, al-Sîrah al-Nabawîyah (3rd edn, eds M al-Saqâ, I al-Abyârî and ‘A Shalabî, Dâr Ibn Kathîr, Damascus 1426/2005) 382–3.

⁹ A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875 <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=226> 103. Emphasis added.

¹⁰IF Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York University Press, New York, NY 1998).

¹¹The National Origins Act was promulgated in 1924; Haney Lopez (n 10) 38. Similar in intent was the Asiatic Barred Zone, which rendered all applicants from within a certain geographical longitude and latitude ineligible for American citizenship.

¹²Indeed, in his remarks at the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 (which prorogued the National Origins Quota System) President Johnson lamented that up until that point “Only three countries were allowed to supply seventy percent of all the immigrants”; JJ Huthmacher, A Nation of Newcomers: Ethnic Minority Groups in American History (Dell, New York, NY 1967) 120.

¹⁴P Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making Since 1789 (trans C Porter, Duke University Press, Durham, NC 2008) 14 (emphasis added). Of course, French citizenship debates have also developed over the past two centuries, with what some have even termed racist definitions being promulgated during the regimes of Vichy (1940–44) and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1974–81); ibid., 5.

¹⁷Richard Dyer, White (Routledge, London 1997) 19–20.

¹³This would go a long way, of course, to establishing whiteness as the prototype for “American.” Again, Morrison: “To identify someone as South African is to say very little; we need the adjective ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘colored’ to make our meaning clear. In this country it is quite the reverse. American means white …”; Morrison (n 7) 47.

¹⁵Of course, the case of French slaves and if and how they were integrated into the newly established French republic in the eighteenth century raises questions here. But, as Charles Taylor recently observes, while white Europeans have successfully integrated into French society as bona fide French, Moroccans (and other peoples of color) have not. “[O]ne French person in four today has at least one grandparent born outside the country. France in this century has been an immigrant country without thinking of itself as such. The policy of assimilation has hit a barrier with recent waves of Maghrébains, but it worked totally with Italians, Poles, Czechs, who came between the wars”; Charles Taylor, ‘No Community, No Democracy’ in A Etzioni, A Volmert and E Rothschild (eds) The Communitarian Reader: Beyond the Essentials (Rowman & Little, New York, NY 2004) 35.

¹⁶ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1998) 143 (emphasis original).

¹⁸On this point, see Haney Lopez (n 10) 49. Note that this was not limited to Arabs and sub-continent Asians but included Japanese, Chinese, Italians, East European Jews, Armenians, Afghans, and others, none of whom at the time was considered white. On another note, Naber may reflect an element of the kind agnosia I have in mind when she buys into the complete marginalization of the fact that “African descent” was recognized as rendering one eligible for citizenship as far back as 1870; Nadine Naber, ‘Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations’ in A Jamal and Nadine Naber (eds) Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY 2008) 14: “The United States passed its first nationalization law in 1790, granting naturalization to aliens who were classified as ‘free white persons’. This ‘racial prerequisite to citizenship endured for over a century and a half – remaining in force until 1952’.”

¹⁹Haney Lopez (n 10) 49.

²⁰Sarah MA Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 2009) 68. To this end, Jewish attorneys even went so far as to write amicus curiae briefs in support of Syrian bids for citizenship.

²¹Ibid. 53.

²²Arabs, i.e., Syrian Christians, doggedly pursue and gain recognition as legally white during the first two decades of the twentieth century. After several cases in which they were denied on grounds of non-whiteness, a number of seminal reversals ensued. Among the most famous was that of George S. Dow, who was finally classed white and granted citizenship in 1915; Haney Lopez (n 10) 74–7. Gualtieri, however, points to the case of George Shimshi, another Syrian, who was finally recognized as white and granted citizenship in Los Angeles in 1909; Gualtieri (n 20) 65–9. As for “Arabians,” they were denied in re Ahmad Hassan in Michigan in 1942 but deemed white in re Mohriez in Massachusetts in 1944.

²³On the induction into and acceptance of American whiteness as a consciously political move, see T Allen, The Invention of the White Race (2 vols, Verso, New York, NY 1994) 1: 1–29.

²⁴Courts tended to rely on four considerations, in no particular order and with various degrees of consistency: (1) legal precedent; (2) congressional intent; (3) scientific evidence; and (4) common knowledge; Haney Lopez (n 10) 63.

²⁵One might note in this context that it is widely estimated that only about 28% of Americans have a four-year bachelor's degree, about 9% have master's degrees and only about 3% hold doctorates. Thus the majority of Americans are non-degree holders and the vast majority is devoid of advanced degrees that are routinely found among Muslim immigrants in many if not most parts of the country. On the other hand, a recent Pew survey suggests that Muslims are similar to the rest of the population in terms of higher educational achievements. While this may be true on a national level, in many areas outside greater Detroit and greater New York City, concentrations of Muslim doctors and other degree-holders would seem to be significantly higher than the national average, which tends to place Muslims outside the residential spheres of working-class white Americans.

²⁶Indeed, George Lakoff forcefully explains that people often vote their identity over their interests. Republicans recognize this and are willing to capitalize on it. Thus, regarding the 2003 recall election in California, where the (theretofore) white majority had grown embattled in its identity, Lakoff writes: “In focus groups, they asked union members, ‘Which is better for you, this Davis position or that Schwarzeneggar position?’ Most would say, ‘The Davis one.’ ‘Davis, Davis, Davis.’ Then they would ask, ‘Who you [sic] voting for?’ ‘Schwarzeneggar’”; George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green, White River Junction, VT 2004) 19.

²⁷Dyer (n 17) i.

²⁸Ibid. xiv. Dyer, who is careful to note that he is white, has as his stated goal to bring people to see how white authority is achieved and maintained, in order to empower them to challenge, expose and domesticate it.

²⁹The point is not to impugn the notion that non-whites can only speak from a particular, historically embedded perspective. The point is, rather, that the same applies to whites and that the universal judgments they espouse are in fact typically “false universals.”

³⁰Nadine Naber, ‘Introduction: Arab Americans and U.S. Racial Formations’ in A Jamal and Nadine Naber (eds) Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY 2008) 2.

³¹One might consider as well in this context the impact of the changed realities in the Arab lands from which post-1965 immigrants came. Between the germination of early Arab nationalism followed by Nasserism, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and Islamic resurgence, the new generation of Arab immigrants may have simply come to America with a much stronger sense of Arab identity.

³²In other words, unlike their predecessors, post-1965 immigrants from the Muslim world may not have questioned whether they could be simultaneously Arab and white, but simply assumed that they could. This assumption, however, has been called into serious question by the realities of the post-9/11 world.

³³Of course, the racial, ethnic or tribal forms of discrimination practiced by Muslims themselves, especially though not exclusively vis-à-vis Blackamericans, are routinely overlooked or simply excused as “cultural differences.”

³⁴I suspect that Hispanicness, certainly in several parts of the country, might provide similarly rewarding insights. Given my ignorance, however, of the Latino experience, that analysis is better left to those more versed in that historical narrative.

³⁵Indeed, as Haney Lopez points out, even Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were classed as “blacks.” For example, in the 1854 case, People v. Hall, a California court ruled that the testimony of a Chinese person, per an 1850 statute barring “blacks” from testifying against whites, was inadmissible in court; Haney Lopez (n 10) 51. Meanwhile, a 1925 Supreme Court ruling in Mississippi held that “segregation laws targeting the ‘colored race’ barred children of Chinese descent from attending schools with White children”; ibid. 52.

³⁶Cf. S. Abdulrahim, summarizing the perspective of an Arab-American from Dearborn, Michigan: “He is subjectively identifying with ‘whiteness’ for ‘rational’ reasons: America belongs to whites and one has to become white in order to become American”; S Abdulrahim, ‘Whiteness and the Arab Immigrant Experience’ in A Jamal and Nadine Naber (eds) Race and Arab Americans (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY 2008) 142.

³⁷James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Dell, New York, NY 1963) 40.

³⁸Speaking in the context of the Asian-American experience, Frank Wu notes that “‘Where are you from’ is a question we all routinely ask one another upon meeting a new person. ‘Where are you really from?’ is a question some of us tend to ask others of us very selectively”; Frank H Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (Basic, New York, NY 2002) 79.

⁴¹Charles H Long, ‘Interpretations of Black Religion in America’ in Charles H Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Davies Group, Aurora, CO 1995) 152–3 (emphasis original).

³⁹Ali Mazrui, World Culture and the Black Experience (University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA 1974) 92, 94, passim.

⁴⁰Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (repr. Quill, New York, NY 1963/1999) x.

⁴²Indeed, were a Blackamerican Muslim to storm into the local KKK headquarters and kill everyone inside, no one would believe that his actions were based on the fact that he is a Muslim and they are Christians, even were he to quote chapter and verse from the Qur'ân to validate his actions. On the contrary, most Americans would see a greater relationship between his status as a Blackamerican and their activities as KKK members than they would between his actions and Islam! Compare this, however, with how the actions of non-Blackamerican Muslims, domestically and internationally, are routinely explained today.

⁴³For example, Samuel P Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (Simon & Schuster, New York, NY 2004) xv–xvi, where the founding “American Creed” is said to include the duty and ability to build a “heaven on earth,” a Puritan “city on the hill.” And yet, to take just one example, when in 1664 the Maryland legislature decreed that “all Negroes then in the colony were to be servants for life by virtue of their color,” this provision endured all the way up to the Civil War! On the Maryland provision, see Huthmacher (n 12) 78.

⁴⁴Or imagine if, instead of connoting brown-skinned Muslims from the Middle East, Newt Gingrich's snipes at sharî‘a were perceived to be veiled references to blacks, as was “crime and welfare” in the 1980s, whether he would long remain a contender for the presidency.

⁴⁵In addition to the kinds of things that others can say and or insinuate about non-Blackamerican Muslims, I would suggest that American blackness is far less restricted in terms of what Blackamericans can say in more overtly religious terms, though as Muslims they must still contend with a degree of restriction that does not apply to non-Muslims. For example, Stephen L. Carter, a Blackamerican Episcopalian and Yale law professor, writes: “I write not only as a Christian but as one who is far more devoted to the survival of my faith – and of religion generally – than to the survival of any state in particular, including the Unites States of America. I love this nation, with all its weaknesses and occasional horrors, and I cannot imagine living in another one. But my mind is not so clouded with the vapors of patriotism that I place my country before my God. If the country were to force me to a choice – and increasingly, this nation tends to do that to many religious people – I would unhesitatingly, if not without some sadness for my country, choose my God”; Stephen L Carter, God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (Basic, New York, NY 2000) 3. Their legal whiteness notwithstanding, one cannot not imagine an Arab, Indo-Pakistani or any other immigrant Muslim writing – or even whispering – such words in America today. Yet, the legacy of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and others makes this far more feasible for Blackamerican Muslims, albeit more as Blackamericans than as Muslims.

⁴⁶Shortly after 9/11, in February 2002, radio and television host Tavis Smiley held his “State of the Black Union” conference at a church in Philadelphia. At one point, Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School posed the question of how “we” could make Muslims feel more welcomed among “us.” Almost before he could get the question out completely, the Revd Al Sharpton interjected that Muslims are already a part of “us,” as there is not a person in that church who did not have a brother, sister, uncle, cousin, mother, father or someone close to their family who is not a Muslim. On the reference to Banû Hâshim, see n 8 above.

⁴⁷There are several websites that carry the written transcript of this statement along with an audio clip of Limbaugh's actual broadcast, e.g. <http://www.mediamatters.org/items/200809220015>.

⁴⁸For the written transcript and audio clip of the actual broadcast, see <http://www.mediamatters.org/items/200808200002> (added emphasis).

⁴⁹Other examples include the case of a woman in Minnesota, Gail Minnow, who during a campaign stop by then presidential candidate John McCain also stated that Obama was not trustworthy, not because he was black but because he was an Arab.

⁵⁰Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville, who actually visited America, had this to say: “The Indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived, but the destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine”; DJ Boorstin (ed) Democracy in America (2 vols, Vintage Classics, New York, NY 1990) 1: 356. Meanwhile, at the end of the twentieth century, Yale's Jacobson would capture the reality described by de Tocqueville in his contrasting the American myth of E pluribus unum (from the many one) with the American reality of E pluribus duo (from the many two); Jacobson (n 16) 109–35.