Islam

Islam is the religion of Muslims, who believe in Allah as the supreme deity and Muhammad as his prophet. Among African Americans, Islam has become a vibrant religious expression that has its origins in the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, Jabul Arabiyya, the First Cleveland Mosque, Darul Islam, the Muslim American Society, and the Islamic Mission of America. The Islamic Mission, later named the State Street Mosque, was founded in 1924 and included immigrant people from Somalia, Yemen, and Madagascar. Many of these people had come to New York City as sailors. They soon found local African American converts.

Muhammad Ezaldeen was a school principal in the 1920s in Newark, New Jersey, who went to Egypt to study Arabic and the Koran. When he returned to the United States he became one of the biggest promoters of the religion of Islam. As a member of the Moorish Science Temple, Ezaldeen sought to bring about an understanding between the Arabic and African communities in New York. He established and served as director of the Jabul Arabiyya, a Muslim community ruled by Islamic law in West Valley, New York. His followers started groups in Jacksonville, Florida; Rochester, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Detroit, Michigan.

The Sunni First Cleveland Movement in Islam was established when the immigrant leaders of the Ahmadiyya Movement could not control the African Americans who wanted a more activist agenda for Islam. Imam Wali Akram founded the First Cleveland Movement in 1936, at about the time Nasir Ahmad and Said Akmal founded the First Muslim Mosque of Pittsburgh. Wali Akram and his wife Kareema learned Arabic and became the major teachers of the religion in Cleveland.

After World War II, many African American artists and musicians found Islam sympathetic. Dizzy Gillespie, who became a Bahai, influenced many musicians who became Muslims. He visited Turkey, Egypt, and Syria in 1956, and his band was influenced by the cultures of those lands. By the l950s, there was a growing awareness of Islam brought about by such people as Talib Dawud, Mahmoud Alwan, and J.A. Rogers, who taught at the Islamic and African Institute in Philadelphia that was established by Dawud in 1957. In the late 1960s, many of the students influenced by this school supported the establishment at Temple University of the Afro-Asian Institute, which later became the Department of Pan African Studies and then the Department of African American Studies.

Soon many African American Muslims sought closer relations with Islamic leaders from the Arab world. Akbar Muhammad, the son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, was among those who attended Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He left the Nation of Islam to become a traditional Sunni Muslim. In 1972, Yusef Muzaffarudin Hamid founded the Islamic Party in North America, which is run by Egyptian Muslims. By 1980, the Islamic Party in North America had left the mainland to carry on its work in St. Croix. Soon thereafter the organization opened branches in many of the islands of the Caribbean, including Grenada and Dominica. In addition, a few of Hamid's followers founded a community in Tate, Georgia, in the 1980s.

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