Black and Invisible: On Finding Your Place in a Faith That Was Always Yours

You can be Muslim your whole life and still be made to feel like a guest in your own faith. Seventeen-year-old Amira Hassan has always known who she is. She is the girl in the second row at Masjid Al-Haqq in Detroit, the one with the journal, the one who knows all the words. She is the granddaughter of a woman who was in the room when Malcolm X came back from Mecca changed. She is three generations Muslim and counting. Then her family moves to Dearfield, Michigan, and Amira walks into a masjid where nobody knows her history - and where she begins to suspect that history might not matter to them even if they did. At the new masjid, Amira is welcomed. And also footnoted. Her family's faith is acknowledged. And also categorized as lesser. The Arabic is beautiful and correct and occasionally performed in her direction. The community is warm, and the warmth has a particular temperature - the temperature of a room that has been heated but has not yet shaken the cold from its walls. At school, she is the Muslim girl. At the masjid, she is the Black girl. In both rooms, she is treated with the careful, well-meaning distance of someone nobody knows quite how to place. What Amira finds - in a letter from her grandmother, in a library, in a friendship with a girl from Ethiopia who has been invisible here for two years already - is a history she was never taught: that between fifteen and thirty percent of enslaved Africans brought to America were Muslim. That men named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Omar Ibn Said and Bilali Mohammed prayed in fields and wrote in Arabic and kept their faith alive under conditions designed to destroy it. That Black people were present in this tradition from the very beginning - not as newcomers, not as converts, but as carriers. And that Bilal ibn Rabah, the man the Prophet chose to be the first muezzin - the first voice to call the faithful to prayer - was a Black African man. Bilal did not become silent. He became louder. Black and Invisible is a coming-of-age novel about faith, history, erasure, and the long work of making yourself so thoroughly documented that invisibility becomes impossible. It is for every young Black Muslim who has ever walked into a room that shares their religion and wondered why it doesn't feel like home - and for everyone who wants to understand why. For readers of Hena Khan, Ibi Zoboi, and S.K. Ali. Grades 8 and up.

Pagina's: 257, Paperback, Independently published