An Islamic Revival in the Cause of Black Survival: The Influences and Impact of the Darul Islam Movement

The Darul Islam Movement, which lasted from roughly 1962 to 1982, was arguably the most successful Islamic revivalist movement in the history of the US. At its height, it consisted of a network of about 40 affiliated mosques, mostly in major US cities, and operated a nationally distributed magazine, full time schools, a printing press, an incense making factory, and various other businesses and programs. Formed in 1962 by several attendees of Brooklyn’s historic Islamic Mission of America, "the Dar" bore some significant traces of the intellectual and political orientations of the Islamic Mission’s founders, Shaykh Daoud Ahmed Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal. However, the founders of the Dar were much younger, and thus, products of a very different cultural and political context than the aging Shaykh Daoud and Mother Khadijah. As a result, the movement they created over the course of the 1960s and early 70s held many concerns and characteristics in common with its contemporary groups like the Nation of Islam, which achieved a great deal of its prominence during the 1950s and 60s while Malcolm X served as the minister of its Harlem Mosque # 7, the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and the cultural organization known as the East, which was located in Brooklyn not far from Ya Seen Mosque – the Dar’s flagship location.

In addition to these local Black radical religious and political organizations, the leaders of the Dar engaged an eclectic mix of Islamic intellectuals and institutions ranging from the Saudi Arabia-based NGO the Muslim World League to Pakistani Muslim religious scholar, Sufi, and philosopher Dr. Fazlur Rahman Ansari. Both leaders and rank-and-file members of the Dar showed a particular interest in the writings of prominent reformists figures from throughout the Muslim world like Abul A'la al-Maududi, Hassan Al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb who championed notions of Islamic revival and saw Islam as the potential basis for mass political mobilization. Notably, this distinct interest in Islamic revivalism emerged at a time when urbanization rendered Black, urban neighborhoods more racially homogenous, leading Black orthodox Muslim communities like the Dar to focus more and more on the specific needs of Black, urban, working-class communities. In this context, Black orthodox Muslims began to openly debate the competing merits of an ideological orientation that was more universalist versus one more explicitly committed to struggles for Black liberation.

This paper considers the diverse set of ideological influences that characterized the development of the Darul Islam Movement, as well as far reaching impact of the movement on the subsequent development of Muslim communities throughout the US. It analyzes and historizes the Dar’s unique theorization of the nature global Muslim collectivity as it crafted a version of Islamic Internationalism that appropriated global “Islamist” discourses, yet contended with pervasive ideals of Black self-determination, Black nationalism, and working-class consciousness that animated radical organizing in urban spaces during the 1960s and 70s. Further, this paper foregrounds debates among Black American Muslims broadly as they sought to balance local and global priorities – working to build political economic power and autonomy in the domestic sphere while pursuing aspirations to transcend the domesticating nature of America’s racial and class hierarchies and legacies of American racial slavery. By doing so, this paper examines the significant appeal that global discourses of Islamic revivalism had among Black American Muslims in particular, and the uses and limits of their engagement with these discourses in their struggle against American racial capitalism.