False Universals and "Immigrant Islam" 3

In all of this, the classical Tradition plays a misleading and profoundly problematic role. On the one hand, it rarely informs the actual substance of the doctrines of Immigrant Islam, at least not directly. This is because most immigrant Muslims are themselves only slightly less removed from the classical Tradition than are their Blackamerican counterparts. On the other hand, the classical Tradition is presumed, by natural inference, to be the basis of immigrant articulations, in which capacity in actually confers authority upon the latter. Because, however, Immigrant Islam is not really based on the classical Tradition, it cannot transfer the latter’s power of self-authentication to Blackamerican Muslims. As a result, the latter are forced to proceed without the power or possibility of self-authentication, which leaves them to process their black, American reality through the prism of the real and/or imagined expectations of immigrant and overseas possessors of “true Islam.”

–pg. 12-13 of Sherman A. Jackson's Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection

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