Wednesday, February 10, 2010

"Sunni Tradition was also identified as the key to overturning the false universals invoked by many immigrant and overseas Muslims,

according to which the realities of the central lands of Islam are treated as the primary object of Muslim religious contemplation, deeply informing the reigning paradigm of a properly constituted Islamic life in America. That paradigm typically excludes Blackamerican concerns or simply assumes them to be subsumed under the models settled on in the Muslim world - a presumption ultimately sustained by a deeply entrenched racial myopia or agnosticism through which immigrant and overseas Muslims tend (or tended) [3] to see America. By forcing the latter, however, to accept both the strictures of Tradition and its ability to sustain multiple view of equal authority, immigrant and overseas Muslims' ability to privilege, if not universalize, old-world and immigrant perspectives through preconscious conflations of "East" with "Islamic" can be greatly diminished, if not eliminated.

-Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, p. 3-4

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