Islam Is Not Your Liberation

Islam Is Not Your Liberation

For years, Islam has been marketed to Black people in the West as strength, discipline, masculinity, structure, resistance, and liberation. In prisons, on street corners, online, and inside struggling communities, the image is constantly pushed:

Islam is the answer.
Islam is power.
Islam is order.
Islam is freedom from Western corruption.

And compared to the collapse of many modern communities, that structure looks attractive.

But structure alone does not equal truth.

A dictatorship can be structured.
An empire can be structured.
A cult can be structured.

The real question is:
What does the ideology produce historically when it gains power?

That is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

A lot of Black Americans are introduced to Islam emotionally before historically. They see discipline, brotherhood, confidence, family structure, anti-drug rhetoric, masculine posture, and certainty. What they often do not see is the full historical tension between Islamic expansion, African identity, slavery, conquest, and religious replacement.

And the moment someone raises those questions, the conversation usually gets shut down immediately.

One of the biggest shields used in these discussions is Bilal.

Bilal is constantly presented as proof that Islam transcends racism. The image is simple:
“Look, Islam elevated a Black man.”

But Bilal has increasingly become less of a discussion and more of a defense mechanism.

Because one symbolic figure does not erase centuries of history.

And history matters.

Long before Europeans entered Africa in the ways modern conversations focus on, Arab Muslim slave trades already existed across North Africa, East Africa, and trans-Saharan routes. Africans were bought, sold, transported, enslaved, and absorbed into expanding Islamic empires.

That is not propaganda.
That is history.

Yet many Black Americans are only taught one side of the slavery conversation.

Even stranger is the contradiction underneath modern conversion narratives.

Some Black converts speak as if Islam is a return to African identity while simultaneously embracing an Arab-centered religious structure:
Arabic terminology,
Arabic ritual forms,
Arabic pilgrimage orientation,
Arabic historical empires,
and societies that often conquered or absorbed African populations historically.

That tension rarely gets discussed honestly.

Then comes the issue of civilization itself.

Look at North Africa.

Large portions of North Africa were once heavily Christian.
Egypt had deep Christian roots.
Christian communities existed across regions now overwhelmingly Muslim.

What happened?

Did entire civilizations simply wake up one morning and voluntarily erase themselves?

Or did conquest, political dominance, taxation systems, military pressure, demographic replacement, and generational transformation slowly reshape entire societies?

That question matters because ideologies should not only be judged by what they preach while weak. They should also be judged by what they historically become once dominant.

And this is where another major contradiction appears in modern discourse.

Western imperialism is constantly discussed — sometimes rightly so. Entire academic systems, documentaries, activists, and political movements are built around analyzing European conquest, exploitation, and colonization.

But something strange happens when Islamic conquest enters the conversation.

The room gets quiet.

Large portions of the Middle East and North Africa were not originally Arab.
Many regions were culturally distinct long before Arab Islamic expansion reshaped them.

Languages changed.
Religions changed.
Legal systems changed.
Civilizations changed.

Yet modern discourse often treats Islamic expansion as if it were merely spiritual enlightenment instead of political, military, demographic, and civilizational transformation.

Why?

Why is Western conquest endlessly discussed while Islamic conquest is treated like forbidden history?

If conquest and imperialism are morally wrong in one direction, then intellectual honesty requires examining them in every direction.

Otherwise history stops being analysis and becomes selective political theater.

Even critics inside these conversations openly acknowledge that parts of the Islamic world once experienced periods of scientific and intellectual growth. But many critics also argue that later forms of religious fundamentalism increasingly suppressed open inquiry, reason, and dissent in favor of rigid theological control.

Whether someone agrees fully with that diagnosis or not, the larger issue remains the same:

Civilizations must survive honest scrutiny.

Not emotional marketing.
Not slogans.
Not selective memory.

And Black people especially should never emotionally inherit an ideology without fully examining:
who conquered who,
who enslaved who,
who expanded where,
who held power,
what happened to conquered populations,
and what the ideology historically produced once dominant.

Now to be clear:
this is not an argument that every Muslim is evil.

That would be dishonest and intellectually lazy.

Many Muslims are peaceful neighbors, workers, friends, and family-oriented people.

But peaceful individuals do not automatically answer larger historical questions.

The real issue is whether Black people are being recruited emotionally into a system they have not fully studied historically.

Because discipline alone is not truth.
Brotherhood alone is not truth.
Anti-Western rhetoric alone is not truth.

Every ideology should face examination.

Christianity.
Islam.
The West.
Everybody.

Truth survives pressure.
Propaganda avoids it.