America’s “Black” Muslims

Turkish Minister for E.U. Affairs and Chief Negotiator Egement Bagis stopped by New York for a day as part of his official visit to the United States. There he met with American Muslims. Compared to the “witch hunt”-like days for Muslims in the U.S. after the Sept. 11 attacks, the atmosphere for Muslims has now improved considerably. This we could observe in the self-confidence and enthusiasm of the American Muslims as we entered the hotel for the meeting. As we know, there is already a considerable number of African American Muslims in the U.S. and has been a rising trend lately.

There is of course a radical Muslim legacy which began with Malcolm X and is continuing today with Louis Farrakhan in the U.S. The Muslims that organized the meeting were more moderate but are also more devout to the Quran at the same time. An American Muslim told us that he thought for 60 years they were reading the Quran when what they had been reading was actually a Bible, in which the name of Muhammad replaced Jesus Christ. Turkish Minister Egemen Bagis attended a dinner organized in his honor by the Muslim American Society led by Imam Warith Deen Muhammad. The minister received several awards and made a striking speech. He referred to two instances to explain the relationship between Turkey and real American “blacks.” First, he referred to how he invited Imam Muhammad to Turkey in 2007. Bagis told the audience how he invited Muhammad, they had dinner with then-foreign minister Abdullah Gul and revealed how Imam Muhammad had predicted that “Barack Obama, who was living in Chicago would in a few years be the vice president first and then the president of the U.S.”

Bagis was applauded not only because he shared this anecdote but also because he invited the Imam to Turkey. The second anecdote he shared was from the 1940s. As I mentioned in my column yesterday, after Turkey bought its embassy building in Washington, Munir Ertegun was Turkey’s ambassador for the next 10 years. And his son, Ahmet Ertegun, who had an interest in jazz and blues, would invite blacks to his house and play jazz with them at a time when the whites refused even to walk on the same road with blacks. The minister ended his speech by saying that “when Ertegun’s son’s attitude irritated whites, a senator wrote a letter to father Ertegun. The senator wondered why they welcomed blacks into their house and let them enter the front door of their house. Ambassador Ertegun replied to the senator: ‘The guests we value we greet at the front door. You are also welcome but we expect you from the back door.’” This was how a citizen of the Turkish Republic viewed blacks at the time.