When most people think of revolutionary Black Muslims, Malcom X’s name often comes to mind. But over the centuries, Black Muslims have led powerful movements of resistance, reform and liberation. Whilst they might often be forgotten in mainstream history, their ideas have travelled far and wide – transcending deserts, ports and mosques. These five figures, from West Africa to the Americas, remind us that Black Muslim resistance has never been one-dimensional – and should certainly never be overlooked. 

1. Assata Shakur

The late Assata Shakur’s story tends to be told in fragments. A former Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member, she is a survivor of state surveillance and a notorious shootout and killing of a New Jersey state trooper, leading to her imprisonment, escape from prison and political asylum in Cuba. But Shakur’s political clarity did not exist in isolation from her spiritual life. After years of exile, she embraced Islam, viewing her faith as sharpening her understanding of justice and grounding her through decades of state hostility. Her life challenged not only the powers of the state but also the narrative of resistance as separate from faith. As she once wrote in her autobiography,

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” 

2. Nana Asma’u Fodio

Long before ‘women’s empowerment’ became a buzzword, Nana Asma’u was building an educational network that transformed the Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa. Born in 1793 to the Islamic reformer Usman dan Fodio, she grew into a poet, linguist, historian and community organiser whose writing stretched across Hausa, Fulfulde, Arabic and Tamacheq. Her work was animated by a belief that knowledge was both a religious duty and a social responsibility. 

She created the ‘yan taru,’ a group of female educators who travelled from village to village teaching literacy, ethics, hygiene and Islamic scholarship to women of all backgrounds. In a society undergoing major political and spiritual reform, Asma’u ensured that women were not simply witnesses to change but architects of it. Her poems, still studied today, carry the tone of someone who understood education as a form of inheritance – something free from the fragility of empires.

3. Al-Hajj Salim Suwari

A thinker rather than a soldier, Al-Hajj Salim Suwari offered a very different model of political thought: one rooted in peaceful coexistence and education, rather than conquest. Living between the 15th and 16th centuries in what is now Mali and Guinea, Suwari developed a framework for how Muslim minority communities could live under non-Muslim political structures without compromising their ethics. This tradition, known as Suwarian, emphasised patience, teaching and spiritual integrity, allowing Muslim communities like the Dyula traders to flourish across West Africa without the warfare that dominated so many empires of the period.

His ideas shaped how African Muslims navigated colonial intrusion and interethnic conflict centuries later,  demonstrating that resistance can sometimes be found in scholarship rather than on the battlefield.

Suwari’s work is a reminder that Black Muslim history contains a vast intellectual tradition that is often overshadowed by stories of conquest or revolt.

4. Lamine Senghor

A decorated World War I veteran turned anti-colonial activist, Lamine Senghor was one of the most dynamic voices linking African anti-colonialism with global socialist and anti-racist movements in the early 20th century. Born in Senegal, he served in the French army and then joined the French Communist Party, eventually forming the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (Committee for the Defence of the Black Race). 

His speeches and writings connected the oppression of Senegalese tirailleurs with the struggles of Caribbean workers, Algerian nationalists and Asian revolutionaries. In 1927, he addressed the League Against Imperialism in Brussels, denouncing colonialism as modern slavery and calling for a universal anti-imperialist struggle. His activism was not just nationalist but pan-African, rooted in solidarity across borders. For Senghor, Islam and socialism were not contradictory but complementary: a way to mobilise both spiritually and politically for justice. He saw Islam as part of a broader moral reservoir that shaped African resistance. Though he died at just 38, his ideas fed into the pan-African imagination that would later animate the independence movements of the mid-20th century.

5. Abdul Qadir Kan

Known to some scholars as a pioneering Muslim abolitionist, Abdul Kadir Kan was the first Almami (leader) of the Imamate of Futa Toro (present-day Senegal). He used his role not only to promote Islamic education and governance but also to prohibit the slave trade in his domain, an act deeply informed by his faith. Thomas Clarkson, the British abolitionist, praised Kan’s principled stance against human trafficking long before many European abolitionists fully mobilised. 

Kan’s resistance was twofold: religious and political. He was defending his people, but he was also resisting a brutal economic system that commodified other Black bodies. His imamate offered a radical alternative: a society governed by Islamic law that protected vulnerable people and rejected exploitation.

Kan’s legacy challenges the common and misinformed narrative that Africans passively suffered colonialism: he built a morally-rooted state in defiance of both local and European powers.

What links these figures is not a single ideology, but a shared insistence on shaping the worlds they lived in through teaching, organising, writing or refusing injustice. Yet, the stories of Asma’u, Suwari, Senghor, Kan, Shakur, and many more like them are rarely taught, resurfacing only during Black History Month before disappearing again. Learning about their stories isn’t about filling a diversity quota, but about correcting the gaps that have distorted how we understand global resistance. Their legacies remind us that many kinds of Black Muslim thought have always been central to how communities organised and imagined freer futures. Remembering them is simply recognising the history that has always been here, just rarely at the forefront of mainstream memory. 

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References

1. Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur, 1987
2. A Plea to Saintly Women: The Life and Legacy of Nana Asma’u by Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research
3. One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe by Jean Boyd and Mack Beverly 
4. Wa and the Wala: Islam and polity in northwestern Ghana by Ivor Wilks
5. White War, Black Soldiers: Two African Accounts of World War I, by Bakary Diallo and Lamine Senghor 
6. “No More Slaves! Lamine Senghor, Black Internationalism and the League Against Imperialism.” Chapter. In The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives, David Murphy
7. Jihad in West Africa: Early Phases and Inter-Relations in Mauritania and Senegal by Philip D. Curtin