Light in the Darkroom

Mahmoud Andrade Ibrahim

The darkroom was my sanctuary, a red-lit cave where the world reduced itself to chemistry and light. I was a medical photographer at a New York hospital, and my specialty was angiographic imaging of the retina, a process that required patience, precision, and long hours in near-total darkness. The images I produced helped ophthalmologists detect diseases that threatened sight: diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, vascular occlusions. Each photograph was a map of blood vessels, a constellation of capillaries that told the story of a patient's health.

The work was meditative in its way. I would sit at the enlarger, negatives in hand, watching as the image slowly emerged on photographic paper in the developer bath. But the hours were long, and the darkness could be isolating. So I developed a habit of calling friends during those stretches, my phone tucked between ear and shoulder as my hands worked the chemicals.

That evening, I called Lamarr.

Lamarr was a Black Buddhist, a man who had found his spiritual home in a tradition that had traveled thousands of miles from its origins to reach him. I attended his wedding, at which he cried, and was one of the first to hear of the birth of his only son, that he named Miles, after the famous jazz musician. He was thoughtful, deliberate in his speech, and carried the particular weariness of someone who had spent years navigating spaces that were not designed with him in mind.

"I need to vent," he said, and I could hear the frustration coiled in his voice like a spring.

"Go ahead," I said, adjusting the enlarger's focus. The image of a retina hung before me, ghostly and inverted.

"I was at the cultural center today," he began. "And once again, the senior members, Black folks who have been practicing for decades, who know the rituals better than anyone, were completely ignored during the planning meeting. We have these Japanese-American teachers who come in, and they're respected, they're listened to. But the Black senior members? The ones who have been there longer than most of the teachers? Their input is dismissed. Their opinions don't matter."

I listened as I moved the paper into the developer, watching the first shadows of blood vessels begin to appear.

"It's like we're invisible," Lamarr continued. "We can be masters of the ceremonies, we can know the sutras by heart, we can have been practicing for twenty years, and still, when the important decisions are made, when the teachings are interpreted, our voices are the first to be silenced. We're good enough to do the work, but not good enough to shape the tradition."

I understood something in that moment, standing in my red-lit darkroom, that I hadn't fully articulated before. The image before me was of a Black patient's retina, I knew this because I had photographed them hours earlier. The blood vessels were delicate, intricate, essential to sight itself. Without them, the eye would be blind.

"Lamarr," I said, "I know exactly what you're talking about. But let me tell you where I've seen it too."

I grew up in New York, in neighborhoods where Black American Muslims and immigrant Muslims from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa lived alongside each other. The masjids were often shared spaces, or at least adjacent ones. And in those spaces, I witnessed a dynamic that mirrored what Lamarr was describing.

The Black American Muslims were often the ones who had built the community. They had been there first, converting in the 1960s and 70s, establishing the masjids when no one else was there to pray. They knew the Quran, they knew the hadith, they had studied and taught and led. But when immigrant Muslims arrived with their cultural capital and their Arabic language skills and their degrees from Al-Azhar or Medina, something shifted.

Suddenly, the Black imams were being "helped" by new leadership. The Black teachers were being "supplemented" by scholars who spoke Arabic as a first language. The Black community members who had been shaping the interpretation of Islam in their context were told, implicitly or explicitly, that their understanding was incomplete, that they needed to defer to those with more "authentic" credentials.

I saw brilliant Black Muslim men and women, people who had been studying Islam for thirty years, who had memorized the Quran, who had lived the faith through the particular gauntlet of American racism, reduced to the role of congregants, their voices no longer welcome in the spaces they had built.

It was the same pattern Lamarr was describing. The same dismissal. The same erasure.

I pulled the print from the fixer and hung it to dry. The retina looked back at me, a perfect circle of life, each vessel a testament to the body's complexity. I thought about how medicine had historically dismissed Black patients' pain, how Black bodies had been used for experimentation, how the medical establishment had long treated Black people as objects of study rather than subjects with their own knowledge and authority.

The image before me was of a Black person's eye. But who had taught the ophthalmologists how to read these images? Who had developed the techniques? Who had cared for these patients when no one else would?

I thought about the Black American Muslim tradition, a tradition of resistance that had produced Malcolm X, who had articulated a vision of Islam that spoke directly to the condition of Black people in America. A tradition that had produced the first Revivalist Movement on American soil, namely the Dar ul Islam Movement, and that of  Imam Warith Deen Mohammed who, in 1975, led millions into Sunni Islam while insisting on the importance of Black self-determination. A tradition that had produced countless scholars, teachers, and leaders who had read the Quran through the lens of their own experience and found in it a message of liberation.

But that tradition was not often recognized as a tradition of tafsir, of Quranic interpretation. The assumption was that real tafsir came from elsewhere, from the Arab world or from South Asian madrasas. The assumption was that Black Americans could receive knowledge but not produce it, could be taught but not teach.

This was the lie that Lamarr was confronting in his Buddhist center, and it was the same lie I had witnessed in American Muslim communities.

I sat down on my stool, the phone still pressed to my ear. Lamarr was quiet, waiting.

"Here's what I'm starting to understand," I said. "The problem isn't just that Black people are excluded from leadership. It's that our knowledge is devalued. Our interpretations are treated as less legitimate, our experiences as less authoritative. And that means the tradition itself is impoverished."

I thought about the Black American Muslim community. How many brilliant minds had been silenced? How many insights had been lost because the people who had them were not considered "qualified" to speak?

"Lamarr, what you're describing in your Buddhist center is the same thing. The tradition is being shaped by people who don't have your community's experience, who don't understand what it means to practice Buddhism while Black in America. And that's not just unfair, it's a loss for the tradition itself."

I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line.

"So what do we do?" he asked.

What we do, I thought, is reclaim the authority to interpret. What we do is insist that our experience is not a liability but a source of knowledge. What we do is develop a tafsir that emerges from our particular location, a Black American tafsir that reads the Quran, or in his case, the sutras, or any sacred text, through the lens of our struggle and our survival.

This is what James Cone did with Christianity, developing a Black theology of liberation that insisted God was on the side of the oppressed. This is what womanist theologians like Katie Cannon and Delores Williams did, reading scripture through the eyes of Black women whose experience had been doubly marginalized. This is what Muslim scholars like Amina Wadud and Sherman Jackson have done, insisting that Black American Islam is not a derivative tradition but a generative one.

A Black American radical tafsir would not simply apply traditional interpretations to Black life. It would start from Black life, from the full sweep of our story, from the majesty of our African past to the wounds of our American present. It would remember the Negus, the Christian king of Abyssinia who sheltered the first Muslims fleeing persecution in Mecca, offering them protection when the powerful of the world had abandoned them, making Africa a co-parent of Islam.  It would remember Bilal ibn Rabah, the Ethiopian companion of the Prophet, whose voice called the faithful to prayer. It would carry the knowledge that Africa was not merely a place of origin but a place of refuge, a land where Islam found sanctuary before it found empire.

And it would remember, too, what came after, the ships, the chains, the auction blocks. It would remember slavery and Jim Crow, the lynchings and the burning crosses, the redlining and the convict leasing. It would remember the police violence that continues to this day, the mass incarceration that has become the new plantation, the cultural erasure that tells us our names are not worth remembering, the economic exploitation that keeps our communities in chains long after the chains were supposedly broken.

From that place, from the richness of our heritage and the weight of our suffering, it would read the sacred texts. It would ask not "What do the scholars say?" but "What does the Quran say to a people who have been enslaved and who have also been kings? What does it say to a people who sheltered the Prophet's companions and who were later told their lives don't matter? What does it say to a people who carry both the memory of Bilal's call to prayer and the memory of the auctioneer's call to bid?"

This tafsir would know that our story is not one of simple victimhood but of profound complexity, that we are the descendants of those who protected Islam and those who were destroyed by empire, of those who built civilizations and those who were reduced to property. And from that complexity, it would draw an interpretation that neither the oppressor nor the forgetful could produce.

It would be a tafsir of both memory and hope, of both grief and resurrection. It would read the Quran as a text that speaks to a people who know, in their bones, what it means to be both the Negus and the enslaved, both the protector and the protected, both the keeper of the tradition and the one whose voice has been silenced.

In that reading, it would find that Allah has never forsaken the oppressed, He has always lifted up the humble and remembered those whom the world has forgotten.

That is what a Black American radical tafsir offers. Not just an interpretation, but a vision. Not just a reading, but a way of seeing.

And it is a vision the world desperately needs.