mehreenkasana:

I urge all fellow Muslims to read this brilliant and crucial letter by Khaled Beydoun for the American Muslim community. Ferguson is our issue.

Ferguson is a Muslim-American issue because we frequently appropriate Black imagery and ideas with no history of aligning ourselves with Black struggle. We quote Malcolm X to counter government surveillance of our mosques, and cite Martin Luther King, Jr. to relate the struggle of Syrians to an American audience.

During the siege on Gaza months ago, we raised banners of Black Civil Rights activists ravaged by police dogs, and posted pictures of Black Civil Rights protestors violently water-hosed. Ideas and images displaced form their original Black context, and pasted to a foreign framework in order to pronounce the plight of Palestinians.

Over and again, we borrow from Black struggle as a means to advance our political or strategic ends. And without pause, condemn Black victims or look the other way during ongoing moments of Black crisis. Both yesterday, and again today.

Ferguson is our issue because, before Muslim-America was “Arab” or “South Asian,” it was Black. Enslaved Muslims constructed the first mosques, observed the inaugural Ramadans, and paved the streets and roads we drive atop today.

Although our segregated masjids won’t reveal it, Black Muslims comprise the biggest segment of the Muslim American population. More than one-fourth of Muslims in the United States today are Black. While disoriented as an “Arab religion” in America, there are far more Black Muslims than Arab American Muslims. Black Muslims also outnumber South Asian Muslims, and rank as the fastest growing demographic of the faith’s domestic population. Muslims aren’t the “New Blacks,” as many pundits stated after 9/11. Muslims have always been Black.

[contd]