Black Belonging & Antiblackness in Full-Time Islamic Schools [PART 4] – IMPLICATIONS FOR MUSLIM EDUCATORS AND LEADERS

It was swept under the rug and forgotten.

—Keisha, Study Participant

On paper, the results look bleak, but seeing the confidence, resilience, grace, and awareness of their mistreatment while embracing their full selves was powerful. The laughter and the tears were powerful. This group of Black Muslims didn’t allow this mistreatment to impact their identity, sense of self, or their connection to their faith. It’s inspiring. It is also difficult; however, there is a verse in the Qur’an that can help us understand the mindset of this demographic, “Nothing placed upon us is too heavy to bear.” This informs the thinking and acts of Muslims, including the people in this study. The opening quote summarizes the experiences of most of the participants in this study and an important message to Islamic school leaders.

Small studies can be self-selecting. Anecdotally, I have heard of people leaving the faith due to their experiences in Islamic schools. I reached out to author and educator Dr. Muhammad Khalifah, who shared publicly at a Muslim educators’ conference that this happened to some of his cousins. We did set an interview date, but unfortunately, he was unable to make the meeting. Five participants said that they distanced themselves from the Muslim community, while remaining Muslim in faith and personal practice, and in two cases specifically, the distance was specifically from the immigrant community due to their experiences.

Implications for Education Leaders

I questioned my faith and felt like I didn’t belong and avoided Muslim spaces.  —Nadia

When I left Ibn Abbas School I went to Elmhurst and I’m hanging with people that are non-Muslim that are sweet and accepting, you know, like, Yo!, what’s up?, I’m not dealing with any of the same problems I had in high school I’m like, what is this? The last four years of my life, I’m around Muslims all the time. You would think this should be the best time of life? And I was just miserable. It’s just utterly miserable to deal with disrespect on the daily.

—Idris

If schools decide antiblackness will not be tolerated, such schools can be a place of affirming the cultures of others and creating brave spaces where teachers, students, and administrators see variation as beautiful and as adding to the culture of a school and beyond. Imagine schools where students can bring their full selves to school without fear of mocking from peers or teachers. But to make this shift we must dig deep and recognize the principles upon which many IMIL Islamic schools were established in the US and the pillars upon which they continue to stand. 

Nadia is a 25-year-old from an African American and Afro-Caribbean family. She is an occupational therapist who attended an Islamic school in the south for one academic year: ninth grade. That one year had her “avoiding Muslim spaces.” She didn’t feel accepted as a Muslim; she didn’t feel part of the school. She gave both questions the lowest response options. She was often made fun of for being Black or being the child of converts and on her first day of Qur’an class, a student told her to “sit down n*****.” 

One of the administrators addressing issues around identity and the racialization of Islam in many Muslim spaces is Principal Mona. Mona has 32 years of Islamic school leadership experience. She reported that when non-black Muslims say they don’t see color, she asks them the following: 

If your daughter was approached by an African man or an African American man, would you let her marry him? And then you look at their face and I’m like, that’s when you know they do have a problem. ‘If you can’t see them as equal to where they could be part of your family, then there’s still a level of racism that you really need to address within yourself. 

She uses this exercise to help them see that the Muslim identity they ascribe to has been racialized.

Farzana is an anthropologist and school co-founder committed to

“connections, creativity, and nurturing the fitra (a person’s innate disposition for good and to love God).” Her Northeast school is 25 years old. It came out of a desire to create a school rooted in Islamic child development theory. She also understands the role of identity, and part of her school’s mission is to “cultivate and nurture a thriving American Muslim identity.” Her school doesn’t use textbooks; their integrated curriculum means that teachers pull together lesson plans that incorporate science, ELA, history, ethics, writing, faith, spirituality, art, character development, etc. 

From the data, there is an indication that many Muslims today in the US and in several Muslim lands, do not see and value the full humanity of the Black community. Considering the scriptural message of loving and serving humanity, I argue that we must see this disconnect and address it directly by acknowledging the problem, living the teachings of the Qur’an, and immersing ourselves in the beauty of its transformative power.              

This disconnect is compounded by living in a society built on the foundational premise of Black inhumanity, antiblackness. Thus, Islamic schools built by people impacted culturally and socially to not see Black humanity must be aware of the factors that cause them to inadvertently create spaces of unbelonging for Black students. 

The results from my study show that many students who attended IMIL schools do not see themselves as part of the school community. Of the respondents, 47% felt that they either mattered a little bit or not at all in their Islamic Schools. Of the respondents, 80% felt that their schools didn’t see their culture. In conversations with teachers and education leaders, I consistently see a lack of awareness that Black Muslims are not a monolith, that the majority are African American with their own unique Muslim culture and various expressions of this Muslim culture, and that we have children of East Africans, West Africans, Afro-Hispanics, etc. 

Most African American Muslims do not have a land outside of America that they call home; thus, America is their homeland and their culture is a bonafide Muslim culture. Black American culture has been shaped by centuries of faith, resilience, love of God, genetic memory, and struggle to live in freedom and security in the US. So when Islamic schools celebrate cultural day and they celebrate Black Muslim culture alongside other cultures from around the world, this acceptance and act of “seeing” can play a part in students feeling a sense of belonging and in students and teachers seeing African American Muslims as fully human and fully Muslims. 

All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a nonArab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab. Also, a White has no superiority over a Black nor a Black has any superiority over a White except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood.

—Excerpt from the Final Khutbah of the Blessed Prophet  

The last mandate of the Blessed Prophet provides a framework for us to understand the identity of a Muslim. We are one brotherhood. We are different, yet our differences do not make us less than, or better than. We come from the same parents, and we are essentially family. This guidance can be an antidote to antiblackness if our society, cultures, and families commit to these teachings. When Muslims buy into the idea of Black inferiority, this khutbah reminds us that this is a fallacy. If our nafs clamors to be “better than,” this knowledge of the essence of humanity reminds us of our true nature and relationship with other human beings on earth. 

There are Muslims who believe antiblackness is just a Black problem^[1] and even those who care about this issue see themselves at most as allies to a cause that does not really have much to do with them since Islam is not an antiblack religion. The problem with this line of thinking is that society needs leaders who see wrongs and right them, be it through their hands, tongues, or at least disliking it in their hearts. Most Americans are not consciously committed to antiblackness either. The challenge is that this country was built upon antiblackness and sadly is sustained by this ideology; a person does not have to be deeply committed to the cause to keep the wheel moving. All it takes is a few people to get anything done and the masses to be indifferent. 

The Qur’an reminds us that, “You are the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah” (Qur’an 3:110). So being an indifferent bystander is not an option, just as being committed to jahili (antiblack) behavior is not an option either. The idea of “purifying the heart” is the essence of addressing antiblackness and can be a framework that describes the work of ridding the heart of bias and myths and cultivating within it truth and appreciation. The idea is that actively working on one’s heart to root out damaging character traits while cultivating positive traits can help us address antiblackness within ourselves, our families, and beyond. 

The Muslim is the one from whose tongue and hand the people are safe, and the believer is the one people trust with their lives and wealth. (Sunan anNasa’i) 

We can ask ourselves—are we people of safety?

Change

Research participants ranged in age from their teens to their fifties. This study spans generations, from children going to Islamic school in the 80s to students who graduated high school in 2024. The data shows no positive change or any regional variations.

One trend is that schools committed to creating nurturing spaces of connectedness and whose founders included Black Americans created spaces that were not conducive to antiblackness. Another trend was that BMBL Islamic schools were spaces of deep belonging for Black students. The caveat here is the importance of vigilance with the hiring process so that the non-Black teaching body or administrators were adults who saw and respected Black students, their intellect, culture, history, and legitimacy within the faith. A final trend is the resilience and support network students inadvertently created to help them navigate school.

Focus group thoughts on change

Hafsa a 31 year old social worker said, “I would say that it’s gotten progressively worse.”

When Hafsa attended an Islamic School, there were about five African Americans also enrolled in her school. Hafsa shared that now, twenty years later, a working-class family can’t afford the school because of the cost.

Salma shared the following: ‘I think that the real improvement now is that people are having the courage to call out Islamic schools for the issues that they have and trying to hold them accountable . . . that is probably the only improvement that

I’ve seen in the past 20 years.” 

Nzingha was conflicted. She was grateful to have attended Unity Islamic School, but the experience was painful. “I don’t really keep tabs on my former school at all. I don’t feel any specific kind of loyalty or anything to the school.” Nzingha did not stay connected to her school and didn’t know if things had improved but she didn’t think so. She based this on her children’s experience of attending a different ILIM Islamic school in the same state. ‘It’s still there. There is just zero recognition and zero understanding. There are a few surface-level changes that Nzingha feels cause the schools to think, “We’ve done our job!” She says, “No, the change has to be systemic, and it has to start with the administration and the board and the teachers and curriculum.”

Shahidah does not believe there has been any improvement. She hasn’t been following too closely, “but I did peek at their Facebook page and stuff like that. And when it comes to diversity it still looks pretty much the same. Actually, probably less. I saw one Black kid and the rest were Arab.” “I didn’t have a grossly negative experience in my Islamic education.” Like Nzingha, Shahidah was grateful for the Islamic grounding her school gave her and felt that this helped her when she went to high school.

Halimah shared, “I was so traumatized from my experience that I, immediately after I graduated, moved very far away from my community. I came back just last year. It’s been almost eight or nine years since I’ve graduated, and not much has changed at all. I have a friend who’s a teacher at my old school and she says that students continue to use the word ‘abid, there are no repercussions, and there are fewer Black students than there were before. Even if there is slight progress as the other sisters were saying, it’s very superficial, and doesn’t get to the root of the issue which is administration, you know and real training.”

Parents

Shahidah said, ‘I think that that’s one thing that we should equip, like, our future generations with. Is being proud about being Black and their history and that it’s not just slavery and not just third world countries

Hafsa doesn’t blame the children for the things they did, but she felt that parents should have done better and spoke of “adults who were essentially bullies.” Twenty years later, she is having open conversations with her parents about these things, and they respond with “Why didn’t you tell us?” Hafsa’s thought on that is twenty years have passed, and at the time, I just didn’t think I could go to them about this issue. Many of her Northeast Black Muslim school peers tell the same story: “Our parents were unaware of the issues that we’re experiencing.”

Haniya could relate to this. “My mother converted to Islam in the 80s. A lot of Black Muslim converts had this idea that once you embrace Islam, um, you know, all racial tensions and the separation caused by racially different identities would disappear.” Haniya felt that this was her mother’s mentality. Haniya also felt that her mother had a lot of denial about some of the experiences Haniya had. There are so few resources for Muslims; she just felt like she had no other choice but to keep us there, despite all our complaints.

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[1] As an antiblackness trainer I encounter this sentiment often and I am encountering it in this study.