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Several years ago as I was paying my
bill at a restaurant in New York city, the cashier happened to be
an Indian looking young woman. She had a name tag on her shirt
that read, "Zainab Singh". I asked her what kind of a name it was
and if she was a Muslim. She said: I do not know if I am a Muslim.
She did not appreciate that her name was a mixed Muslim-Hindu
name. She told me that her parents were from Caribbean and she was
born in US. A year ago I met a young Indian looking woman engineer
at my place of work by the name, Priscilla Mohammad. I asked her
if she was a Muslim. She said that she was a Christian, her
parents were from Caribbean. I asked her how she got this name.
She said her parents were Muslims in Caribbean at one time and had
converted to Christianity but kept their last name.
About 150 years ago India's British rulers took away a large
number of very poor Muslims from various parts of India as
indentured labor aboard ships to work on the sugar cane
plantations in the Caribbean. They told the Indians that after a
few years they will be able to go back to India. But it never
happened as the British masters demanded hefty ship - fares to
take them back to India. As these Indian laborers were paid a
pittance in wages in the Caribbean they could not afford to pay
hefty fares and go back. They kept postponing their return trips
and then the trips did not materialize. At the same time they
brought many poor Africans to Caribbean to do the same work on
similar terms. They also did not go back to their countries in
Africa.
The sugar cane plantations were like plantations in the southern
states of US. Conditions of living and working were near slave
like, though they were called laborers, not slaves. Most of the
Indian laborers were either Muslim or Hindu. But living in those
awful conditions and without enough knowledge of their respective
religions, and no places of worship of their own they soon became
irreligious. Also the British missionaries arrived from England to
prosletize them, preach Christianity and convert the Muslims and
Hindus into Christians. Having the upper hand and the support of
the rulers they were successful in converting a large number of
the Indian laborers into Christianity. But many instead of
converting to Christianity became irreligious.
Among the Muslim and Hindu Indians in the Caribbean, and among the
Indians and Africans, marriages took place and the offspring came
up with mixed Muslim-Hindu-Christian names, without knowing what
it meant. As the older generations passed away and there was no
contact with the mother country or the outside world, the
succeeding generations of Indians really did not know what was
their religion, how they were to worship God etc. From a religious
perspective it was a confused society.
It was only in the mid 1960s when US immigration laws were relaxed
to allow colored people to immigrate to US that many
Indian-Caribbean migrated to US. The influx was mostly to the big
cities on the East coast of US in cities like New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Washington, Miami etc. About the same time a few
small groups of Muslim preachers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
arrived in the Caribbean countries and tried to tell the
Indian-Caribbean there that the ancestors of many of them were
Muslims and that they must revert back to Islam. Utilizing the
vastly changed social scene in the Caribbean they also built a few
mosques that slowly helped some of the local population revert to
Islam and practice Islam.
About five years ago I met a hijab wearing Indian-Caribbean Muslim
woman in Washington DC who told me that until age 30 she did not
know what was her religion and that only then she learned that her
ancestors could have been Muslim, so she converted to Islam and is
now learning Islam, reading Quran etc and is teaching the same to
her young children. It made me happy to learn that she was now
quite a devout practicing Muslim.
As much better educated immigrants from India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh arrived in US in the 1970s and acquired good jobs in
US, instead of befriending the less educated and poorer
Indian-Caribbean Muslims and mixing with them socially, they kept
away from them. Most of the Indian-Caribbean people speak a Creole
language that is a derivative of English mixed in with Caribbean
origin words. For sure they do not know how to speak, read or
write in Urdu or Punjabi or Bangla. That became another barrier in
the social mixing of Caribbean Muslims with Southasian Muslims in
US. At the same time the Caribbean-Indian Muslims are very keen to
regain the Indian-Muslim identity and language and culture of
their ancestors. They want to know if their ancestors came from
Punjab or UP/Bihar or Bengal or Gujarat or South India. So today
in the big cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington
DC, mosques built by the Caribbean Muslims are coming up. These
mosques serve not only as mosques but also as venues of social
mixing for the Caribbean Muslims.
Yet most of the Caribbean Indians whose ancestors were Muslims in
India are not Muslims. They are either Christians or irreligious
or mixed Muslim-Hindu. There is a big need for learned and
dedicated Muslim scholars from South Asia to go to the Caribbean
and preach Islam and convert these Caribbean Indian adults back
into Islam, and teach them Quran, Hadith, Islamic history. What is
needed is a sustained effort not just flying visits and
conventions.
The writer is a
Washington based activist.
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