As part of Wasat’s Guest Speaker Series we are happy to have Imam Dawud Walid join us on February 19th at 7pm PST for a discussion about his new book Blackness and Islam. You can sign up below to receive notifications about this event.

Muslims who are Black in the West in particular, have found that while Islam may not discriminate based on race, many Muslims do. To make matters worse, some of those Muslims will delve into that Islamic tradition to justify their biases and bigotries, seeing no contradiction between their racism and the Islamic ideals.

This work seeks to clarify and debunk some traditions which support their racist positions, and presents biographies of early Muslims who were Black. The biographies of these great Muslim personalities shows us how Blackness was a normal part of life for early Muslims, in sharp contradistinction to modern prejudices against Black folks found in some Muslim communities.

---

Imam Dawud Walid is currently the Executive Director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI) and a Senior Fellow at Auburn Seminary based in New York. Walid has studied under qualified scholars the disciplines of Arabic grammar and morphology, foundations of Islamic jurisprudence and sciences of the exegesis of the Qur’an.

Walid has studied under qualified scholars the disciplines of Arabic grammar and morphology, foundations of Islamic jurisprudence and sciences of the exegesis of the Qur’an. He previously served as Imam at Masjid Wali Muhammad in Detroit and the Bosnian American Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan.

He is the author of the book Towards Sacred Activism, and is co-author of the books Centering Black Narrative: Black Muslim Nobles Among the Early Pious Muslims and Centering Black Narrative: Ahl al-Bayt, Blackness & Africa.