U.S. Muslims host protest against anti-black racism

NEW YORK — Several hundred Muslims gathered at the Barclays Center Plaza, a daily site of Black Lives Matter protests, for a khutbah, or Friday sermon, on June 5. An imam and other speakers led prayers and decried anti-black racism in the Muslim community, calling it an issue that requires the attention of all faithful Muslims and saying it must be addressed before racism outside the community can be dismantled.

“So before we address what’s going on, we must work to have the Muslim community face their own hypocrisy — the racism within our own community,” said an imam over a loudspeaker. “Until we deal with this, we cannot deal with any other type of racism outside.” 

A protester reaches his hands out in prayer. Photo by Micah Danney.

After the sermon, the attendees prayed and then gathered for a protest march to Grand Army Plaza, half a mile away.

Protesters bend to pray together at the Barclays Center Plaza in Brooklyn June 5. Photo by Micah Danney.

Hamza Murtaza, an engineer who joined the march, said that after two months of restrictions on religious gatherings in New York, a global hotspot of the novel coronavirus, he had heard of a few gatherings for Eid al-Fitr May 23–24 where social distancing was practiced. Other than those, this was the first service he knew of since the shelter-in-place order was issued in mid-March.

A protester leads a chant with a megaphone. Photo by Micah Danney.

Murtaza attended because Islamic teachings instruct Muslims to stand up against oppression, he said.

“So out of that, I believe, a lot of people have come out, and if the message goes on similarly, I think it’s going to keep growing bigger and bigger,” he said.

Oriole, a young Catholic man from the Bronx, said he joined the Muslims’ protest because it was peaceful. 

“All we saw over the weekend was violence and stuff, so it was important to see some kind of prayer, some sort of calming down, showing that this is peaceful protest,” he said.

Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch fellow and a reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for the GroundTruth Project.