Sultan Almosbeh
Dr. Sharon Albert
Islam In America
08 May 2025
Shabazz to PΓ©rez: The Muslim Experience
The course of American history has been directed by individuals who, when faced with oppression and misunderstanding, turned to religion, not just as a source of personal strength, but as a means of resistance. Among these characters, especially prominent American Muslim converts, one finds voices that navigate the intersecting complexities of race, religion, and national identity. In the documentary Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary and the film New Muslim Cool, we witness the transformative power of Islam in the lives of two men: Malcolm X and Hamza PΓ©rez. Though they were born in different decades and cultures, and the two figures are separated by a considerable amount of time, both men serve as potent Islamic examples. Islam serves as both a spiritual refuge and a dominant ideological tool that allows black and brown converts to resist racial oppression in a world that has historically devalued them.
The profound personal and ideological revolution of Malcolm X from gangster to preacher, one of the most powerful voices in American history, is hard to match. The precursors of this eventual shift are his seedy early life, rocked by familial trauma, racial violence, and eventual incarceration. His introduction to what would become the rest of his life began in a cell, learning about the Nation of Islam. From an early age, Malcolm was confident in himself, recalling a conversation with a teacher of his in which he explained his desire to practice law. His teacher tells him this cannot be, and that a black man simply will not become a lawyer. A profound statement, one must understand that neither the teacher nor the child holds these beliefs, but that the society in which they live forces them to recognize these barriers and adjust their lives accordingly. In his younger years, Malcolm turned to a life of crime, prostituting black women to white men and white women to black men. Malcolm eventually is incarcerated and learns of the Nation of Islam, an Afrocentric group dedicated to the liberation of the black man through Islam. He comes out of prison a completely different man, one so moved he rejects his old name (little) in favor of X; a symbol that fills in for his now lost African name, and replaces his white-slaver given name of little. It is imperative to recognize how much of an impact Islam has had on Malcolm. Islam is a tool for Malcolm that allows him to understand his role in altering a fundamentally cruel society, bent on segregation and inequality; it is not the adherence to the faith in and of itself, although that does help, but Malcolm’s ability to see true liberation and understand that there exists a world in which freedom for all, and the subjegation of none, exists.
In the same way, New Muslim Cool tells the story of Hamza PΓ©rez. He is a Puerto Rican-American rapper and former drug dealer who embraces Islam and begins to find himself in a world rocked by racial tension and defined by a post 9/11 frenzy. Similar in his youthful years to Malcolm, Hamza found himself engrossed in a life of drug dealing and gangbanging in a city that seemed like these where the sole options for young black and latino men. Feeling alone and frustrated with the emptiness of life around him, Hamza was approached by a sheik while smoking marijuana on the street and told about Islam; at 21 years old, he rejected his old life and began anew, as a Muslim. Hamza began to recognize the traps that young men fall into and the overpowering cycle of street life and prison, well known to all but seemingly ignored by society as a whole. Hamza becomes a youth mentor and speaks at prisons often regarding the cycles that young black and brown men fall into. As he begins to make progress with the prisoners and his talks become a central part of their lives, his clearance is abruptly revoked. Similarly, a mosque that his community purchases becomes intensely surveilled and eventually raided by the FBI in brutal fashion. Hamzaβs sudden threat to the
