Microaggressions: A Black Muslim response!

“So your Muslim? Can you even recite the Qu’ran?” Can you say Al-Fathiah?”

Let me make this very clear: when I recite Al-Fatihah I strive to make it for the pleasure of Allah(SWT). I dont do it to accommodate some pseudo-religious test by non-black Muslims to verify whether or not I am truly an authenticate Muslim. Truth be told: even though I born in a Muslim household. I only started learning how to say the prayers in Arabic a couple of years ago. As African-American Muslims, we were robbed of our original language: Arabic.

However, Ahmad Baba al Massufi was a great scholar of Timbuktu in West Africa and was a master Arabic Grammarian. Philis Wheatley one of the pioneers of African-American literature was known to have wrote in Arabic when she was young. In DisForming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular, Roanld Judy notes that an enslaved African had a manuscript that contained unintelligible Arabic. Scholars examining the document speculated that the brother was in the process of learning Arabic when he was young but his studies was interrupted. Thus, the Arabic he writes is “broken” and “unintelligible” as a result of slavery interrupting his studies.

So, for me personally I am actually in the process of learning the recitation of the Qu’ran. I make a plethora of errors when attempting to do so.  Does this somehow make me less of a Muslim than those fortunate enough to study tajweed since they were kids? Not one iota. I am not a Johny come lately Muslim in any sense of the word.