Today we are sharing an essay written by Jerel Yusuf Matthews. This essay weaves together a review and reflection of Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival, and a personal narrative of life as a Black American Muslim growing up in the South Side of Chicago and under incarceration.
We met brother Jerel through the good people at Believers Bail Out, a community-led organization based out of Chicago that works to bail out Muslims in pre-trial incarceration and ICE custody. Dr. Maryam Kashani, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and the author of Medina by the Bay, is also a co-founder of Believers Bail Out.
While incarcerated, Jerel earned a non-traditional BA in Social Science from Northeastern Illinois University where through the lens of Black radical feminism he interrogated an interdisciplinary study that focused on a critique of race, mass incarceration, resistance and activism while exploring the root causes of trauma, social inequities and the ways we relate to one another and ourselves in everyday life.
As both a Muslim and abolitionist, he comprehends abolition through a theo-political lens as something that should be in constant practice beginning internally and then externally, as is Islam.
He was introduced to Kashani and her work through his participation in Jamaat Ibad al-Rahman, a once-thriving Muslim community within Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, which has now been shut down. An avid reader and writer of reviews, Jerel notes that Kashani’s book was one of the first he’d read that connected contemporary justice work with Islam.
Of his reasons for writing this essay, Jerel says he was impressed by how Kashani powerfully deconstructed dominant narratives and authentically portrayed how personal history, identity and experiences have impacted the lives of Muslims in the US and globally. He felt writing an essay would be a great opportunity to introduce the publication to others in the Muslim community in hopes of it encouraging them to learn, do better, and mend and solidify intracommunal relationships.
As this essay is a personal reflection and critical analysis of Medina by the Bay, it includes Jerel’s response to certain matters expressed in the book, such as his critique of Shaykh Hamza Yusuf’s post-9/11 spiritual and political ideological shifts as the co-founder of Zaytuna College and a prominent American Islamic scholar. Jerel’s views should be considered and respected as his own.
Medina By the Bay gives Muslims and non-believers a much-needed interrogation of Islam and the role that race, politics, and gender play in how Islam is viewed, practiced, and suppressed. Kashani writes through the lens of a Muslim woman using both theological Islamic values and abolitionist principles, what she describes in her book as “an around-the-way approach from ‘an around-the-way girl’” (p. 35).
Kashani conveys the diversity, contradictions, and contentiousness within Islam in a way in which those of us who are in and from the trenches, who are situated in active sites of war, can relate and truly appreciate. I believe abolition is rooted in Islam so that is the scope through which I view abolition.
In the introduction, Kashani introduces Brother Masoud and describes his calling of the adhan as a “blues” adhan (p. 2). I’d never heard of this, but as Kashani conveyed why this particular style was called a blues adhan, I could see and feel the description. It actually made me pay closer attention to one of the elder brothers, Jamal, who used to call the adhan at Jamaat Ibad al-Rahman in a unique way when I was there, and I related his style of adhan to what I might hear in Masoud’s.
The blues adhan is an aggressive and uncompromising expression of conflict and cultural formation that cannot be exploited because it was born in passionate revolt against the unlivable.
Now when I hear Jamal’s rendition, I hear terror, struggle, and steadfastness. The blues adhan for African American Muslims is a way of subconsciously articulating the experiences of our African Muslim ancestors from the time they arrived on American shores and linking them to the realm of our presentness, uniting our hearts and spirits before we submit, surrender, and supplicate to the Most Merciful, Allah.
It can be recognized as an alternative art form of communication, analysis, observation, and celebration of some freedoms, and also a recognition of being unfree, making note of things that have been documented but not written. The blues adhan is an aggressive and uncompromising expression of conflict and cultural formation that cannot be exploited because it was born in passionate revolt against the unlivable.
Islam has been expansive and influential in the culture of the world. I’m thankful for Kashani’s acknowledgment of the Five Percenters, Moorish Americans, and the Nation of Islam and their contributions. In the 20th century, they revitalized Islam in the African American community after it had been decimated by settler colonialism/capitalist slavery. These sects of Islam in the Black community were not always in accordance with orthodox Islam but they were a necessity at the time and their good definitely outweighed their bad.
As a kid growing up on the South Side of Chicago, this is what I knew as Islam. My dad and other elders were part of these nations. These are the people who educated me regarding who I was (knowledge of self), what I was up against in this world, the importance of self-reliance, and the struggle for love, peace, truth, freedom, and justice.
In Chapter 1, “Medina by the Bay,” Kashani mentions Arab Muslim-owned liquor/grocery stores in African American communities. As she recalls, the owners of these stores largely came to America due to displacement from war, colonial occupation, and poverty. They came to the US seeking upward mobility and as Kashani discusses, in their quest they became participants in the further disenfranchisement of the neighborhoods and people in them (p. 65). In this discourse on immigrant participation in disenfranchisement, Kashani quotes a Yemeni store owner, “This fast money comes with its own moral deterioration and abysmal life where one no longer battles with notions of good and bad deeds (p. 66).”
This brought back many memories for me as Arabs and Arab-owned liquor and grocery stores were a huge part of the community I was raised in, and I had personal experiences with the owners of these stores and their families. It was not a relationship of contention, but we never acknowledged each other as Muslims, not even a salaam.
Growing up, I never thought of Arabs as Muslims because the Islam I had been exposed to was Black-focused, with the Nation of Islam being the dominant form of Islam. My relationship with the Arab store owners was one of mutual unhealthy exploitation. At times, we protected them, and at times, they alerted us, but our circumstances had us in two different modes of survival, and there was abandonment of the Qur’an that caused harm on both ends.
Then, as well as today, many Muslim immigrants come to the West adhering to the judgments and prejudices of the dominant group (whites). Black Americans have been portrayed as the lowest of character to the masses. When another race, looking for upward mobility in the West, assimilates into the status quo, the last thing they want to do is be aligned with those they are programmed to think will hinder them in any way.
It was not a relationship of contention, but we never acknowledged each other as Muslims, not even a salaam.
Capitalism has a dual character, one that homogenizes and one that differentiates. They operate in conjunction with an exploitation axis and an expropriation axis which relies on a logic of differentiation which reproduces racialized and gendered subjects, and at the bottom of this axis, for five hundred years, has been African Americans.
This has had a psychological effect that informs how some Muslims who are Black see and feel about themselves, the world, and other non-Black Muslims. Al-Hajj Malik Shabazz seemed to be solidifying relationships between the Arab and African American communities before his death. The carceral state forcibly interrupted the harmony of these relations with his assassination.
Kashani speaks to this in chapter 2, “Roots, Routes, and Rhythms of Devotional Time,” during Yemeni Islamic scholar Habib Umar’s 2011 visit to Shabazz’s grave in Harlem, New York, (the first stop on his US tour that concluded in the California Bay Area). Kashani endeavors to reclaim the spiritual Malcolm, the Allah-conscious Al-Hajj Malik Shabazz, to situate his life’s work and legacy towards ta’dib (Islamic education) within a genealogy that leads back to the prophets of Islam. Al-Hajj Malik has always been a martyr in the Black community, but I was elated to learn of his status and standing as a wali, a global Muslim leader, and I loved how eloquently Kashani frames the Prophet’s descendant, Habib Umar’s visitation to his grave site as bringing Al-Hajj Malik’s figurative body in relation to the Prophet Muhammad’s (may peace be upon him) (p. 87).
Also in Chapter 2, Kashani recalls Imam Zaid Shakir, (Islamic scholar and co-founder of Zaytuna College), positing during his introductory speech of Habib ‘Umar (at the commence of his Bay Area tour stop) that Muslim ritual practices cultivate metaphysical strength as a form of discipline that Muslim communities, especially activists, need to reform society (p. 88). I believe this to be true, but it made me ponder, what about activists outside Islam? I have a friend who is an abolitionist, activist, scholar, leader, and all around good person, though she is not Muslim. I often share with her abolitionist practices that are rooted in and interconnect with Islam, using examples from the Qur’an, hadith, and sharia.
Kashani endeavors to reclaim the spiritual Malcolm, the Allah-conscious Al-Hajj Malik Shabazz, to situate his life’s work and legacy towards ta’dib (Islamic education) within a genealogy that leads back to the prophets of Islam.
What triggered me to do this was she once asked me how I understood my belief system as an abolitionist and a Muslim and I told her that my belief system is one, as Islam is abolition. She later related to me that she considers herself agnostic or atheist, but tells me abolition functions as her belief system “sometimes even approaching spirituality.”
Reflecting on her statement, and drawing from Kashani’s book, where the example of the hadith is given regarding the atheist: “surely no barrier exists between the cry of the oppressed and God even if that cry should come from an atheist” left me with the question: Is my friend’s ability to fight to correct the wrong in society due to a closeness with Allah? Does she sometimes approach spirituality due to the revelation of the hadith and sometimes experience tawhid? (p. 200).
A majority of my theo-political formal education has come from sisters in Islam as well as women who are non-believers. Some sisters whom I learn from and with on the outside have been my source of noor (light) down the road to my transformation within these confines. I agree with Kashani’s analysis that female scholarship speaks to their commitment to creating subjects rather than objects of knowledge that have a transformative impact on the world and people around them (p. 104). I can attest to being one of those subjects.
As Muslims, diversity should be our power, but we are rendered powerless when we instead build walls between us due to color, geography, capital, and a host of other things that have nothing to do with Islamic ideals.
When I think of just relations, I think of my Muslim sisters who have navigated this world at times in multiple forms of consciousness, being a Muslim female of a particular ethnicity, then amongst Muslims where they should be comfortable to relax or seek refuge in the mosque and Islamic schools, they must meet with certain requirements of a culture of Islam and also due to the tenets of Islam.
Kashani’s profile of Imam Zaid Shakir solidifies my belief that abolition is rooted in Islamic theology when she recalls him tracing genealogical lines of Muslims in the present to the Sahaba, the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Shakir demonstrates that the first generation of Muslims had different ethnicities, which exemplifies how Islam transformed social relations in a time of tribalism. This was indeed abolition!
Muslims, from their inception, have been innovators and agents of change. In Kashani’s reflection, Imam Zaid Shakir didn’t just display abolition in Islam in a historical context; he also provoked thought regarding the future of Islam. He was trying to train his students to confront manners of difference and discrimination.
As Muslims, diversity should be our power, but we are rendered powerless when we instead build walls between us due to color, geography, capital, and a host of other things that have nothing to do with Islamic ideals. We must embrace one another as brothers and sisters in the name of Allah. Together we are a global majority; divided, we are reduced to mere domestic minorities.
This concludes part one of the essay. Part two will be published next week, insha’Allah.
Jerel Matthews is from the Auburn Gresham neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago. He is a father, young grandfather, brother to many, abolitionist, writer, poet, artist, and Muslim who is currently incarcerated and fighting for his freedom. He earned a BA in Social Science from Northeastern Illinois University and is a proud member of Jamaat Ibad al-Rahman.
As both a Muslim and abolitionist, he comprehends abolition through a theo-political lens as something that should be in constant practice beginning internally and then externally, as is Islam. He is a proponent for social change and works with the non-profit organization Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) to end mass incarceration.
Of his experience of incarceration, Jerel says, “Physical bondage breaks the heart, but for a practicing Muslim it also rebuilds character because there is wisdom in tribulation. Prison makes one become used to suffering and struggling but Allah gives us weapons to adapt to any kind of life. The beneficial and sacred knowledge the Most Merciful has adorned me with allows me to suppress much of the bitterness bondage tends to corrupt others with.”
Feature image: from the book cover, created by Kameelah Janan Rasheed