Perspective: Islam, Politics and Black Music

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“The Ahmadiyya Muslim Movement challenged The Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. for popularity among the Black masses in the 1950's and 60's.”

Dr. Yusef Lateef, an Ahmadi Muslim & Grammy Award-Winning Musician

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | UK Desk
Source/Credit: Black Agenda Report
By Norman Richmond aka Jalali | September 27, 2017

Excerpt 

One Muslim group in the United States, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Movement challenged The Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X for popularity among the Black masses in the 1950's and 60's. The Ahmadiyya movement came to the United States in 1911. One convert to the Movement was the Antigua-born jazz trumpeter, Talib Dawud, formerly Alfonso Nelson Rainey, who in 1958 married another convert, the jazz singer Aliyah Rabia aka Dakota Staton. Dawud distanced himself from the Nation of Islam and wrote many articles critical of both Elijah Muhammad and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbaz (Malcolm X) for the African-American owned Chicago daily, New Crusader.

It may shock some but Islam is neither alien nor new to Africans in the Diaspora. Many enslaved Africans were Muslims when they landed in the wilderness of North America. Professor Gerald Horne, author of Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary, discussed this many times on Diasporic Music on https://blackpower96.org/ . Says Horne:

"Many of the enslaved Africans were Muslims when they crossed the Atlantic. And like the so-called (conversos) or the cryptic Jews who after 1492 and their expulsion from Spain were forced to hide the practice of their religion either in Spain or, say, in Mexico where the Spanish came to colonize in the 1500s. Likewise, you had enslaved Africans who tried to keep their Islamic faith under wraps. In fact, in North Carolina, which was a slave state, there are documents written in the Arabic script by enslaved Africans stemming from the antebellum era."


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