“A day of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny”.

This adage comes to mind as protests erupt following the recent killing of George Floyd in broad daylight by police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd was the latest of so many lives senselessly taken, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and David McAtee, bespeaking a racism so deeply entrenched that innocent black people are dying at the hands of those meant to protect them. Yet these killings only scratch the surface of the problem. Police brutality is not a novel phenomenon but a symptom of the virulent pandemic of anti-blackness and devaluation of black lives that has plagued our communities, globally for centuries.

Renewed cries of justice in the US have echoed across the world through protests in the UK, France, Amsterdam, Seoul, Rio de Janiero, spotlighting racism on our very doorstep. Whilst British police do not carry firearms as standard, police brutality is equally pervasive in the UK. Recently, protestors bore placards stating the “UK is not innocent” highlighting the UK’s responsibility for the deaths of Mark Duggan, Sarah Reed, Jimmy Bumenga, Rashan Charles and Mark Nunes, amongst countless others. Harrowing stories of police brutality in the USA and names to forever remember include Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner; sadly this is a short list of victims of a broken, corrupt and racist system.

Indeed the Black Lives Matter movement has thrown systemic racism and discrimination that is part of the fabric of British institutions into sharp relief. A snapshot of this discrimination will show black people prosecuted three times more than white people in the UK, and between 2014-18 black people seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. 12% of police incidents using force involve black people despite them making up 3.3% of the population.

In 2012, the Hostile Environment Policy led by Theresa May, treated those of the Windrush generation as illegal immigrants resulting in their loss of jobs, homes, access to healthcare and at times even detention and deportation. In 2017, the fire at Grenfell tower left 72 people dead, the majority of which were ethnic minorities with survivors still awaiting permanent housing.

Whilst it is true that the aforementioned discrimination is enacted through policies on a structural level, no doubt the furore has caused us to reflect, as individuals and especially as Muslims, on our position in this movement, our responsibility, our actions, our response and perhaps even our complicity in allowing this virus to fester.

Islam should be the vanguard of the fight against racism, so is our ostensible apathy not incongruent when our faith predicates upon it?
It is interesting that when the issue of black civil rights arises we readily quote Martin Luther King, we laud Steve Biko and we extol the efforts of Malcolm X, but to what extent can we lay claim to their legacies if we are not taking on their struggles?
Throughout both the Quran and Seerah, there are recurrent themes on upholding justices:

“O you who believe, be persistently standing firm for Allah as witnesses in justice, and do not let the hatred of a people of prevent you from being just. Be just, for that is nearer to righteousness. Fear Allah, for Allah is aware of what you do.”(5:8)

This ayah underlines the centrality of civil resistance to our faith and as witnesses to Allah we have a responsibility to enact the values and ethics of our faith in actively fighting injustices.

In fact, the tenet of justice is so important that Allah (SWT) will uphold a just nation even it is disbelieving and destroy an unjust nation if it is believing.

Ibn Al-Qayyim (RA) comments upon this saying that when you look in the Qur’an every time Allah destroyed a nation it was because they oppressed others, i.e not disbelief alone but disbelief coupled with injustice.

A Hadith of our beloved Prophet (SAW) similarly reinforces this:

“Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.”

This hadith shows the faith’s emphasis on transformative action; hatred of oppression is the mere baseline because no doubt the support we can offer the black community is within our means. The hadith underlines an important point of reflection; beyond engaging in conversations around injustice, how do our activisms move the needle from rhetorical solidarity to tangible actions that allow for systematic change? How do our Islamic ethics translate into action on an everyday level to confront oppression, dispel unconscious biases, influence policymaking and shift power en route to an equitable society.

We must educate ourselves and confront the realities of our privilege, as uncomfortable as they may be; not because we ought to feel guilty but in order to assess how we can convert these privileges from blind spots to vehicles of change. As the writer Bell Hooks observes; “Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. We have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”

Whether as a school governor petitioning for the decolonisation of the school curriculums, as a student getting involved in Black History Month, as community leaders inviting Black speakers to talks, as constituents lobbying our MPs on raising the issues in parliament, we all have a role to play in dismantling systemic oppressions according to our capabilities and spheres of influences.

Essentially we need to cut through the hype. For the Black Lives Matter movement to be sustainable, the fires of indignation that enrage our hearts need to be fuelled beyond current conversations into actionable and long-term measures. Allah (SWT) tells us in the Quran that “Whoever saves a life it would be as if they had saved the whole of humanity”(5:32). It is therefore not enough to be neutral or passive; when racism is taking lives, the only way to save them is to be actively anti-racist.

By Ruqaiyah Amin