Dawud Walid

Fed up of fellow Muslims’ widespread and apparently growing use of the Arabic word “abeed,” which means “slave,” as a slur for Black people, in 2014 Dawud Walid wrote an essay titled “Fellow humans are not ‘abeed” and used it as a form of counterspeech. Walid is the longstanding executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR Michigan) and has written several books on race, Islam, and activism. In the essay, he described the historical meaning of the word “abeed” and its derogatory use. He wanted to convince people who were using the term to stop.

After writing the article, Walid took to Twitter. “When I first got on Twitter it was to highlight anti-Muslim hatred as part of my job with CAIR. I later came to the conclusion that in order for Muslims in America to push back against Islamophobia, we had to deal with our own inter-Muslim tribalism and racism,” Walid said. 

He searched for use of the word “abeed” as a slur, in Tweets written in English and Arabic. When he found it, he would reply with a link to his article, writing “please read this.” 

Walid said he sent the article to several hundred people. Many, unsurprisingly, did not reply. For those who did, Walid said there were three types of responses, from people who: 

1) tried to defend their use of the term, telling him to stop being so touchy,
2) defiantly tweeted back the word “abeed” (in one case, repeated as many times as the character limit of a tweet would allow)
3) apologized, saying that they “didn’t know abeed meant slaves” and that they had grown up hearing their parents or grandparents use the term “without animus.”   

Walid said that he hoped his counterspeech helped people understand why the word is offensive. “I don’t think people can be bullied out of being racist. People’s moral consciousness has to be revived” he said.