Jun 28, 2009 1
Race, religion, and Michael Jackson.
I'm kind of fascinated with the question of Michael Jackson's funeral, and whether or not it will be Muslim. Jermaine ended his press conference with "may Allah be with you" and now even Andrew Sullivan is posting about it.
Reports that Michael Jackson had converted to Islam created a minor buzz on Muslim blogs last fall, but I didn't hear much about it elsewhere. Part of me was okay with that: the guy had become so weird that I'm not sure he did Islam's image any favors. But most Muslim bloggers who talked about it reported it as a happy event and welcomed him into the fold, under his new name, Mikaeel Jibril. A few other articles came out a week or two later saying it was just a rumor: that Jermaine had converted in the '80s, but Michael never did. Both Yusuf Islam and Dawud Wharnsby Ali, who were supposedly present at said conversion, said it wasn't true. Michael himself neither confirmed nor denied the story, though he certainly must have been aware of it.
We'll never know. But I thought the silence outside of Muslim Blogistan was telling. There are more Black Muslims in the U.S. than there are Arab Muslims, their history here pre-dates immigrant Islam, and most of them are Sunni, not Nation of Islam. But in the media they are presented as exceptions, or at best as avid followers of Louis Farrakhan. The Islam of someone like Dave Chappelle is rarely mentioned, and Michael Jackson was probably likewise considered an outlier, as he was in so many other ways, so reports of his conversion were ignored, doubted, or dismissed as a stunt, despite the otherwise obsessive interest in his personal life. Thus the narrative of who counts as a "real" Muslim remains intact. A Pakistani man who kills his wife does so because the Qur'an told him to, but even during the height of the War On Terror the D.C. sniper — also Muslim — was slotted into the Violent Black Male category. Not a category that's any better, mind you, but evidence of the way both stereotypes are calcified. Black and Middle Eastern men are both dangerous, but for different reasons.
In contrast, there was the case of John Walker Lindh, a devout Muslim by about any standard you care to employ, but he was white, so the media treated him like a mixed-up boy-child from northern California who dabbled in terrorism because he was spoiled by his hippie parents. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Black Muslim convert who killed an army recruiter in Arkansas, was not treated as part of a larger conspiracy until it was discovered that he'd traveled to Yemen, although he was charged with terrorism — unlike Scott Roeder, a white man who engaged in a different politically-motivated murder one day earlier. Roeder was described as mentally ill.
Michael Jackson's funeral won't answer any questions about his relationship with Islam, if there even was one. The need for an autopsy means he couldn't have been buried within 24 hours, and at any rate it's common among American converts to have mixed ceremonies. But the conversation still interests me.
