Column One: Black Muslims: Finding community and faith in South L.A.
Beneath the glinting green dome of a mosque off Malcolm X Way in South Los Angeles, a spiritual leader in his late 80s is hammering home a vital message:
“Malcolm was my teacher,” says Hasan, 89, the slender leader of Masjid Bilal Islamic Center. The mosque founded a half-century ago is a place for spirituality, Hasan says, but worshippers must live in America — not the masjid.“Why are you sitting back and letting other people make the rules, and you don’t attend a council meeting to see what they’re doing or saying?” Hasan asks. “You’re not going to change anything sitting in your living room.
“We are products of their stories. We’re younger, we want to move a little faster, we want to take a few more chances,” Saafir says. “Imam Hasan,For Saafir, that means revering the past while providing services that help South L.A. today. “You can invoke Malcolm all you want, talk about him and his speeches,” Saafir continues. “But these are some Malcolms here that you need to invest in.”
Many of those converts were heeding not only a spiritual call, but the urgent voices of the civil rights and Black Power movements resisting racist oppression. In South LA, community leaders say, the priorities for many in the Muslim community still center on social justice, strengthening the family and obtaining economic parity.“No. 1 for us is economics and being behind financially. Two is families — making them strong,” says Imam Rushdan Mujahid-Deen, associate imam at Bilal.
“Some of them are now business owners. We have one of our brothers, he did over 10 years. And he was a gang member in this neighborhood. And now he has a trucking company.“Islah is used as a word in the Quran,” Saafir adds. “It means to revive, renew, restore something, right. But it also means to restore relationships between people.”
Kenyatta Bakeer, a member of Islah who helped launch its school, says the organization’s community work is born out of “a duty in our own space.” To Imam Hasan, the move to mainstream Islam under Warith Deen Mohammed represented “evolution” for the community. The building that once stood there was demolished in the 1980s due to earthquake damage, and the mosque has been expanding since 1999. The center finished building a charter school on its grounds in 2007. Most of the students are Latino, Hasan says, and the majority are not Muslim.
Hasan’s recipe is his own, adapted from an imam he knew in New York . Every Tuesday, he steps into the kitchen at the masjid, dons a white apron and throws the mini pies into the oven to raise money for the masjid.
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