Imam Luqman Ahmad Mosque Without Borders

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ، وَالصَّلَاةُ وَالسَّلَامُ عَلَى رَسُولِ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ، وَبَعْد

By any honest measure, racism is not just a social problem; it is a spiritual disease. And it’s not a problem just in America—it’s a problem in Muslim America. The Qur’an tells us that Allah created human beings in different colors, tribes, and nations as a sign of His power, not as a ladder of superiority. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ declared that no Arab is superior to a non-Arab except by taqwa. Race was such an important topic to the Prophet (SAWS) that he included it in his farewell sermon.

Yet anti-Blackness persists in the American Muslim community—often quietly, sometimes openly, and almost always without accountability. For decades, many immigrant Muslims have tried to sidestep the issue of race by insisting that “Islam doesn’t see color.” It’s a comforting slogan, but in America, it functions as a form of denial. In a country built on racial hierarchy, where race shapes housing, education, policing, and even life expectancy, pretending race doesn’t matter is not neutrality—it is complicity. 

Black American Muslims know this all too well. They have lived at the intersection of two struggles: the struggle against anti-Black racism in America, and the struggle against racial bias within their own religious community. They built the earliest Muslim institutions in this country, carried Islam through the darkest chapters of American history, and introduced the faith to millions. Yet their leadership, scholarship, and lived experience are often marginalized in immigrant-dominated spaces. 

This is not simply a sociological failure. It is a moral one. Racism violates the very foundations of Islamic ethics. It elevates human categories above divine decree, corrupts the heart, and fractures the ummah in ways that no amount of rhetoric about “unity” can repair. 

The problem of race in the United States is examined everywhere—in books, classrooms, documentaries, courtrooms, political debates, and even Hollywood. It was a central fault line in the Civil War and remains one of the defining moral struggles of American life. Yet in Muslim America, race is still treated as a taboo subject. It is rarely discussed in mixed company. Immigrant imams almost never address it from the minbar, and many fear losing their jobs if they do. Today, Black American Muslims talk about it constantly, but mostly among themselves. The conversation has yet to become a genuine cross-cultural dialogue within the broader Muslim community. 

American Muslims cannot claim any moral high ground in this country while avoiding the issue of racism in their own ranks. So far, the community’s response has been silence, a sentimental retelling of the story of Bilal, and a quiet segregation between Black and immigrant Muslims. The result is the emergence of two Muslim Americas—separate, unequal, and unable to speak honestly to one another. Racism and racialized attitudes in the American Muslim community will not disappear through silence, slogans, or wishful thinking. It requires a moral awakening—a willingness on the part of immigrant Muslims to confront their own inherited biases, to listen to Black Muslims without defensiveness, and to reshape institutions that have too often reflected the racial hierarchies of the wider society. 

This is not about guilt. It is about responsibility. 

For many Muslim immigrants, especially from Arab, South Asian, and North African contexts, America presents a dizzying political strife, to enter a society where the primary, inescapable conversation is about race—a conversation their own cultures have deliberately avoided. And at the center of that conversation are Black American Muslims. Anti-Black racism is not simply a moral failure or a social injustice. In an Islamic framework, it is a violation of tawhid—the very foundation of the religion. Tawhid is not only the belief that Allah is One; it is the belief that only Allah has the right to elevate, diminish, honor, or disgrace His creation. When human beings assign superiority based on race, color, or lineage, they are trespassing into a domain that belongs exclusively to Allah. This is why racism is not just ugly behavior. It is a theological corruption.

And here is the profound dissonance: Immigrants encounter Black American Muslims, some converts and some who are not converts, who are not coming to learn at the feet of an immigrant imam. Islam has been in the United States since the time of slavery. They are leaders. Scholars. Founders of mosques, professionals of every discipline. Heirs to a centuries-old Muslim American legacy that predates most of their own arrivals. They are confident, theologically astute, and—most disruptively—unwilling to accept a secondary status. 

Just as white Americans had to confront their own moral failures around slavery and segregation, immigrant Muslims must confront the ways they have absorbed and reproduced anti-Black attitudes in America. Race is too central to American life to be ignored. And Islam’s moral vision is too clear to be selectively applied. 

If Muslims in this country want to embody the prophetic ethic they so often preach, they must begin by addressing the racism within their own ranks. The Qur’an tells us that Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves. That work begins with honesty, humility, and the courage to face the truth. 

The American Muslim community cannot claim prophetic values while quietly benefiting from racial hierarchies. It cannot celebrate Bilal while sidelining his descendants. And it cannot hope to heal until it confronts the disease. Racism is a spiritual sickness. Its cure begins with a courageous moral awakening. And Allah knows best. 

—Imam Abu Laith Luqman Ahmad 

Shaykh Luqman Ahmad, born and raised in Philadelphia Pa, and son of American converts to Islam, is an American Muslim scholar, educator, and community leader with more than four decades of service. A graduate of the Islamic University of Omdurman, with time spent at Umm al-Qura University, and in classes at the Haram in Mecca. Imam was first introduced to Islamic learning by his parents, he studied with numerous scholars, most notably the late “Sayyid Sabiq”, author of the book “Fiqh as-Sunnah”.  For a list of his teachers, consult his blog at imamluqman.wordpress,com. He served as the Imam of Masjid Ibrahim Islamic Center in California for 20 years, guiding one of the region’s most diverse Muslim communities with a blend of classical Sunni scholarship and deep awareness of American social realities. Over the course of his career, he has also served as an Imam and or resident scholar at several masaajid across the country, including in Philadelphia, Toledo, Sacramento, and Folsom, California.  

He is the author of several books, most notably The Devil’s Deception of the Modern-Day Salafi Sect, a widely discussed critique of contemporary Salafism, and Double Edged Slavery, an original work examining the mentality, history, and lived experience of Black Sunni Muslims in America. His writings, lectures, and community work continue to influence conversations on Islamic law, identity, leadership, and the future of American Muslim communities. Currently, he writes, does research, and is a guest khateeb at the Quba Institute in Philadelphia. He can be reached at: imamabulaith@yahoo.com