Pedagogy of Remembrance: Safiya Asya Bukhari's Ethics of Solidarity

Abstract

As a central actor in the Black liberation movement in the United States, Safiya Asya Bukhari played a critical role in ideological and operational work, parallel to that of Assata Shakur, who has received comparatively more recognition. Bukhari's experience as a Black woman, Muslim, political prisoner, and revolutionary illustrates the Fanonian definition of rank-and-file activism in the practice of militancy, while the ethical aspect of her work is crucial to understanding the evolution of Black radical formations. As a champion of political prisoners and prisoners of war, she amplified the testimony of captive members of the movement. Her praxis, while not always articulated in theoretical language, has profound implications for theory. This essay derives an ethics from her life and thought, an intervention that brings a grammar of Muslim ethics into conversation with ideas of Black struggle to engage with the question of solidarity and its horizons.

Introduction

Strands of activism, education, and spirituality are interwoven in the life of Safiya Asya Bukhari (-Alston, born Bernice Jones, 1950–2003), who underwent a profound political and spiritual transformation. A sheltered college student who joined the Black Panther Party (BPP),¹ she went underground with the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and was elected vice president and minister of defense of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). Her experience as a political prisoner led her to cofound the New York Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Jericho Movement for the freedom of all political prisoners, embodying a revolutionary ethics. There are significant parallels between her life and that of Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, from whom she drew inspiration and whose work toward justice she continued.² Like Malcolm's, her life was transformed through self-education, and in her grounding as a Muslim she rediscovered a system of faith on her own terms, pioneering revolutionary Islam in the United States. Her example helps us to theorize the formulation of ethical practice in a contemporary context of political organizing, armed struggle, state repression, incarceration, and marronage.

This essay touches on several themes connected to the possibilities of solidarity, highlighting consciousness and remembrance as drivers of political vision and action. It notes that, despite her importance, Safiya is neglected in the scholarly literature on the Black liberation movement. While recognizing the Fanonian logic of revolt in her operational tactics, I emphasize informal aspects of her education and reflection for the purposes of this discussion on the ethical stance underlying militancy. The essay that follows considers the question of solidarity through a grammar of Muslim ethics, showing that Safiya's spirituality as a Muslima was grounded in the praxis of education and activism.

In its method, this essay upholds a tradition of critical hagiography in the Muslim community, challenging the position of progressive intellectuals like Manning Marable, who, in their effort to “humanize” Malcolm X, use criteria that effectively separate him from the people who view his martyrdom in a broader Qur'anic perspective.³ As one slain in the path of God, a shahid, or witness, remains living testimony, as described in Qur'an 3:169, “Do not think of those who have been killed in God's way as dead. They are alive with the Lord, well provided for.”⁴ As for this essay's register, it is not a significant enough intervention to eschew academic jargon and speak in the everyday language of struggle, for many movement activists also model a dense theoretical style. Even Malcolm X, in “making it plain,” employed multiple registers to communicate. This essay pays tribute to a soldier and organizer who was skeptical of armchair theorizing. But, as we can observe, Safiya reflected deeply on the predicament of political prisoners and prisoners of war, and her thoughts on the subject allow for multiple readings. This particular reading does not claim to be an authoritative account of her life or the movement; while contributing to a theorization of struggle, it continues an educational tradition.

This essay also questions the imposition of categories from critical theory that effectively subsume Islamic concepts under the rubric of materialism. Projects that attempt to decolonize knowledge also privilige Westernizing discourses and read Islamic practices from an Atlantic perspective in which Caribbean and Latin American thinkers are central. One example is liberation theology, which emerged from South America. My work emphasizes an independent trajectory distinct from that of Catholic liberation theology. While some authors like Farid Esack and Hamid Dabashi, and more recently scholars associated with the Critical Muslim Studies group, have employed liberation theology as a framework, I argue that it is shaped by fundamentally different conditions.⁵ There is much of merit in liberation theology, but my work takes the position that liberation from oppression is intrinsic to the Husayni tradition of the Prophet's family (ahl al-bayt) and to the spirit of Islam, especially the Husayni tradition of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt), although often submerged by dominant (Umayyad and Abbasid) imperial historiography and quietist schools of theology. In this sense, the metahistorical context, which encompasses prophetic biography and sacred history, supersedes colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial chronologies and responds not only to Euro-American coloniality but also to dynamics within Islamic intellectual history. Taking such a global historical perspective adds nuance from non-Western intellectual traditions to make sense of the local. Moreover, the notion of “independent thinking” from the ideas and experience of Malcolm X is a departure from nationalist frameworks, requiring a radical break with domestic thinking.⁶ He advocates for global Black thought, and, oriented toward revolutionary practice, encourages students to “read everything.”⁷ If we consider the insurrection of enslaved Wolof and Taino people on Diego Columbus's plantation on December 25, 1521, and Muslim participation in the Haitian Revolution and in the Bahia uprisings of the 1830s, these actions appear not as isolated eruptions but as constituting a broader narrative of African/Black Muslim insurgency and solidarity that incorporates facets of Islamic practice. In a similar vein, the efforts of Black political and cultural actors to preserve and reestablish Muslim identity through literacy activities, from retaining and reconstructing languages to writing in Ajami and Arabic, are forms of self-determination, of which Malcolm X is a stellar example, although he is often disassociated from this historiography. Many Muslims in the Americas identify with such histories of uplift, which are narrated at the community level in various ways and have a life outside the university.

Sources

Safiya Bukhari appears infrequently in the secondary literature on the Black liberation movement. Unlike celebrated participants in the struggle, she has not to date received recognition corresponding to the importance of her contribution. Scholars have addressed her participation in Panther programs and the Black Liberation Army, her significant critique of sexism within the party, and her efforts to free the movement's political prisoners.⁸ These aspects of her practice are but a sample of the radical thinking and action in which she was engaged, forming a multifaceted praxis. As an organizer within the movement, she experienced major transformations in consciousness as exemplified in shifts from social service to political militancy, community volunteering to armed action, and conservative beliefs to revolutionary Islam. The formation of her subjectivity has lessons to impart for the politics of solidarity, for it was her encounters with oppressive conditions that transformed her thinking and impelled her to act. In this respect, her “ethical self-fashioning” took place in the context of revolutionary struggle. As bell hooks writes,

Safiya embodies radical Black female subjectivity and the decolonized mind, and her participation in resistance—in her words, “constant struggle on all levels”—offers illuminating insights.¹⁰

Her contribution parallels that of Assata Shakur, and their works should be seen in concert, not viewed as rival paradigms, for they were close comrades who forged solidarity with one another. Assata recalled that “she was a warrior-woman who did everything she could to free her people and to free political prisoners.”¹¹ The contemporary slogan “Assata taught me,” used by participants in the Black Lives Matter movement, connects generations of activists and histories of resistance.¹² Assata's autobiography remains an essential source of political education, while the belated compilation of Safiya's writings, The War Before, has received comparatively little attention. Granted, the former is a more extensive and readable work by a living activist and commentator, whose escape to Cuba remains a bright star in the long night of repression that the Black liberation movement confronted. Joy James has pointed to their similarities as two women who were BLA leaders and prisoners of war.¹³ Both escaped, survived, and lived to teach the people, a confirmation of their tenacity and the strength of their unfailing commitment. Yet Safiya remains an unsung “lioness for liberation,” in the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal.¹⁴

The War Before is an indispensable, if abbreviated, account of Safiya's thought. In part, limited materials pose a challenge to reconstructing her biography, which has not yet received a full treatment like Assata. Mumia cites her unpublished manuscript entitled “Reflections, Musings, and Political Opinions” (1997), the original of which was not consulted for the writing of this essay. Fragmentary sources on Safiya's life have circulated and been reprinted in different venues. Her essay “Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary” was written in 1979, with postscripts added in 1980 and 1994, before being published in Joy James's Imprisoned Intellectuals and the journal Social Justice in 2003, the year of Safiya's death. On the one hand, my reliance on a single piece of writing illustrates the paucity of written materials. On the other hand, the reproduction of such limited accounts itself performs a kind of repetition, in keeping with the notion of “remembrance” discussed here as a spiritual, political, and pedagogical act. The development of textual sources on her life from pamphlet to academic journal article calls for interrogation in that it points to the packaging of ideas and their reception by different audiences. As Laura Whitehorn notes in the introduction to The War Before, Safiya was “not particularly interested in telling her story; she's interested in helping others see that a struggle for justice is necessary—and worth joining.”¹⁵

The Black Radical Tradition as Islamic Movement

Safiya embodies the recent history of Black liberation, while equally contributing to an overlapping hemispheric tradition of Muslim struggle. The two are inseparable. Muslim political action in the Americas began with resistance to enslavement and found expression in insurrection, marronage, and revolution from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, the reconstruction of Islamicate communities of African descent in the Western hemisphere took place primarily through conversion and immigration, and through Muslims’ participation in diverse organizations, drawing on past paradigms while creating new forms. The situated practice of Islam in a particular time and place relates to textual sources and living expressions of religious practice, constrained by material conditions. Nonetheless, the emerging account of Islam, not unlike its antecedents during the era of enslavement and abolition, is grounded in the desire for comprehensive liberation. Through the reemployment of Islamic themes in the context of the Black radical tradition, emerging narratives help us to rethink the place of Muslim activism in the histories of Black/Afrikan liberation. Thus, the three dimensions of political and spiritual awakening discussed here are refractions that move toward a unitary practice of solidarity, based on an ethics of transformation.

Over its longue durée, a defining expression of Muslim life in the Americas is the connection to freedom struggles of people of African descent since the Middle Passage. The intervening century between direct contacts with African Islam and its palpable resurgence in the diaspora has been described by Samory Rashid as a gap in sources and interpretations, in which the remnants of Islamic practice in the Americas are “hidden transcripts.”¹⁶ In the twentieth century, Malcolm X personified an unfolding reconstruction of Muslim beliefs that eventually took a Pan-Africanist, Third World direction. In this vein Safiya, as an exemplar of Muslim activism, inflected Islam with meanings born of the Black liberation movement and vice versa. Muslim political prisoners from the late Mutulu Shakur to currently incarcerated Imam Jamil al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) also echo this trajectory in different ways.

The role of Muslims in the movement is often treated as epiphenomenal or ideologically marginal. In spite of the fact that the Panthers’ Ten Point Program was modeled on the Nation of Islam's (NOI) “What the Muslims Want,” not to mention the BPP's very establishment “in the spirit of Malcolm X,” there is considerable ambivalence when it comes to recognizing Muslim influence and participation. Naturally, this relates to the divergent ideologies and orientations of the groups. Participation in the NOI is frequently viewed as a prerevolutionary, cultural nationalist stage of political consciousness, as seen in the life of Malcolm X, in contrast to the maturation of political vision and action in revolutionary internationalism. However, this chronological “stageist” perspective does not square with the lived experience of Muslims in the movement. From its inception, the NOI contained traces of a global if not internationalist perspective. Moreover, the turn to Islam following state repression was not a step back or a reversal but an expansion of militancy to other arenas of life. Indeed, the number of personnel in the Black Power movement who became and remained orthodox Muslims after state repression of key organizations and following their incarceration as political prisoners points to a sustained engagement with Islamic thought and practice that manifests in a variety of ways, giving rise to new kinds of activism, praxis, and sociopolitical formations.

The idea that Islamic conversion (or “reversion”) is simply a survival tactic or “wellness” regimen designed to surmount prison conditions is a reductionist stance that does not take seriously the political implications of an epistemological shift from materialism to a perspective that foregrounds the immaterial. The critiques of orthodox materialists who view Islam as a bourgeois ideology, a form of false consciousness, or a matter of mystification have not addressed how Islamic practice takes the struggle to new levels, while advancing self-discipline beyond the expectations of a political line, whether that of a party, street, or prison organization.

Political Education: The Logic of Revolt

In Safiya's personal transformation, we can observe a comprehensive program of political and spiritual awakening, one that is connected to a long history of resistance. The approach to education and liberation that she takes involves a form of multifaceted self-determination that joins self-actualization with collective struggles for sovereignty. In contrast to accounts of political awakening that remain limited to the solitary individual, Safiya writes, “We were embarking on a campaign to change the world, one person at a time. That change begins with rebuilding the character into a revolutionary character, of which the central component is love. That means love of yourself and love of the people.”¹⁷ Serving the people as an expression of love underlies processes of revolutionary transformation at the heart of solidarity.

Other venues for her political education include working in radio journalism on the New York public radio station WBAI, serving as secretary of the East Coast communications unit of the Black Panther Party, and editing the BPP newspaper Right On.

Safiya's unrelenting logic of action-oriented politics defied abstract theorization. Fanon remarks that, under conditions of decolonization, the militant “discovers in the field a new political orientation which in no way resembles the old. This new politics is in the hands of cadres and leaders working with the tide of history who use their muscles and their brains to lead the struggle for liberation. It is national, revolutionary, and collective. This new reality, which the colonized are now exposed to, exists by action alone.”¹⁹ Without a doubt, Safiya sought a greater role and ground-level decision-making power for rank-and-file activists.²⁰ The consciousness of the militant in the field rests on the logic of revolt. It is from this position that she insisted, “I am not a feminist. I am a revolutionary.”²¹ It should be noted that this disavowal is born in the fires of insurgency and not in the aftermath, at a moment of reflection. The means of struggle in a united front defines the course of action.²² “We had taken on the persona of sexist America,” she writes, “but only with a Black hue. It was into this that the Black Panther Party was founded, declaring that we were revolutionaries and a revolutionary had no gender.” Her ambivalence toward critics in the community also made her resolute against them: “I would like to remind you of two things. The first is, we must remember that everybody that is Black is not involved in the Black Liberation Struggle and therefore, their critique of the struggle or elements of the struggle is not done with the motivation of curing the sickness to save the patient.” This admonition reminds us that the movement's participants have taken on unique commitments and that outsiders’ intentions should be evaluated in addressing their critiques. Indeed, Safiya critiqued sexism in the Black liberation movement as well as in the Muslim community. Her critical positions allowed her to participate in efforts to address social problems by working through contradictions. Despite intense pressure to tow the Cleaver line from Algeria, she exhorted others to “follow the principle, not the man.” Safiya's logic of revolt militated against complacency, systemic indifference, the violence of poverty and miseducation, and the lack of services. “It is extremely crucial that, as we struggle against our primary enemy, we remember that ours is a collective struggle, a struggle for human rights for all of our people, men and women, and as long as one of us is oppressed none of us is free”: It is this ethics of solidarity that solidified her commitment to political prisoners.²³

Safiya was a “lifeline” who connected political prisoners and prisoners of war to the outside world.²⁴ Evoking historical resonances, Mumia Abu-Jamal likens her to Harriet Tubman, a poignant comparison that highlights her unyielding commitment, outspoken public image, and fierce determination.²⁵ The refusal to abandon comrades before and after her own incarceration is a measure of her solidarity. Indeed, the names of the BLA collectives in which she participated, the Harriet Tubman Brigade, Wretched of the Earth Collective, and Amistad Collective (of which she was the only woman unit coordinator) kept alive the memory of their referents while bringing into existence through action new interpretations of a long-standing tradition of struggle.

Spiritual Front

Five years before her own incarceration, Safiya embraced Islam in 1971 in Sankore Masjid, founded by Muslim prisoners in Greenhaven Correctional Facility. Sankore Masjid is a storied center of spirituality and knowledge in the Black liberation movement. For imprisoned Muslims to have forged political space within the carceral depths was more than a demand for religious freedom; it constituted both an act of self-determination and one of epistemic decolonization. That they named the space Masjid Sankore after the celebrated center of learning in Timbuktu, Mali, resonates as an expression of identification with both Pan-African consciousness and the global community of Muslims (ummah). This signals the simultaneity of African and Muslim being. Here we can understand how the struggle for self-determination encompasses individual and collective movements for political, economic, cultural, and epistemological sovereignty. Self-determination in this sense relates to the political destiny of an oppressed people in concert with individual self-actualization. The varieties of Islam, including Islamicate cultural forms, embraced by people of African descent in the West throughout the twentieth century can be interpreted as a “return to the source,” in Amílcar Cabral's formulation, and a “decolonization of the mind,” in the words of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.²⁶ The search for non-Eurocentric paradigms attracted many to disparate Third World philosophies. As with the Black liberation movement, Malcolm X also remains deeply influential to this development. Indeed, like many before and after him, he experienced several iterations of Muslim practice in searching for answers to the problem of racism, which he understood in historical, cultural, and philosophical terms.

Like her political awakening, Safiya's spiritual beliefs were forged in the furnace of resistance and took shape gradually. At the outset, Safiya had defended the right of her BLA comrades Nuh Abdul Qayyum (Albert Washington) and Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom) to maintain and express their faith. “I reminded those who objected to his being a Muslim that we were fighting for freedom and self-determination. I said, ‘How can we talk about self-determination if we would deny someone their freedom to believe in the existence of God?’”²⁷ It is key that she phrases this as a “reminder,” in a pedagogical move that offers clarification and redefinition rather than a doctrinaire or textbook account of self-determination. Her outspoken recognition of Muslim faith, although not one she personally shared at the time, also reflects political flexibility, a willingness to distinguish between tactics and ideology. Her understanding of collective self-determination did not abrogate individual freedom of conscience. In this sense, it echoes what Malcolm X had described as “thinking for yourself.”²⁸ This act of solidarity propelled her to investigate and ultimately embrace Islam as “a way of life” (din). “Nuh turned me on to Islam, which gave me a new security, sense of purpose and dignity.”²⁹ In this context the act, direct or indirect, of calling to Islam (da'wa) is not so much evangelization as politicization on another level. While she considered Nuh her teacher, she writes that “It was reading the Qur'an for myself that made me decide that I wanted to seriously study the Islamic way of life. As I studied, I learned that Allah makes Muslims, man does not.”³⁰ Safiya's spiritual awakening was the fruit of study, or seeking knowledge (talib al-‘ilm) and striving with the intellect. “I read the Qur'an on faith and the oneness of God. I wrestled with my belief. Finally, on a basic level, I concluded that nothing happens to us without the permission of Allah. This may sound simple and matter of fact, but it's not. There was an entire analysis and process I went through before this became real to me.”³¹ This process of conversion or “reversion” is often related in narrative form with educational intent and forms a pivotal section of The War Before, just as the chapter “Saved” performs a similar function in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. More recently, the Black Dawah Network has produced artwork illustrating Safiya's transformation in prison, another form of visual remembrance that speaks to a new generation.³²

In her memoir Safiya writes, “My belief in Islam as a way of life was becoming more solidified also. On the one hand, I was faced with revolutionaries who had problems with my being Muslim. On the other hand, I was being told by Muslims that in order to receive support from them I had to denounce the Black liberation movement and my codefendant who was not Muslim.”³³ With her deepening commitment to freedom and faith, Safiya viewed liberation ethics and Islamic practice as inseparable. She understood that practicing Islam meant being loyal to her non-Muslim codefendant. In the early 1970s, when adherence to Islam was not as widespread, drawing a sharp delineation between Muslim and non-Muslim was inappropriate, in her view, an importation of unnecessary strictures that did not align with realities on the ground. Potently, she articulated that for her “Islam and revolution is not a contradiction.”³⁴ This statement, also the title of one of the chapters in The War Before, sums up her reconciliation of politics and faith, which were enmeshed, although her perspective was based less on familiarity with written material of an Islamic nature than on the spirit of the faith, which she understood as opposing injustice and oppression in any form. Articulations of this belief reverberate in the writings of Muslims in the Black liberation movement. In this vein, for example, Nuh issues an almost identical statement that “Islam is not incompatible with revolutionary ideology.”³⁵ Posited in such a way legitimates a controversial position in the face of prejudice. In a 1992 interview, Safiya explains that “the Qur'an . . . said it was incumbent upon a Muslim to wage a struggle against tyranny and oppression wherever it may be found. That gave me the license to be a revolutionary and a Muslim at the same time.” She continues, “A true Muslim will not sit idly by and allow tyranny and oppression in whatever form to happen without waging struggle against it. So, I see no contradiction between being Muslim and a revolutionary. I see a contradiction in the way that Islam is practiced in the world.”³⁶ This point, put another way, locates the contradiction in practice, not theory. Her reading sees Islam as a revolutionary ideology, practice, and belief system that moves beyond materialist paradigms.

For Safiya, intellectual understanding was rooted in the practical requirements of Islam, which she sought to honor. “The discipline of making salat five times a day and having Allah constantly in your remembrance is a wonderful thing,” she remarks, “because it enables you to deal with the madness around you.”³⁷ This statement recalls the verse from Ar-Ra'd that references dhikr, the Islamic term for remembrance: “Those whose faith and whose hearts find peace in the remembrance of God—truly it is in the remembrance of God that hearts find peace.”³⁸ Under conditions of incarceration, foundational activities and basic necessities taken for granted in the outside world are magnified in meaning, value, and effect. “On the spiritual front, I was struggling to get a halal (permitted foods) diet, to observe jummah (Friday prayer), and to fast for the month of Ramadan.”³⁹ It took a monumental effort to gain such religious freedoms for Muslim prisoners, often through individual litigation in state and federal courts. Black Muslims has not been recognized as a legitimate religious group until the courts mandated that they be given the legal protections afforded to other denominations. Moreover, the state deems potentially subversive any activity of political prisoners, who contend with intensified surveillance and criminalization.

The outward aspects of religious practice such as making prayer in congregation and observing dietary rules also correspond to an inward dimension, in which one transforms the substance of the soul. The outward (zahir) and the inward (batin) are conjoined spheres, in which the former is apparent while spiritual vision (basira) is required to perceive the latter. If self-discipline translates in social terms to self-care—healing, rebuilding, and fortifying oneself for the continuing struggle—it also has a mystical meaning of detachment from materialism in all senses. Islam is attractive precisely because as a complete system of individual and social thought and practice it provides an alternative to carceral systems designed to colonize mind, body, and soul. Because of the totalizing nature of coloniality, decolonization requires a comprehensive program of action (‘amal) and constant self-evaluation (muhasaba), or taking account of oneself. “Over the next two years, both my political and spiritual beliefs were to be tried by fire.”⁴⁰

Safiya not only espoused and practiced self-determination; she operationalized it on several levels. She is a singular figure, standing fearlessly like Zaynab bint ‘Ali (d. 682) in the court of the Umayyad tyrant Yazid ibn Muawiya. In Islamic history, the archetypal uprising is that of Imam Husayn ibn ‘Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and his family and companions near Karbala, Iraq, on the day of ‘Ashura, Muharram 10, 680. His sister, Sayyida Zaynab, survived the massacre, experienced captivity, and inaugurated the remembrance of the martyrs in the elegies recited during annual mourning ceremonies. For her part, Safiya took a courageous, independent stance in opting for legal self-representation. In prison, her unique position posed challenges that took great effort to overcome: “Being an orthodox Muslim, a political prisoner, and a woman was unheard of.”⁴¹ She fasted alone in her cell and, in the venerable tradition of marronage, escaped from prison to get medical care. She viewed this as a form of jihad—“exertion,” “striving,” or “struggle,” a misunderstood concept that she never shied away from and defined on her own terms. After being recaptured, she was placed in solitary confinement for three years and seven months. In response to her treatment, she went on a hunger strike; ultimately, it was her own litigation that freed her from captivity under the Equal Protection Clause.⁴² Even though the warden called her “a threat to the security of the free world,” the judicial system recognized her fortitude and commitment to the welfare of other prisoners, and the prison psychologist admitted that “few others have the strength of character she has.”⁴³ Safiya’s fortitude emanated from within, and she writes, “It is the intentions of your heart and your determination to struggle in the way of Allah that makes you Muslim.” As part of that process, she confronted her own fears. “In dealing with the government of the United States of America, I was very clear that they were just men and women, while Allah was God. Him alone should I fear.”⁴⁴ Such disavowals of false authority reinforced her political and religious convictions.

Safiya grappled with herself in the process of understanding Islam as a comprehensive system that requires internal work and external application. In naturalizing the faith to her particular circumstances and larger history, she made connections and established parameters from which to act. She applied Qur'anic verses in the contemporary context of the movement for Black and Third World liberation:

Her opposition to injustice was fortified by a Qur'anic outlook, which she understood as an alternative to Eurocentric ideologies. As one commentator notes,

This perspective from an American Muslim is representative of an Islam grounded in struggles against the carceral state, without being defined by its conditions and limits. The overriding political commitment of both Safiya and the commentator is the pursuit of a just society viewed through the prism of faith, in tune with earlier generations of activists who sought comprehensive transformation based on truth and justice.

Her description of “internal revolution” evokes the extensive Islamic literature on self-transformation, the ethical practice known as jihad an-nafs (“struggle with the self” or the soul) that results from theory and practice, reflection and correction, a praxis that moves beyond temporal and spatial confines. The transcendental dimension of this battle against the ego that is considered “the greater jihad” makes it universal in all times and places and accessible wherever one finds oneself. Safiya’s reference to Malcolm X underscores both the urgency of the moment as well as his influence on her thinking.

Pedagogy of Remembrance

As a conceptual frame, “pedagogy of remembrance” fuses two elements in relation to solidarity. One, pedagogy, refers to learning and teaching, and the other, remembrance, involves awareness or consciousness. In Safiya's life and her work, the processes of learning, political awakening, becoming Muslim, and teaching fall under the heuristic of pedagogy. The concept of remembrance also relates to being attuned to individual and communal identity, history, politics, and goals. In the religious context, one cannot ignore the meaning derived from Islamic practices of dhikr, the remembrance or invocation of God. “I was learning that Islam is not a religion that you observe only on Friday or when you are in the presence of other Muslims. Islam is a way of life. You live within its tenets 24–7. Allah is constantly in your remembrance.”⁴⁸ Remembrance is at the heart of Islamic practice: the performance of the canonical prayer five times daily, the recitation of the Qur'an, the practice of dhikr, invoking the names of God. Learning and teaching are incumbent upon all, as mentioned in the Qur'anic verse describing “the mutual teaching of truth, and of patience and constancy” (Qur'an 103:3).⁴⁹ As an observant Muslim, Safiya retains this definition in her religious commitments, and we can stretch the meaning of remembrance to relate it to activism. Indeed, bearing on this stance of solidarity is the hadith (prophetic saying) according to which “the likeness of the believers in their mutual love, mercy and compassion is that of the body; when one part of it is in pain, the rest of the body joins it in restlessness and fever.”⁵⁰

Safiya fulfilled Malcolm X's imperative to “think for yourself.”⁵¹ She also sought to “make it plain,” to convey ideas in a way that was perhaps deceptively simple on the surface of her statements, but with a profundity born of struggle. She sought to clarify the rationale for her beliefs and actions:

The notion of bearing witness to the truth, even against one's own self, is a central concept in Muslim ethics, one that has multiple dimensions: from the testimony of faith (kalima shahada) to the advanced spiritual station of witnessing realities (mushahada).

As early as 1981, before she was released, Safiya had issued a pamphlet entitled Lest We Forget, a collection of short biographies, photographs, and poems of forty-three Black liberation activists who had been either assassinated or “slain in combat.” Here she wrote, “We know that where there is struggle there's sacrifice. The death of our comrades was a sacrifice, for in our struggle some deaths are lighter than a feather and others are as weighty as a mountain. Every one of these deaths is weighty as mountains, for these comrades not only practiced the principles of revolutionary warfare, they taught others to do the same.”⁵³ This “chronicle of unsung heroes” was an important intervention in movement history and foreshadowed the efforts she would undertake in the last stage of her life.

For political prisoners, the return to society is a test of faith and struggle, often without adequate support networks. Upon her release from prison in 1983, Safiya had to rebuild her life, reconnect with her family and community, and find a way to continue her activism in a world vastly different from the one she had left. Rather than capitalize on her participation in the BPP, however, she continued the struggle by other means. Refusing to succumb to complacency or nostalgia, she faulted former Panthers who were inactive for “not understanding that it is not about what you used to be, but what you are doing now.”⁵⁴ This steadfast refusal to idealize the past made her homecoming a new front for activism as she shared lessons through ongoing action. Mumia recalled that “as she was a student . . . so she was a teacher, not only of youth, but also of her contemporaries, some of whom seemed to forget early lessons that she was determined to remind and reteach them.”⁵⁵

She crystalized an agenda for herself and those who remained in the struggle: obtaining the freedom of US political prisoners and prisoners of war. This practical effort meant publicizing the plight of her comrades as well as providing concrete support. She cofounded the New York City chapter of the Campaign to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Jericho Movement to release political prisoners and prisoners of war. When Fidel Castro visited New York City and met community members at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1995, Safiya read messages from political prisoners and addressed the gathering on behalf of Assata Shakur:

This echoes the statement from political prisoners made by fellow Panther and Muslim Dhoruba Bin Wahad to Nelson Mandela when the latter visited Harlem in 1990. Using a momentous occasion in the presence of global icons of struggle to stand in solidarity with political prisoners awakens a new generation to movement history, reminds veterans of unfinished work, and sets the agenda without compromising the vision.

Rebuilding her life as a veteran of the movement, Safiya recalled, “When I was in the Black Panther Party, we used to say ‘Educate, Organize, Educate, Organize, Agitate, Liberate!’ . . . The idea was clear, whatever we were attempting to do it began with education and it ended with liberation, or more precisely—educate to liberate! This manual helps us to educate the community and organize them in order to liberate our political prisoners and prisoners of war.”⁵⁷ The Jericho Manual became an indispensable tool for advancing the struggle. To this end, she also contributed to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, an organization that brought attention to the evolving plight of political prisoners. With her friend and comrade, movement pioneer Yuri Kochiyama, who had also converted to Islam in 1971, she visited political prisoners and built a network of dedicated support. Safiya and Yuri, “the patron saints of political prisoners,” had also “studied and worshipped” under Imam Rasul Suleiman at Sankore Mosque.⁵⁸ More than an act of political solidarity, this form of remembrance grew from an ethical stance of seeing others as you see yourself. Speaking out, educating the public, and organizing prison support are pedagogical commitments observed in Safiya's life, forms of grassroots political action, spiritual service (‘ubudiyya), and remembrance. She saw herself as an “activist, an on-the-ground worker who practiced rather than preached.”⁵⁹ Her activities included working as a paralegal on briefs, writing letters to parole boards, and visiting prisoners. She was suspicious of theorization for fear of becoming an “armchair revolutionary” but was widely regarded as an organic intellectual whose political thought and spiritual life were forged in the movement. At the same time, she was circumspect and identified errors of practice: “One of the things that is very clear is that we haven't done the necessary education and organizational work in the streets in order to deal with a movement in the ways that we moved then. We were young, we were idealistic and we were impatient.”⁶⁰ Laura Whitehorn recalls that “Safiya lived her politics, exuded solidarity from every pore and in every fiber of her being. She acted on her beliefs—and she was constantly questioning, refining and developing those beliefs.”⁶¹

As the conscience of society, political prisoners have published trenchant accounts of state repression.⁶² Their stories of awakening constitute a literature of resistance that teaches unacknowledged truths. In this way, they also share a didactic commitment in bringing to light injustice. Taking an ethical stand against oppression, dissidents elucidate realities that are obfuscated by education, media, and popular culture. Listening carefully to voices that have defied silence is itself an ethical practice particularly when the fetishes of identity, performance, academicism, and consumerism inform so much current political practice. Working on their behalf and fighting for their release are part of the exterior and interior struggles of changing the world and oneself. “We must instill into the hearts and minds of our children, our people, ourselves this ability to struggle on all fronts, internally and externally, laying a foundation built upon a love for ourselves and a knowledge of the sacrifices that went before and all we have endured.”⁶³ It was in the confines of prison that Safiya finally had time to contemplate the direction of the movement and the next stages: “Sitting in a maximum-security cell for three years and seven months afforded me an opportunity to reflect upon my life and the lessons I was forced to learn. Now the learning process is over . . . it is time to put what I have learned into practice; freedom will only be won by the sweat of our brows.”⁶⁴ Learning and practice correspond to knowledge (‘ilm) and action (‘amal), where one is incomplete without the other. As a form of action, teaching redistributes the wealth of knowledge. “So, the educational phase has to be so that when you move from one level to the next in the struggle, that it is understood that the people know what we are doing.”⁶⁵ When Nuh died of liver cancer in a prison medical facility in New York in 2000, Safiya was closely involved with his funeral preparations and designed the inscription on his tombstone. With this final act, she laid to rest a mentor and teacher who not only introduced her to Islam but also “taught [her] compassion.”⁶⁶ Burying comrades and writing eulogies are more than symbolic acts of commemoration. They constitute the politics of bearing witness to truth (mushahada) at the heart of a pedagogy of remembrance. In this spirit, Safiya also shared personal testimony as an activist, community worker, and Muslim convert at a venue for radical poetry in New York City, University of the Streets.⁶⁷

There are layers of meaning in Mumia's tribute to Safiya, which ends with the exhortation, “Remember her, by making her dream, reality!”⁶⁸ Remembrance, dreaming, and realization are key acts in the movement from potentiality to actualization. This pedagogy of remembrance retrieves buried truths, imagines new possibilities, and carries out the practical tasks needed to fashion a new reality. The artifacts of remembrance—the pamphlet, poster, flyer, letter, oration, interview, and memoir written by and on behalf of political prisoners—are echoes of the voices that emanate from behind the walls. Mumia's statement is thus not just an epitaph but also a political axiom. Revolutionary formations exercise self-criticism both during and in the aftermath of political practice, which Safiya exemplified in her political education work. In assessing her contributions to the struggle, we should remember that an effort to convey lessons to the widest possible audience is a hallmark of her writings and interviews. Indeed, reconstructing the life and thought of Safiya Bukhari is an unfinished task that itself reflects the pedagogy of remembrance.

Conclusion

Muslims have an important place in the historiography of Black insurgency in the United States, yet, because their religious beliefs are not always evident, this dimension remains marginalized in mainstream accounts. The “hidden transcripts” still await careful excavation.⁶⁹ Without diminishing the evidence, scholars exploring archival and material sources in nineteenth-century South Carolina and Bahia have shown sensitivity to linguistic and cultural nuance.⁷⁰ For contemporary history, the sources are clearer, even if their interpretation must be elucidated, drawing on new theoretical work. The radical subjectivity of New Afrikan / Black Muslim women challenges conventional approaches that sideline their contributions even while they represented the broadest vision.

This essay has amplified the voice of Safiya Bukhari, assembling a selection of texts to reinscribe her thought. To the degree that it has “remixed” her ideas, it has sought to remain faithful to the spirit of her example. Focusing on three facets of her praxis—the logic of revolt, internal revolution, and the ethics of solidarity—I have argued that her “pedagogy of remembrance” contributes to a definition of grounded spirituality in the Muslim Americas. Conditions for practicing Islam have rarely been optimal, and resources have been scant, but the struggle has continued with available materials in the spirit of the tradition, if not always to its letter. Safiya organized survival programs, participated in modern-day marronage, supported political prisoners, and commemorated martyrs. Like Harriet Tubman, she engaged in border crossing by moving between worlds of confinement and freedom, and between planes of physical and metaphysical struggle. Her example is a reminder that another world and another self are possible, where one is inextricably linked to the other in a unified program of liberation. It is an ethical duty to bear witness to truth, remember those forgotten in exile or “buried alive” in prison, and seek lessons from those who have sacrificed by paying the greatest price for freedom. Safiya shares the lineage of spiritual warriors like Malcolm X, whose shahadat set in motion the Black Power movement and inspired the ongoing reformulation of Islam as “methodology of the oppressed.”⁷¹ In her truth-seeking and soul-searching, Safiya embraced Islam on her own terms and remains a compelling, if overlooked, representative of Black/New Afrikan Muslim praxis in the United States. As her teacher, Sheikh Nuh Abdul Qayum, said, “When it comes your turn to pass it on, you leave the legacy on a higher level. See, it's about one generation to the next until victory. . . . The victory doesn't necessarily mean the surrender of the enemy or his collapse. It's the knowledge that others will carry on. As long as that's going on there's no defeat for us.”⁷²

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the panel “Islamic Liberation Theology and Islamic Politics” at Fundación Euroarabe in Granada, Spain, June 18, 2013.

Notes

Works Cited