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One of the most bizarre
manifestations of African-American pride is its contemporary identification with
Islam. Like Kwanzaa, however, Islam has a far shorter and less memorable
history in Black America than most of us realize (or is usually prudent to point
out).
The story goes that in 1930 Allah
appeared to the people of Detroit in the form of a mysterious man named “Fard.”
Allah’s human form seemed to be of African and Arab descent and claimed to
have been born in Mecca, a descendent of the prophet Muhammad. He preached a
message of racial identity and claimed that Islam was the true religion of the
black people of America before they were robbed of it by the White man.
In fact, Fard was really just a
small-time conman named Wallace Dodd Ford, who served three
years in San Quentin for drug-dealing. He drifted into Detroit at a time when
many African-Americans were beginning to form racial identity groups around
charismatic personalities such as Marcus Garvey. Of course, racial consciousness
was hardly just “a black thing” at the time, as the 1920’s were also when Ku
Klux Klan influence peaked in America.
Interestingly, Ford was neither of
African or Arab descent, as he claimed. He was a mix of European and
Polynesian. But he did recognize an opportunity when he saw one, and the street
preacher soon built up quite a following among those who could appreciate an
overtly racist theology that persists to this day in spite of its zaniness.
According to Ford, and his Nation of
Islam, Africans were the original and only people of the world (divine and
uncorrupted) before whites were invented by an evil scientist named Yakub in a
malicious experiment with tragic consequences. Islam is the true religion, and,
at some point, a spaceship will be sent by Allah to eliminate the white
people from the earth.
Although it may be difficult to
imagine such a crackpot being given the time of day in this progressive age, in
fact much more than that is awarded to Louis Farrakhan every time he plans one
of his narcissistic “Million Man” marches. Prominent political figures such as
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton never fail to line up behind the leader of an
organization that openly espouses a message of racial superiority. In
2005,
even Bill Clinton lent his endorsement to the event – of course, he’s supposed
to be our first Black President (at least for the black people who managed to
survive his unwillingness to stop genocide in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Sudan,
Zaire, Burundi and Rwanda – as Clinton’s eight years in office saw more Africans
lose their lives in wars than were ever brought to America in chains).
It’s only fitting that the nation’s
largest and most accepted racial hate organization got its start through false
and fatuous circumstances. Ford was not just an imaginative preacher of hate,
but a skillful con artist as well. He charged people $10 in the middle of the
Depression to divine their “original” Muslim name for them, and he had affairs
with several women. In 1933 (and again in 1934) he was asked to leave town by
the police following a ritual killing committed by a devoted follower. The
second time around he managed to disappear so effectively that many believe he
was killed by his heir, Elijah Muhammad.
Like Ford, Elijah Muhammad was also a
fraud. He fathered several children from illegitimate relationships and
disillusioned several of his followers in the process.
One of these was Malcolm X, who
traveled to Mecca for the Hajj at about the same time and came away with even
more reasons to be disenchanted by the Nation of Islam. Traditional Islam may
be an artificial religion designed under very harsh conditions in the 7th
century, but at least there isn’t talk of UFOs or evil scientists, and neither
is it racially exclusive. Malcolm was impressed to see people of all races
circling the black rock together and he broke away from the Nation of Islam.
Shortly thereafter, he was killed for his principles by followers of Elijah
Muhammad.
The modern Nation of Islam is led by
Louis Farrakhan, who broke away from Elijah Muhammad’s son in 1977, after the
latter began moving the organization toward traditional Sunni practices. Today,
most Black Muslims observe mainstream Islam with a slight racial tinge, rather than the
cultic heritage of Wallace Dodd Ford and Elijah Muhammad. This includes
teaching directly from the Qur'an and stressing the Five Pillars of Islam.
The legacy of the NOI, however, is
that many African-Americans are drawn to Islam out of racial pride, thinking
that there is some sort of association with Africa. Muslim evangelicals in the
black communities and in prisons often play this up in an attempt to persuade
the gullible into rejecting Christianity as the “white man’s religion.”
Now, there is terrible irony to this
romanticism… and I do mean terrible.
In the first place,
Christianity in Africa predates Islam. Christian missionaries were on the
continent within two decades of the Crucifixion. Secondly, unlike
Christianity, Islam had no interest in missionary hospitals or the poor. Arab contact with Black Africa was
for one purpose only, plain and simple:
Slavery.
The awful truth is that Arabs ravaged
Africa for almost a thousand years before Europeans ever began to export black
slaves. In fact, it was the foundation of slave procurement and trading
established by the Muslims (usually through Jihad) that enabled the European
practice.
Far more Africans were swallowed up in the fourteen hundred years of
Islamic slave trading than in the three centuries of European
practice. An estimated 17 to 20 million Africans were exported from their
native land to the Muslim world, but this isn't the whole story. With a
transport survival rate of less than 1 in 3, Dr. John Alembellah Azumah
estimates that perhaps 50 to 80 million more died in route.
Here is a quote from an
observer in Zanzibar that sheds light on the harsh conditions of Islamic
slavery:
"As they filed past, we
noticed many chained together by the neck... The women, who were as numerous as
the men, carried babies on their backs in addition to a tusk of ivory or other
burden on their heads... It is difficult to adequately describe the filthy state
of their bodies; in many instances not only scarred by [the whip], but feet and
shoulders were a mass of open sores... half-starved ill-treated creatures who,
weary and friendless must have longed for death."
The text (quoted from Dr.
Azumah's
The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa) goes on to describe the fate of
those who became too ill or too weak to continue the journey - as related by a
Muslim "herdsman":
"Spear them at once!
For, if we did not, others would pretend they are ill in order to avoid carrying
their loads. No! We never leave them alive on the road; they all
know this custom."
When asked who carries the
ivory when a mother gets too tired to carry both her baby and the ivory, the
herdsman replied, "She does! We cannot leave valuable ivory on the
road. We spear the child and make her burden lighter."
Although the Qur'an does not
distinguish between races, there is a strong legacy of racism against people of
African descent in early Islam.
Again quoting from
The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa, Dr. Azumah provides several examples
of Islam's early attitude toward blackness:
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The hadith in which an
Ethiopian woman laments her racial inferiority to Muhammad, who consoles her
by saying, "In Paradise, the whiteness of the Ethiopian will be seen over
the stretch of a thousand years."
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The Muslim Arab and
Persian literature which depicts blacks as "stupid, untruthful, vicious,
sexually unbridled, ugly and distorted, excessively merry and easily
affected by music and drink."
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Nasir al-Din Tusi, the
famous Muslim scholar said of blacks: "The ape is more capable of being
trained than the Negro."
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Ibn Khaldun, an early
Muslim thinker, writes that blacks are "only humans who are closer to
dumb animals than to rational beings."
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Classical Islamic law
allows a light-skinned Muslim man to marry a black woman, but a black Muslim
man is restricted from marrying a light-skinned woman. As the
literature of the time put it, "only a whore prefers blacks; the good
woman will welcome death rather than being touched by a black man."
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Another hadith quotes
Muhammad: "Do not bring black into your pedigree."
In fact, the original Arabic
word for slave, "Abd," evolved into the the colloquial word for a black person
after the establishment of Islam.
Muhammad owned and sold black
slaves. In fact, the pulpit of his mosque, from which he preached
Islam, was built by slave labor on his order.
Even Christianity’s harshest critics could hardly picture Jesus as a
slave trader. Whereas the New Testament merely acknowledges slavery, the
teachings of Islam offer explicit guidance in the details of the practice, thus
endowing it with divine sanction.
The Qur'an encourages sex
with slaves in several places, which explains the
2-1 ratio of female to male slaves taken from Africa by Muhammad's descendents.
The Muslims were more interested in the sexual servitude of black women than the
Europeans, who exported
Africans for labor.
As one might have guessed, the
life of slaves in
Muslim countries was quick and painful. There is a reason why one doesn't
find too many
native blacks in Saudi Arabia or Iraq today. Enslaved men could not bear
children because they were often castrated, and the unfortunate Africans as a group
did not ultimately survive the brutal treatment.
By contrast, the 400,000 slaves
brought to America over the course of 200 years managed to leave the most
prosperous group of African people on the planet. You can tell a lot about a
people’s quality of life by the things they choose to complain about. While the
life expectancy in some African countries is less than 19, what with disease,
abject poverty, starvation and kleptocratic dictators, African-Americans are
actually demanding financial compensation (reparations) for not having to
live in those conditions.
So ingrained is slavery in
Islam that the religion's holiest city, Mecca (site of the Haj pilgrimage), was
a slave trading capital. Up until the 20th century, Mecca served as the
gateway to the Muslim world for slaves brought out of Africa. Azumah
notes:
"It became a custom for
pilgrims to take slaves for sale in Mecca or buy one or two slaves while on Haj
as souvenirs to be kept, sold or given as gifts."
The last slaves were traded
there openly in 1960!
Arab enslavement of black
Africans continues to this day in the Muslim world, particularly in the Sudan,
Niger, and Mauritania.
Slavery would most certainly exist
today in the same form that it did for more than a thousand years in the Arab
world were it not for the Western Christian-based nations “imposing their values on Muslim
lands” by putting an end to it. The horrific situation that we described
of slaves in Zanzibar was forcibly suppressed by the Europeans.
There is not, and never has
been, an abolition movement within Islam.
Unlike the West, the Muslim world has
yet to offer an apology for slavery. The institution is ingrained in the
Qur'an. To admit that it is a mistake would be to admit the fallibility of
the Qur'an and bring its divine origin into question. Even today, Muslims
act as if Islamic slavery was a favor done to the millions of unfortunate men,
women and children who were forcibly uprooted from their native lands and sent
to lives of sexual and menial servitude deep in the Islamic world.
Slavery was not entirely race-based
in Islamic history (although it eventually became illegal to enslave an Arab).
Hungary was pillaged of 3 million people over a 150 year period, and Muslim
slave traders raided European coasts for well over 1000 years, killing, raping
and taking slaves.
But, perhaps the most conspicuous
example of overt racism in Islam is the genocide in present-day Sudan by the
Arab-Islamic government and the refusal of Muslim organizations around the world
to condemn it. Over two million black Africans have died from Arab
aggression in the Christian south. And 200,000 more were killed by Arab
militias over the last four years in Darfur. The Arabs are known for
rampaging through villages and hacking black Africans to death in the name of
Jihad while screaming things like, "Kill the slaves!"
Although the Darfurians are
mostly Muslim as well, there is little to no attention placed on their plight by
international Muslim organizations. Despite being repeatedly challenged on
the issue, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), for example,
has never bothered to condemn the Islamic Republic of Sudan for the Arab
massacre of Africans.
Compare this to the outrage,
sympathy and money that is poured out on the Palestinian people... who are
Arab. Yet, the number of Palestinian civilians killed in their
relentless conflict with Israel over the last 40 years is less than the average
number of Africans killed by Islam each month.
Even in the earliest days,
racism against blacks was a fringe part of Islam. At one time there was a
law that mandated the death penalty for anyone suggesting that Muhammad was
black. Perhaps it is for this reason that quite a few hadith mention the
"whiteness of the prophet" - explicitly referring to his skin color.
Africa and African-Americans owe
absolutely nothing to Islam, because it has done nothing good for
them. It inspires slavery, but not abolition. It may not be the “White man’s
religion,” but that certainly doesn’t make it the Black man’s.
Additional Reading (from Family
Security Matters):
Nation of
Islam - Empty Legacy (Part 1)
Nation of
Islam - Empty Legacy (Part 2)
Nation of
Islam - Empty Legacy (Part 3)
Nation of
Islam - Empty Legacy (Part 4)
Go back to the List of Islamic Terrorist Attacks
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