Contrary to common belief, blacks make up the largest block of Muslims in America, University of Michigan Prof. Sherman Jackson said Wednesday night in Annenberg Hall.

Speaking to a crowd of 70 students and Evanston residents in an event organized by Northwestern’s Muslim-cultural Students Association, Jackson explained how the unique characteristics of black religion have shaped Islam in America.

Jackson, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies, said black Americans accept Islam because it validates their past and speaks to their future.

“A black man adopts Islam not in order to become an honorary Arab or white man but to become a truer black man,” he said.

Blacks in the United States view Islam in a unique way because of their own rich cultural history, Jackson said.

“Black Americans are a separate and distinct people whose peopleness was fired in the crucible of their experience in America,” he said.

Islam did not gain a strong following among black Americans until the 20th century, after several hundred years of Christianity as the major outlet for black religion.

“Once adopting Christianity, black Americans would no longer be limited to yelling and screaming in tongues at American intolerance,” Jackson said.

In the early 1900s, black churches began to move away from the protest sentiment of black religion, and Islam filled the void, he said.

“Islam, at this point more imagined than real, was appealed to as a sanctuary for black religion,” Jackson said.

Islam attracted black Americans because it was not tied to white people and had no organized authority that said who could speak in its name, he said. It earned a place of recognition in black society because black Americans could shape it to their own experiences.

“Muslim observers have often been shocked by the supposed blasphemies of early black Islamizers, such as the idea that God is a man and God is black,” Jackson said. “However, these infelicities are no more outlandish than those encountered in the early Muslim world.”

With the arrival of more immigrant Muslims in recent years, black Islam was thrown into a struggle for legitimacy with the more traditional, Middle Eastern Islam.

“What we have is a clash of histories,” Jackson said. “This is the chapter that we are now in.”

Weinberg senior Tehseen Ahmed, a member of McSA’s executive board, said Jackson’s speech helped people recognize the rift between the two Muslim communities.

“Definitely there have been good relations between the communities, but the tension is more about how to make the two communities into one,” Ahmed said.

Still, those tensions aren’t evident among Northwestern’s Muslims, Education senior Aisha Jett said.

“Me being black has never been an issue in McSA,” she said.