Ethnic Minorities and People of Color

One of God’s names is “a l-‘Adl,” which means “The Just.” The idea that my father, Allah yrahmou, transmitted to me is that Islam is fundamentally an ideal of justice. So, to the question “Can one be Muslim in the West?” his answer (as well as mine) would have been a provocative “No.” The presentation I will make here is not that of an Islamic scholar, as I have neither the qualification for it nor the pretension to it. Instead, I would like to offer an analytical framework for understanding the interactions between the fact of being and calling oneself Muslim and the fact of being involved in politics. Wal-‘Ilmou lillâh.

If Islam is really this ideal of radical justice, then our presence as Muslims in the heart of the imperial city, in the heart of injustice, is problematic. In this context, perhaps we would have more humility if we saw ourselves as becoming Muslims.

Some of you may dismiss that statement since, at the individual level, you respect the teachings of the sacred book, the five pillars of Islam, the Sunnah and the great principles. These are indeed the bases of Islamic practice and they are fundamental to whomever aspires to belong to the Ummah el Islamiya. But I contend that there is a profound contradiction between the ideal of justice advocated by Islam and the material gains that we have achieved by living, to a great extent, off of spoliation of the South (in the form of wages, social redistribution or political rights). We are certainly not the main beneficiaries of North/South domination (the bourgeoisie is), and we are not even secondary beneficiaries (the white working classes are). We are the unwanted and collateral beneficiaries of this system but we still benefit, even while remaining in the margins.

When I say “we,” I mean this intermediate category between Whites and people of the Third World, that is, postcolonial subjects living in the West. Ancestors of colonized people and victims of structural racism in the North, they are despised, relegated, discriminated against but their burden is lessened, relatively speaking, because they enjoy the social, economic and political rights of liberal democracies. So I speak of “aristocratic indigenous people” not unlike those in white left movements who speak of “aristocratic laborers.” The first thing to do in order not to escape one’s conscience is to face reality in all its ugliness. And the first ugliness of this system is that none of us is innocent. But we are not guilty either because the world in which we live is a system that precedes us and will probably survive after us. We are not guilty, but we are responsible. We are responsible as human beings, we are responsible as third-people living in the North, and we are responsible as “potential” Muslims. In my view, it is based on this awareness and this objective situation in conflict with the Islamic principle of justice that we must forge politics. Here, I would like to introduce a distinction between social and political Muslims. The first are, in a large sense, cultural Muslims (they inherited Islamic culture because they were born in an Islamic environment—they practice or not or are converts) while the second are those who, in addition to having faith, are aware of their responsibility in a structurally unjust world. It is this second category that is the focus of my interest in this paper.