African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity: Between Traditional Islam, African Heritage, and the American Way

Abstract

Abstract Ali Marzrui, in his 1986 televised PBS series, “The Africans,” argued that Africans are the cultural heirs to a “triple heritage,” consisting of (1) Africanity or traditional indigenous culture, (2) Islamic culture, and (3) Western culture. This triple cultural heritage, according to Mazrui, is at the center of all of the African continent’s contemporary conflicts and predicaments.1 I intend to argue here that African-American Muslims are also heir to this “triple heritage,” but that vastly different historical circumstances between continental Africans and Africans in the diaspora (i.e., in the Americas) have resulted in entirely distinct patterns of interplay among these three cultural factors. In other words, the patterns of enculturation (socialization within the indigenous culture) and acculturation (adaptation to non-indigenous cultures) are vastly different in the African diaspora from what they are on the African continent, even though the basic cultural factors are similar, if not identical. Nevertheless, this “triple heritage” lies at the center of all of the African-American Muslim community’s contemporary conflicts and predicaments, in much the same way that the “triple heritage” is at the center of Africa’s conflicts.