Let�s Take it to the Streets

By Umar ben-Ivan Lee

For years I have been annoyed at the fact that Muslims seem to focus too heavily on Dawah in prisons and not on the college campuses and not amongst street gangs (two fertile grounds for Dawah). I have also been upset by the fact that none of the main political activist organizations want to touch gangs with a ten foot pole (with the exception of Jim Brown). So what you have are Muslims waiting on people to go to prison before we intervene and activist rallies that are lily-white and made-up of the disgruntled children of the white elite.

I have always thought that American society couldn�t be changed until there is a credible and organized force that is ready, willing and capable of confronting the system and calling them out on their shortcomings. The leftist activist organizations are not a threat because they have no connections to the masses, are not growing and are not capable of violence even if they wanted to be violent. They pose no threat whatsoever to the status-quo in this nation and they operate within certain boundaries that all have agreed upon.

What will strike fear into the heart of this land is if those forces that are already organized can be mobilized for positive action. If this conversion can be made amongst American street gangs, like what happened with Jeff Fort when he became Muslim and turned the Blackstone Rangers into El Rukn in Chicago, they will be able to galvanize the communities in which they have credibility in.

In the ghettos and barrios of America the older more established civil rights organizations, for whatever reason, have no real connection with the masses of the people and especially the young people. But on a day to day basis it is the street gangs who call the shots on the streets at night and whether or not they are engaged in positive action, or well-thought action, they are confronting the system in an adversarial way.

Gang members, and other street people, are outside of the system; they are revolutionaries and may not even know it. Unlike many other activists they are not going through a phase and it is not an option for them to one day join the system that they are now fighting; they are in it until they die.

Furthermore, the modern left in America, and specifically the white left, is no longer capable of violence even if their lives depended on it because their membership comes from upper-class backgrounds. Now I am not encouraging violence, that would be foolish, but what I am saying is that any time you are in a struggle you want the other side to know that all things are on the table and you can use this as a negotiating tactic .Anarchist kids may talk tough but at the end of the day they�ll bust a few windows and paint graffiti on a Starbucks window and then cry when the get sprayed or locked-up. The brother in prison gets hit with pepper spray in the face and responds �who threw that water in my eye?�

Towards this effort I am happy to see the Inner City Muslim Action Network of Chicago holding their even that is attempting to reach out to the youth on the streets in a positive way. They are holding an event in June that will feature Hip-Hop, sports, games and lectures and is targeted towards the streets. This organization has also been involved in reaching out to gang-members for several years.

May Allah reward them for their effort because someone needs to touch these suffering young men, who are destroying themselves and their communities, most especially their loved ones, and help them turn their lives around. The sad fact is, for most of these young men (and some women) no one can relate to them and people are scared to reach out to them and so they are completely ignored by everyone out of fear and ignorance and then they just end up dead or in jail and become a statistic.

I am not na�ve; I have had friends killed by gangs, and I have had friends of mine in gangs kill people, so I know there is a very dark, sad and lonely side to gangs. But if we are serious about spreading the Dawah of Islam in this society we should dare to follow the example of IMAN in our communities and if we are serious about radical social change in America then we should seek to try and galvanize and organize the most lethal possible revolutionary force in this nation. The revolution will not be led by the idle coffee shop conversationalists or the ivory-tower professors; the revolution will come from the streets and why not spend our efforts in bringing those who are organized for what is negative into a radical force for positive change?