c. 2007 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ As the tribute to Malcolm X wound down, Aaliyah Turner surveyed the scene at Roxbury Community College and gave herself a mixed review.

The crowd was diverse _ black Muslims, Jewish peaceniks, white leftists, Arab Muslims, Harvard students, even a representative from the Nation of Islam. But Turner, 28, had hoped for double the 200 people who turned out.

“Maybe we’ll try it again next year,” said Turner, who organized the tribute with peers from Masjid Al-Quran, a nearby mosque where Malcolm X often preached when he visited Boston.

Beneath Turner’s assessment was a sense that the future of African-American Islam weighs heavily on people like her, the children of parents who joined and later left the Nation of Islam, the religion’s black nationalist offshoot.

Now in their 20s, 30s and 40s, this new generation, born into the faith, confronts new challenges, starting with the perception that all black Muslims are converts, members of the Nation of Islam or somehow not quite “authentic.”

Keenly aware of their parents’ legacy, they face pressure to maintain communities built with racial pride and religious zeal, as well as struggles for acceptance by Muslims from traditionally Islamic countries.

“That’s what motivates me to be active,” said Jamil Abdullah, 31, whose father was a respected imam at Masjid Al-Quran and whose mother founded the state’s first accredited Muslim grade school. “I’m afraid, when my parents’ generation won’t be able to do it any longer, that we won’t be able to carry that torch.”

For many born into Islam, being recognized as genuinely Muslim is feat by itself.

“People sometimes automatically assume that since I’m African-American, that I’m a convert,” said Jihaad Abdul-Majid, a 23-year-old student in Louisville, Ky., whose parents converted in the early 1970s. “They ask `when did you convert’ and `how do you like Islam?”’

Abdul-Majid laughs such questions off, but is still surprised by them, given that African-Americans have been converting to Islam for decades.

The Nation of Islam, the introduction to Islam for many of the younger generation’s parents, was founded in 1930 by Fard Muhammad, who preached black unification through Islam on the streets of Detroit. Followers regarded Fard Muhammad as a divine figure, and Elijah Muhammad, who led the movement after Fard’s disappearance a few years later, as his messenger.

But When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, his son, Warith D. Mohammed, took the movement into mainstream Islam. W.D. Mohammed still leads the movement today under the name The Mosque Cares. In 1978, Louis Farrakhan revived the Nation of Islam, including many of its black nationalist ideas.

While most black Muslims have distanced themselves from the Nation of Islam and embraced more traditional Islam, the movement’s legacy, coupled with the perception that they are converts, still dog relations with immigrant Muslims.

Many immigrants assume black Muslims don’t know Arabic, the language of the Quran and Muslim worship, and don’t take them as “serious” or “authentic” Muslims. In some cases, black Muslims say, its simple racism.

“I never really felt like I fit in with the Arab Muslims, even though I really wanted to. I just felt like they never got past the fact that I was black,” said Turner, who spent several months in Syria studying Arabic and Islam.

Abdul-Majid, in Louisville, agrees.

“One of the main struggles I’ve had is kind of not feeling like I belong anywhere,” he said. “It’s difficult sometimes to feel a part of my non-Muslim community because of what I can and can’t do. But at the same time, amongst Muslims, there’s the cultural element of not feeling like you belong because you don’t have, quote-unquote, the Islamic cultural background.”

As a result, many back Muslims are becoming more “traditional,” said Zain Abdullah, an expert on Islam and ethnicity at Temple University in Philadelphia.

“At some point, you look to authenticate the Islamic practice by learning more of the Quran, learning the Arabic language, referring to the sunnah (example of Prophet Muhammad),” Abdullah said. “And sometimes that search takes them abroad, to the Middle East.”

While it is important to learn Arabic for worship and reading the Quran in its original text, many devout black Muslims say it is also important not to confuse Arab culture with religion.

“There are some African-Americans, I’m not going to say that they’re too Arab, but I feel like they think to be Muslim you have to be Arab,” Turner said.

But, she added, black Muslims have advantages over their immigrant counterparts, including cultural icons like boxer Muhammad Ali, comedian Dave Chapelle and rapper Mos Def. What’s more, being black sometimes spares them suspicion of terrorist links, given the association of soem Arab and South Asian Muslims with radical Islamist groups.

“To some extent … being African-American almost makes it a little bit easier for me being a Muslim, because there’s not as much of the negative stereotypes of Muslims,” Abdul-Majid said. “I feel like the African American part almost dampens the negative (associations people have of Muslims).”

Black Muslim parents, especially those who came through the Nation of Islam and then moved with W.D. Mohammed into the mainstream, know all about the difficulties of keeping their children within Islam’s fold.

Ayesha Mustafaa, 53, converted just after W.D. Mohammed succeeded his father. Today, she is editor of The Muslim Journal in Chicago, the movement’s weekly newspaper. She recounted a conversation with her 25-year-old daughter, one of her four children.

“Mom, you converted to Islam and your mother was Christian, right?” her daughter asked.

“Yeah.”

“Your mother didn’t want you to do that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s my choice, right?”

“I had to say, `yeah,”’ Mustafaa recalled with a laugh, but added that the daughter is still a Muslim, if more “career woman” than religious woman.

Mustafaa said Muslim schools are a “saving grace” in keeping children in the Islamic faith.

“Because those formative years, you hold on to them much longer, and you can protect them to a degree from the peer pressure,” she said. “Our community has seen its greatest successes with the next generation where we’ve had Muslim schools.”

Rafiq Akbar, a convert who once walked Boston’s neighborhoods with Malcolm X recruiting members for the Nation of Islam, and his wife believe their 11 children _ all devout Muslims _ will stay with their religion.

“We always felt that if they followed the teachings of Al-Islam, they were in good hands,” Akbar said, just before the call to prayer rang out at the Malcolm X tribute.

Sitting next to his father, Jamil Akbar, the fourth-youngest at age 39, added: “We’re blessed with an inheritance.”

KRE/LF END SACIRBEY

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