Dear Non-Black Muslims: Your Silence is Not Peaceful
By Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King made the above statement in his first book, Stride toward Freedom, and would go on to express this idea multiple times until the end of his career. King chastised the white liberals of his time for their unwillingness to act in the fight for Black civil rights. He correctly saw them as assisting in the commission of evil.
In their import and impact, King’s sentiments remind me of the oft-repeated saying of the Prophet Muhammad (s): “Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.” Acting when there is evil is fundamental to our faith and anti-Black racism is a great evil of the world–past and present.
Yet, it would seem many of the American Muslim community’s laypeople and leadership would not only accept this evil but even argue that it doesn’t exist for the sake of being “peaceful.” The most recent and notable example was when Sheikh Hamza Yusuf at the 2016 RIS (Reviving the Islamic Spirit) Convention supported his views of not allying or supporting current Black liberation movements within the U.S. because “we are a people who call to peace.”
I wonder when in history that inaction, in the face of oppression, has ever led to peace.