Sultan Almosbeh
Dr. Sharon Albert
Islam In America
08 May 2025
Shabazz to Pérez: The Black and Brown 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 against an inherently racist system.. 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 Pérez. 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, and the very same world that once relished in their subjugation fights just as hard to keep them oppressed: creating a whirlwind of difficulty and tension for those who reject their oppression and turn towards the factors that keep them oppressed.
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. Upon his release from prison and briefly into his career as a preacher, he began to be painted as a violent revolutionary by white mainstream media. It is imperative to recognize how much of an impact Islam has had on Malcolm. Once a modern-day slaver, specializing in the sale of black women to wealthy whites, Malcolm X emerges as a champion for civil rights and equality, by any means necessary. Equally as profound as his transformation is his experience at Hajj, where he understands that black and white are meaningless attributes in the world of Islam, where he who is Muslim is merely an equal servant of God and abides by the same principles as those around them. Throughout Malcolm’s whole life, law enforcement has been there to harass and complicate his life. When he was a criminal, they arrested him; when he became a champion of black liberation, they painted him as violent and dangerous. Even the concept of Islam was presented by white media as inherently oppressive and dangerous, despite knowing shockingly little about the true values of the faith. Malcolm X served as a danger to a white-dominated society, not because he preached for equality but because he encouraged black Americans to think for themselves and realize that they lived in a system designed for them to fail.
In the same way, New Muslim Cool tells the story of Hamza Pérez. 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 were 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. Hamza’s sudden threat to the world came not when he was a gangbanger, not when he was a drug dealer, but when he recognized his role as a dealer or a banger created the chains that kept black and brown Americans in worse conditions than others. When he begins to speak against the systematic oppression of black and brown people and turns to a faith untainted by American society, he is met with federal raids and a completely unjustified expulsion from the prison system.
Islam in America is a threat. Not a threat to Americans, certainly not a threat to buildings or schools, but to American ghettos and power structures that depend on the subjection of black and brown bodies. When men like Hamza and Malcolm X adopt Islam, they not only change the way they pray, but also the way they think and see the world around them. By rejecting their roles assigned to them by society, not a lawyer but a pimp, not a rapper but a drug dealer, they inspire others around them to do the same. Their outreach to their communities could cause dozens, hundreds, if not thousands, of young people of color to similarly reject their roles and topple a nation built on racial hierarchies. One young black man’s success is an anomaly; one million would change America overnight. This is why Malcolm X was so heavily slandered, why Hamza was silenced, and his mosque was raided, all to protect the racial dynamics so heavily injected into the lifeblood of America. Their lives and legacies make it clear to us that through faith, one begins to understand their potential in life, and if this potential is ever realized it may uplift those around them; becoming a dangerous threat in the eyes of a nation founded on the backs of slaves, and grown through intensely racial dynamics.
