Dear Muslims: Is your masjid is simply a prayer place in an affluent suburb with no engagement with black folks in the hood at the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy? If this is the case, do not speak to me about Malcolm X. Is your masjid a place that you merely go to engage in the obligatory salah, dhikr, tahajjud, qu’ranic recitation and other rituals but is not a place where the congregations seeks to implement Qu’ranic principles to establish... Read more
True Black history has been obfuscated and replaced with nefarious Eurocentric myths. Africa is portrayed as a place without history: primitive, inferior and impoverished. The noble descendants of Africa are by extension portrayed as incompetent and inconsequential actors in world history. To counter these Eurocentric tall-tells that masquerade as objective history, Carter G. Woodson first proposed Black History Week, which later expanded to a month. Muslims, who have been duty-bound to submit to Quranic revelations of getting to “know each... Read more
Richard Dawkin’s Islamophobia: A Black Muslim Response pt.1 Along with Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet, and Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins is known to be one of the four horsemen of the contemporary neo-atheist movement. Their criticisms of Islam generally evoke secular enlightenment discourse from whence their worldview of secular humanism emerges. At the core of Dawkins belief is the perception that Islam is archaic and at odds with modernity. Within his writings and public statements, Dawkins seeks to inculcate the... Read more
Read Part One Here: Bill Maher’s Islamophobia: A Black Muslim Response (Editorial Note: 2/16/2017: This article has been updated in which Hakeem Muhammad responds to several criticisms of the article) An essential element of Bill Maher and Sam Harris’s political philosophy is the belief that Muslims are a disproportionate cause of terrorism. In a recent televised interview with Harris that, Bill Maher states,“We are never going to defeat terrorism until we reform Islam. And we’ll never reform Islam if we can’t talk.”... Read more
A consistent theme in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was his defiance of political correctness. Trump’s willingness to explicitly call out “radical Islam” was seen as a prime manifestation of his refusal to be politically correct. Critics of Islam dismiss the assertions that ISIS and Al-Qaeda are not representative of Islam but instead are perversions of the faith. Such discourse they believe is saturated in “political correctness. “ They argue that ISIS’s action must be the result of Islam; after all,... Read more
Dawah is an Arabic word which means to invite someone to embrace Islam. When Malcolm X went to the Mosque for the first time, he said he was upset that the Mosque still had empty space. Malcolm X thought to himself: how can the Mosque still be empty when the streets are filled with brainwashed black brothers and sisters utilizing profanity, fighting each other, using drugs, and engaging in a litany of other self-destructive activities? Subsequently, Malcolm X... Read more
In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, former president Barack Obama discusses reading the literary works of very prominent black leftist intellectuals: W.E.B Dubois, Langston Hughes, James Balwdin, and Richard Wright. Obama, states that though the literary works had their merit, within, every one of these works he found,””the same anguish, the same self doubt; a self contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect.” However, Obama discovered an exception after reading... Read more
During this tumultuous Trump era in which islamophobia and anti-blackness have overt manifestations emanating from the executive branch of the world’s greatest superpower, Black Muslims, let us stand firmly upon the shoulders of those who came before us and remain unapologetically Black and Muslim. Though Trump’s advisor on National Security, Michael Flynn sees our beautiful faith as a “malignant cancer,” let us double up our efforts to turn to our faith for freedom, justice, and equality by continuing our holy protest against the real cancer wreaking havoc in the... Read more
During Black History Month at Truth to Power, we will be hosting a black Muslim history series. This series will expose hidden information about black Muslim history that has been systematically concealed by Eurocentric distortions that has placed African Muslim history to the periphery. During this month, stay tuned for: The 5 classical black west African scholars of Islam you need to know! The 5 Great Black Muslim civilizations you need to know!” The African-American Muslim history timeline! Press continue... Read more
Analyzing the impact of Islam upon Black America, in The First Next Time, Black Intellectual, James Baldwin states that Islam has been able to accomplish what welfare workers and various city agencies have attempted to do but failed to do; making drunkards sober and lowering the recidivism rate of prisoners. Most significantly, Baldwin states that Islam has been able to, ’invest both male and female with the pride and serenity that hang about them like unfailing light.’” In Baldwin’s... Read more
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