African Americans, Islam, and Sudan before Farrakhan

Historian Dawn-Marie Gibson has traced America’s Muslim community to those African Muslims who arrived on slave ships. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries—the tragic era of the transatlantic slave trade—Muslims from North and West Africa arrived in the Americas. Though Muslim enslaved persons tried fervently to preserve their religious heritage, from the nineteenth century American slaves faced violent efforts to stamp out any vestige of Islamic and traditional African faiths they may have had. However, many African Americans began to identify with Islam in the early twentieth century. This phenomenon was particularly true among Black people in some of the northeastern states and was even more apparent for those who had recently escaped the southern United States, which was then mired in Jim Crow racism.⁹

One man’s efforts contributed to Islam’s rise in the United States, and his focus on American-born Blacks in Sunni Muslim organizations transformed American and African religious history. This figure was Sudanese-born Satti Majid Muhammad al-Qadi Suwar al-Dhahab (or Satti Majid, for short). Satti Majid was born in Sudan’s Old Dongola province in 1883. A member of a well-known family of religious judges and clerics, Majid studied Islam under local sheikhs. A self-described missionary, Majid entered the United States around 1908 and stayed until 1929. He worked primarily in New York City, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Majid paid particular attention to African Americans, and throughout his ministry he pointed to what he perceived were violations of Black American rights. Islam, from Majid’s perspective, was a religious and moral system that would curb American injustice. In articulating his message that Islam was a great option for African Americans, Majid was concerned with conveying Islam’s universality, addressed misconceptions, and explained the religion’s egalitarian concerns. In the greatest testament to the efficacy of Majid’s message, he is said to have converted over forty thousand Black Americans to Islam.¹⁰

Majid was disturbed by the teachings of one Noble Drew Ali. Born Timothy Drew in North Carolina, Ali created the Moorish Science Temple (MST) in 1913. He saw Black Americans as Asiatic and descended from biblical Moabites and the Islamic Moorish Empire. Being Moors, African Americans—in his cosmology—are religiously Muslim. However, Islam was recast so that only a handful of practices and idioms were ostensibly Islamic.¹¹ Satti Majid was so troubled by Ali’s teachings that he traveled on behalf of American Muslims to Cairo in 1929 to discuss the Moorish Science Temple with scholars at Al-Azhar University. They speedily issued a fatwa, or ruling, on the MST’s “errors.” Though Majid wanted to return to the States as an official missionary representing Al-Azhar, the institution declined, and he never returned.¹² A year after Majid’s departure, W. D. Fard Muhammad founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit. The NOI turned popular racial assumptions on their head by demonizing Europeans. Rather than blackness representing the epitome of evil or worthlessness, the organization instead taught that it embodied positive virtues like cleanliness and self-confidence. Blacks were divine; whites were devils. Fard labeled his doctrine Islam and tried to convert Black people, claiming that the religion would liberate them from white dominance. Fard mysteriously disappeared in 1934. By the end of the 1940s the Nation believed that he was God incarnate and claimed that his successor, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, was God’s messenger.¹³

The Nation of Islam became increasingly popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, years when the American civil rights movement was intensifying. The 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks spurred the Montgomery Bus Boycott that catapulted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into prominence; federal troops were sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to enforce school desegregation; student sit-ins forced desegregation in public facilities in 1960–1961; and in 1963 approximately 250,000 people gathered in the March on Washington. African Americans struggled for integration, equality, and economic improvement. Nigerian professor E. U. Essian-Udom noted in his 1962 study Black Nationalism that there was growing feeling among Blacks in northern US cities “for re-identification with Africa”: “In the last few years a significant number of groups have cropped up among Negroes representing the interest of those who seek a re-identification. Such interest should be expected in view of the wind of change blowing across Africa.” Yet NOI leader Muhammad did not seem to completely grasp this re-identification, Essian-Udom said.¹⁴

As synonymous as Elijah Muhammad may have been with the Nation of Islam, his prominence was soon rivaled by Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little in 1925, he was arrested in 1946 for burglary and began serving a ten-year sentence. While in prison he became exposed to the Nation’s teachings and submitted to its discipline and guidance. Upon his release in 1952 he was renamed Malcolm X and speedily rose in the Nation’s ranks. Outside of his interest in Black America, Malcolm’s primary political interest was in Africa. In 1954 he compared the situation in Vietnam with the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and in 1959—while serving as Elijah Muhammad’s ambassador—he toured Egypt, Nigeria, Ghana, and Sudan. Malcolm was hosted in Sudan by Malik Badri, a Sudanese student he had corresponded with before his arrival. Badri noted that Malcolm X was already versed in Sudanese history before his arrival in Khartoum. Near the Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman, Malcolm mentioned that he was particularly “fond of the Mahdi and his revolution, as a revolution at that time between the blacks and the whites, and the way that he had defeated the British in a number of battles.” Malcolm, furthermore, was “very proud” of the Sudanese Mahdi “as a hero of the blacks—not as a Sunni Muslim,” scholar Robin D. G. Kelley writes.¹⁵ While in Mecca, Malcolm X connected with Sudanese political officials and spiritual guides. Sheikh Hassoun was one of the men he encountered there. Born in 1898 to a prominent family in Sudan, Sheikh Hassoun had been lecturing in the Grand Mosque and preaching in Masjid al-Haram for some time before meeting the famous Harlemite. Hassoun eventually became Malcolm’s spiritual adviser and mufti of New York’s Muslim Mosque, Incorporated. Following Malcolm’s February 1965 assassination, Hassoun washed his body with sacred oil and wrapped him in white shrouds.¹⁶

That decade, another American Muslim organization emerged. Blending Islam and Black Nationalism, the Ansarullah was led by the controversial Imam Isa. Born Dwight York, Isa became interested in northern Sudanese Nubians and traveled to Sudan. He paid homage to the Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman, met with members of his family, and visited Aba Island. On his return to America, York claimed descent from the Mahdi. The Sudanese Mahdi was supposed to have said, “I’ll have a descendant who will rise in the West, that my name will be heard there.” Isa claimed that Al-Hadi al-Mahdi, who was killed in 1969, had come to the United States a long time ago, married an African American woman, and returned to Sudan. Isa claimed that he was a product of that marriage and was consequently the Mahdi’s grandson. He gave himself the name Al-Hajj al-Imam Isa Abd Allah Muhammad al-Hadi al-Mahdi. His followers believed that he was the lamb that would suffer the sins of his people (the 144,000), and Ansarullah recruitment of that multitude was seen as a precondition for the millennium.¹⁷ In the 1970s and 1980s, the Ansarullah community (“Ansaaru Allah”) adhered to Islamic beliefs and adopted Muslim social patterns. The group positioned Sudan as Islam’s true epicenter and Arabic, the Koran, the true Sunna, and Islam to be Nubian.¹⁸

While some may read Imam Isa as a curious or even bizarre individual, his significance in the history of African American engagement with Sudan is perhaps most discernible when read against the grain of previous Black invocations of Sudanese history. Though Horace Cayton argued that the first enslaved people brought to the United States came from Sudan, Imam Isa made a personal genealogical link to the Sudanese Mahdi. Though Malcolm X envisioned the Mahdi as a racial exemplar rather than a Sunni Muslim, Imam Isa’s followers believed that he—supposedly the Mahdi’s grandson—possessed eschatological significance. Thus, in his claims to literal familial relationship to the Mahdi and the religious significance that this may have imparted upon him, the figure of Imam Isa represents a singular union of African American invocation of Sudanese history and religion. An atypical person that stands out from the multitude of other African American men and women covered in this study, Imam Isa reflects one element of the diverse invocations of modern Sudanese history and engagements with it.

Imam Isa’s 1970s-era pamphlets and newsletters did not provide much commentary on contemporary Sudan.¹⁹ This negligence, however, was not only not indicative of the entire African American Muslim community, it was also amplified by the reality that epochal events were unfolding in Sudan at the time.

The Second Sudanese Civil War

The Second Sudanese Civil War ignited in 1983. President Jafaar Nimeiri, who had been in power since 1969, had become increasingly annoyed by southern autonomy, and most of the officer corps had been opposed to the integration of former Anyanya rebels into the Sudan People’s Armed Forces. In May 1983 a military unit at Bor (in southern Sudan) refused an Armored Division company’s attempt to disarm the 105th Battalion. The garrison escaped on their way to Ethiopia to rendezvous with senior southern commanding officer John Garang, effectively beginning the war. In addition to these military origins, southern Sudanese resistance was also sparked by the Sudanese government’s new policy of forced Islamization. President Nimeiri, who in 1977 had created a committee to Islamize Sudanese laws, began a nuanced program of literalist Islamization in Sudan in September 1983. That month he decreed that sharia would be state law, and judicial applications included amputations to punish theft and whippings for alcohol offenses. Specific interpretations of Islamic law were imposed on Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Colonel Garang would lead the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) for the entirety of the war, which dragged on for the next two decades.²⁰

The war years witnessed a series of political shocks and human sufferings. In 1983–1984 alone, famine took the lives of an estimated two hundred thousand people in northern Sudan. After a popular uprising unseated Nimeiri from power in 1985, the Sudanese military governed the country for a year before Sadiq al-Mahdi—the Mahdi’s great-grandson—was elected prime minister in 1986. In the late 1980s another famine—this time in the South—killed an estimated quarter of a million people. In 1989 Brig. Gen. Omar al-Bashir overthrew the young al-Mahdi government and established an Islamist state. That same year, the UN established Operation Lifeline Sudan to provide access for humanitarian relief operations.²¹

Sudan’s Islamist government encouraged slavery during the war. Reports of slaves captured in the aftermath of the 1988 al-Da’in (Darfur) massacre came to the attention of international human rights groups, and reports of slavery continued after the 1989 coup that brought Bashir to power. Government-organized militias sold hundreds of thousands of people from southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains into slavery. Some women and girls were kept as concubines, and many were subject to rape. Others were sent north, where they worked on farms.²² According to the US State Department and several human rights groups, slavery not only existed but thrived during the war. According to the human rights groups, the government allowed militias to keep what they had pillaged rather than paying them directly.²³ “It’s war booty,” said Jemera Rone, a field representative for Human Rights Watch/Africa, in the New York Times in March 1996. “They’re given free license by the government. They’re not prosecuted. In fact, the government denies that it is taking place.”²⁴ While calculations on the number of enslaved vary, estimates range from tens of thousands to upwards of one hundred thousand.²⁵

The 1990s, like the war’s previous decade, were tumultuous to say the least. Amid the war against the Khartoum regime, Dinka and Nuer peoples waged their own conflict that caused massive casualties before the Sudan People’s Liberation (SPLA) could establish hegemony. The first half of the decade saw the Sudanese government declare a jihad, a series of military operations, and the UN Security Council ultimately sanctioning the Khartoum government in 1995. By the late 1990s President Bashir was locked in a power struggle, and, in a move smacking of authoritarianism he dissolved the national assembly and declared a state of emergency. In July 2002 the Sudanese government and the SPLM/A signed an agreement in Kenya that included a framework of principles—including southern self-determination—as a foundation for negotiating a peace. Following pressure from the US government and a coalition of American religious groups, the Sudanese government signed a peace deal with the southern rebels in 2004. In 2005 the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed, ending the sordid war. More than two million died, and another four million southern Sudanese were displaced. Longtime leader John Garang—president of the southern Sudanese government and first vice president of the Government of National Unity—would not live out the year, losing his life in a helicopter crash.²⁶

While a fierce conflict was waged on Sudan’s soil, other belligerents waged a different war with different munitions. What transpired was a holy war between African American Christians and Muslims, contesting the terms of solidarity with the Sudanese in unprecedented fashion.

Black Christian Solidarity and Southern Sudan

During the Second Sudanese Civil War, US political campaigns for southern Sudan were dominated by religious opposition (Muslim vs. Christian) and racial opposition (Arab vs. Black African). American human rights groups like Christian Solidarity International (CSI) and the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) framed the war with narratives of modern slavery and connected Southern trauma to the travails of American Christian, Black, and Jewish minorities.²⁷

CSI’s John Eibner played a critical role in pushing for African American mobilization. In 1992 Eibner—at the invitation of the New Sudan Council of Churches—traveled to southern Sudan to investigate slave raids and other abuses. Encouraged by local leaders, he began a series of publicized slave redemption efforts in 1995 and made a whopping thirty-five trips to Sudan between 1995 and 2003. He records redeeming over eighty thousand enslaved persons on these trips. The CSI marshaled African American history, allowing the organization to craft familiar polarization that appealed to the US public. Anthropologist Amal Fadlalla writes that the white versus Black dynamic in the US context mapped onto the Arab versus Black Sudanese framework, and the language of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist movement was used to fight twentieth-century slavery in southern Sudan on religious and humanitarian terms.²⁸ Several African American leaders and pastors joined Eibner on his sojourns to Sudan, and the CSI went so far as using the term “underground railroad” in referencing its mission.²⁹ By the middle of 2000, in the waning months of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a group of Black clergy from around the country felt moved enough to address a pointed letter to Congressional Black Caucus chairman James Clyburn. After calling out President Clinton and other world leaders for remaining silent on the issue of Sudanese enslaved people, the letter made a plea that linked contemporary Sudan with historical US slavery: “We, African-American pastors from around the nation, write to ask the Congressional Black Caucus to come to the front of this battle. As the descendants of African slaves, we must not rest until those now held in bondage are freed.”³⁰

One Black clergyman who just so happened to have founded the Congressional Black Caucus did his part to bring attention to the issue. Rev. Walter Fauntroy—a longtime pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington, DC, as well as former DC congressman—was embedded among Black church networks and leaders. After radio talk show host Joe Madison’s initial CSI-facilitated trip to the Sudan (where he participated in a mass slave emancipation), he recruited his friend Fauntroy to join him on a second trip to southern Sudan in the spring of 2001. The two men helped to galvanize Black churches and took the issue to the Urban League, Congressional Black Caucus, and the NAACP. Following Fauntroy’s Sudan trip, two African American clerics from Boston—Gloria White-Hammond and her husband and co-pastor Ray Hammond—went on a slave redemption trip with John Eibner to southern Sudan in the summer of 2001. Enthralled by the stories of women redeemed from slavery, White-Hammond was compelled to form My Sister’s Keeper, a humanitarian organization designed to help Sudanese women rebuild their loves. She took additional trips to Sudan that were covered by the likes of the Boston Globe and NBC’s Today Show, making her a major figure in the Sudan campaign. Rev. Al Sharpton, who himself was flown to Sudan by CSI, pledged to spread the word about Sudanese slavery, and the organization’s efforts to connect Frederick Douglass’s story with that of Josephine Bakhita—a Darfurian Sudanese woman who was born in the nineteenth century, experienced slavery, and became a Catholic nun following her emancipation—attracted African American Catholic attention. Black Christians were not alone in this abolitionist movement. The camp included conservative Republican senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Sam Brownback of Kansas, the latter of whom joined African American congressman Donald Payne on a trip to southern Sudan in 1998.³¹ “As well as being a black radical issue,” writes Richard Crockett, “slavery in southern Sudan and the persecution of the Christian churches also became a key issue for Republican-voting white Christian evangelists.”³²

For those African Americans who aligned themselves with southern Sudanese, the reality of slavery bound them together in a way that few—if any—other shared experiences could. Because blackness in the American context was the singular feature defining who could and could not be enslaved, an argument can be made that a history of enslavement is one of the defining elements that is needed for African Americans to endear ourselves to Black people beyond American shores. In this paradigm, a shared history of enslavement is perhaps even necessary for the deepest level of solidarity to be possible. But the idealization of southern Sudan was problematic. The CSI linked Frederick Douglass to Josephine Bakhita, and her narrative attracted the African American Catholic community. Fadlalla writes that Bakhita’s experience of slavery, conversion, and liberation through Christian faith showed “how affective violence is narrated to celebrate ideas of humanity, rescue, and salvation.” “This narration,” Fadlalla continues, “also highlights the feminized vulnerability of the Southern Sudanese and links their struggle to that of Jewish and Christian blacks in the United States.”³³ Any presentation of southern Sudanese as vulnerable, helpless people in need of Western intervention reeks of the kind of infantilizing language of benighted, helpless Black Africans that forms the bedrock of neocolonialism. African American Christian usage of such language would complicate the question of racial solidarity to the extent that it would effectively be a discursive camaraderie predicated on Black American superiority over Black South Sudanese.

While African American Christians certainly had their eyes on Sudanese happenings, they were not the only Black American religious group deeply invested in the Sudan at the time. Black Muslims stood on the other side of the aisle and showed a differed side of solidarity.

In 1994 Charles Jacobs organized the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group. Jacobs, who is Jewish, was among the first to publicize the reality of slavery in Sudan and the West African nation of Mauritania to the American public. He, along with a Mauritanian Muslim named Mohammed Athie, broke the story of a modern slave trade in those two countries in the New York Times. The AASG faxed materials to Black newspapers in its attempt to kindle support for abolition, and it was largely through the AASG that Samuel Cotton, an African American, acquired his knowledge of slavery’s history in Africa and the contemporary situation. Cotton was a student at Columbia University and part-time journalist for the weekly City Sun, New York’s second-largest Black paper. In 1995, after much research, Cotton wrote a series of articles on contemporary slavery in Sudan and Mauritania.³⁴

NOI spokesman and international representative Akbar Muhammad took the defense, contending that Cotton had succumbed to a Jacobs-led Jewish plot against the Muslim world. Muhammad swore that neither slavery nor trafficking of enslaved persons existed in the modern Arab world.³⁵ In an NOI press release dated March 24, 1995, he noted: “Mr. Samuel Cotton … said that the President of Africa’s largest country, the Sudan, has six to eight slaves in his home in Khartoum… . Cotton’s quotes and most of the information called ‘research’ was obtained directly from the Anti-Slavery Group based in Washington, D.C., via Dr. Charles Jacobs. Dr. Jacobs has been using the pain of a Black Mauritanian to justify his attack on Islam.” Muhammad, in the press release, said that an invitation had been offered to members of the Black press—including Cotton—to visit Sudan.³⁶ Cotton stated that he could not accept the invitation: “What could I possibly learn while traveling under the auspices of the very [Sudanese] government that my sources alleged was guilty of gross human rights violations and of winking at the practice of slavery?” He realized that Muhammad’s principal aim was to protect Islam and encourage its continued advance among African Americans.³⁷ After issuing the press release, Muhammad claimed that Cotton and the City Sun were being used as puppets in a “Zionist plot” to assail Islam and slow its growth in the United States. This “plot,” in Muhammad’s estimation, was not limited to an anti-Muslim agenda. Rather, it also aimed to divide the Black community over the slavery issue and discourage those engaged in business from investing in Africa.³⁸ Muhammad termed Jacobs a “Jewish consultant” and described his press releases as “using the old FBI trick of planting stories.”³⁹

While any antisemitic attack on the figure of Charles Jacobs would be fundamentally reprehensible, the notion that he criticized the Sudanese government on Islamophobic grounds is justifiable. To begin, Jacobs frequently deployed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric. His political investments in his abolitionist work were linked to a commitment to the most conservative arm of the American pro-Israel movement and, according to Melani McAlister, “would evolve into an activist agenda on the dangers of ‘Islamic extremism’ that eventually pitted him against most of the liberal and progressive Jewish community in Boston.” After founding the AASG, Jacobs began working with another organization he had founded—the David Project—to produce a film that framed Columbia University’s Middle East Institute as hostile to Jews and anti-Israel.⁴⁰ Jan Rakowsky, reporting for the Jewish newspaper Forward, wrote that after its founding the David Project “quickly developed a national reputation for hounding Muslims that it perceives to be a threat to the Jewish community.”⁴¹ David Project executive director Phillip Brodsky admits that the organization’s approach was “combative” before it was moderated in 2015.⁴²

It is unfair to ascribe Jacob’s personal views to Samuel Cotton. However, it is important to consider the progeny of his knowledge concerning slavery in Sudan and, with it, the larger infrastructures of knowledge production and media circulation informing the history of African American engagement with the country. While the veracity of slavery in Sudan during the Second Civil War has been proven, it is fair to consider how Jacob’s views (and those of others) may have influenced reportage of the subject and consequently helped shaped Black American knowledge and opinions. While I am not likening Jacobs to the following entities, it would be foolish to think that Black newspaper editors and contributors, diplomats, and other figures who wrote about Sudan and/or journeyed through the country did so through lenses completely untouched by their class, racial, gender, and other perspectives and biases. Given the fact that Cotton was one of the most influential Black Americans bringing Sudanese matters to light, the complexities of one of his sources—Jacobs—warrants mention.

On November 6, 2004, Akbar Muhammad—still the NOI’s international representative—pivoted again to anti-Zionism on a panel concerning Sudan. During the discussion, Muhammad, who acknowledged that he had traveled to Sudan three times, claimed that there was a war against Islam taking place and that part of that effort was to break up Africa. Propaganda was involved, he said. “And what pains me is we allow our enemies, especially the Zionists, to give us agendas.” He cited the example of Sudanese slavery, which had apparently been “given” to Black people as an agenda. What, then, was the target of this supposedly Zionist agenda? “They used this false issue of Arabs enslaving Black people as a way to attack and discredit the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan,” Akbar claimed. He further argued that Zionists wanted Blacks to oppose Sudan and were concerned about Islam’s influence among the descendants of American slavery.⁴³ Muhammad did not stop at claiming that the matter of Sudanese slavery was a false Zionist plot. Rather, he used the panel discussion to claim that the Zionists had given Black people a new agenda. Muhammad challenged those present to examine the reasons for the continued “propaganda program” against Sudan and argued that the plan was to break up that country. “There are large deposits of oil, which are yet untapped. There is uranium, gold and the most important resource … the vast reserves of water that flow under the sands in the Sudan. They want to control those resources.”⁴⁴

Farrakhan also denounced critics of the Sudanese government as tools of Zionist or State Department conspiracies and insisted that reports of Sudanese slavery were an Israeli-CIA anti-Arab smear campaign.⁴⁵ In July 1996 he openly queried, “[Is Sudan being condemned] because this Islamic government is trying to build an Islamic nation?” He continued that he should and would condemn slavery but would not allow himself to be used as a Western pawn in a political game to destabilize Sudan’s Islamic government. The Final Call noted that Farrakhan had visited Sudan in recent years and met with SPLA leader John Garang. “Not once,” the article stated, “did Mr. Garang mention slavery as an issue of conflict with the government of the north.”⁴⁶ Years later, Farrakhan appeared on James Mtume’s Open Line radio show on New York City’s 98.7 KISS FM, joined by Akbar Muhammad. During the discussion, the Garang meeting came up. After reiterating the fact that slavery was never mentioned in that conversation, Farrakhan shared that Rebecca Garang (John Garang’s wife) broke down and cried after he had mentioned the word “justice.” Rebecca, said Farrakhan, said that he was the only person who came and talked about justice. The injustice, he shared, was racism. “The Arabs,” he stated, “had mixed their blood with the Africans that live in the North. They are Arab-ized and Islamic; and the same racist poison that has poisoned the bloodstream of Islam has made the Arab North feel superior to the Christian Animist-African South in the Sudan.” Farrakhan continued that southern Sudan was Black: “Racism exists there like the enemy has done to us: When you are lighter, you think you are better than your Black Brother or Sister.”⁴⁷

NOI antipathy was not only directed toward Jews; it was also directed toward sources of information concerning Sudan. Farrakhan and other NOI members often disputed the veracity of Sudanese slavery on the grounds that the sources had an anti-Arab agenda. This shows the racial elements of NOI solidarity with Sudan and contrasts with those Black writers who, at earlier moments of the twentieth century, highlighted the history of Arab slavery in Sudan. If those earlier statements were made to conjure sympathy for and solidarity with Black Sudanese, the decision made by Farrakhan and others to defend the Sudanese government on the grounds that there was an unjust anti-Arab agenda at play is striking. The meaning of Arabness had different functions for different Black Americans at different moments in Sudan’s history.

In March 1996, the Black-oriented National Newspaper Publishers Association presented Minister Farrakhan with an award. At a press conference held in Washington, DC, Farrakhan answered questions about his African tour that had made a stop in Sudan. He was on his way out of the press conference when someone shouted a question to him concerning Sudanese slavery. He pointed at the inquirer and issued a challenge: “If slavery exists, why don’t you go as a member of the press?” Farrakhan added, “If you find it [slavery in Sudan], then you come back and tell the American people what you have found. But don’t let the State Department be your official source” (one State Department report showed that 400 Black Sudanese had been sold in Libya).⁴⁸ Two Baltimore Sun reporters—one Black and one white (Gregory Kane and Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, respectively), took up the challenge and went to Sudan. They found a slave market, purchased two half-brothers in a rural market for $500 each, and returned them to their families in a Dinka village. Human rights organization Christian Solidarity International assisted the reporters who wrote a major investigative series for the Baltimore Sun in June 1996 concerning the sale of African children by Arab slave traders in southern Sudan. Farrakhan repeatedly refused the Sun’s interview requests.⁴⁹

On July 17, 1996, the Final Call published an interview with Farrakhan. In it he referred to articles published by the Sun that documented how Kane and Lewthwaite had illegally traveled to Sudan and purchased two enslaved youth. Now a month after the Sun’s reporting on slavery in Sudan, Farrakhan condemned all forms of slavery but nevertheless wanted reports of its reality in Sudan “verified” by an interfaith team of Muslim and Christian journalists and leaders. “The Baltimore Sun is not a news source I should accept as gospel,” said Farrakhan in the interview. The Sun said that he cited the Koran to underscore his position: “When an unrighteous man brings you news, look carefully into it lest you harm a person in ignorance, then be sorry for what you did.” Farrakhan, in addition to questioning the Sun’s validity, wondered in the Final Call how long slavery had existed in Sudan if it was indeed present. He noted that when Amnesty International pronounced a list of indictments against Sudan in 1985 (including political imprisonment, torture, and the death penalty), they mentioned nothing concerning slavery.⁵⁰

“Muslims need our own news service and Africa needs our own news service,” declared Farrakhan in a Q&A with Sudanese media in January 1998. “[These are necessary] so we can counter the managed news of Reuters, BBC, Associated Press and all of them who color the news for their purposes. We need to have an independent news media that will allow us to free our people from the lies and distortions that are promoted by the Western media.”⁵¹ Minister Akbar Muhammad blamed the media for what he perceived as their intentional efforts to cast the Darfur crisis in an Arab versus Black dichotomy. During his joint radio interview with Farrakhan, Muhammad stated, “Whenever we look at the world and talk about a government, they show a picture.” He continued by saying that if you talked about Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign, the media showed an image of the Iraqi leader, and the same went for Syria and its president, Hafez al-Assad. “They have talked about the Sudan, but if I asked an audience across this country what the president of the Sudan looks like, most people do not know.” Muhammad noted that Bashir had just traveled to Iran but that little information was printed depicting him with the Iranian leader. This, he argued, was because Bashir was Black: “as Black as me or [even] Blacker” (“So he does not fit the script of ‘the Arab who is killing Africans’”). Muhammad recalled being in a room and a man asking for Arab tribal leaders to stand up. Those who stood up were Black. When the man proceeded to ask African tribal leaders to stand, those who did were also Black. “So we looked at each other because the picture in America is that these White Arabs are killing Africans. The Brother said clearly what makes them Arabs is that they only speak Arabic… . What makes them Africans is they speak an African language and Arabic.” Muhammad asserted that the language framing Sudanese Arabs enslaving Africans was “very clever” and something that the media pushed to spur “natural hatred of Blacks for Arabs so that Arabs look like the real culprits.”⁵²

The grandest refutation of the Arab versus Black narrative given before the Nation of Islam did not come from Farrakhan but from the Sudanese president himself. On February 23, 2007, President Omar al-Bashir granted an exclusive video interview to workshop attendees at the NOI’s Saviours’ Day convention at Detroit’s Cobo Center. The Nation’s chief of staff had extended the invitation to the Sudanese leader. The conversation was simulcast on Sudanese state-run television and reported by Askia Muhammad in the Final Call. Speaking before NOI members and reporters, Bashir said he was using his speech—which, according to Muhammad, may have been the first interactive video conference between an African head of state and a Black American group—to invite the media and American public to learn the truth about Sudan.⁵³ Bashir injected race into his speech—“Talk of Arabs killing Blacks is a lie,” he said. Adding that Sudan’s government was “a government of Blacks, with all different ethnic backgrounds,” he conflated Sudanese, African, and racial identities: “We’re all Africans. We’re all Black.” Muhammad, reporting on the speech in the Final Call, prefaced his coverage by describing Bashir as a “brown-skinned president who would be considered ‘Black’ in the U.S.” Muhammad reported that “[Bashir] called ‘false’ charges that his ‘White, Arab’ government enslaved some of its ‘Black,’ African countrymen, and even engaged in …‘ethnic cleansing’ in order to rob and dominate the country’s Black population in the southern regions of the country. Those charges were proven to be hoaxes by investigative reports.”⁵⁴

Askia Muhammad’s decision to describe President Bashir as someone his Final Call readers might consider Black like them calls to mind earlier decisions by Percival Prattis to comment about the physical similitude between Sudanese and Black Americans in the Pittsburgh Courier decades earlier, when Sudan’s postcolonial future was in question. It also invokes the way that George Padmore described nationalist leader Abdel Rahman el Mahdi in the 1940s. Just as Prattis and Padmore had done over fifty years earlier, Muhammad now attempted to make a Sudanese figure more relatable to his African American audience by drawing attention to his skin color. What made this latest discursive move such an enlightening—if not bizarre—point of contrast with those earlier counterparts is that Bashir was leading a regime that was complicit in the enslavement of Black south Sudanese and the alleged genocide of Darfurians. Muhammad’s decision to highlight Bashir’s physical resemblance to Black Americans, while perhaps productive in refuting common binaries between Black and Arab Sudanese, reads as an affirmation of racial solidarity with a man who was leading the slaughter of other Black people. In this light, Muhammad’s comment was at once self-serving and self-defeating.

“I can appreciate the Nation of Islam’s need to promote black pride,” said African American columnist Clarence Page in 1995, “especially when it means profits for the Nation of Islam. But, if black pride means anything it means caring about black people, even when their oppressors don’t happen to be white.”⁵⁵ Cotton, writing in his book Silent Terror, noted that the silence of those in the Islamic world (and particularly Black Muslims in Africa and the United States) on the issue of slavery in the Arab world was “disturbing.”⁵⁶ Randall Robinson, president of the TransAfrica Forum (an African American social justice advocacy organization), was quoted in the New York Times stating that he wasn’t sure whether Americans knew much about slavery in Sudan: “If more people had known, they would have been shocked and disappointed with his [Farrakhan’s] statements of support for Sudan.” Black newspapers, radio stations, and television programs like PBS’s Tony Brown’s Journal publicized the Nation’s support of a regime accused of condoning slavery.⁵⁷

Two of the most notable responses to Farrakhan and the Nation came not from African Americans but—fittingly—from Sudanese themselves. The first came from Sabit Abbe Alley. As a toddler, Alley was forced to flee with his family to Uganda during the First Sudanese Civil War. Following the peace agreement that ended that conflict, Alley returned to Sudan and studied at the University of Khartoum. He joined the civil service in the South after graduating in 1977 and worked in the regional parliament, governor’s office, and tourism department. Bashir’s 1989 coup halted his career. Alley, who criticized the regime, fled to Kenya and later to the United States. While in exile, he served as an associate representative for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. Working in that capacity, he engaged with UN officials, US politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and churches about the southern Sudanese struggle.⁵⁸

Alley’s article “Genocide and Slavery in the Sudan” appeared in the June 6–11, 1996, edition of the Brooklyn-based City Sun. In it, Alley mentioned that Farrakhan had spoken over radio station WLIB and addressed a rally at a Brooklyn church on the Sudan catastrophe. On both occasions, the minister refuted reports of Arab Sudanese enslaving Sudanese Africans. “According to brother Farrakhan, the claims of genocide and slavery in the Sudan are mere fabrications and propaganda by the Western world and media to disgrace Islam and at the same time tarnish the ‘good’ image of the Islamic Republic of the Sudan.” Farrakhan, according to Alley, also argued that the United States and European and African countries were plotting to stop Sudanese authorities from establishing a model Islamic state and exporting Islamic fundamentalism abroad. “Members of the Southern Sudanese Community in America in particular and their friends were stunned and outraged by these statements,” Alley said. “They found it hard to believe that a man of Farrakhan’s standing and intelligence could stoop so low as to flirt with Arab slavers and deny the existence of an industry (slavery) which has grown tremendously over the years and has become common knowledge the world over.”⁵⁹

Alley took direct aim at Farrakhan by claiming that his defense of the Sudanese government’s war and slave apparatus was because he had a personal stake in the matter. “He is on Khartoum’s payroll… . The arguments about Western propaganda and the defense of Islam are merely rationalizations and cover-ups. What true Muslim would defend an Islamic government whose pronounced policy is the extermination and enslavement of its citizens, including Muslims[?]”⁶⁰ After concluding that Farrakhan seemed to be playing a critical role in oppressing people in southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and the Ingessina Hills, Alley suggested that no one should be surprised because it was known that the minister loathed southern Sudanese. For evidence to support his claim, Alley pointed to comments Farrakhan made at his February 1996 Saviours’ Day address and subsequent speeches “where the Minister graphically described the people of South Sudan as being very, very, very, very … very dark with kinky hair, as compared to the brown (white!) Northern Arabs, who, according to Farrakhan, looked exactly like him! He used the adverb very 15 times to emphasize his color prejudice against the Southern Sudanese.”⁶¹ Just as Askia Muhammad likened President Bashir to American Blacks, Farrakhan’s decision to distinguish northern and southern Sudanese according to skin color (and identifying with the former) recalls Percival Prattis’s mid-century comparison of Sudanese to Black Americans. In that context, however, Prattis did so while distinguishing Sudanese from historical Arab oppressors. Farrakhan, in contrast, was now likening himself (physically) to northern Sudanese now accused of enslaving Black southerners. “It is indeed ironical,” Alley argued, “that a supposedly black man of slave descent should hate his kith and kin and actively participate in programs aimed at their eradication from the face of the earth… . Minister Louis Farrakhan should realize that despite his support for the Arab and Islamic fundamentalist government of the Sudan, the black African people of the Sudan will not disappear from the face of the earth.”⁶²

The “kith and kin” line was taken up by another Sudanese figure. Born in Sudan in 1938, Bona Malwal studied journalism at Indiana University (where he graduated in 1963) and later economics, journalism, and international relations at Columbia University. During the First Sudanese Civil War, Malwal served in a variety of capacities. He worked as an information officer for Sudan’s Ministry of Culture and Information, edited the English-language Vigilant newspaper in Khartoum, and was elected to Parliament representing Northern Gogrial in April 1968. In 1975 he was appointed a full cabinet member, becoming the first southern Sudanese appointed minister of culture and information. In the early 1980s, Malwal—by then a critic of the regime—was imprisoned with other leading southern politicians for his opposition to the government’s southern Sudan policies. Upon his release he went into exile in the UK and later the United States. Returning to Sudan after the 1985 fall of Nimeiri’s regime, his newspapers (Vigilant and Sudan Times) reported on violence against intellectuals in the South and dissension in the government. In July 1989 he again went into exile in London, where he founded the Sudan Democratic Gazette. Malwal would later be involved in negotiations for the Chukudum Agreement, in which the Umma Party and SPLM/A pledged themselves for the South’s right of self-determination.⁶³

On August 21, 1999, Malwal delivered the annual Bayard Rustin Lecture at the A. Philip Randolph Institute’s National Education Conference. Founded by labor activists and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in 1965, the APRI was created “to continue the struggle for social, political, and economic justice for all working Americans.”⁶⁴ “Your distinguished gathering being largely an African American audience,” Malwal said, “most of you will wonder why I should be so overwhelmed. After all, I am one of you and should feel at home, which I do.” He continued, “Only in very rare moments like this one, when you honour me as you are doing … do my people know they have kith and kin in America who have not forgotten them.” Malwal acknowledged that APRI president Norman Hill had eloquently spoken in an address titled “Slaughter and Slavery in Sudan” and said that the candor of Hill’s message had emboldened him to be candid about one particular aspect of his people’s suffering: “the attitude of a small section of the African American community, and of some very few Black leaders, to the enslavement and genocide being perpetrated by the government of Sudan against my people.” Noting that Hill had mentioned Farrakhan in his address, Malwal continued that he would confine his comments on the matter to Minister Farrakhan because of his denial that he had seen any slavery in Sudan. “[This] has caused not just considerable damage to the cause of the enslaved people of Sudan,” he said. Returning to the familial paradigm, he continued, “Coming from a blood brother … it is both humiliating and demoralising to the Black people of Sudan.” While Malwal described Farrakhan as a close friend of many Arab and Islamic leaders, he positioned him as being particularly close to the Sudanese government. “We do not begrudge that friendship,” he continued. “[As an African American Muslim leader] we would expect him to use his friendship with the regime in Khartoum to plead the just cause of the Black people of Sudan, as he does the cause of the African American Muslims.” Malwal contended that if that had been the case, Black Sudanese might have benefited from the minister’s relationship with their enemies as a mediator. However, denying their suffering to protect their enemies was “a betrayal of one’s own” and an encouragement to Sudan’s government to continue its anti-Black genocide.⁶⁵

After informing his audience that it was impossible for Farrakhan to have been mistaken about who was mistreating whom in Sudan, Malwal stated:

Some of you may remember the joke Mr Farrakhan made about those of us in Southern Sudan on an American television show when he got back home, five times referring to us as “Black, Black, Black!” He then went on to say, “As for the people of Northern Sudan, they are just like you and me!” Mr Farrakhan chose to put some colour distance between himself and us—with his fair skin closer to that of the Arab—in preparation for the public somersault he was about to perform in defence of the enslavers of my people.

“We had known all along that Mr Farrakhan represents a sector of the African American community” he said, “but not the entire lot.” Malwal then contrasted his listeners with the NOI leader. “We have always believed that you [the audience] … would be for us if you knew the truth, the facts of our suffering.” He declared his hope that from that day forward, the southern Sudanese cause—and particularly their struggle for racial equality, right to live in dignity, and the end of slavery and genocide—would have “many strong advocates” among them. “As you return home … we hope you will rally the African American people to join the struggle to free the Black people of Sudan.”⁶⁶

In brief, Black responses to the NOI rhetoric about Sudan were marked by several important observations. Clarence Page and Samuel Cotton were able to acknowledge that the words of Farrakhan and other Black Muslims carried significant weight. While the racism and denial that permeated such rhetoric may have separated them from the likes of the NAACP or Congressional Black Caucus, it did not hollow the significance of their standing. Yet it was the very recognition of the influence that Farrakhan and Black Muslims wielded that disappointed some Black observers. If harnessed the right way, opined Cotton, the NOI could have played a remarkable abolitionary role not only in Sudan but in Mauritania as well. Notwithstanding the words of Cotton, Page, and Randall Robinson, perhaps the most enlightening Black responses to Farrakhan and the Nation came from Sudanese figures Sabit Alley and Bona Malwal. Their use of the “kith and kin” phrase to argue for Sudan’s relationship to Black America is captivating due to comments made decades earlier about Black Americans being descendent from Sudanese slaves. It is also ironic, given NOI attempts to liken northern Sudanese—so often framed as Arabs who enslaved Black Sudanese—to African Americans. It seemed that African Americans like Farrakhan could phenotypically self-identify with the very Sudanese accused of oppressing Black Africans. The politics of African American solidarity with Sudan at the turn of the century was in many ways more difficult to crack than ever before.

Genocide in Darfur

Sudanese slavery was coupled with genocide in Darfur, in western Sudan. The First Darfur Rebellion began between the Fur tribe and government-allied Arab tribes in 1987. While the conflict ended two years later with a negotiated peace agreement, peace did not last long. The Second Darfur Rebellion began in 1995, this time between the Masalit tribe and Khartoum-allied Arabs. Though that rebellion ended in 1999, the Third Darfur Rebellion began in 2003. This time, an alliance of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples allied together and fought against the government and its allies among Arab tribes in northern Darfur. The Sudanese army launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign to quash the rebellion. Three hundred thousand people died, 1.8 million were displaced, and nearly three thousand villages destroyed. The N’djamena Humanitarian Ceasefire Agreement between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebel movements was signed in 2004. That year, a UN commission of inquiry was created to explore the question of Darfurian genocide. International leaders and aid agencies accused the Bashir-led government of supporting the Janjaweed, a militia accused of atrocious acts like burning villages and slaughtering civilians. In 2009 the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Bashir for crimes in the region, and ICC prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.⁶⁷

While Akbar Muhammad’s aim in drawing attention to Sudan may have been antisemitic, oil’s role in US-Sudanese relations could not be ignored. The State Department—despite legislation restricting trade with Sudan due to terrorist activities—allowed two American companies to negotiate oil contracts with Khartoum in early 1997. Minister Farrakhan himself pointed to oil as an integral American interest in Sudan. In April 2006, five members of Congress were arrested during a protest outside the Sudanese embassy that aimed to draw attention to the genocide in Darfur. Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was among those arrested.⁶⁸ “When you see Senator Tom Lantos leading the march on the Sudanese Embassy and [fellow Holocaust survivor] Eli Wiesel, these are Zionists,” Farrakhan claimed in comments published in Final Call. “Why are they leading the march? … It is that there is oil in the West [western Sudan].”⁶⁹

In addition to pointing to oil’s possible influence on America’s focus on Sudan, Farrakhan referenced Palestine to interrogate the intentions of those who sought to shine a light on Sudan but ignore other violent contexts. During Farrakhan’s radio appearance in which he mentioned Senator Lantos and Elie Wiesel, he made the following accusation: “Do you really think that they have compassion for what is going on in Darfur? Human suffering is human suffering. Don’t tell me you have compassion for the Blacks who are suffering in Darfur when you have Palestinians suffering under your nose and you do not care anything about that.”⁷⁰ He noted that at first 180,000 dead were reported in Darfur, then 400,000 and another two million displaced. He added, however, that 3.5 million had died in the Democratic Republic of Congo without any talk. In addition, children in northern Uganda were fleeing kidnappers and being made to fight against the government. Yet, like the Congo case, Farrakhan mentioned, there was no talk. Why, then, was there talk about Sudan? “The Sudan has been on the agenda for regime change,” he opined, “because the country housed Palestinian Resistance Fighters and Osama bin Laden, and put him out. But the Sudan is an Islamic regime that is against the State of Israel.”⁷¹

To be sure, Sudan’s relationship to Israel since the conclusion of the First Civil War could not always be described as oppositional. Sudanese President Jafaar Nimeiri (1969–1985) was the only Arab leader to endorse the Camp David Accords, not just out of loyalty to Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat but also, according to Andrew Natsios, because he may have feared Israeli interference in Sudan’s affairs (as had happened in the First Civil War). After Sadat was assassinated in retaliation for his peace agreement with Israel, Nimeiri was the lone Arab head of state to attend the Egyptian leader’s funeral. In addition to these actions, Nimeiri helped evacuate the Beta Israel Jewish community from Sudan and enabled their relocation to Israel. However, all links ended with Bashir’s 1989 coup. His government was not only initially hostile toward Israel and the United States but also preferred to align with Iran and extremist groups. Hassan al-Turabi, leader of Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood, invited Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and several extremist leaders to operate in Sudan. However, following a nasty split with Turabi in late 1999, Bashir terminated relations with Iran and realigned with Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Sudanese foreign minister Ibrahim Ghandour stated that Sudan wasn’t opposed to exploring the possibility of normalizing relations with Israel, a strategy many saw as the best means of getting Sudan removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.⁷²

Farrakhan, speaking at Chicago’s Mosque Maryam in April 2007, again referenced Palestine in his attempt to question the altruism of those concerned with goings-on in Darfur. “These people who claim to desire to help the suffering people of Darfur don’t desire to stop the suffering of the Palestinian people that live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. America wants to set up a secular government in the Sudan and overthrow the Islamist regime.” His remarks were published in the Final Call.⁷³ Farrakhan was joined in his assertions by William Reed, president and CEO of Black Press International. Writing as a guest columnist in the Final Call in January 2008, Reed asserted that anyone who claimed that genocide was occurring in Darfur and didn’t acknowledge that the same or worse were taking place in Occupied Palestine, Uganda, the Central African Republic, or the Democratic Republic of Congo was “engaged in deception about the subject.”⁷⁴

Thus, it is evident that NOI messaging concerning Sudan was infused with anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and generally antisemitic messaging. Minister Farrakhan and others linked such language with denials of Sudanese slavery, oil, and the racial nature of the Darfur crisis. The comments concerning Israel and Palestine are part of the same genealogy of anti-Israel statements made in the context of the First Sudanese Civil War. This reality speaks to the enduring proximity that the Arab-Israeli conflict had for some Black American observers—Muslim and non-Muslim—of Sudanese politics and social life, and how it became a ready instrument to express endearment for Sudan. As such, the views expressed by the NOI in this section show that Black solidarity with the Sudanese (whether northern or southern) often came with antipathy for some other group.

On May 15, 2007, the Final Call published Jehron Muhammad’s report on a Black delegation that had returned from Darfur. The report not only featured further critique of the supposed Arab-Black dichotomy in Sudan but also levied additional salvos at media coverage more broadly. “The truth concerning the atrocities and fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region,” Muhammad wrote, “is more complex than the U.S. media would have you believe.” He noted that the Black press delegation—led by Abdul Akbar Muhammad, president of the Youth for Africa Foundation—wanted to get a clear understanding of what was happening in Darfur. During their nine-day visit the delegation met with and questioned President Bashir about the role of the African Union and UN peacekeeping forces in Darfur. The delegation comprised thirty-two people representing such media outlets as the Tom Joyner Morning Show, Black Entertainment Television, TV One, New York’s 98.7 KISS-FM, and Final Call. “What they’re saying,” said delegation leader Muhammad, “is there are some Arabs killing Black Africans trying to exterminate them, raping their women, killing their children, pushing Black Africans off their land. But if there is another side to it then we should report it.” The delegation reportedly interacted with government officials, residents of internally displaced persons camps, and typical Sudanese citizens and, during these exchanges, asked why Sudanese called themselves Arabs. Muhammad reported that many said that they identified as Arab because Arabic was their first language, and that if an African language was their mother tongue, then interviewees described themselves as African or referred to their tribe. Many Sudanese apparently answered with “Do I look like an Arab?”⁷⁵

From Satti Majid to Malcolm X to Imam Isa, Sudan was a part of twentieth-century African American Islam in compelling ways long before the Second Sudanese Civil War’s first shots were fired (in 1983), the first person was enslaved in that conflict, or the first whispers of genocide emerged from Darfur. Notwithstanding the actions of those men, Black American Islam’s most significant engagement with Sudan occurred during the cataclysmic events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such engagements were led by Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Their positions, words, and actions shed light on the terms of racial and religious solidarity, the continued centrality of print media, and Sudan’s place as an arena where Black America’s relationship with Israel and Jews was contested.

Toward the end of his memoir, Samuel Cotton writes that he had met with leaders from Black orthodox Muslim organizations who appeared both sympathetic and cautious in their approach to slavery in the Arab world. “They have perhaps been more concerned about the image of Islam to be of any assistance or support to the anti-slavery movement. Torn between loyalty to Islam and their perception of themselves as black people, they have placed their religion above the liberation of their fellow man. As a result, they too have shown no interest in helping to eliminate this plague upon the homeland of their ancestors.”⁷⁶

NOI accusations of a Zionist conspiracy and condemnations of an anti-Arab agenda were the two foundations on which the Nation’s defense of Sudan were built. Their actions not only highlight the continued salience of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Black engagements with Sudan but also throw a wrench into the role of race in this history. Though African American writers had largely linked Arabness with Sudan’s enslaving oppressors, Farrakhan and other Nation members now marshaled that racial identity in their defense of the Sudanese government. While this resulted in yet another instance of Afro-Arab solidarity (coming after anti-Israeli sentiments expressed during the First Civil War), NOI efforts to defend the Sudanese government were done at the expense of those oppressed Black people suffering under the Bashir regime.

Diving deeply into the substance of their commentary, one finds a calculated—and clearly problematic—strategy at play. The Nation was arguably the only American organization of its size (Black or white) to support the Sudanese government. When it sought to dismiss the credibility of slavery and genocide claims by pointing to an anti-Arab agenda, there was in fact anti-Arab demonization in the United States after the events of September 11, 2001. By pointing to physical similarities between African Americans and northern Sudanese, Farrakhan merely repeated what Percival Prattis had said decades earlier when, in the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, he made the Sudanese more familial to his African American readership. Thus, it is of no small consequence that the Nation of Islam—one of Black America’s largest, most prominent organizations—took a pro-Sudanese position even when its government was guilty of the most heinous crimes. The Nation’s position in this regard may not be morally defensible, but it does show how determined and complicated African American sentiments toward Sudan could be.