"As I explained in Islam and the Blackamerican, however, in negotiating its future,

Blackamerican Sunni Islam will look to Sunni Tradition not as the end but as the beginning of religious deliberation. The point, in other words, is not to go back in search of cut-and-dried solutions but to benefit from Tradition's authority and intellectual capital, while heightening the likelihood that one's own deliberations are not derailed by the allure of undisciplined compromise or crass, "religionized" pragmatism. This latter interest can be most effectively realized by placing one's views in dialogue with the accumulated wisdom of Islam's ongoing conversation with itself. In this context, the move to position Blackamerican Muslims as active agents, as opposed to passive recipients, recognizes a fundamental difference between bona fide Islamic thought on the one hand and ideas and propositions whose proponents simply happen to bear Muslim names on the other.

-Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, p. 4