Muslims who live in Turtle Island, better known as North America, are mostly settlers. We are first, second, third or whatever generation “_______”. Our families, for the most part, are not the original inhibitors of these lands and have no legitimate right to them. We likely did not ask the righteous nations of these lands for permission to settle/immigrate/seek refuge. Instead, we went to a government office and applied to travel to Canada or the US, paid some fees, signed some papers and swore loyalty to the queen through an oath, in the Canadian case. These countries are “Nation-States” that have been occupied for centuries, and where Indigenous communities have fought the occupation and colonization of their lands non-stop.
Unless you are Indigenous from Turtle Island or the descendant of the black peoples brought here through the slave trade, as people of colour and as Muslims we are settlers.
For years it is has been mind-blowing for me that many Muslims in Canada are close to the Palestinian cause, but neglect to look around them. We declare our “Canadian-ness” without questioning that the very nature of Canada’s national identity is the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the stealing of land and the implementation of some of the most racist policies in the world. Canada, for example, remains the only country with an official policy and management system dedicated solely to the control of Indigenous peoples. The Indian Act determines “Indian-ness” as well as different “rights” as per status, sex, place of residence, etc. Also, Canada’s reserve system was the model used to create South Africa’s apartheid system.
In the Canadian case some Muslims tend to think that Canada is an extension of the U.K… white, Christian and “developed” in its own right. All this forgetting the inter-connectedness of the colonial project. For instance, the fact that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are three separate countries today or that North Africa and the Arabian Gulf were made into nation-states with arbitrary borders (through a lot of erasure of Bedouins, Berber, Kabyle, and other Indigenous groups) is partly because of the colonial and imperial experiences that Britain and France had over the previous hundreds of years in Turtle Island.
Muslims forget that Canada’s first mosque lays on Treaty 6 nations’ territory, an area where Indigenous peoples where starved to death and where buffalo were hunted to almost the point of extermination by European settlers. They are often ignorant to the fact that North American’s first madrasa stands on the land of the Mohawk people in Akwesasne. In addition, few know that the two most Northern mosques are located in the Inuit Nunangat, the traditional territories of the Inuit and in zones where forceful resource extraction by settlers is very high. And that the largest populations of Muslims concentrated in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal live in the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Anishinnabe, Missassauga, Mohawk and Abenaki, among others.
Settler-bison hunt in the US and Canada. 1870s.
In my years as a convert, I have heard numerous Muslims telling me that “colonization was a hundred years ago,” that “this is the way it is,” that “they pay taxes and Aboriginals don’t,” that they have “as much right,” etc. The attitudes are common, particularly among Muslims who came to Canada during the Liberal era of the 60s; who immigrated after the reform of Canada’s immigration system, which worked around racial categorizations (that is right, Canada prevented many non-whites, non-Christian, LGBTQ, ill people, HIV/AIDS positive people and others from immigrating). For them, the system works. Thus, they often make Indigenous communities to be winy and backwards groups of people abusing the welfare system.
For many Muslims, Canada represents a land of opportunity. And while it is great that things worked out well for some of these Muslim communities, it is important to recognize that the massive immigration allowed by the Canadian government from the 60s until the 90s was not only driven primarily by the needs of Canadian capitalism, but was also only possible through the displacement, removal and violation of Indigenous nations.
Let’s be clear, Indigenous communities never consented to their own starvation, abuse and death. The treaties and agreements they negotiated, and through which many try to hold the government accountable right now, were made under the threat of extermination. That threat has never disappeared. To this date, the government defines identity, the education of Indigenous kids, their removal from their households and communities, their right (or lack thereof) to life, their access (or lack thereof) to resources, etc. Canadian taxes at the federal and provincial levels, pay for good roads and stuff, but they also pay for an apartheid system that deems Indigenous lives unworthy of sovereignty, recognition and rights.
When Muslims say they do not owe anything to Indigenous communities they are not only wrong (if you buy someone else’s stolen land knowingly, you are also accountable), but they become active participants in the oppression and erasure of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Why is this important? Because as a Muslim, if one has experienced racism, sexism, Islamophobia and the alike, one needs to realize that all of these oppressions are inter-connected. One cannot cry Islamophobia, but look the other way when Indigenous communities talk about the colonial experience. Islamophobia and racism are a result of colonialism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.
Many Indigenous activists understand that. That is why some Indigenous communities have mobilized around issues that affect Muslims heavily. They have supported Palestinian activists on two grounds, first as fellow Indigenous sisters and brothers whose land is occupied, but also as Muslims and refugees. They stood against the occupation of Afghanistan. They have supported Muslim women’s right to wear hijab and niqab when governments have tried to ban the garments like in Quebec. And they have been fighting Canadian extractive companies working both in Canada and in countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc. The assumption here is that you cannot dismantle a system that is so heavily embedded by just fighting a piece of it… therefore, the call for decolonization.
Decolonization is a stand for resistance, a movement building around the dismantling of settler-colonial structures and systems that have oppressed peoples for centuries. The most obvious expression of this system is the state, but it is not the only one. Decolonization entails the reimagining of mutual relationships beyond the myth of the nation-state. And while we know that the state is not going to disappear tomorrow, there is a commitment to working at the grassroots level, and beyond the academy and onlinectivism, to reclaim Indigenous knowledge, culture, land, etc. That is why this is a project. The work entails challenging the official discourses of the state around identity, multiculturalism, rights, etc. It requires educating ourselves and helping others find resources. It needs relationship-building and ally-ship in spaces free of Islamophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigration attitudes and white-privilege. And it requires listening to Indigenous peoples.
In the settler context, to be an ally goes beyond solidarity since it entails being responsible and accountable. As Harsha Walia says, “Being responsible for decolonization can require us to locate ourselves within the context of colonization in complicated ways, often as simultaneously oppressed and complicit.”
But decolonization is necessary not only for the sake of Indigenous nations. What Muslims in Canada need to recognize is that, as much as they may benefit from the system, as many of us settlers do (if you have a place to live and food on the table every day, you benefit), the Canadian state was designed around the blood of Indigenous and black communities, and continues to feed from these oppressions. Simply put, Islamophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia will continue to exist as long as the colonial project continues to be the basis of our dear and beloved settler-nation-state.
Identity Crisis 
“Muslims who live in Turtle Island, better known as North America, are mostly settlers…Unless you are Indigenous from Turtle Island or the descendant of the black peoples brought here through the slave trade, as people of colour and as Muslims we are settlers.”
Well, the largest single ethnic Muslim group in the U.S. ARE African-American Muslims. (44%)
This is such an important post. I am based in the U.S. and consistently see mainstream organizations promote and fuel pro-nationalist and pro-assimilationist political narratives that completely work to erase indigenous communities. The response to Islamophobia from these groups have been overwhelmingly about showing how “American” we are “just like everyone else” (which is obviously code for white people), and how Islamic principles are totally similar to what the “founding fathers” believed in. Just because Thomas Jefferson owned a Qur’an means we ignore the fact he was a slave owner and perpetuated genocide against indigenous peoples?
Unfortunately, mainstream responses to Islamophobia are more concerned about making white non-Muslims comfortable than addressing and challenging white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy — as well as being conscious and holding ourselves accountable, as you discussed in your post.
This is a good piece but it needs to go further and recognise that Muslimness that it takes for granted and glorifies is itself a colonial project – not European colonisation but Arab colonisation. How else do we explain that Egypt speak Arabic today and that people with south Asian descent have Arabic names? Attempts to decolonise should not stop at decolonising European power structures but also power structures laid by earlier colonisations as well. In the very least, these should be acknowledged to avoid ‘holier than thou attitude’ this piece has.
Thanks for this. Yes, and elsewhere in my writings this is questioned, particularly in the setting of Latin American and Muslim identity, where we tend to erase Arab/Muslim colonial history. The Arab colonization of Spain, for instance, was a huge driver of the colonial project in Turtle Island even in terms of language. There is not enough written about this.
“The Arab colonization of Spain, for instance, was a huge driver of the colonial project in Turtle Island…” seriously? Shifting the blame from the Inquisition to the tolerant Muslim rule of Spain??
What do you mean by that? The “tolerant rule” of Islam? For real? Didn’t the Arab Muslims invaded places where they were not welcome? didn’t the take over lands that weren’t theirs? Didn’t they created government structures according to their principles that did not necessarily accommodate not only Christians and Jewish people, but those that were considered “pagans”? The Inquisition came later and it was a direct response to the Muslim rule, that as much as it is romanticized by Muslims, was a period that was very difficult for those under their colonial rule.
Full agreement with the writer and with Mast Qalandar.
As a black Muslim woman, I detest immigrant Muslim sucking up to mainstream, middle class christian society at the extent of their black and indigenous brothers and sisters, then turning their back and appropriating Malcolm X, tokenizing Bilal (may God bless them both) and tweeting “All lives Matter” and “Muslim lives Matter”(Meaning, non-black Muslim lives)
It’s a toxic mix of anti-black racism, classism, the model minority myth and a complete erasure of black people’s struggles and the black history of Islam in the U.S.
Enough is enough.
Thank you for this… ❤ ❤ ❤ So much need for change.
Isnt Islam, like Christianity, by nature assimilationist. Arab Muslims colonized most of west Asia, North Africa and even parts of Southern Europe. If Muslims had been the first to “discover” the Americas would they not have done the same as Christians? Also, how can Islam be pro-indigenous if it is pro assimilation, since forced assimilation is a key factor in cultural genocide?
Oh,and while we’re at it, let’s stop Arab supremacy in Islam, too! Allah never said that there is so such thing as a “chosen people”, God and the Prophet forbade racism, yet Muslim communities worldwide are steeped in it. Just because someone is Arab, or knows Arabic doesn’t mean he/she is a good Muslim, or even a Muslim at all. I chose to study Arabic myself, and I love the Arab language, but I love & respect all languages.
Especially Sranan Tongo, Dutch, English (Queens English & African American Vernacular English), Spanish and French are dear to my heart.
Quranic Arabic is a sacred, liturgical language (just like Latin in Roman Catholicism, Sanskrit in Hinduism, Kromanti in winti, etc.) It was&is NEVER spoken by ordinary folks in their day-to-day lives. Even in the Prophets days, it was the language of poets, NOT the vernacular people spoke in their day-to-day life. No one in the world speaks Quranic Arabic as a mother tongue. People speak all kinds of vernacular Arabic, but that is NOT the language of the Quran.
We need to stop privileging all stuff which is(considered) Arabic above everything else. Yes, I love the Arabic language, music and Oriental dance. But I also love hiphop, R&B, flamenco, fado, morna, merengue, qawwali, kawina, kaseko, bigi poku, Italian opera – get the picture?
So, it’s time to end Arab supremacy in Islam. Period.
Suggest reading this recently written piece below as it speaks to all, if not most of these issues in your article and even the comments. Whether on the difference between liberalism and radicalism, the delusion of nonviolence, ‘what fasicm is’, anti-blackness, indigeneity as anon-racial/ethnic construct, and in relation to the islamic concept of fitra, given the use but limits of identity politics, decolonization, reindigenization, 1492 and much more. See: On the Delusion of (non)violence & Difference between Progressive-Liberalism & Radicalism: Between Trump, BLM, DAPL-INM, & Tahrir: – https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mohamed-jean-veneuse-on-the-delusion-of-non-violence-difference-between-progressive-liberalism
The author also wrote on Islam & anarchism or a ‘social justice islam’ using the Qur’an as primary source, in an MA thesis and it has been due out as a book for sometime. Also wrote on Transgenderism and Islam and is apparently working on an ethnographic PhD on gender and sexuality in Egypt and Turtle Island and identifies as African and Arab Muslim anarchist and apparently lived with the Zapatistas and been active with indigenous struggles on Turtle Island for a long time. He has also has a blog. His MA thesis is here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mohamed-jean-veneuse-anarca-islam
poi: An excerpt from the arab/anti-blackness section is below, because as he states we can’t homogenous ‘arabness’ either as if black arabs don’t exist let alone the intersections of blackness and islam, or even black immigrant’ assimilation into the transatlantic experience while the former elide their responsibilities towards addressing settler-colonialism and decolonization. There are black, red, brown, skins with white masks as the author states. Everyone has been affected by ‘cultures of whiteness’ and ‘white values in terms of ethics and politics’. Suggest setting some time to read the whole piece though, as ‘dense as it might seem’ because it does cover a lot and from a social movement perspective given the title.
Small Excerpt:
“I see Somali American Muslims writing articles, employing and applying binary logics and facile argumentations in articles, as Islamophobia Will Never Be the New Blackness[lxxvii] (2015), dehistoricizing history itself, as she engages in an neoliberal influenced ‘Oppression Olympics’ and ignores the politics of her own American-citizenship, that certainly taints and impacts her, but that nonetheless collapses and homogeneously monolithizes the transatlantic black-slave experience (which she was never a part of). This Somali-American’s view is no different than literatures that have come to fetishize ‘Blackness as the quintessential Other’, or as the ‘new indigeneity’ and hence the organizing principle upon which our movements ought situate themselves, and without which there is no liberation’ (Mbembe, 2017). All the while as this Somali-American dismisses her own positionality as a settler, ongoing neocolonial indigenous concerns, and her own assimilation into the ‘Black American experience’. Despite an undeniable ‘Arab supremacy’ (impacted by Gulf states) and the hyper-visibility and invisibility of blackness globally, within Muslim and non-Muslim communities, and yet, still, in this article’s case, absent of any nuanced examination of the distinct functioning of blackness in different contexts. As if there aren’t Black African-Arabs, for instance, in thus far as Nubian and Sudanese Egyptians who conjunctively, as opposed to binarically, see themselves as both African and Arab (when the truth of the matter is Egyptian racial/ethnic identity is constructed as any other, in this particular case, having been conquered and colonized by the Hyksos, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans, the French and the British). Or, even, in the case of Palestine, as if there aren’t internalized white-imperial and colonial influenced ethnic/racial and classist hierarchizations of Arabs and Muslims amongst themselves, let alone amongst Blacks themselves in settler-colonial Israel and the U.S./Canada, that was never discussed or broached in this Somali-American’s article. As if Blackness, Islam, and Arabness[lxxviii], are homogenous categories that do not dynamically separate and intersect historically depending on the context. Particularly when Islamophobia and anti-blackness, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, when one examines the experience of the first Transatlantic Slaves during the Middle Passage, the forcible conversion of a hardly insignificant proportion of Muslim-African slaves to Christianity, and the former’s roots in the Iberian Muslim Peninsula.
Indeed, the Somali-American writer completely elides the fact that:
“Arabia has always been part of the African world…[that] for more than 70,000 years there have been Black people in Arabia [and] it hardly gets more indigenous than that. [After all] to claim that Black people are in Arabia primarily because of slavery or modern economic driven migration erases tens of thousands of years of history in the region and the very long connection Arabia has with the rest of Africa…[More so, that in] the beginning…[Arab and Muslim] slave trade was mostly done by people who’d be considered Black against other people who are considered Black…In the early period most of the slaves were actually coming from Eurasia, a lot of whom were Slavs (which is where the word slave is derived from in the first place). When The Arabs were fighting against Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) and conquered Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, the vast majority of those Arab conquerors would be considered Black today. A lot of the people who were conquered hadn’t become Arabs yet, a major exception being the Ghassanid Kingdom of Arabs from the Azd tribe who migrated from Yemen to Syria. This is not to say that there weren’t a lot of Arabs there, there were. But the majority of people in that area were not identifying as Arabs until after the Umayyads conquered the region…That when it comes to West Africa and East Africa, conversion to Islam was mostly peaceful. If the same wars of conquest had been engaged in by the Arabs in those regions it is likely that you’d have ‘Arab’ states in West Africa and East Africa. In the West and East African context, the spread of Islam was [in this sense] peaceful…Arabs didn’t have a colonial relationship in these areas when they began to spread Islam” (2017).
Therefore, to the contrary “parallels can be easily discerned between Islamophobia and anti-black racism as particular manifestations of similar impulses that consist of a cocktail of intersectional racisms” and burgeoning scholarships addressing the nuance of these concerns and issues (Austen, 2015; Beydoun, 2013; 2015; Coletu, 2015; Ihmoud, 2015; Naber, 2015; Fletcher Jr., 2015; Baghoolizadeh, 2015; Mire, 2017). What then are the consequences of seeing “Black American/Canadian Muslims as neither bystanders nor allies who are ascribed both epithets ‘thug’ and/or ‘terrorist’, and thus rather as intersectional subjects of anti-black racism, poverty, mass incarceration, or police brutality” (Austen, 2015)? Wouldn’t this imply “then that anti-blackness and Islamophobia” can “become intimate bedfellows” given that “anti-black racism, poverty, gentrification, mass incarceration, and police brutality” are also simultaneously legitimate ‘Muslim’ issues”, that indeed Muslims ought to have been concerned with all along, given Islam’s inarguable anchoring in non-identitarian, non-racial and non-ethnic, social justice paradigms[lxxix] (Austen, 2015)? And again, without denying either or condoning the fact that non-black Muslims continue to hide behind the Qu’ran perpetrating and perpetuating anti-Blackness and Afrophobia, to the extent that they don’t even recognize black names “as Sundiata Keita, Usman Dan Fodio, Mansa Musa and great Islamic civilizations like the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire and the Sokoto Caliphate, that mean nothing to a majority of Muslims”[lxxx] (Finna, 2015).
Nonetheless, it’s as if Black Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians[lxxxi] don’t have similar and altogether distinct struggles and don’t experience racism and ethno-centrism from Ethiopian, Eritrean Mizrahi and Sephardic Zionists. And in other instances, one sees, the recurring anti-Arab sentiments, now internalized, on the part of northern Africans in relation to Arabs whom they believe colonized them, eliding the intimate inter-racial/ethnic relationships between Northern African Hamitic/and Arabian Peninsula Semitic peoples; well, what about Zionist Africans who have now colonized Black Arab Palestinians in this reverse cycle of an instance?”
While I agree that there was wrongdoing done to the indegenous, I don’t agree with the way you’ve generalized and portrayed Muslims’ attitude towards the rights of the indegenous. You haven’t noted the many efforts which the Muslim Canadian community is doing to recognize and help. You haven’t noted the thousands of Canadian Muslims leaving Canada because of the wrongdoing dine in Canada, and because they feel they don’t belong here. There are many ways to look at this issue, and for now, it seems more realistic to try to fix the situation of the indegenous, and educate the general population than to point fingers at modern day Canadian Muslims, as they weren’t the ones who committed those crimes. Also, remember, Allah brought Muslims to this land, through many reasons , including refugee status as a means of bringing Islam to the country. And, if you know your religion well, you know that there’s nothing better for the indegenous people than Islam. As that is what will last for them in the long run, in front of Allah.