For more than 1,400 years Muslims have gathered in what is today Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
To perform Hajj, the fifth of Islam’s five pillars, is the dream of every adult Muslim if they are physically and financially able, and this month millions of Muslims, traveling from Malaysia, Mali, Mashhad, Minnesota – from all corners – have been arriving in Mecca in order to gather as one to reaffirm the solidarity of the umma, the community of Muslims. Together, they pray for enlightenment, mercy and forgiveness, and renew their commitment to God and service to humankind.
Among the community will be Muslims descended from America’s earliest slaves, Americans who for centuries have struggled to affirm their right to be American, to be Muslim, to be black – to be free.
“There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world,” Malcolm X wrote in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, describing the pilgrimage he made in 1964 after he turned away from the Nation of Islam and embraced Sunni Islam. “They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.”
Islam, which may have arrived in the Americas as early as 1619 – a year before the Mayflower arrived – when 20 African slaves were brought to Jamestown, is believed to have been the religion of perhaps 15 percent to 30 percent of the slaves abducted from Africa to work lands stolen from Native Americans.
In 1682 their dehumanization, along with all other oppressed people stolen from their homes to serve the colonialist settlers, was cruelly affirmed when Virginia passed a statute which referred to “negroes, moores, molatoes, and others, born of and in heathenish, idollatrous, pagan, and Mahometan parentage and country” who “heretofore and hereafter may be purchased, procured, or otherwise obteigned, as slaves.”
“(N)egroes, moores, molatoes, and others…”
That Islam has been present yet basically unacknowledged in the Americas for nearly 400 years – mostly unnoticed until 9/11 when, to many Americans, Muslims appeared like Topsy, speaks either to the ignorance or willful blindness of white Christians who fear acknowledging that amidst the millions of slaves forced to work the land stolen from indigenous peoples were adherents of another faith, Islam – and that they are still here, today raising their franchised voices.
Today, the American Muslim community – a community of descendants of slaves, of converts, of migrants and refugees and their descendants that have come to America for opportunity and/or sanctuary; a racially, ethnically and socially diverse community “from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans” – is expanding its engagement in our Public Square.
Last Tuesday, former refugee Ilhan Omar, already America’s first Somali-American state legislator, won Minnesota’s Democratic primary for Congress and is expected to be elected to Congress in November, succeeding Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress.
Ellison, running for Minnesota state attorney general amid last-minute allegations of domestic abuse by an ex-girlfriend, which he denies, handily won his primary on Tuesday.
Former Michigan Democratic state representative Rashida Tlaib, the oldest of 14 children and the first person in her family to graduate from high school and college, won her Democratic primary, putting her on course to become Congress’s first Palestinian-American woman.
Tlaib and Omar may, as did Ellison in 2006, take their oath of office on a Quran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
Americans may witness in Congress a Somali-American Muslim, Omar, take her oath of office wearing hijab, a traditional headscarf worn by many Muslim women.
Americans may witness, as Tlaib has promised, a Palestinian-American Muslim take her oath of office wearing the traditional embroidered Palestinian thobe belonging to her mother.
They’re Americans; they’re Muslim; they’re winning.
This week, on Aug. 21, to mark the end of Hajj, the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims – Ellison, Omar and Tlaib among them – will celebrate Eid al-Adha, Feast of the Sacrifice, honoring the willingness of Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his first-born son as an act of obedience to God and when, at the last moment, through God’s Grace and intercession, a ram was offered instead.
On Eid al-Adha, to commemorate and honor God’s Grace, Muslims sacrifice an animal whose meat is divided into three portions: one-third for the poor and needy; one-third for relatives, friends and neighbors; one-third retained by the family.
Children get new clothes, adults wear their best, communal prayers are performed, special sweets are cooked and shared, and the holiday is spent with family and friends.
It will be celebrated in Malaysia, Mali and Mashhad. It will be celebrated in Muslim communities in Minnesota, Michigan and New Hampshire.
I will celebrate.
It will be celebrated here because we hold “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
In 1790 President George Washington wrote to Congregation Jeshuat Israel in Newport, R.I.: May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants – while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.
It will be celebrated here because there shall be none to make us afraid.
(Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. He can be reached at [email protected]. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.)
