Sherman Jackson and "Black Religion"

Surely one of the most interesting figures to emerge from the American Muslim community in the latter half of the 20th century is Sherman Jackson, an African-American intellectual of considerable depth, breadth, and moral passion. Jackson's work is rife with provocative arguments and stimulating ideas and deserves to be placed front and center in any consideration of what it means to be Muslim and American in the 21st century.

As an African-American thinker, Jackson is preoccupied with questions of race, and such questions have drawn him into the penumbral area of ontology with predictably unsatisfactory results: in his book Islam and the Blackamerican (Oxford, 2005), for instance, he argues against the notion of "ontological blackness" as a biological category (p. 13) only to affirm it on the next page as a sociohistorical one (p. 14). As I have argued repeatedly in this blog, ontology is a problematic "science" at best, but I do not think that Jackson's apparent muddle in this instance is fatal to his analysis. Moreover, if by "ontology" Jackson actually intends something other than metaphysics, his thinking on this issue may not be muddled at all--but, to this reader anyway, his intention in using the term is unclear.

Jackson's identification of "Black Religion" [BR] is most intriguing. Not to be confused with "African-American religion" as a whole, he stipulates that BR is best understood as a "subset of the aggregate of black religious expression in America" (Jackson, 2005: 29). It is a distinctive "religious orientation among Blackamericans ... the central preoccupation of [which] is the desire to annihilate or at least subvert white supremacy and anti-black racism" (ibid).

He then argues that

Black Religion has no theology and no orthodoxy; it has no institutionalized ecclesiastical order and no public or private liturgy. It has no foundation documents or scriptures, like the Baghavad Ghita [sic] or the Bible, and no founding figures, like Buddha or Zoroaster (ibid, 31).

Instead, BR is closer to "deism" or the "natural religion of Blackamericans, a spontaneous folk orientation at once grounded in the belief in a supernatural power outside of human history and yet uniquely focused on that power's manifesting itself in the form of interventions into the crucible of American race relations" (ibid, 31-32).

Here, I think, Jackson has allowed himself to be seduced by a myth of primordial primitivism that unnecessarily deprives his conception of the richness that admitting its connections to the utopian impetus of Near Eastern prophecy would otherwise provide. I am unsure why he would embrace such a myth, although I suspect that he is attempting to create a space for Blackamerican Islam in a playing-field that has been dominated (historically) by the Black Church. Personally, I think the victory here, if there is one, is Pyrrhic, but I have no real stake in the outcome of such intra-communal sparring.

What I most appreciate about Jackson's delineation of BR's "constitution" is this litany: "subversion, resistance, protest, opposition" (ibid, 32). These nouns reveal BR's methodological kinship with Etienne de la Boetie's anarcho-humanism and, likewise, Leo Tolstoy's--suggesting that BR, like Tolstoyanism, represents a prophetic attitude or "attunement" that serves as a foundation for the personal appropriation (see Jackson's interesting discussion of this term and its relationship to religious conversion, ibid, 28-29) of existing religious traditions.