veiled4allah: jihadis in the hood?

The rise of Islam and Islamism in American inner cities can be explained as a product of immigration and racial politics, deindustrialization and state withdrawal, and the interwoven cultural forces of black nationalism, Islamism and hip-hop that appeal strongly to disenfanchised black, Latino, Arab and South Asian youth... ...Many blacks and Latinos in American metropolises live in poverty and feel alienated from the country's liberal political and cultural traditions. Repelled by America's permissive consumerist culture, many search for a faith and culture that provides rules and guidelines for life. Often they are drawn to strands of Christianity that endorse patriarchy, "family values" and abstinence. But many young African-Americans, and increasingly Latinos, reject Christianity, which they see as the faith of a guilty and indifferent establishment. Christian America has failed them, and stripped them of their "ethnic honor." Estranged from the US, and in the case of Latinos, from their parents' homelands, many minority youth search for a sense of community and identity, in a quest that has increasingly led them to the other side of the Atlantic, to the Islamic world. Sunni Islam, the heterodox Nation of Islam and quasi-Muslim movements such as the Five Percenters and Nuwaubians allow for a cultural and spiritual escape from the American social order that often entails a wholesale rejection of Western culture and civilization...

...By embracing Islam, previously invisible, inaudible and disaffected individuals gain a sense of identity and belonging to what they perceive as an organized, militant and glorious civilization that the West takes very seriously. One Chicano ex-convict tried to explain the allure of Islam for Latino inmates, and why Mexican-Americans sympathize with Palestinians: "The old Latin American revolutionaries converted to atheism, but the new faux revolutionary Latino American prisoner can just as easily convert to Islam....There reside in the Latino consciousness at least three historical grudges, three conflicting selves: the Muslim Moor, the Catholic Spanish and the indigenous Indian.… [For the Mexican inmates] the Palestinians had their homeland stolen and were oppressed in much the same way as Mexicans."...

...In the wretched social and economic conditions of the inner city, and in the face of government apathy, Muslim organizations operating in the ghetto and prisons deliver materially. As in much of the Islamic world, where the state fails to provide basic services and security, Muslim organizations appear, funding community centers, patrolling the streets and organizing people...

...At ISNA's Third Annual Conference on Islam in American Prisons in July 2002, keynote speaker David Schwartz, who recently retired as religious services administrator for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, strongly rejected the notion that American prisons were a breeding ground for terrorists, and stated that Islam was a positive force in the lives of inmates. Scholar Robert Dannin adds: "Why would a sophisticated international terrorist organization bother with inmates -- who are fingerprinted and whose data is in the US criminal justice system?"...

...Pan-Africanism and pan-Islam were fused together by African-American and Muslim intellectuals over a century ago to fight colonialism, racism and Western domination. Today that resistance strategy has been adopted by tens of thousands of urban youth (judging by NOI rallies in the US and Europe) in the heart of the West. The cultural forces of Islam, black nationalism and hip-hop have converged to create a brazenly political and oppositional counterculture that has a powerful allure. At root, the attraction of African-American, Latino, Arab, South Asian and West Indian youth to Islam, and movements that espouse different brands of political Islam, is evidence of Western states' failure to integrate minority and immigrant communities, and deliver basic life necessities and social welfare benefits -- policy failures of which Islamic groups (and right-wing Christian groups) are keenly aware...