Chapter Three

REDEMPTION

What good is knowledge if you can’t hear it? The Bible says blessed is he that has an ear to hear. So what good is the body of knowledge we call religion if nobody can hear it?

Warith Deen Mohammed, As the Light Shineth, 67

I was freed by the revelation.

Anonymous, interview with author, August 11, 2009

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When does the Qurʾan emerge as an American sacred text? When it strikes the chords of local Muslim collective memory. One such moment occurred during a lecture by an African American Muslim speaker, Imam Warith Deen Mohammed, which he delivered in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1987 in front of some two hundred African American Muslim men. Much of it he spent retelling the Qurʾanic (and biblical) story of Joseph. Somewhere in the middle of that retelling, after a joke, he suddenly stopped, waited for the hearty laughter of his audience to subside, and delivered his sermon’s key rhetorical punch: “Remember,” he told his listeners—some of whom, like many other black men, had been incarcerated—that Joseph had been thrown into jail for “wanting what the big man wanted.”

Behind the pops and cracks of the audio recording, there came a barely audible response: some of the men groaned.1 In that moment and for that audience, the story of the Qurʾanic prophet was no longer a tale from a faraway past, depicted in a foreign language of an old and exotic scripture, or in a seemingly neutral translation by a foreign Muslim authority in a printed book that rested somewhere on the top shelf in their homes and houses of worship. The sound of their response signaled a deep, felt-in-the-bones connection between the Qurʾan and who they were. It embodied the resonance between their collective memory and their Qurʾan.

Of course, the phrase “big man” is not Qurʾanic. It is an African American expression, whose cultural roots reach back to slavery. It is a polyvocal term, whose meanings include a slave owner, a slave driver, or a prison guard. In either sense, it is a figure of authority, who in no time at all can inflict unspeakable pain on a black human being because of a suspicion of wrongdoing, or just to maintain the status quo of the American racial hierarchy by inflicting terror on a random black body that would serve as an example for other black men, women, and children. It is a phrase that connotes the history of humiliation and dehumanization. It is likely that Mohammed’s abrupt reminder resurrected in his listeners’ bodies the physical memory of lynching, which was a close memory for many black people of that generation (his father witnessed a lynching when he was a child). In the Qurʾan, Joseph was incarcerated because he was accused of lusting after his master’s wife. And the people who listened to the Cleveland sermon knew very well what had happened to men like them when they were suspected of glancing improperly at a white woman. Their collective groan was the sound of black bodies remembering the whippings and crucifixions of slavery and Jim Crow.2 It was an American sound of the Qurʾan.

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This chapter explores the Qurʾan-based language of African American Muslims by examining the oral tafsir of Imam W. D. Mohammed, with a particular focus on the speeches and sermons he gave from the mid-1980s and until his passing in 2008. During this period, approximately half of African American Muslims affiliated themselves with his leadership, which amounted to as much as 20 percent of the overall Muslim population in the United States.³

Wallace D. Muhammad was born in 1933 in Hamtramck, Michigan, near Detroit, in the family of Elijah and Clara Pool, African American migrants from Georgia. Two years before his birth, his father had encountered a mysterious stranger, who presented himself to Detroit’s African Americans as a messenger of Islam. The stranger explained that Islam was the original religion of the black people, which they had forgotten after being enslaved in America. What he said was not unique: the idea of Islam as a viable and, for some, more authentic religion was relatively widespread among African Americans in the urban North after World War I. While present among groups that identified themselves as Muslim, such as the Moorish Science Temple, it was also part of the broader discourse. The largest black nationalist movement of the time, the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey, included Muslims. Even non-Muslim affiliates of this movement often talked of Islam as an authentic African American religion.⁴ Elijah Pool’s teacher spoke of it as the only way toward the liberation of black Americans, through which they would be able to restore their status as the original human beings and true masters of God’s creation. The stranger used a variety of names and titles: Professor Ford, Mr. Farrad Mohammad, F. Mohammad Ali, Mr. Wali Farrad, and W. D. Fard. Later, he would be most often remembered as Fard Muhammad. (People who affiliate themselves with this history pronounce the first name as “Farad” while spelling it as “Fard.”) Elijah Pool converted to the new religion and assumed a new name: first, Elijah Kareem, and later, Elijah Muhammad.

Within a couple of years, Elijah Muhammad became Fard Muhammad’s chief representative. In 1934 his teacher disappeared, and the disciple became the leader of the organization, which came to be known as the Nation of Islam. Over the next several decades, it became the largest black nationalist movement in U.S. history. At the height of its influence from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, it had a mosque in every major American city, owned a newspaper that boasted the largest distribution of any African American publication, and operated countless businesses, including banks, farms, restaurants, and food-distribution companies. Malcolm X was the Nation’s most famous representative. Martin Luther King, Jr., used the Nation of Islam as a sort of a scarecrow: he spoke of it as a terrible alternative that awaited America if it did not move away from its racist practices.5 Muslims, African American and immigrant, who did not affiliate with the Nation, repudiated its teachings. Particularly troublesome to them was its denial of the doctrine of the afterlife and its belief that Fard Muhammad was a God and that Elijah Muhammad was the messenger of that God. Along with such tenets came the Nation’s theological notions of the collective divinity of black and other non-Caucasian human beings, which was contrasted with the notion that whites were by nature devils. Yet, in its rhetoric—which resonated in many ways with the language of Christian and other black nationalists, such as Henry M. Turner—there was a powerful message of racial uplift, which the Nation translated into its theology and practice. The broader influence of this message was evident in the Black Power movement.

In 1975 Elijah Muhammad died and his son, Wallace Muhammad, took the reins of the Nation of Islam. His authority rested partly on the story of his birth: according to the lore of the Nation’s members, Fard Muhammad had assigned a special status to this child of his favorite student. Of course, there were complications. Elijah Muhammad excommunicated his son Wallace from the movement on several occasions. The first time it happened was in 1957. Influenced by his interactions with other African American and immigrant Muslims, Wallace Muhammad came to disagree with the Nation’s theological tenets. Authentic and orthodox Islam for him was Sunni Islam. And so, while serving as a minister at the Nation’s mosque in Philadelphia, he taught its members Sunni Muslim doctrines and practices. Another problem he ran into was related to his role as a confidant and advisor to Malcolm X during Malcolm’s all-too-public and scandalous break with the Nation in 1964. Yet, throughout this time he remained close to the movement. Each excommunication was followed by reunion. The final reconciliation between Wallace Muhammad and his father took place in 1974, shortly before Elijah Muhammad’s death.

This paved the way to Wallace Muhammad’s crowning as the Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam. After taking control of the organization, he led the effort to gradually convert its members to Sunni Islam. By the early 1980s the transformation was complete. Most members of the Nation followed Elijah’s son—who in the late 1970s adopted the name Warith Deen Muhammad (later to be changed to Warith Deen Mohammed)—and embraced the Sunni Muslim identity. Some split from Imam Mohammed’s group and formed new versions of the Nation. The most famous of them was the reconstituted Nation of Islam of Minister Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933).

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What I just presented is the story of Mohammed’s life as it has been usually told. When he died on September 9, 2008, numerous newspapers issued obituaries about the man who turned the “fiery” Nation of Islam into a mainstream movement.6 Most academic reflections have followed a similar outline, focusing primarily on the late 1970s and early 1980s. The classic work that set this trend was C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America. There have been, of course, several academic works that went further and deeper. Mattias Gardell’s In the Name of Elijah Muhammad is a superb ethnography of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which includes nuanced analysis of its relationship with W. D. Mohammed’s movement. Islam in Black America by Edward E. Curtis IV offers an outstanding overview of the history of the Nation of Islam and its successors. Both Curtis and Gardell provide excellent analysis of African American Muslim discourses. In Gardell’s book, however, Mohammed and his group are side characters, and Curtis’s analysis of his rhetoric stops with the 1980s.

Journalists and academics have a good reason to pay particular attention to the Nation’s transition into a Sunni movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the largest African American Muslim community, which happened to be very different from the Muslim groups that are usually called “orthodox.” Mohammed’s accomplishment of converting most of its members was monumental. No less a charismatic figure than Malcolm X had tried his hand at this task and failed: faced with the overwhelmingly negative reaction from his former coreligionists, he bitterly exclaimed, “I had known … that Negroes would not rush to follow me into the orthodox Islam.”⁷ Mohammed accomplished this undertaking through an ingenious strategy of gradual reinterpretation of the Nation’s beliefs and practices. As he later explained, it was a strategy of change through preaching: “What I have done is simply talk on the double meaning of Elijah Muhammad’s teaching.”⁸

Preaching is an art of rhetoric, and rhetoric is an art of persuasion. One of the characteristics of Mohammed’s rhetoric from the period of his reform was his use of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament, which had been an important source for his father’s interpretations of both the Qurʾan and the Bible.9 Throughout the late 1970s, Mohammed presented his reformation as the culmination of the process initiated by his father and Fard Muhammad. The period of their leadership, he proposed, was akin to the “First Coming of Christ.” It was the “First Resurrection” of African Americans to Islam, their natural and original faith. His reform was the “Second Resurrection”: “In the First Resurrection,” Mohammed explained, “God began to raise us out of the graves by beginning to unveil the Truth. In the Second Resurrection the Truth is not just unveiled in a sense of scriptural interpretation, but we come to a kind of a natural interpretation…. We have been taught many things in the teachings of the Great Master W. F. Muhammad [Fard Muhammad] and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that prepared us for this time.”¹⁰

What happened after this “Second Resurrection?” Nothing dramatic—if we are to believe the common version of the story, reflected in the New York Times obituary: “Imam Mohammed moved decisively toward the religious mainstream. In 1992, he became the first Muslim to deliver the invocation for the United States Senate. He led prayers at both inaugurals of President Bill Clinton. He addressed a conference of Muslims and Reform Jews in 1995, and participated in several major interfaith dialogues with Roman Catholic cardinals. He met with the pope in 1996 and 1999.”¹¹

Indeed, this record of his activities is impressive. But it reads like a depiction of the life of a former statesperson whose most important achievements were in the past. The problem with such a presentation is that it creates an impression of a leader who had spent the last twenty-eight years of his life in semiretirement.

For the people from his community, nothing could be further from reality. For them, he was an authentic voice of the Qurʾan, which emerged most clearly after the “Second Resurrection.” The three decades after the mid-1980s were crucial precisely because they were relatively free from the ordeals of the period of reform. During this time, he was continuously developing an African American way of understanding the Qurʾan, which he taught in countless sermons. These were the decades when he preached what his audiences would later come to call “the tafsir of Imam W. Deen Mohammed.”¹²

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In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Mohammed and his community organized countless gatherings where he would teach and preach. Central among those were annual Ramadan sessions. On one such occasion in 2003, a young woman in the audience stood up and asked him, “When will you translate the Qurʾan?” He answered, “I am doing it all alone but I hope to one day call together a team at least to meet once a month. And I’m working on it all of the time so that we can actually start collecting my commentary…. We can do it, in shaʾ allah, one day soon. But I think it is Allah’s, subhanahu wa taʿala [‘may He be glorified and exalted,’ a Muslim equivalent of ‘Praise be to God’], will that I just do it as I work with you. And you are taking notes and we can pull it together one day soon, in shaʾ allah.”13

The young woman made a technical mistake: Imam Mohammed never produced a formal translation of the Qurʾan. He was not a translator in the technical sense like Muhammad Pickthall, Yusuf Ali, or Thomas Irving. In his response, however, he glided right over this point—maybe because, as a skilled teacher, he was careful not to sidetrack his audience with an unnecessary correction. He talked instead about his commentary on the Qurʾan. In this one instance, he summarized the nature of his tafsir. It was not what academics would call a tafsir—it was not a book. Rather, it was his lifelong effort of preaching and interpreting the Qurʾan for the benefit of his and other communities. From this standpoint, there was perhaps a deeper reason why Imam Mohammed skipped over his student’s technical slipup. On a deeper level, she was absolutely right: his tafsir was indeed a form of translation—not technical, but cultural.

Another possible reason for his response was that, at this exact time, he was in fact discussing with some of his colleagues a project of translating the Qurʾan. This effort came to be spearheaded in 2006 by two of his close associates, Imam Darnell Karim and Imam Vernon Fareed. Within the next three years, they published five sets of CDs under the title Tafseer of Imam W. Deen Mohammed. These CDs contained recordings of Arabic recitations by Imam Karim, readings of their English translation by Imam Fareed, and interviews with Imam Mohammed. During the interviews, Fareed asked Mohammed to comment on specific Qurʾanic verses, expressions, and ideas.¹⁴ That was the exegetical part of the CDs. The translation part was not a made-from-scratch original. Rather, it was a modification of Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Qurʾan, which Fareed customized to be more in tune with contemporary American spoken English and resonant with his community’s tradition of reading the Qurʾan.

The choice of Yusuf Ali’s translation reflected the history of the Qurʾan in Imam Mohammed’s movement, as well as among wider circles of African American Muslims. One of the first initiatives he undertook when he became the leader of the Nation of Islam was to shift his community to the use of Ali’s translation. Before then, Elijah Muhammad and other authorities of the Nation worked with the translation by Muhammad Ali (not Muhammad Ali the boxer; the boxer was named after Muhammad Ali the translator). That translation came to the Nation of Islam via Ahmadi Muslim missionaries from India, who had been active in African American neighborhoods in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁵ The consequent shift to Yusuf Ali’s translation was part of the transition away from Elijah Muhammad’s interpretations of the Qurʾan. For example, Elijah Muhammad used Muhammad Ali’s translation of Qurʾan 20:102—“On that day [of resurrection] when the trumpet shall be blown, and We will gather the guilty, blue-eyed, on that day”—as the scriptural proof of his theological claim about the devilish nature of the white people. In his reading, the whites were the “blue-eyed devils” of the Qurʾan.16 W. D. Mohammed’s shift to Yusuf Ali’s translation was also fitting because it established a shared textual basis between his and other Muslim communities. This translation was widely distributed by immigrant and international Muslim groups, most notably by the Muslim World League. At the same time, while promoting and largely relying on Yusuf Ali’s translation, Mohammed emphasized the need for indigenous African American engagement with the Arabic Qurʾan and its independent translation. His sermons and lectures were the rhetorical spaces where he performed, in front of his audiences, his cultural translation of the Qurʾan. On such occasions he taught them how to translate the scripture into their lives. His hope was that, perhaps, a technical translation would follow at some point in the future. The priority, however, was the Qurʾan’s ongoing cultural translation.

Fareed’s modifications of Yusuf Ali’s translation presented some of his teacher’s key exegetical insights. Most notable among them was Imam Mohammed’s rendition of the basmala, a Qurʾanic invocation, which Muslims repeat at the beginning of every important action. Yusuf Ali translated this Arabic phrase—bi-smi llah al-rahman al-rahim—as “in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.” This became a common phrase in the American Muslim vernacular. Its wide usage was an indication of the influence of Yusuf Ali’s translation, and the institutions that fostered it. Mohammed’s version was different: “With G-d’s Name, The Merciful Benefactor, the Merciful Redeemer.”

Two details are important about Mohammed’s basmala. First, it demonstrated his engagement with the printed Qurʾan; and second, it reflected his lifelong work of translating the Arabic scripture into the African American Muslim vernacular. On the immediate level, he translated the Arabic word “allah” into an English word, which was pronounced as “God,” but printed as “G-d.” The pronunciation established an obvious shared ground between the cultural background of his audience, overwhelmingly former Christians, and the language of their Christian families, neighbors, and friends. By urging his audiences to use this word, he prompted them to speak in a way that resonated with the broader American and African American way of speaking. (After 9/11 many immigrant Muslims started emphasizing the use of “God” instead of “Allah” for a similar reason.) The printed version of “G-d” was likely borrowed from a parallel Jewish convention. It was likely a result of Mohammed’s extensive interfaith work, which had begun in the mid-1980s. At the same time there was another, uniquely Muslim logic behind this move. On a more subtle level, the spelling of “G-d,” which omits the vowel “o,” is reminiscent of the Arabic writing and print. Arabic words are based on their consonants. In Arabic, consonants are written and printed, but short vowels, like the second “a” in “allah,” are often omitted. Instead, they are typically filled through oral pronunciation. Therefore, it is likely that, by printing “G-d,” Mohammed provided a visual bridge between the printed English of his audiences and the Qurʾanic Arabic.

More important, however, was yet another feature of his basmala: his translation referred to God as the “Redeemer.” Redemption was the essential theme in his engagement with the Qurʾan. His articulations of redemption as a Qurʾanic idea remained key throughout his career. Of course, his use of this theme shifted over time because his sermons and lectures always related the Qurʾan to changing practical concerns. As concrete issues changed, so did his interpretative emphases. In the 1970s and early 1980s, his task was to transform his father’s movement into a Sunni group. Later on and until his passing in 2008, his mission was more substantial: he endeavored to provide the tools that would help his community and other African American Muslims to live as confident—independent but not isolated—participants in American life. In this respect, his oral exegesis was vital. Through preaching, he continuously transformed the Qurʾan into a spoken sacred text. He spoke from the Qurʾan and by doing so taught others how to speak as American Muslims. The fact that his community’s language was based on the Qurʾan made it Muslim. The fact that it was distinctly African American made it American.

Two of the words I just used are likely to be problematic for some of my readers. For some people in Imam Mohammed’s community, it would be the word “preacher.” For some other Muslims that word would be “redemption.” Mohammed used both words but, of course, in ways that were specific to him. Quite often in his speeches, for example, he would refer to something another “preacher said.” Typically, he would mention that on his way to a venue where he was delivering his talk he was listening to the radio and heard a “preacher say” something resonant with what he was about to teach. What he never said was that a station and preacher he was listening to was Christian. It was obvious because his community never used this word for Muslim speakers such as W. D. Mohammed. They reserved “preacher” for Christians. At the same time, the fact that their teacher listened to Christian preachers was for most of them neither unusual nor alarming. They were, after all, a part of the African American world. Their neighbors and many of their family members were Christian, and Imam Mohammed often spoke in front of Christian audiences. Yes, his community was Muslim; but they came from the culture of the black church, and their Islamic tradition belonged to what some academics call “Black Religion.”17 From this perspective the word “preacher” is inescapable: for those not accustomed to the vocabulary of Imam Mohammed’s community, like most of this book’s readers, it conveys his role and his work more readily. Besides, if what he did was not preaching, why would he compare what and how he taught with what he was hearing from other preachers?

Mohammed’s other word, “redemption,” might come across as strange for some other Muslims because it is characteristically African American. Indeed, “redemption” stems from the Christian vocabulary, where it is tied to the concept of original sin. In most Muslim interpretations, the Qurʾanic view of human history does not include this notion, at least not substantively so (although there are some parallel, but distinct, articulations in the Shiʿi tradition).18 Fazlur Rahman, for example, stated emphatically in his Major Themes that “for Islam, there is no particular [idea of] ‘salvation’: there is only success [falah] or failure [khusran] in the task of building the world.”¹⁹ Tellingly, Rahman wrote this passage as a commentary on what he perceived as a dominant trend in the interreligious dialogue between Muslims and Christians, where Muslims and other non-Christians are often compelled to communicate through Christian-sounding terms. Without such an engagement with Christians, at least for Rahman, there was no reason to look in the Qurʾan for the idea of “salvation” or redemption. This subject of conversation became thinkable for him only through interreligious exchanges with Christians. For African American Muslims, however, the very sense of who they are includes their Christian cultural heritage and the Bible-based language of their broader community.

In African American religious discourses, the language of redemption is inescapable. Since the nineteenth century African American preachers and writers have developed a tradition of biblical interpretation that articulates redemption as the vital answer to the large-scale suffering of their people. James H. Cone, a famous Christian theologian, reflected on this tradition when he stated that African American exegesis conceived suffering as the “badge of true discipleship.” This pairing of suffering and discipleship enabled African American exegetes, most often preachers and their listeners, to make sense of their collective suffering. They did so by retelling the stories of the biblical Israelites, particularly the story of Exodus, and by speaking of Jesus as a suffering servant. Crucial here was that they identified African Americans—as a collective, a people—with Jesus and the Israelites: like Jesus, they suffered; like the Israelites, they were chosen because of their collective suffering. The redemption they preached was collective as well—the redemption of African Americans as a people.²⁰ Another unique feature of this tradition is the stress on redemption as a “this world” concept, a process that has been unfolding through African American collective history.

Mohammed’s Qurʾan-based message of redemption was grounded in this cultural legacy. It was also a development of the tradition of preaching of the Nation of Islam, where the theme of redemption was central. Elijah Muhammad spoke of it when he taught that “Islam is our salvation” and stressed that the salvation of the black people was taking place in this world, during the lifetime of his followers. This was the theological basis for his rejection of the Christian and Muslim notions of the afterlife. His son disagreed and taught that his father’s dismissal of the afterlife was profoundly un-Islamic. Yet, even after his movement had become Sunni, he continued to speak about redemption. What he borrowed from his father—and from the broader African American religious discourse—was the articulation of the redemption of black people in terms of their concrete realities. For him, redemption was about an uplift of the African American people in this world, which included social, economic, and spiritual aspects of their lives. And the promise of such redemption, for him, was in the Qurʾan. As he declared in a speech from the late 1980s, it was “Allah’s will … that this religion of al-Islam and the Book of Qurʾan are destined to be our Savior.”21

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From the very first speech Mohammed gave upon inheriting his father’s office, at the age of forty-one in 1975, he presented himself as an agent of a Qurʾan-based transformation. On that occasion, he declared that his father had “unlocked the Bible and by unlocking the Bible he made us unlock our minds.” He explained that, before Elijah Muhammad, they “only read the scripture in print.” But reading a printed scripture, he said, was not enough because “the scripture says, blessed is he who hears the word!”²² The new stage in the movement’s history, he indicated, would be based on hearing the Qurʾan.

From that moment on, Mohammed inextricably linked his authority to the Qurʾan. He relied on this connection, for example, in the early 1980s, when he was introducing a notion of an African American methodology (madhhab) of Islamic jurisprudence. At that point, in a speech at Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in Harlem, a mosque named after Malcolm X, he offered his own interpretation of Qurʾan 5:51. Yusuf Ali translated that passage as “O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other.” Mohammed interpreted it as not speaking about some eternal categories of people, “Christians” or “Jews,” but about specific Jewish and Christian communities in Arabia at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who were politically antagonistic to the nascent Muslim polity. Based on this observation, he argued that his community and other African American Muslims must be wary of taking as “friends and protectors” specifically those who opposed the independent growth of African American Muslims. He explained that, at that particular time, such people included some foreign Muslim authorities and some immigrant and African American Muslims who “represent[ed] foreign concerns.”²³ Through this exegesis, he responded to a two-pronged opposition his movement was facing at that particular period of its history—from those who criticized him as not being sufficiently “orthodox,” like Brooklyn’s famous African American Sunni leader and former member of the Nation of Islam, Imam Siraj Wahhaj (b. 1950), and also from those, like Farrakhan, who charged W. D. Mohammed with betraying the legacy of Elijah Muhammad. Imam Mohammed did not spell this out, but it is quite possible that by “foreign concerns” he meant Wahhaj’s close affinity with international Muslim authorities, such as the Muslim World League, and Farrakhan’s partnership with the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi. His broader argument prompted his community to keep developing an independent orientation in religious and social life.

Mohammed’s exegesis of Qurʾan 5:51 at Masjid Malcolm Shabazz reflected a rhetorical move that was typical throughout his career. Like Muhammad Ali—the boxer, not the translator of the Qurʾan—he used his challengers’ strengths by utilizing the energy of their attacks and ultimately turning it onto themselves. (He and his community often talked about Muhammad Ali.) Of course, his art was rhetorical. He was not a boxer, although he had boxed in his youth. His preaching, however, resonated with the skills he had learned as a boxer. His preferred method of public speaking was through the Qurʾan, which was the prime weapon of his rhetorical defense and attack. How he used it to buttress his authority is reflected in a statement he made in another mid-1980s speech: “There are those who want to charge me with something because they don’t want to follow the Qurʾan. They don’t want to be real Muslims. It isn’t me. None of those people have anything against me personally.”24 This was a martial-arts type of rhetoric: under attack by his critics, who used the Qurʾan as a key source of their oratorical strength, he avoided their punches and simultaneously responded with a Qurʾan-based retort of his own. His phrasing, however, was about more than sparring with his critics. It was his way of communicating an intimate relationship he cultivated with the Qurʾan. For his community, those who heard him, this was the foundation of their teacher’s authority. He assured them of it constantly, as he did in one of the last speeches he gave right before his passing in 2008. “When I am talking,” he reminded his audience, “I am speaking from Scripture. Don’t think that I am giving you my words; I don’t have any words. All of my words come from Scripture or from somewhere else.”²⁵

How did Imam Mohammed speak from the Qurʾan? How did he make its words his own? And how did he teach it? As he retold the scripture’s stories, recited its verses in Arabic and interpreted its “signs” in the colloquial English of his African American audiences, he presented his oral exegesis of the Qurʾan. But there was more to his preaching than content. His sermons demonstrated to his community how to speak the scripture. From such efforts, there emerged a particular tradition of African American exegesis of the Qurʾan. It was unique to his movement. Yet, it also reflected the language of the broader African American Muslim community.

Mohammed’s oral tafsir belonged to an African American tradition of Qurʾan-based speaking. To understand it, it must be heard, because “what good is knowledge if you can’t hear it?” The best way to hear it is by listening to how it came to be developed, through constant rearticulations, by Mohammed himself and by the people who learned how to speak Qurʾanically by listening to his sermons. Therefore, what follows is my experiment in comparative hearing. My first example is a lecture Mohammed gave at Masjid Bilal in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1987 during an annual gathering of local leaders within his movement, the National Imams’ Meeting. (This chapter’s opening vignette is based on that sermon.) To provide a broader contextual reading, or hearing, of his rhetoric, I will juxtapose it with some of his other speeches, from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. My second key sample is a 2009 sermon by one of his students, Imam Faheem Shuaibe. I was not among the original audience who listened to Mohammed’s Cleveland address: I found a CD recording of it, titled “National Imams Meeting: Yusuf Analogy,” while conducting research for this book. I was, however, at As-Salaam Islamic Center of Raleigh on Friday, May 22, 2009, when Shuaibe delivered his khutba, which he titled “Fear Not For Allah Is With Us.” My analysis of both speeches is informed by conversations with people in the community.

Preachers’ exegeses are inseparable from their immediate contexts. In this sense these two sermons were distinct. In the 1980s, for instance, the idea of an African American President of the United States was thinkable—Jesse Jackson (and W. D. Mohammed) worked toward it—but it was still a dream. In 2009, when Shuaibe spoke to his audience, it was a reality. Yet, despite this temporal distance, these sermons had much in common, primarily because their language was at once African American and Qurʾanic. They were additionally resonant because they were delivered at times of crisis. Mohammed spoke in 1987, when his organization lost a protracted legal case over his fathers’ estate, which had begun in 1979. As he recalled sixteen years later, in 2003, this was a serious financial blow to his community’s institutional life, which resulted, for instance, in the closing of many of its private schools, including one in Raleigh.26 Shuaibe addressed the North Carolina community less than a year after the passing of Imam Mohammed and during an immense economic crisis, which, as happens too often, hit African Americans the hardest. On both occasions, as different as they were, these two preachers taught the redemptive message of the Qurʾan.

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Mohammed’s 1987 speech at Masjid Bilal was connected to a series of events that revolved around the mosque’s Tenth Annual Awards Dinner. These dinners were a local tradition, which the Cleveland community used to highlight their contributions to their city’s life: they typically included as guests and honorees representatives of local government, business, and nonprofit sectors. The 1987 dinner was organized to coincide with a National Meeting of imams of Mohammed’s movement. His lecture addressed that specific audience. Its excerpts were later published in his organization’s newspaper, Muslim Journal. In the late 2000s its complete recording was distributed by his office as a part of its “History Speaks” series of audio and video records.27

In terms of style this speech was fairly typical. Mohammed spoke from a rough outline and mostly improvised. In this way he followed the rhetorical tradition of Elijah Muhammad, who also tended to improvise: both of them were more “spiritual,” rather than “manuscript,” types of preachers.²⁸ Mohammed himself acknowledged his father’s influence on his style of preaching. In one respect it shored up his authority. It also signaled that he shared his listeners’ cultural location—or, as he would put it, “home”—as African Americans and former members of the Nation of Islam. Even his demeanor reminded them of his father, who taught them, “Don’t act proud. Be humble and yet commanding.”²⁹ This was certainly his son’s public persona.

Content-wise, this lecture was representative of how Mohammed spoke in the posttransformation period of his career. By 1987 he no longer argued against his father’s theological formulations. By that point all who had wanted to leave his movement had already left. For those who chose to stay, their new, post–Nation of Islam identity was a given. And so, unlike in his speeches from the late 1970s and early 1980s, he engaged in these later talks with the memory of his father and with the time of transition not as an explicit ground for rhetorical contestation but rather as a shared story whose outcome was established and whose experience united him with his audience.

Structurally, the sermon revolved around two Qurʾanic passages. Its first half was a commentary on the Qurʾan 3:110, which lasted over an hour. Yusuf Ali translated this verse as “Ye are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah. If only the People of the Book had faith it were best for them; among them are some who have faith, but most of them are perverted transgressors.” The second half of the lecture, which was also over an hour long, was his commentary on sura Yusuf (Qurʾan 12). Mohammed referred to this Qurʾanic and biblical figure as both “Yusuf” and “Joseph,” thus providing a bridge between the Arabic scripture and his English-speaking audience. For the rest of this chapter, I will follow this practice as well.

The first half of Qurʾan 3:110 is among the Qurʾan’s most frequently quoted passages. If there is such a phenomenon as Muslim collective memory, then the phrase “you are the best community” is certainly central in it. In sermons it often serves as praise directed at an audience: it wins them over and then prepares them to hear what comes next, which is typically a corrective message. In fact, this verse reflects one of the peculiar features of the Qurʾanic text itself: like many of its other passages, it presents a conditional status of being Muslim, a person or community who professes submission to the divine will. It affirms that belonging to this community is indeed a high status, but it also states that it needs to be continuously reasserted through action, by “enjoining what is right” and “forbidding what is wrong.” This rhetorical move is characteristic of the Qurʾan as a text of didactic discourse: during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, and through his recitations, it communicated with his often apprehensive audiences to persuade them to change their lives. W. D. Mohammed took a cue from his scripture’s rhetorical style and used this passage pedagogically as well, to highlight how it was speaking directly to his African American listeners.

He began his lecture by reciting Qurʾan 3:110 in Arabic, then made an important digression, and returned to this verse some twenty minutes later. During that detour he reminded his listeners about an observation he had made repeatedly in many of his other speeches after 1976, when, during his movement’s annual gathering, the Savior’s Day, he had lifted the American flag and announced that from now on they would work to become fully incorporated into American civic life. In 1976, only a year after he had become the head of the Nation of Islam, this declaration came as a shock to many within and outside the organization. The Savior’s Day was the Nation’s central recurring event, during which Elijah Muhammad would preach his message of black separatism, segregation from the “devilish” American society, which included a policy of officially abstaining from participation in American politics.30 W. D. Mohammed used this symbolic occasion to announce a radically new direction in the public stance of his movement. He did this by proposing an inherent correspondence between the Qurʾan and the U.S. Constitution. By 1987 this declaration became a staple in his speeches.³¹ In Cleveland he gestured toward it as he was preparing the ground for his exegesis of Qurʾan 3:110. He reminded his listeners that “our religion gives the concept of our personal and community life,” which, he further explained, was reflected in the Qurʾanic phrase “one community”: “One community under God, isn’t that what we are? Ummatun wahidatun under God, responsible to Allah. Ah? You’ve heard that same language, haven’t you—one nation under God. Now, that language from the Constitution of the United States, or its introduction, or preamble to the constitution of the United States—one nation under God—is not new. Fourteen hundred years ago, that’s more than 1000 years before that language was formed—same language: one community, responsible to Allah. And we may say ‘one nation under God,’ because ‘umma’ can be translated as ‘nation’ sometimes. Ah? Ummatan wahida—one united people, responsible to Allah, responsible to God.”32

Most Qurʾanic passages that speak about “one community” use this phrase as a lament: they state that the humanity had once been one umma, one community of believers, but as time passed, most people forgot that the purpose of their creation was to serve God and thus became dispersed into many groups.³³ This note of scriptural lamentation was important to Imam Mohammed. He would often say, with sadness in his voice, that most people—African Americans, Muslims, and others—had led themselves astray and become disconnected from God-consciousness. But for him this Qurʾanic phrase also promised that human beings could once again unite, in all their diversity, to work toward the establishment of a better society. This promise, he never tired of reiterating, had come true in human history repeatedly. The most recent such example for him was the success of the civil rights movement. In that case—and, as he emphasized, in the Qurʾanic telling of human history as well—success was not attained by a majority but rather by select human beings who retained and cultivated their awareness of God. Thus, in another late 1980s speech, he challenged his audience: “Do you think people are saved by a majority? Study history. Societies are always saved by a minority, a select few.”³⁴ In a 2003 speech he repeated the same idea, all along echoing the Qurʾanic lamentation and promise of redemption. And as was typical of his overall rhetoric, he used these notes to interweave his understanding of the Qurʾanic pattern of history with the African American collective experience: “I’m convinced also that leaders in the history of African-American people who are Christian, and that is a great majority, they got help from God and God has been in that work and God has been with us as long as we were with God and until we went after the dollar…. He is still with us. Few of us. And that’s too bad. But don’t feel discouraged because never in the history of a people there were many leading them. Always a few. Always a few.”³⁵

In the 1987 sermon W. D. Mohammed’s civic message was likely an elaboration on Qurʾan 21:92 or 23:52, which celebrated the community of the people who followed the Prophet Muhammad as “one community.” He echoed this note of celebration when, some twenty minutes into the speech, he began interpreting Qurʾan 3:110. He stressed that the correspondence between the Qurʾanic “ummatun wahidatun” and the American “one nation under God” was not coincidental. This was how “God identified us,” he explained; it was a divine hint that indicated African Americans’ unique place in history: “[God] also said that you’re a community. That ‘you’re the best community brought out’—’ukhrijat.’ ‘Ukhrijat’ means ‘brought out,’ ukhrijat. ‘Exodus’ means brought out. So no wonder that Muslims recognize that we also have Exodus. In order to join the Muslim life, the Muslim community, you also have to come out. Come out of Egypt! Come out of the world, to enter the community of al-Islam. The best community brought out. ‘For what?,’ God asks us—for the good of all people. For the good of all people.”36

A written rendition of this statement loses some of its key aural characteristics and therefore its sound and meaning. Mohammed’s transition from his commentary on “one community” to the celebration of “the best community” and to the idea of Exodus was seamless: there was no pause before “Exodus.” By speaking live, he conflated the Qurʾanic word “ukhrijat” with “Exodus” as though their correspondence was natural and commonsense. For him, in the Qurʾan there was an indication of the idea of Exodus that resonated with African American interpretations of the biblical Exodus, which drew vital parallels between the collective suffering of the black people and the suffering of the biblical Hebrews. Had he been speaking to a more general audience, which included Muslims from outside his community, he might have explained that the Qurʾanic “ukhrijat” was a linguistic sign for the concept of Exodus, and that the Exodus of the Israelites was but one example of the God-ordained process of bringing a community out of slavery, literal or otherwise. But, speaking to imams in his movement, he did not need to spell this out. By preaching, speaking live, and alluding to the meanings embedded in their vernacular, he made them hear his point.

Mohammed’s exegesis of “ukhrijat” was ingenious. The only other prominent interpreter who also commented on this Qurʾanic word was Sayyid Qutb.³⁷ A degree of similarity between Mohammed and Qutb may not be coincidental. Both exegetes engaged in a particular modern form of tafsir, which emphasized Qurʾanic themes. And they both found in the Qurʾanic “ukhrijat” the theme of God-ordained societal movement towards God-consciousness. For Qutb this particular word and passage presented an occasion to comment on the political message of the Qurʾan and its relevance for contemporary Muslim activism. In this case he was following the logic of Mawdudi, who had influenced both him and Mohammed. Yet, Mohammed’s weaving together of “ukhrijat” and the African American concept of Exodus was unique. It was also typical of his preaching throughout his life. In speech after speech, particularly since the early 1980s, he repeatedly drew parallels between the Qurʾanic stories of Moses and the Israelites and the African American experience. In one early 1980s speech, for example, he declared, “We’re like Israelites…. [And, like African-Americans in the United States,] Moses was like an adopted son in the house of the Pharaoh.”³⁸

In the Cleveland sermon, Mohammed used the word “ukhrijat” to draw contemporary lessons from the story—or, rather, the concept—of Exodus. He explained that the real meaning of Exodus was not about departing from a place but about moving toward a condition promised by God. This, he said, African Americans had not yet done: they had not yet “accepted that we are a legitimate part of this country entitled to a share of it like everyone else.” And he illustrated his point by reminding his listeners of their shared history: “After I became a leader, I lifted the flag in respect, the American flag. And my picture was taken. [But the reaction was,] ‘Hey, there is a crazy man!’ Most of my own people didn’t like it. I hadn’t had a single political leader or church leader come and say we’re proud of what you did. Why? Because most of them feel like they are on the outside too!”39

As he offered this recollection, his audience responded with murmurs of approval, which became particularly pronounced when he said, “most of them feel like they are on the outside.” Riding this wave, he expanded upon his Qurʾan-inspired interpretation of the role that African Americans and Muslims had to play in American life: “We’re a minority in this country with a double job of establishing ourselves…. As a minority in America we have to start with a double concern: … one to establish ourselves, and one to complement America, to be a beautifying addition, a healthy addition … in this plural society we call America.”⁴⁰

Mohammed’s reference to all American Muslims, and not just African Americans, was characteristic of his overall rhetoric. He presented his community’s experiences as valuable for their immigrant and other coreligionists. In the 1980s it was one of the major themes of his speeches. In 1982, two years before Jesse Jackson’s first presidential campaign, he openly mused that he might one day run for the office of the president of the United States. In a 1988 radio interview, which was meant for the general audience, he reminisced about that unofficial musing and reflected on deeper motivations behind it: “Our religion promotes democratic process…. In fact, our religion is a democracy…. Maybe I’ll never be a president of the United States, but I don’t think the country should overlook the fact that we have some unique kinds of mentality and personality and sensitivities in people here in America who used to be cut off from the American privileges, but now have grown with this country and have now become sensitive to the needs of the American people—and we are also Muslims.”⁴¹

In later years he developed his interpretation of the “ukhrijat” further. In one of his last speeches, he translated this word not as “brought out” but as “evolved.” This new iteration emphasized the organic connotation of this word: “evolved,” he explained, “means [that] He [God] raised it up naturally.… He brought you out of nature. You are evolved upon the excellence of your nature.”⁴² In this later rendition of his exegesis, he again connected “ukhrijat” with “one community.” While continuing to urge participation in public life, he also stressed broader implications of this concept. Public life, he taught in a 2007 address to students of the Sister Clara Muhammad School in Washington, D.C., developed in accordance with the pattern of human movement through life. To him it was based on the logic of nature, exemplified by the Qurʾan’s depictions of the collectively harmonious life of animals, such as the bees in sura 16. Just as there was a God-ordained logic in the movement of nature, he explained, there was also a parallel logic in “the movement of Scripture”: “Eventually, there is the public life. Streets to connect the smaller communities and businesses form great transportation and transportation systems. All of this evolves from human life. The needs that God has clocked into human life produce all that we see in man’s life. If you lose those sacred bonds, you give yourself into slavery. We have come now to the unity of the family of man: that we all are the same creation. In science, if you want to study the human species, you have to accept, firstly, that the human species is one life or one creation.”43

In the 2007 speech Mohammed was commenting on, without directly quoting, another Qurʾanic verse that talks about community, Qurʾan 16:120: “inna ibrahima kana ummatan qanitan li-l-lahi hanifan,” which Yusuf Ali translated as “Abraham was indeed a model devoutly obedient to Allah, (and) true in faith.” Ali’s translation skipped over the difficult phrase “ibrahima kana ummatan,” which literally means, “Ibrahim was a community.” Mohammed revisited its literal meaning and found in it a message that spoke to African Americans as a people. For him, Ibrahim was indeed a community: like all scriptural characters, he was not a model for individuals only but for the people who strove to be faithful to the revelation and their divinely created nature.

⋅⋅⋅VII⋅⋅⋅

Like many preachers, Imam Mohammed did not just summarize or quote scriptural stories but retold and often reenacted them. In the second half of his 1987 speech, he acted out whole scenes from the Qurʾanic story of Yusuf in sura 12. His voice became tender when he spoke about the anguish of Joseph’s father, whose son was tricked by his devious brothers and left abandoned in a well, to be eventually sold into slavery. At another point his audience responded with roars of laughter when he mimicked the voices of maidens enamored with Yusuf—he was, after all, a man of unsurpassed natural beauty. It was at this moment, as he relaxed the senses of his listeners through a hearty joke, that he stopped, waited for them to quiet down, and then reminded them that Joseph, a prisoner and slave, stood accused of the crime of “wanting what the big man wanted”—that he was accused of a sexual transgression against his master’s wife. Before this moment of comic relief—which Mohammed immediately followed by a rhetorical strike to the solar plexus of the African American collective memory—he had set up his retelling of Yusuf’s story: he recited in Arabic, and then translated the Qurʾan’s insistence that Joseph and his brothers were signs for those who seek answers (Qurʾan 12:6). He explained that he was relating this story and interpreting its signs “for the interest of the leadership … and the future of Muslims in America.”44

The serious purpose of the sermon’s humorous features was to relax and therefore open and prepare his listeners to hear his central message—that, through the story of Yusuf, the Qurʾan was speaking to them about their “true nature” and redemption. After all, as he explained in a 2008 speech, “one of the meanings of redeem is ‘to get back’” to one’s true nature.⁴⁵ Mohammed’s style of disarming his audience with a joke and then delivering a serious punch was characteristic of his art of preaching. In speech after speech, he used this move to shape the Qurʾan-based language of African American Muslims. Its effectiveness was subtle but powerful. He did not explain what was too difficult to explain. Rather, through a joke and a poke, he made it possible for his listeners to become open to hearing the Qurʾan.

Another key instant in his retelling of Joseph’s story occurred when he once again highlighted the redemptive quality of the Arabic Qurʾan. He did so by interpreting the word “ghayaba” in the first part of Qurʾan 12:15, which depicts the moment when Yusuf’s brothers threw him into the well:

But before his imprisonment in Egypt, they had put him in the hole. Right? And according to the words of God, the hole was without water. And empty. And they put him in the lowest depths of the hole. And the term that’s used in the Qurʾan is “ghayabati-l-jubb,” “ghayabati-l-jubb.” And the word “ghayaba” is from also “ghaib,” which means “unseen”—unseen, not manifest, not existing presently. So they put him in something that wasn’t seen. They put him to a test, when he could not see what was there. Uhm? What was there was absence: the bottomless pit. The bottomless pit. Now, if you ain’t got no bottom, you can’t see no bottom, you can’t see the foundation. Ah? So they put him in the hole, and the depth to which they put him is called “ghayaba,” “ghayaba,” “ghayaba”—meaning, where, that it was at that point, where things are so mystified, things are so indefinite that nothing can be visualized, nothing can be defined. Nothing is really present. The foundation is in the future. Ah?⁴⁶

Once again, a transcription of an oral uttering fails to convey the sounds that infuse it with meaning. What does not come across in the printed iteration of Imam Mohammed’s exegesis is significant. He pronounced the Arabic phrase “ghayabati al-jubb” with the emphasis on the double “b” at the end. In this way he followed the standard rules of Arabic pronunciation. But then in a way that provided an acoustic correlation between Arabic and English sounds, he pronounced his translation—“the bottomless pit”—with a playful double “t.” In his rendition, Joseph was thrown not into a “pit” but into a “piTT!” Sound was an important dimension of meaning in his cultural translation of the Qurʾan. It was a vital element of his spoken Qurʾan. What a transcription can imitate, however, is how he kept interjecting his sentences with “Right?” and “Uhm?” and “Ah?” He peppered all his speeches with such interjections. They emphasized his key points. Embodied in this function, however, was yet another and deeper purpose: through his “ahs” and “uhms” and “rights,” he continuously called on his listeners to engage in a dialogical call-and-response with the Qurʾan and with him as its speaker.

In the rest of the sermon, Mohammed built on his definition of the word “ghayaba.” By bringing up the image of the bottomless pit, he articulated the Qurʾan as a scripture that addressed the collective memory of his audience, as the people who had been denied freedom. And, as he continued to retell sura 12, he connected the Qurʾanic sign of “the bottomless pit” with Qurʾan 12:21, which he quoted in Arabic, translated into English, and then commented upon. Again, sound was important here. Or rather, in this particular uttering, crucial were his pauses and intonations, which I note in brackets and italics: “And also God says of him [Joseph], he says, ‘wa li-nuʿallimahu min taʾwil al-ahadith’—’and that We may teach him’ [long pause] the mystery [long pause], ‘the mysterious interpretation of some of the great reports, ahadith’ [plural form of the word hadith]. Praise be to Allah [quick pause]. Now, I was talking on the interpretation of the Qurʾan once and some of my, eh, learned elder, he said, ‘you’re reading the Qurʾan wrong, brother imam: “no one knows the taʾwil except Allah”’ [long pause]. Well [short pause], God says that He taught Yusuf [short pause] some of the ‘taʾwil al-ahadith’! [long pause filled with the listeners’ laughter]. We know that only Allah knows it but He doesn’t keep it to Himself, He gives it to whomsoever He wills.”47

Perhaps the most significant pauses in this passage were before and after the word “mystery,” which Mohammed pronounced mysteriously. The sound of his silence conjured a sense of the transformative realm of the God-ordained unknown, the “ghayaba,” or “the bottomless piTT.” This was the place where his lecture’s two major themes, redemption and nature, intertwined. These were the ideas behind his presentation of Joseph as a scriptural sign for the African American people, which he made explicit within the next few minutes. African American collective suffering, he insisted, had a parallel in the Qurʾan. Like Joseph, he said, they were once “cast off, considered to be worthless.” And just as God lifted up Joseph, God was looking out for African Americans as well. What connected their stories was suffering. But suffering alone was not enough. To be redemptive, it had to be endured purposefully, which, in Imam Mohammed’s tafsir, meant staying true to one’s nature. “And [Joseph] was tested, wasn’t he?” he asked. “But they couldn’t take him away from his home. They couldn’t take Joseph away from his home.”⁴⁸ Joseph’s home, he explained, was his God-created human nature. It was a spiritual, rather than a physical, home. As his audience surely remembered, people could be stolen away from their families and sold into slavery, or thrown in jail. But as long as they remained conscious of God and truthful to their nature, they would be ultimately saved.

There was another lesson in Mohammed’s retelling of Yusuf’s story. One can hear it in the hypothetical but surely based-on-experience exchange between him and his “learned elder.” Of course, before saying, “learned elder,” he paused briefly, filling the moment not with silence, but with an “eh.” And then, as he often did while preparing a serious punch, he made his listeners laugh. All of a sudden, while retelling another Muslim authority’s words, he began to speak with a heavy Egyptian accent: “you’re reading the Qurʾan wrong, brother imam: ‘no one knows the taʾwil except Allah.’” Through this light-sounding note, Mohammed addressed two serious matters, both of which had to do with taʾwil, a term for a mystical type of interpretation of divine signs, which Joseph, the Qurʾan says, was naturally able to perform.

No one can imitate an accent without extended exposure to its sounds. Mohammed’s ability to reproduce a particular Arabic accent—and not some generic, Hollywood-style simulation—reflected the fact that he knew and was friends with many Arabic-speaking Muslims in the United States and abroad (Muhammad Abdul Rauf, whom I mentioned in chapter 1, was among his close personal friends). The Egyptian “elder” who corrected Mohammed was also likely a friend: he called him a “brother.” The appraisal this “brother” offered—“you’re reading the Qurʾan wrong”—was fairly typical among Imam Mohammed’s immigrant and foreign observers. Most of them pronounced it with the best intentions, as brotherly advice. Yet, it was a strike to the very core of this African American leader’s authority, which was based on his ability to interpret the Qurʾan for his people.

What made Mohammed’s response to this challenge particularly delicate was that he himself, through sermons and personal example, encouraged his community to learn from other Muslim authorities. Many of his students followed this suggestion. Islam, after all, is a transnational religion and its preeminent centers of learning, such as the Egyptian al-Azhar Seminary, are located abroad. This reality, however, often produces a perception, shared by many in the American Muslim community, that foreign authorities are somehow more authentic and their voices more central. Because of the delicate nature of this dynamic, Mohammed delivered his response informally. He did not spell out what I just explained. Rather, through a joke, he relegated the foreign critic to the margins of his community’s religious discourses. In this sermon and for that particular audience, it was Imam Mohammed who came to occupy the center of the learned Muslim dialogical space—because he spoke the Qurʾan fluently, in their language, while his Egyptian “brother,” with his heavy accent, appeared out of place.

There was, however, yet another and deeper connotation in his reply. In this humorous interjection, he delved into one of the Qurʾan’s most difficult passages, Qurʾan 3:7, which, in Yusuf Ali’s translation, states, “He it is Who has sent down to thee the Book: in it are verses basic or fundamental (of established meaning); they are the foundation of the Book: others are not of well-established meaning. But those in whose hearts is perversity follow the part thereof that is not of well-established meaning. Seeking discord, and searching for its interpretation, but no one knows its true meanings except Allah, and those who are firmly grounded in knowledge say: ‘We believe in it; the whole of it is from our Lord; and none will grasp the Message except men of understanding.’”

Throughout the centuries this verse has fueled numerous arguments, which boil down to the question about the limits of the human understanding of God’s revelation. For the Qurʾan’s interpreters, key in this passage have been two words and a pause. The words are “muhkamat,” which Ali translated as “basic or fundamental,” and “mutashabihat,” which he rendered as “not of well-established meaning.” Both of them are understood as describing two categories of the Qurʾan’s phrases: “muhkamat” designates expressions whose meanings are easily accessible; “mutashabihat” is a word that stands for the scripture’s mysterious signs. And here lies the central dilemma of the Qurʾan or any other divine revelation: who can access its mysteries and how can they do it? What, for example, is the meaning of “God is the light” in Qurʾan 24:35? Yet, before answering this question, exegetes have had to deal with a more immediate problem: where do the phrases in Qurʾan 3:7 begin, and where do they end? Without this important detail, any uttering, divine or human, is not clear. This is why the question of the pause in this verse is crucial. The written Arabic text of the Qurʾan, however, does not answer it: it has no commas or periods. By itself it does not signal whether or not there is a pause between “no one knows its true meaning except Allah” and “and those who are firmly grounded in knowledge.”

This conundrum stems from the fact that the Qurʾan was—and is—a recited, oral text. The breaks between its phrases were—and still are—determined by various traditions of recitation. Its earliest manuscripts had no marks guiding its pronunciation; later manuscripts and printed editions have used elocutionary symbols derived from different schools of recitation. In modern printed English translations, interpreters who think that there is a stop between “except Allah” and “and those” designate it with a period. This definitive punctuation means, as the Imam Mohammed’s Egyptian “elder” and many other Muslim authorities maintain, that “no one knows the taʾwil except Allah.” Period. End of discussion. But other Muslim interpreters have heard the Qurʾan differently. Their traditions of recitation do not have a pause between “except Allah” and “and those.” Such traditions of reciting and hearing the Qurʾan, which conflate the two phrases into a single uttering, authorize taʾwil, the mystical type of interpretation.

Yusuf Ali, of course, marked this contested space with a comma, a tentative pause. In this way, he elegantly and subtly walked between two opposing camps of the Qurʾan’s interpreters. Had he used a period, he would have sided with one camp. Had he used no punctuation mark at all, he would have signaled his belonging to another. His comma was a compromise: it allowed both sides of the exegetical conflict to see in his printed translation a representation of their view. At the same time it was also likely an understated expression of his exegetical opinion. By using a comma and not a period, he avoided limiting the naturally polyvocal quality of this passage and thus hinted that mystical exegesis was indeed possible—for select people, those “who are firmly grounded in knowledge.” Punctuation, with its commas and periods, is a distinct tool of the modern technology of print. And Ali, it seems, was using the tools at his disposal to perform a delicate, almost surgical, exegetical move.

Mohammed’s interpretation was just as elegant. Because he delivered it as live speech, an informal-sounding dialogue with his students, he was able to utilize the power of spoken language, which, if it is shared, enables its participants to complete each other’s phrases. As a preacher, he made use of allusions. His spoken exegesis resonated with his audience because he spoke their language and because many of them learned how to decipher his connotations by hearing him speak and discussing his speeches year after year. Like Yusuf Ali’s, his exegesis was subtle. He chose to engage with the central controversy of the Qurʾanic exegesis by telling a humorous anecdote. Yet, for those who were meant to hear it, his lesson was powerfully direct. Through Joseph’s example he answered the centuries-old Muslim debate about the possibility of mystical interpretations. His answer was simple: taʾwil, the inspired type of exegesis, was real in the Qurʾanic narrative of Yusuf. His obvious allusion, which he did not need to spell out, was that it was also a historical fact. Based on everything else he had said in this and other sermons, at least some of his listeners, perhaps a select few, were prepared to hear what he was implying. They knew that God’s intervention was real. Their collective memory, embodied in their and their preacher’s language, told them that African Americans were uniquely chosen participants in the divinely guided human history. Otherwise, their experience of slavery and their trials in postslavery America would be inexplicable. Their perseverance of suffering made them, as a people, unique; it gave them distinct sensibilities. They heard Imam Mohammed telling them that they were like Joseph. They felt that the Qurʾan was speaking to them through Yusuf. And some of them must have also heard a particularly controversial element of their teacher’s message, which he made sure not to say in a way that could be quoted and therefore misunderstood: do not be surprised if a black man, whom many “cast off” and dismiss, is inspired to understand God’s mysterious signs.

Allusion is a powerful preaching tool, which Mohammed used often. Recurring in his sermons were allusions to his ability to understand the Qurʾan and the Bible. Echoing his interpretation of Joseph’s story, he often implied that this ability was at once unique and natural. The word through which he signaled this correlation was “innocence.” In his oral tafsir the words “innocence” and “innocent” were often related to the state of being uncorrupted by the oppressive environment and remaining connected to one’s fitra, to the natural human disposition toward following the divine path.49 In the 1987 sermon he spoke about the innocence of Joseph, which was to him Yusuf’s truly unique quality. The preservation and cultivation of that innocence was Joseph’s strength. Despite being thrown into the “bottomless pit,” sold into slavery, and imprisoned, he survived and retained the ability to understand God’s signs.

In another speech, at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 2003, Mohammed explained that such natural innocence was also the force behind his own ability to understand the scripture. On that occasion, addressing an audience of Christian and Muslim African Americans, he offered a prolonged biblical exegesis, which he tied to his interpretation of the Qurʾan. Then, using a peculiar trait of oral communication that is prominent in the Qurʾan, he referred to himself in the third person and said:

Don’t forget that this man is an excellent student of the Bible [audience reacts: applause from some Christians and Muslims, and “allahu akbar,” a Muslim equivalent of applause, from some Muslims] and in the discussion of the Bible and its wisdom, et cetera, are bar none [laughter, applause]. I am not intimidated by the Pope of Rome, or the President or the Bishop of the Baptist Conference, or what you call it?—the Baptist National Convention. None of them make me feel uncomfortable. In fact, I can go to sleep and they wake me up and I will continue the conversation [laughter]. Yeh. Not bragging! Not bragging! But I’ve studied diligently and for a long many years and I thank God—God preserved my innocence, my truthfulness. And I was not selfish. I was not reading the Bible to prove something for myself or to disprove something against somebody else. I read it just to know. I didn’t have any prejudices or anything. And God has blessed me with more than most Christian leaders have. I assure you of that. And why shouldn’t He bless me? I do believe in divine intervention! And Mister Fard was divine intervention. Elijah Muhammad, his able spokesperson, divine intervention. Malcolm X—my old friend and the father of this wonderful girl over there [one of Malcolm X’s daughters was in the audience]—divine intervention. Yes. The Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks, Dr. King taking up the cause—divine intervention. So I believe in divine intervention. Yes. Wallace D. Mohammed, breaking the lifeline of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Mister Fard, cutting you off, cutting the umbilical cord so that you can live again [applause]—divine intervention! Yes! So I believe in the divine intervention. So why shouldn’t God then—if I believe that Wallace Deen Mohammed is the divine intervention and He has prepared me to teach you Islam, the Qurʾan and the way of our Prophet, prayers and peace be upon him: I live in a predominantly Christian society, my neighbors are Christian and it’s a Christian public listening, or they will hear it later. And whatever we do in this society, we do it amidst the Christians, on their block, in their neighborhood. So you think God wouldn’t prepare me to also understand and speak with Christians and help you to live better with your Christian neighbors? Yes. So God had to educate me both in Christianity and Islam in order for me to serve His cause here in America [applause]. And I will never be big headed! If I come swollen-headed, if I get an ego, it’s a curse of God on me. It ain’t my nature. Ain’t nothing in me want that. Nothing in me wanna be big shot. Nothing in me wants to be seen. I don’t want to be seen. I want you to see what you need to see to help your life! Not me as a person. Not me. I’m happy not to be seen! … And because of that, I think that’s why God has made me the leader of these people that’s going to change the world [applause and a pause]. I shouldn’t have said “finish changing the world.” Because from the moment that they picked us up and singled us out for abuses, I think we were already being an influence for changing the world. Yes, for changing all the world!50

In introducing Mohammed’s 1987 speech, I mentioned that it took place at a time of crisis, the negative conclusion of a major legal proceeding. At the end of the sermon, after he had delineated his interpretive authority and commented on Joseph’s God-inspired taʾwil, he delivered his concluding remarks. Mindful that his listeners had a shared concern, he made sure to answer their question preemptively: how should they deal with their current predicament? His message, as always, came from the Qurʾan. He reminded them that their scripture communicated the story of Joseph for a specific group of people, for those who “seek answers.” Joseph’s story, then, was a model for his community who, like Joseph, were facing trials and tribulations. And so he preached on:

Now, looking at Joseph’s situation God says He “taught him the mysterious interpretation of some of the great reports.” And God, behind that, He says that God takes charge over His command. He will not leave His orders and commands to others! What does He mean by that? God will not leave the circumstances and commands that He himself has charge over, has given Himself to, he Has pledged Himself to. He has pledged Himself to looking over those things. He will not leave those things to men of the world [brief pause, then proceeding in a rapid tempo]: That’s telling the wile, that’s telling the imperialist, that’s telling dictators, that’s telling the world powers that God will not accept that you suppress the urges that He put in His creature, to put him in his full life and his full existence. Those that are inclined to be in accord with God’s will, He himself will look after them. And if you try to imprison them, He will break that situation. If you try to imprison their mind, He will break that situation. If you try to deceive their instincts, He will break that situation! No matter how much knowledge you get of science and the manipulation of human life, the science and psychology—no you can’t come up with nothing that God has not already devised a scheme that will overcome it. Yeh, that’s what Allah is telling!

This was the high note of the sermon, which Imam Mohammed ended abruptly with yet another reminder. He returned once again to Qurʾan 3:110, which he recited in Arabic and then translated: “you are the best community brought out for the good of all people, commanding by the highest standards and prohibiting all that is offensive and believing in God.”51

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Mohammed’s rendition of the Qurʾanic story of Yusuf made it African American. His preaching belonged to the tradition of African American religious rhetoric. Like other black preachers, he wove the collective memory of his people into the scriptural narratives he spoke. His Christian counterparts developed the tradition of the African American spoken Bible. In conversation with his listeners and many other American Muslims, he participated in the ongoing process of the shaping of an American spoken Qurʾan.

One of the best collections of African American Christian sermons is Cleophus A. LaRue’s The Heart of Black Preaching. Among its many samples, which parallel Imam Mohammed’s technique of enabling scriptural stories to speak in the African American vernacular, is an early 1990s sermon by Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., a contemporary of Mohammed, who became famous in the late 2000s as Barak Obama’s Chicago-based pastor. That sermon, which Wright entitled “What Makes You So Strong?,” sounded similar to Mohammed’s retelling of the Qurʾanic story of Yusuf: it was a rendition of the biblical story of Samson. Wright presented Samson as a biblical personality, whose qualities were a sign for African Americans. Samson’s strength, like the strength of the black people, was inspired by God. It was shaped through suffering. But it was not suffering per se that made Samson strong. It was his perseverance and endurance of suffering. In Wright’s articulation, divinely guided endurance was a badge of African American discipleship and the path toward their redemption.52

Mohammed’s Cleveland sermon carried out a parallel retelling and drew analogous conclusions. Yet, what it did was also distinct. An important feature of his oral tafsir was his style of engaging with the Arabic Qurʾan, which made use of its polysemy. After all, as I have implied, what makes a preacher effective is her or his ability to bring up different shades of scriptural meanings, which resonate with their listeners in particular moments of their lives. For the community of Imam Mohammed, what resonated was his ability to make the Qurʾan speak to African Americans as a people. That was the reason why he stressed that Yusuf was a sign for African American hearers of the Qurʾan. And that is why he emphasized that Ibrahim was indeed an umma. By speaking the Qurʾan with African American emphases and intonations, he made it come alive for those who heard him. He did what the Qurʾan itself calls on its listeners to do: he responded to its invitation to engage in a dialogic communication with the revelation. Of course, such dialogue is possible only when humans and their communities speak from their own memory and their own, ever-changing, and very specific circumstances.

The strength of Mohammed’s preaching is evident in the responses of his audiences, and the extent to which, through several decades, many of them held on to his unique message. The following analysis of a particular example highlights the perseverance and unique characteristics of W. D. Mohammed’s tradition of speaking Qurʾan.

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Friday, May 22, 2009, was unusual. The ordinarily quiet parking lot in front of the As-Salaam Islamic Center in Raleigh transformed into a mini-bazaar. The typical Friday gathering of some forty people swelled to almost a hundred. The reason for the change was a visiting khatib, Imam Faheem Shuaibe. The congregation’s leader, Imam Oliver Muhammad, introduced Shuaibe to his community as a “person who needs no introduction.” He later told me that Shuaibe was known as one of the “first-row students of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed.” In May 2009 Shuaibe was on a speaking tour of the United States. The mosques, such as the one in Raleigh, invited him to speak at a critical juncture in the history of their movement: their leader had passed away less than a year before, and the community throughout the country was struggling with questions of authority, including their interpretive authority. There was, of course, an additional element of crisis: it was also the time of an economic depression, and many people in this middle-class congregation were losing, or afraid of losing, their jobs and homes. Over the festive atmosphere of their Friday gathering—which included a “Fry-day” cookout with the best fried catfish I ever tasted—hovered a cloud of distress.

Shuaibe’s mission during the tour was related to his status as a “first-row” student of Imam Mohammed. For at least thirty years, he had served as one of the premier exponents of his leader’s teachings. For example, in the 1990s he published a series of brochures that defended Mohammed’s interpretations of the Qurʾan from attacks by some African American, immigrant, and foreign-based critics, whom Shuaibe described as “Salafi.”53 I heard about these brochures in my research in North Carolina and in California’s Bay Area, where I interviewed students of Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir, some of whom spoke highly of Shuaibe as a prominent local leader. In the late 2000s his presence was prolific on the websites affiliated with W. D. Mohammed’s leadership, such as www.newafricaradio.com. His base was in Oakland, California, where he served as the imam of Masjid Waritheen and director of the Mohammed Schools of Oakland.

At least two other details distinguished Imam Shuaibe. The first—and, as my conversation partners in W. D. Mohammed’s community often stressed, minor detail—was that his predecessor at the Oakland mosque was a person known as “Mr. Muhammad Abdullah.” Many, including Shuaibe, believed that Mr. Abdullah was none other than Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam. Apparently W. D. Mohammed never confirmed Mr. Abdullah’s identity publicly. Shuaibe recalled in one of our conversations that Imam Mohammed had introduced this man once in the 1990s to a large gathering in Los Angeles. While speaking from a stage, he invited Mr. Abdullah to come next to him and said, “This man is not that man.”⁵⁴ Shuaibe’s take on this phrase was indicative of the discipline of interpretation Imam Mohammed had instilled in his listeners. For Imam Shuaibe, it meant that his teacher did not deny the “material reality” of Mr. Abdullah being the same person as Fard Muhammad. Yet, he emphasized that the mind of “this man” was different from the mind of “that man,” of Fard Muhammad in the early years of the Nation—because, like most members of the movement, Mr. Abdullah/Professor Fard changed through the teachings of W. D. Mohammed.

The second detail is more important. People inside and outside of W. D. Mohammed’s community, those who knew about Shuaibe and spoke highly of him, emphasized to me his reputation as a Muslim scholar actively involved in dialogue with Muslim authorities outside the movement.⁵⁵ During his khutba at the Raleigh mosque, he relied on this reputation. This came across in the friendly explanations that several people in the audience offered to me as we milled around in the mosque’s lobby and its parking lot after the prayer: “He is one of our scholars,” “He teaches well,” and “If you want to learn about Imam Mohammed, listen to Imam Shuaibe.” Some also added that the future of the movement was ensured by the work of people like Shuaibe, who “carry on the tradition.” One key aspect in the continuation of this tradition was in how its adherents negotiated their unique religious articulations within the dialogical space they shared with competing American and international Muslim discourses. Here, of paramount importance was their connection to the Qurʾan and their distinctive discipline of its interpretation.

Shuaibe began his khutba with a Qurʾanic passage, verse 40 from sura 9 (“al-tawba,” or “Repentance”). His sermon was a meditation on this verse, which he presented as speaking directly to African Americans in any situation, including the time after the passing of their teacher. His choice of sura al-Tawba was significant. Many Muslim exegetes regard it as the last revealed sura of the Qurʾan. In addition, his selection of verse 40 was particularly relevant in the context of his sermon, because in it the Qurʾan addressed the memory of its first community of listeners: it spoke directly to the companions of the Prophet Muhammad and reminded them about an episode from their short history—the story of the Prophet and one of his close followers, Abu Bakr, fleeing from Mecca toward Medina to escape the persecution of their Meccan foes. At one point in their journey, the two fugitives were about to be caught by a Meccan posse, which included experienced trackers, who were hunting after the runaways by tracing their footprints. The fugitives hid in a cave. By a miracle of God, the pursuers did not enter that sanctuary, and the Prophet and his companion were saved.

By choosing to speak from this passage, Shuaibe attempted to interweave this Qurʾanic memory—as the Qurʾan had once told it to its first associates—with the memory of the “associates of Imam W. D. Mohammed.” He recited Qurʾan 9:40 in Arabic and then provided his own translation. Or rather, in the style of Imam Mohammed, his translation was an interpretative rendering of Yusuf Ali’s translation.56 He continued,

Just a general translation: “If you don’t help, surely Allah helped him when he was driven out by the unbelievers being one among the two, being the second of two, when the two were in the cave, when he said to his companion, ‘don’t fear’—or actually—‘don’t grieve, surely Allah is with us.’ And Allah sent down upon him tranquility and security and strengthened him by forces you did not see. And Allah made the word of those who reject as-sufla’—“He humbled it,” “He lowered it.”⁵⁷

Shuaibe’s “or actually” was his corrective interjection into a foreign authority’s interpretation of the Qurʾan. It set the tone for the rest of his sermon. He used Ali’s translation as a basis for his message. It was a convenient choice: his audience, following W. D. Mohammed’s instructions, had been reading Ali’s text since the late 1970s. But Shuaibe, like his teacher, immediately signaled that he was speaking directly from the Arabic Qurʾan. The Qurʾan emerged here as a text of his community, whose interpretation had to be done by them.

To underscore this point, Shuaibe immediately confirmed that this verse was part of the ritual and speaking practice of the congregation he was addressing. “You can make this connection right away,” he told them, repeating in Arabic a phrase from another Qurʾanic sura, “‘thumma raddadnahu asfala safilin’—diminished it, right?” Through this move, without translation, he connected his interpretation of the word “as-sufla” in Qurʾan 9:40 to Qurʾan 95:5, which Yusuf Ali translated as, “Then do We abase him (to be) the lowest of the low.”

Sura 95 is one of the Qurʾan’s shortest chapters. Because it is short, it is often recited in prayer and meditation. Therefore, for the audience at the Raleigh mosque, as for most practicing Muslims, Shuaibe’s Qurʾanic quote required no translation. His act of skipping translation had a didactic purpose: it prompted his listeners to begin engaging directly with his exegesis of the Arabic Qurʾan, based on their own Qurʾanic memory. His allusion to Qurʾan 95 was additionally pertinent because this particular sura had been central in the oral tafsir of his and his listeners’ teacher. Imam Mohammed’s preferred way of interpreting the Qurʾan was by the Qurʾan itself, and Qurʾan 95 featured prominently in his interpretations of other Qurʾanic passages.58

Subtler still was Shuaibe’s attempt to follow W. D. Mohammed’s technique of relating the sound of the Arabic Qurʾan to the everyday words and experiences of his African American audience. In Mohammed’s 1987 sermon it came across in his rendering of the phrase “bottomless pit” as a “bottomless piTT!,” which sounded like the Arabic “jubb.” In the Raleigh khutba, Shuaibe did something similar right after he had offered his translation of the phrase in 9:40 that contains the word “as-sufla.” His technical translation of this passage, which in Arabic reads, “wa jaʿala kalimata alladhina kafaru as-sufla,” was, “And Allah made the word of those who reject as-sufla.” Then he added an explanation: “He [God] humbled it, He lowered it.” To provide a cultural translation, however, he brought up an example from the run-of-the-mill experience of his listeners, especially, he said, “the sisters.” (About 60 percent of the people in his audience that day were women.) “Do you hear?” he asked, “What does the word ‘sufla’ sound like?—Soufflé!”

Through this acoustic resonance between similar-sounding but unrelated words, Shuaibe made the first subtle move toward the exegetical lesson of his sermon, which had to do with fear. What does it mean that God made the “the word of those who reject [the revelation] as-sufla”? This means, he explained, that it had become like a soufflé. And, “when you prepare soufflé, what is one thing you fear? Falling! One breath—puff, it’s gone!” Later in the sermon he would remind his listeners about what the Qurʾan and W. D. Mohammed had said: “Adam was made from sounding clay. It wasn’t just clay; it was sounding clay. Meaning that part of the nature of Adam is how he relates to sound. Ah?”59

Shuaibe’s technique of conveying scriptural meanings through sound followed an African American tradition of preaching.⁶⁰ In the Raleigh sermon, as in many of his other speeches, he added to it an interpretation through etymology of words. In this respect he was also moving along the trajectory charted by other figures who shared the legacy of the Nation of Islam. In the Nation a classic example of a similar rhetorical practice, which went beyond scripture, was Malcolm X’s explanation of the word “negro,” which he deciphered as being derived from the Greek word “nekros” or “a dead body.”⁶¹ The Nation’s religious teachings, he stipulated, were meant to resurrect the “dead body” of the African American people for a new life. W. D. Mohammed also used the word “negro” in a way that was similar to Malcolm X’s explanation. In the 1987 sermon this word connoted a black person who had not yet discovered his or her true nature. That true nature was muslim—as in any person who submits to God and not necessarily “Muslim” as an identity marker. Another example, which some of my conversation partners in W. D. Mohamed’s community brought up, was his play with the sound of the name of the Qurʾanic Adam. What does “Adam” sound like? Mohammed answered that it sounds like “atom” and taught that, in nature, the atom is the basic building block for everything else, which contains the potential for everything else. In his tafsir, the Qurʾanic Adam was the symbol for the human potential inherent in every human being.⁶²

Shuaibe structured his Raleigh khutba as a dialogical progression toward its rhetorical peak. He climbed the mount of his sermon together with his audience and used the Qurʾan to mark their path. Each step he took, each of the sermon’s transitional points, was demarcated by yet another Qurʾanic signpost. And as he spoke, he intertwined the Qurʾan with references—more often implicit than obvious—to the collective memory of his listeners. Central here was the story of the Prophet Muhammad and Abu Bakr’s miraculous escape from the Meccan posse.

After reciting and translating Qurʾan 9:40, he acknowledged, “you all surely know this story,” and explained that, while preparing the sermon, he had consulted some sources: The Life of Muhammad by the Egyptian writer Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Mawdudi’s tafsir, and the classic biography of the Prophet Muhammad by Muhammad ibn Ishaq, an eighth-century Iraqi scholar. He said that these and many other sources depicted the moment of the Prophet and Abu Bakr’s miraculous salvation in the cave as “the turning point, the key moment” in the history of Muslims. Had the Prophet and Abu Bakr been captured and killed, the history would certainly be different. “Of course,” Shuaibe immediately affirmed, “Allah wouldn’t allow this.” But, at the moment when the two runaways were hiding in their cave, the danger they faced looked very real. To underscore this peril, Shuaibe reminded his listeners that the Meccan trackers, who were pursuing Muhammad and Abu Bakr, were “professionals—these guys don’t miss!” And so they tracked the trail, left by the Messenger of God and the person who would become the first caliph, to the entrance of the cave where the two were hiding.

This, Shuaibe remarked, was where Yusuf Ali’s translation failed. The Arabic Qurʾan records the words of assurance, which the Prophet had offered to Abu Bakr, as “la tahzan.” Ali interpreted this phrase as “don’t fear.” Shuaibe, however, stressed that this Qurʾanic phrase must be translated in the way closest to its plain Arabic meaning: “don’t grieve.” This interpretation was informed by a contextual approach to the Qurʾan. Shuaibe explained this by reminding his audience that the situation the Prophet and Abu Bakr had been facing was so dire that Abu Bakr “was like ‘it’s over now!’” He continued, “It wasn’t just like fear. It was like—‘oh, man, it’s over now!’ What the Qurʾanic word means is that, in Abu Bakr’s mind, the situation was already resolved—they were already caught, there was no way for them to be rescued. And [that is] when the Prophet said, ‘la tahzan inna allaha maʿana!’—don’t grieve surely Allah is with us!”

Of course, this Shuaibe’s audience knew the outcome of this narrative well: God had protected the two refugees by inspiring a bird to build a nest at the entrance to the cave and a spider to weave a web over it. The trackers thought that surely such things could not happen overnight and decided not to enter the cavern. For his listeners, at that particular time in their lives, Shuaibe brought up an additional meaning of this story. Alluding to the crisis in the movement and explicitly commenting on the economic crisis in the country, which threatened many African Americans in Raleigh, he preached in a loud staccato: “That has to become your regular equipment in life! Whenever you think, ‘oh, it’s over now! They’re gonna take away my house!’—la tahzan! Don’t fear! Surely God is with you!” But then he paused, waited to hear his community’s quiet attention, and said in a low voice, “Now, you gotta be innocent now.”

By preaching the concept of innocence, Shuaibe engaged a powerful trope from W. D. Mohammed’s rhetoric, which time and again reminded his people that, through the revelation, God spoke directly to them and that, no matter how difficult their circumstances, they would be saved as long as they were with God. Shuaibe continued to speak in this tradition as he went on with his sermon. He preached that, if people in his community wanted to remain true to God, they should strive to heed the words of the Qurʾan and the Prophet Muhammad: “don’t grieve, surely Allah is with us.” Like Abu Bakr, they should neither grieve nor fear—even when their teacher had just passed away and even as agents of predatory banks were about to enter their homes and take away their families’ places of refuge.63 “If you’re in Allah’s plan,” he reminded them, “you’re in Allah’s hands.”

But how would the hearers of the Qurʾan at the Raleigh mosque know that they were in God’s hands? Shuaibe formulated his answer through yet another Qurʾanic citation, aided, once again, by Yusuf Ali’s translation:

Allah has a project, an assignment for us—wa-l-takun minkum ummatun—Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good….⁶⁴ Our job is to build an umma and a jumuʿa [a Friday congregation] is not an umma…. Until you look like the Chinese or Koreans look in Chinatown or Korea town, until you look like the Hispanics look in their location, until we, as Muslims, look like they look, we don’t have umma. Ah? Until I walk out of my house and I don’t have to go to no other school but my school, and when I leave school, when I go into a corporation, I go into a business, I go into a business with the support of my community. Ah? When I go to get my clothes clean, I hear the person at the register say ‘as-salamu ʿalaykum.’ [The audience reacts with ‘allahu akbar!’] When I go to the gas station, when I go to the theater, the movies that I see, when I go to a bookstore, the books that I open up, when I hear the songs on my radio station, and I see the programs on my television station—Now we’re talking umma! Until then, we’re just renters in this situation…. But that’s Allah’s project, Allah wants Muslims to have that. He don’t need that. We need that! “wa-l-takun minkum ummatun” [literally, “and let there be among them a community”]—you and I be an umma!

My, or any, transcription of this passage fails to convey the rises and quells in the volume and tempo of the preacher’s delivery. This passage was one of the high moments in the sermon, which became audible when his phrasing became rapid and his voice, projected from a classroom-style podium, rose and swept across the men sitting on the floor in the front of the prayer space and women sitting on chairs behind them. Shuaibe punctuated his sequences of high-volume and elongated sentences through meaningful pauses. He stopped for a second before his quietly interrogative “ahs.” Immediately after the second “ah,” he almost shouted: “Now we are talking umma!” His pauses highlighted the words “umma” and “community.” What gave strength to the sound, style and substance of his speaking was the long tradition of African American Christian and Muslim preaching, with its characteristic stress on community uplift. After this passage, quite suddenly and to give yet another acoustic sign of transition, he paused once again, looked around the room, and then proceeded to teach in a low voice, in a manner that was distinctly slow and methodical.

Shuaibe’s rhythm of preaching reflected his training in W. D. Mohammed’s school of rhetoric. His teacher would do something very similar in many of his speeches. He would typically start his lectures by speaking slowly, in a low voice. He would raise the tempo of his delivery several times in a sermon, with each high note marking a key point in his commentary on the revelation and African American life. Then, abruptly, he would make sure to slow down again. And he would always conclude on a quiet, contemplative note. Both preachers’ styles were undoubtedly influenced by the African American Christian tradition of preaching. It was also in line with the oratorical legacy of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad and W. D. Mohammed spoke more like teachers than preachers. Through this distinction their preaching rhetorically enacted the message of Professor Fard Muhammad. The fiery style of preaching was too Christian for the people who had converted out of Christianity. Their mode of public speaking was deliberately lecture-like; it was their way of speaking as Muslims.

In the Raleigh sermon, Shuaibe followed this trajectory of his community’s tradition. And although for a few moments he sounded like a fiery preacher, he made sure to quickly slow down and begin to speak, once again, like a teacher and not a preacher. What made this transition visible was that, after the pause, he opened his copy of the Qurʾan and adjusted it on the shelf of his podium. He took another moment to lean down and search for something in the briefcase stored underneath his lectern. From there he took out another book, which he then placed next to his Qurʾan. After this professorial-looking maneuver, he opened up the Qurʾan and began to read it out loud. Acoustically and visually, his busy pause was the quietest point in the sermon. It was the precursor to its punch line.

Shuaibe resumed his progress toward his khutba’s climax by returning again to Qurʾan 9:40. In a low-key and methodical manner, he recited in Arabic the opening line of the verse: “illa tansurahu faqad nasarahu allahu idh akhrajahu alladhina kafaru thania ithnayn idh huma fi-l-ghari—when the two of them were in al-ghari.” That was how he spoke this passage—most of it in Arabic. Of course, he had interpreted it already, at the beginning of his sermon. Here, he translated a part of it—“when the two of them were in”—to remind his listeners about what they had already heard and to highlight the next Qurʾanic word, which he made sure not to translate: “al-ghar.” Then he made yet another pause, looked over his audience to see that they were paying attention, and continued to speak slowly: “Now, that’s the key word here, for this subject. It’s translated [by Yusuf Ali] as ‘cave.’ That’s how you translate it. It’s translated as ‘cave.’ But you know the name of the sura, sura 18? You know the name of that sura? Al-Kahf. Al-Kahf. Translated as ‘cave.’ Well, this is God speaking. So how come [in 9:40] He didn’t say they were both in the kahf? [pause]. Let’s see.”

At this point, Shuaibe opened his other book. He half-lifted it up and explained, “It’s a dictionary of the Qurʾan.” Before using it, however, he reminded his listeners that in their community the preferred method of interpreting the Qurʾan was by the Qurʾan itself: “Of course, the Qurʾan is the best dictionary. But this is very good. It’s recommended by the Imam [W. D. Mohammed], rahim allahu ʿalayhi [‘mercy of God be upon him,’ a Muslim equivalent of ‘God rest his soul’]. Maybe that will help you.”65 He explained that he merely wanted to see what the dictionary said about the word “ghar”: “This ghar. I just want to look at, look at.” And then he stopped in midsentence, paused again, and sighed: “Ah. Imam Mohammed, rahim allahu ʿalayhi, he [pause]. There is [pause]. Well, I’m not capable of measuring of what he’s done for us [pause]. Because what he’s done for us hasn’t come to the end yet. So how do you measure? You can’t measure. Don’t think that his life ended with his physical life on this earth. That was Allah’s mercy to him and to us [long pause]. Because we aren’t easy people to hang around too long [surge of laughter].”

Through this humorous, self-deprecating, and almost familial note Shuaibe gestured toward all the memories he had shared with his listeners—all the moments of their complex experiences as members of W. D. Mohammed’s community, including those they viscerally remembered as instances of their human failings. In close groups, as in families, people often speak in comparable modes. Through hints, jokes, and half-sentences, they share memories that must not be explicitly voiced. Such memories are too intimate to be openly displayed, even among closest associates. Allusions to such delicate recollections are among the most effective ways of making rhetorical connections. They recall shared and intimate bonds among those who “get it.” Because of this, skillful preachers often use such allusions, often phrased as jokes, when they attempt to establish an affinity with their audiences. In the Raleigh sermon this moment of intimate connection was a part of Shuaibe’s teaching moment. Through a wave of spirited laughter, his listeners let him know that they heard what he was saying. And like any effective preacher, he was not going to waste this opportunity by saying something superfluous. What followed was his critique of who his people were as Muslims, of how they engaged with the Qurʾan and their realities. This correction would become his way of guiding his audience toward a Qurʾanic response to their current trials.

“You see,” he explained, ordinarily the word “ghar” was “translated as a ‘cave.’” But the dictionary recommended by W. D. Mohammed indicated that such a translation was incorrect. Most translators, he said, misinterpreted this word.⁶⁶ They did not notice that the actual root of “ghar” consisted of three Arabic consonants: ghayr, ya, and ra. This root, he explained, indicated a condition of and a potential for change. From it, he taught, came the Arabic nouns for “change” and “transformation” and their corresponding verbs.

After this technical intervention, he paused once again, and said in a quiet and intimate voice:

Now why is it important? It’s important. That is so important because, as I introduced this idea, I mentioned Imam Mohammed. And I say that because [pause]—the fact that Imam Mohammed, what he brought us, has not been thoroughly appreciated, because we haven’t yet learned how to read the Qurʾan in the original language. That’s really, that’s a large part of why you don’t get this proximity of energy and language and life between [the Qurʾan and] most of the community associated with Imam Mohammed. And, if I’m wrong I stand to be corrected, but [another pause]—we are not yet readers of the Qurʾan, and understanding it in the original language, and therefore unable to make a connection between the thought that Imam Mohammed has given us, which is borne out of the Qurʾan, and the Qurʾan itself.

Shuaibe’s critique was weighty. No wonder he worked so hard to establish a sense of intimacy with his listeners. It enabled him to deliver his harsh lesson without so much as a murmur of apprehension from his audience. Besides, he was already known for offering such critique on many occasions. His reputation in W. D. Mohammed’s community was that of a leading Muslim scholar. In this capacity he participated in the effort to educate the young people in the movement. His role as the head of a K-12 Muslim school in Oakland was a part of this reputation. In addition and very significantly, he had spearheaded the effort to facilitate the training of his community’s young adults at Muslim educational centers abroad. On his visit to Raleigh, he was accompanied by a young man who had recently returned from studying in Syria.

But there was more to Shuaibe’s ability to deliver his critique than his skill as a preacher and his reputation as his community’s religious authority. His sermon was yet another reminder about the intimate connection between W. D. Mohammed and the Qurʾan. Mohammed’s authority rested on this relationship. And Shuaibe preached that the future of those who called themselves “associates of Imam W. D. Mohammed” depended on their ability to read and understand the scripture. The obvious implication, which he did not need to explicate, was that they needed to overcome their reliance on immigrant and foreign intermediaries. That was the reason behind his working through Yusuf Ali’s translation. His critique was a reiteration of a message that W. D. Mohammed had constantly and variously repeated: now that the former members of the Nation of Islam had embraced a Sunni Muslim identity, they had to cultivate their own way of being members of the global umma. Shuaibe told the Raleigh community, echoing Mohammed, that the key to this complex balancing act—of being independent and yet not disconnected from other Muslims—was in their hands, that they needed to “read the Qurʾan on [their] own.” He explained that they needed to tread toward this goal by following the “methodology of Imam Mohammed” and that “[although] Imam Mohammed didn’t live long enough to tell us everything that we need to understand about the Qurʾan, he worked hard, al-hamdu li-llah, and long to give us insights, tools that you can have in your own little tool belt. Ah?”

How could the people in the community read and understand the Qurʾan on their own, after their teacher’s death and without excessive dependency on foreign authorities? Following “the methodology of Imam Mohammed,” Shuaibe pointed to a Qurʾanic sign that illuminated the path his listeners had to walk. That sign was the Qurʾanic “ghar.” He explained that, in the Qurʾan, it was a polyvocal sign. Its quality of conveying a multitude of meanings reflected God’s way of speaking to different communities and that African American hearers of the Qurʾan would find in it their unique connotations: “So if Allah, subhanahu wa taʿala, chose to use this word, ‘ghar’ as opposed to ‘kahf,’ it means something! Allah don’t talk like us [listeners’ laughter; preacher’s pause]. Allah means exactly, precisely, scientifically what He meant to say. And when you look deeper you find a broader connection. So what’s the connection, brother?”

Like his teacher, Shuaibe formulated his answer by reading the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan; he discovered the answer in another Qurʾanic passage. Likely by the habit cultivated over his three decades of preaching, he located the proof-text for his interpretation in a verse that many Muslim preachers all over the world recite and interpret routinely, Qurʾan 8:53. Muslims who attend Friday prayers hear it often. Therefore, he recited it quickly, from memory and without searching for it in his still-open copy of the Qurʾan. He trusted that his community knew its meaning and provided only a partial translation: “‘dhalika bi-anna allaha lam yaku mughayyiran niʿmatan anʾamaha ʿala qawmin hatta yughayyiru ma bi-anfusihim’—Allah will never change the condition of the people until they change it themselves with their own, with what’s going on in their own self.”67

Leaning upon the shared memory of an often-repeated Qurʾanic phrase, he then made another step towards his sermon’s apex. The importance of this step was audible in the increasingly rapid tempo of his delivery and the elevated volume of his voice, which he suddenly slowed down and lowered in the middle of the utterance after an expressive pause:

So the same thing that you get change from, same word, the same three radicals give us that word ‘cave.’ So Abu Bakr and Muhammad, they were in the middle of the biggest transition ever! The biggest change that was about to take place in the history of man! What was going on in that moment in that cave?! The whole world was about to change! The whole world was about to change! [He pauses and switches to a lower octave.] And it all hinged upon whether the Meccans listened to the trackers. Ah? Or whether Abu Bakr was going to say, “I give up!” Ah? He wasn’t gonna do that. But he was grieving. So that was an important ghar. That was an important moment of transition. That was an important situation. That was an important change. That was a change that had the tendency to provoke fear and grief.

Here, Shuaibe made yet another preacherly pause. He gave a long glance over his audience. For a second he looked directly at me. He did not know who I was. The community’s leader, Imam Oliver Muhammad, would introduce me to him after that Friday prayer. From what I could tell, I was the only non–African American Muslim in that gathering, and probably the only person not affiliated with the larger W. D. Mohammed community. It seemed that Shuaibe noticed my out-of-placeness. Then he sighed, paused again, and continued to speak:

Listen associates of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed—forgive me if I’m being too parochial for some of you, but I’m here now and I’m gonna have to talk to folks [pause, and then a sudden outburst of volume]—YOU ARE IN THE CAVE! You’re in an important moment of transition. You’re going through changes. You have doubts. You don’t know who to listen to. You don’t know who’s right, who’s wrong. They’re coming at us this way, they’re coming at us that way: “Oh look at so and so!—they’re doing that!” Well it says, “la tahzan inna allaha maʿana!” Don’t grieve! Allah was in charge before, Allah is in charge now and Allah is always in charge! You have nothing to fear if you’re in touch with the plan and the project of Allah [pause]. Now, if you’re not sure if you’re in Allah’s plans, I understand [quiet laughter]. But, those who are in the plan, you know what I’m saying.

This was the sermon’s crescendo, whose energy Shuaibe used to expound the message of his exegesis. He emphasized that God had helped the Prophet and his companion exactly when they needed a miracle most, at the moment of their historical change. When things seemed to hang by a thread, “that’s when Allah helped them.” And here he reminded his listeners of what the Qurʾan says in its depiction of that crucial moment—that God had “sent down sakina [tranquility and calmness]” upon the Prophet and his associate. To accentuate it, he repeated it one more time: “Allah sent down the sakina.”

Shuaibe spent the rest of his seventy-two-minute sermon tracking down from this rhetorical summit. He spoke more about salvation at times of tribulation. And he reiterated that deliverance was in the hands of the believers: that they had to persevere and strive to be “in Allah’s plan.” After he had completed his khutba, he led the community in their collective Friday prayer. As he and we prayed, he recited a long passage from sura al-Tawba, which included “don’t grieve.”

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Shuaibe’s sermon is an example of the profound influence of W. D. Mohammed’s oral tafsir on his movement’s speakers. To be effective, a preacher must speak in the language of his or her listeners, connect with their memories and be in sync with their sensitivities. A sound sermon, therefore, is a dynamic reflection of the community to which it belongs. Like speech itself, sermons are always collective. Some of their most telling meanings are not even, technically speaking, linguistic: they are embodied in the listeners’ responses, audible in their laughter, silences, or groans, which signal that they know what the preacher is saying. It is on this level—the level of sensibilities—that W.D. Mohammed translated the Qurʾan into an African American sacred text. How did he do it? By constantly preaching and speaking the scripture.

I mentioned earlier that many academic and journalistic depictions of W. D. Mohammed and his community tend to focus on the reform of the Nation of Islam and overlook the subsequent decades of their lives. This tendency is understandable: many journalists and academics, particularly historians, examine their subjects with the help of dates that mark dramatic transformations. From this perspective, the period after “Imam Mohammed moved decisively toward the religious mainstream” may appear uneventful, perhaps even boring, and therefore uninteresting to explore. After the reform, there were no big dates to their history. Most of the time, after this period, Mohammed devoted to preaching. And preaching, by its nature, is very repetitive. The change it cultivates is difficult to demarcate.

In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Imam Mohammed repeated himself a lot. In speech after speech, until his passing in 2008, he returned to the same key ideas: nature, history, community life, and, most of all, redemption. Time after time, he used the same, or similar, phrases and made the same, or similar, points. He did it because he taught his community the Qurʾan. And scriptures are not like other books—they are not textbooks or novels, which can be read once or twice, and then comfortably forgotten. People hold on to their scriptures because they want them to inform their lives. They want their Qurʾan, or any other sacred text, to keep on speaking.

In one conversation I asked Imam Shuaibe what he thought about the repetitive nature of his teacher’s preaching. “Of course,” he told me, Imam Mohammed repeated the same notes: “he was like a trumpet”—trumpets have three plungers, and the music flows from it based on which plungers are held down or up—“and that’s how he played his tune to the world.”68 I liked his comeback because it resonated with my own hearing of his teacher’s unique sound. To me, Warith Deen Mohammed sounded like Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917–1982). Light listeners of jazz might know Monk’s name, they may even give him a listen, but then they tend to cast him off, because, to an unaccustomed ear, his sound is jarring. Yet, for those who take time to hear it, his music eventually emerges, like Yusuf from “the bottomless piTT,” as a creation of unparalleled beauty.

To translate this into an academic vernacular, Shuaibe’s explanation is akin to Walter Ong’s description of the art of authors/speakers of oral texts: they “rhapsodize”; they stitch “songs together.” W. D. Mohammed’s preaching contained in it volumes upon volumes of oral tafsir, where he stitched together the stories and sounds of the Qurʾan and the collective memory, the “songs,” of his people. His text was oral and oral texts are distinct. As Ong explained, they live through repetitive “voicings.”⁶⁹ (On a different note, those who do not give time to the Qurʾan often complain that it is too repetitive and, therefore, confusing and perhaps even boring.)⁷⁰

Indeed, Mohammed’s work over the last three decades of his life involved incessant repetitions of scriptural signs. Yet, in each moment, his Qurʾanic renditions were also different, because each time he spoke, he addressed an audience facing a different trial: he spoke to people moving through life. And because of this movement of life, he constantly repeated that his listeners needed to keep themselves attuned to what he called “the movement of Scripture.” What he meant by it was the Qurʾan’s polyvocality, which allows its diverse communities of hearers to hear it differently, at different times. Therefore, he kept moving and speaking. Each year, he traversed the country dozens of times to speak in front of live audiences. All along, he spoke “from Scripture” and “from somewhere else”—the collective experiences and memories of his people.

During my research, many people in Mohammed’s community reminded me about a slogan he had coined in the late 1970s: “Words make people.” To them the words he taught throughout his life were Qurʾanic. And in a way he wanted them to live their lives as a Qurʾanic people as well—not as some strange new creatures, who would suddenly forget their own memories, but as people who would be at once fully Muslim and African American. In his last public speech, which he delivered two days before his passing, he said, “When I’m talking to an audience, I’m really concerned for my students. I want them to be present and take notes, because I’ve always given information to my students at the same time as speaking to a public audience.”71 Through this comment he summarized his lifelong endeavor, which was to engage his listeners in the discipline of hearing the Qurʾan. What they heard was him speaking a Qurʾan-based language, which he fashioned through his own hearing of the revelation. In the Qurʾan he heard redemption. He spoke what he heard.

This chapter’s two opening quotations are a call-and-response from Mohammed and one of his hearers. Mohammed’s quote—“What good is knowledge if you can’t hear it?”—is from a speech he gave in the late 1970s. The respondent, who chose to be anonymous, was one of my mentors, an elder in the community who helped me learn its language. One of our tutoring sessions took place on the front porch of his house, on a hot late afternoon in the summer of 2009. We spent a couple of hours together, mostly consumed by his recollections. After a while, our conversation came to a long pause: he was tired and I ran out of questions. But we still had time. So we sat looking over his neighborhood’s quietly beautiful tree-lined street, with some kids riding bikes at a distance. We shared a silence. And then he said, “You know, I was freed by the revelation.”

I think I heard him. From what I know, he was not speaking of an exact dramatic moment, an earth-shaking event to which a historian might be able to assign a date. He was not freed in a second, or a week, or a year. Rather, he transformed himself as he was hearing, time after time and for at least four decades, the oral tafsir of his teacher. His freedom was not a date but a process—because, as Imam Mohammed taught, freedom is a way of living, which must be ceaselessly nurtured. A redemptive scripture must be perpetually remembered. What Mohammed taught was a language of the Qurʾan. For him and his community, it was the language of their collective salvation. After all, as he once said, “human beings are formed by language.” And, “if you can create a new language environment for a people, you can give that people a new lease on life.”⁷²

In some technical respects his tafsir was not unusual. His declared method of interpreting the Qurʾan by the Qurʾan, for example, was not exclusive to him. The fact that he spoke about it reflected his engagement with other Muslim authorities. The tafsir of his community, therefore, was not out of sync with international Muslim currents. At the same time, while speaking as members of the global Muslim family, this community has had a unique sound. They have been speaking the Qurʾan with a distinctly African American conceptual accent. An example of it is Imam Shuaibe’s exegetical pursuit of redemption in the Qurʾanic “ghar,” which reprised his teacher’s search for salvation in Joseph’s “ghayaba.” Such echoing communicated their belonging to a particular tradition of African American engagement with the revelation. A sign of this tradition is the quest for redemption in the Arabic Qurʾan.

What a sacred text says depends on how humans voice it. An African American spoken Qurʾan cannot but speak the language of redemption. And “surely God is a hearer.”73