Shaykh Muhammad Nubee was born on a farm in the eastern part of North Carolina. He was a farm boy, raised on that farm until he was seven or eight, and then the family moved into Raleigh, to a community called College Park. It sat about half a mile from St. Augustine's University, a Black private university, and most of the people who lived there were Black, Christian, and conservative in their values.
It was a lower middle income neighborhood of single family homes, and the families were intact. Everybody knew everybody. When it got dark, mothers stood on their porches calling their children home by name. Getting in trouble was shameful. If a teacher said she was going to call your mother, she called, and you knew what was waiting for you at home. In those days, a girl who became pregnant out of wedlock was sent away to have the baby, and the baby was usually raised by an aunt or a grandmother.
His second or third grade teacher lived with the family on the farm. That was how it worked in the segregated South of the 1950s. The school was small and Black only, and a teacher who came to a rural community had nowhere else to stay.
When he went back with his brother-in-law about eight or nine years ago, the old neighborhood had changed. The city had grown out to meet it, and gentrification had taken hold. The house he grew up in was gone, torn down and replaced.
He went to college in North Carolina and graduated in 1972. After that he went to work for Fortune 500 companies, Philip Morris and the financial division of General Motors. For a young Black man in the early 1970s, that was doing well.
He was introduced to Islam in 1974, through the Nation of Islam, the way many Black Americans were in those years. When the leader of that organization died in 1976 and his son took over, Muhammad made his real shahada to follow the Quran and the Sunnah. That was his conversion, almost fifty years ago now.
It cost him. He was working for Philip Morris at the time, a tobacco giant that also owned a beer company, and he found he could not keep doing it. He was out there peddling cigarettes, peddling cancer, going to pool parties and pushing cigarettes and beer. He quit. He had no other job lined up, and it terrified his wife, but he could not do it in good conscience.
His father was furious, to the point of wanting to disown him. His mother was fine with it. Her only question was whether they believed in God. When he said yes, she said she was okay. Some relatives did not want to call him by his new name, Muhammad. He told them they were college graduates and they could manage to say it. He lost most of his old friends and gained new ones in the Muslim community.
He became one of the imams in the community he belonged to, with very little knowledge, because someone had to lead and guide people. In the 1980s, immigrants began arriving in large numbers and the picture changed completely. They had first come in the 1970s to study at the universities, from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and then from Palestine, Jordan, Pakistan, and India. Most of them stayed, and they had the money to build schools and proper masjids, while the African American communities mostly had storefronts.
What pushed him to look outside America was his children. He and his wife were worried about raising them in a country where the moral decay was moving fast. Things that had been unheard of when he was growing up were now happening, even to Muslim boys and girls. They looked at Sudan. He made several trips to Morocco.
Morocco was the turning point. Coming out of a masjid in one of the big souk areas of Casablanca, walking down a winding path, he saw European tourists with their cameras and shorts, and the thought came to him almost out loud: what are you doing here? Then the real thought hit him. For the first time in his life, he was in the majority. People who looked like him. People who believed like him. He wanted his children to feel that shift in their own minds.
On the way out of Morocco, standing in line at the airport, he heard a European man complaining about the corruption, about having to pay to get his bags on the belt. The man's wife smacked him in the back and told him to be quiet. This is their country, she said. Muhammad thought about that for a long time. This is our country, even with its faults. It belongs to us. He could never have said that in America.
By then most of their children were already late teenagers or in college, too old to be moved. But the two youngest came with them, and they ended up in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE more or less chose them. They had thought they would go to Kuwait, but Kuwait would give his wife a visa and not him. Then they heard about Dr. Bilal Philips in the UAE. He told them there were jobs for English teachers, plenty of them, so they packed their bags.
His wife got her job first, before they left the States. She and the children went ahead, and he stayed behind for about a year to close things down. Then he followed, still without a job of his own. He found work almost immediately. A brother there helped newcomers from the West find their way, and Dr. Philips knew the families who ran the international schools. Muhammad went from school to school, knocked on doors, and presented his credentials. Nearly everybody was hiring in those days, and a degree was not always required. That changed by the mid 2000s.
He worked in Dubai for five years, and on a special government technical school project out of Abu Dhabi. The pay on the government project was very good. In the private schools of Ajman and Sharjah, you had to fight for your dirhams. He lived in Sharjah and Ajman and worked in Dubai. The only times he said he was ready to leave were on the roads. The driving was wild. One night on the Corniche from Sharjah toward Ajman, a driver sat on his tail flashing his lights, inches away, and he thought they were going to crash. That same night, driving on, he saw a masjid on the corner and heard the adhan, and he said alhamdulillah.
Dealing with the government was a different story at first. It was unorganized and full of corruption. But he gives credit to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, who became the ruler of Dubai. Within a few years the immigration department changed completely. Officers greeted you in a big open building, the lines were short, and you got your visa in days instead of weeks.
What he loved most about the Emirates was the ease of the prayer. They made sure a Muslim had no problem fulfilling salah, in a masjid or even in a mall. Everywhere he lived, there were at least five masjids within a five minute walk.
He is in Egypt now, and the project he works on is about Muslims in America. He and his brother-in-law spent years asking a simple question: what is our mission? His brother-in-law asked an imam once, and the imam sat in silence and said he did not know. Muhammad says that if you asked American Muslims whether they have a collective mission, most would stare at you, then start talking about the purpose of life. That is not the same question. The purpose of life is worship. A mission is what you are meant to do as Muslims in a particular place.
He believes the early Muslims in America, mostly African American converts in the 1960s and 1970s, had that sense of mission. They thought Islam offered an alternative and America needed to change. That got lost in assimilation and in the idea that the goal is just to get along and chase the American dream, the house with the picket fence and two and a half children and a dog.
He explains it with a hadith about a ship. Believers are on the top deck and disbelievers below, and the ones below decide to drill holes in the hull to get water without bothering anyone above. The Prophet said that if they are left to it, everyone drowns. The holes, Muhammad says, are capitalism, consumerism, feminism, and all the other isms eating away at the ship that is America. He says America was founded on genocide and slavery, and no empire built on falsehood can stand. Rome fell, and this one is going out too.
So there are three choices, as he sees it. Stop the people drilling the holes. Get off the ship. Or go down with it. Going down with it is not a choice he accepts. He is for getting off the ship, for those who can, and for trying to stop the drilling for those who can do that. When he stands before Allah, he wants to be able to say that he tried to save the ship.