Loading ...Rabab Jafri: Muslims for Black lives
By Rabab Jafri
The Michigan Daily
On Feb. 24, three Black males — 23-year-old Mohamedtaha Omar, 20-year-old Adam Mekki and 17-year-old Muhannad Tairab — were murdered execution-style in their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Omar and Tairab were Muslim and Mekki was a Christian. Then, on Feb. 27, 17-year-old Black Muslim boy Abdullahi Mohammed was shot by police in Salt Lake City. Mohammad was reported to have been holding a broken end of a broomstick. Police officers told him to drop the broomstick before shooting him four times. Fortunately, he survived, but he is now in critical condition. As I try to make sense of the world around me, my responsibility to speak up only feels more and more urgent by the day. I could not have imagined how my last column on being an ally to the African-American community would become a challenge to myself so soon.
I will not sit silently —
I will not.
It was not more than three weeks ago that I wrote about being an ally to the Black community, and not more than two that the Muslim Student Association had an event on the intersectionalities between the two communities. In my column, I concluded that the most important place to be an ally is among our own friends and family, because we know our own communities best. So here I am, as a South Asian American, speaking to my Muslim community:
We have neglected our African-American brothers and sisters for far too long.
The harsh reality of this truth is one that I have known for much too long, but over the past month it has been pushed to the forefront of my mind. To be silent on such issues is to actively exclude African-American Muslims from the community, which is sadly the case because these Muslims are often not seen as part of the community — due in part to ethnic differences. As many Black Muslims expressed in the #BeingBlackandMuslim hashtag on Twitter, they are often overlooked, misunderstood or not seen as “Muslim enough” by other Muslims, despite the fact that Islam encourages people to see one another as equals regardless of race.
The incidents regarding Mohamedtaha Omar, Adam Mekki, Muhannad Tairab and Abdullahi Mohammad should serve as a reminder to the Muslim community to speak up against injustices. What occurred instead, however, was a struggle to decide whether to say anything and if so, what should be said.
On social media, the three young men murdered in Indiana were compared to another murder last year, when three Arab-American Muslims — Deah, Yusor and Razzan — were shot execution-style in a North Carolina parking lot. The social media campaign used for Deah, Yusor and Razzan #OurThreeWinners was repurposed in the new campaign as #OurThreeBrothers. I interviewed Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and an African-American Muslim, about these issues.
“There’s no doubt that the three people from Chapel Hill and the three in Indiana are both issues that pertain to heinous gun violence,” Walid said. He also explained that despite the similarities, there is not clear evidence the young men in Indiana “were targeted for their ethnicity or their race, so it is not exactly an analogous situation.” He then said, “There was a presumption from some people in the community they were involved in something nefarious or in a bad location, as if that justifies them being killed execution-style.”
The social media campaign was to encourage Muslim Americans to speak up and demand answers, just as they had for the Arab-American Muslim. This brought attention to how Black Muslims are treated by the Muslim-American community, waking up the social conscious of many, but though there is some progress in the community a tweet is not enough.
“In this particular situation,” Walid said of the local Muslim community, “I would think that the primary responsibility would be to reach out to local law enforcement and to see if their community can help raise money for a reward for anyone that has information about the murderers of these three souls.”
This presumption among community members matched what unfolded on social media, where people were comparing Mohamed, Muhannad and Abdullahi to Deah, Yusor and Razzan. People claim that because less evidence existed of Mohamed, Muhannad, and Abdullahi’s murders being tied to race or religion, their murders should not be held in the same regard. But this lack of evidence does not mean the Muslim community should not demand answers. There is no evidence of these young men being killed due to gang violence. They were immigrants, seeking a better life that was taken from them too early. In regard to Abdullahi Mohammed, the 17-year-old, the issue of brutal police force on a young Black male is evident, but there was even less attention to this from the Muslim community on social media.
This may be because there was no similar case to compare the reaction of the Muslim American community to, but it is a sad day when the only time Muslims react to atrocities against Black Americans, regardless of religion, is when there is another tragedy to compare it to. It is a sad day when the only reason that Abdi Mohammad got the little attention he did from Muslim Americans is because of his name.
“That issue is much more clear. We don’t have the body cam footage, but what we do know is that our country has a very long history as well as a contemporary reality of accepted force being used against Black people in this country.” Walid continued, saying that the police officers who shot Abdi Mohammed in Salt Lake City “didn’t know his faith, but definitely saw his Black skin.”
People should be demanding answers and for the body cam footage to be released. These tragedies should show the Muslim community what their role is in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. We must stop seeing it as separate from the problems in the Muslim community, as there are overlaps between the Black and Muslim communities. As Walid said, “If the issue of Black suffering is addressed and ended in America, then de facto Islamophobia will be significantly eroded.”
This is not to say that Muslims are the only ones who should care about police brutality or the lack of media coverage when a Black man or woman is murdered. It is a human rights issue that inequality and racism exists in America and that gun violence is so prevalent and police brutality affects our community. To my fellow Muslims, there is no situation in which you should not be speaking up, even if it just be demanding for facts to be released. This is regardless of whether the victim is Muslim or not. But that some of these victims were Muslim highlights how this issue affects us.
I will not forget my Black brothers and sisters.
I will not.
Rabab Jafri can be reached at rfjafri@umich.edu.
Source: www.michigandaily.com