MALCOLM WAS WRONG

Black Americans and Islamic Da'wa
by Hugh Fitzgerald

"Given Islam’s record on slavery, black Americans should think twice about converting. And there are other considerations. Islam does not permit music, though here and there folk music has been allowed. But music having to do with religious worship is absolutely forbidden. When black Americans convert, they are throwing out all of Gospel music, doubly wicked in Muslim eyes: the music itself is forbidden, and this particular church music takes its texts from Old Testament stories (stories involving Jews, and the Promised Land). It is curious that real Muslims regarded (and may still regard) Elijah Muhammad's Black Muslims as not the real thing, partly because of the claims made on behalf of Elijah Muhammad himself, and partly because of the music that occasionally was allowed (and may still be) at certain gatherings of followers.

When black Americans discard Christianity for the sake of Islam, because they are fooled into believing that Islam is somehow the correct vehicle of protest, they manifest ignorance of the whole horrible Arab slave trade. That trade began earlier and ended (where it did end) later than the European slave trade. Also, it was, because it involved the castration on site of so many black African children, much greater in scope. The mortality rate was something like 90%, so that only 1 out of 10 black male children seized and castrated by the Arab slavers actually made it to the slave markets of Riyadh, Cairo, Baghdad, Damascus, Algiers, Istanbul, and similar centers of Islam. See "The Hideous Trade" by Jan Hogedoorn.

Those Afro-Americans who are made the obvious target of a campaign of Da'wa (as are immigrants from Latin America), and who choose to embrace Islam, are unwittingly, with that "reversion" to Islam (one in which they are seldom presented with the full meaning, or texts, of Islam), also turning their back on, discarding, jettisoning, the place of Biblical imagery and of the Bible in the history of black America.

Decades ago, when the Black Muslims first got started (and because of Elijah Muhammad's own claims, and other doctrinal irregularities, Arab Muslims never considered them to be "real Muslims" and even today are contemptuous of "Black Muslims" as opposed to "black Muslims"), much was made of their ability to supposedly "straighten people" out—have them wear coats and ties, give up drugs and alcohol, and so on. Well, perhaps. But what it also did is cause them to abandon their entire pre-Islamic history, and to thus sever ties with their own past, their own relatives who remained Christians or part of a Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition.

Finally, let's talk about racism. Anyone who has spent even a week in the Arab states of the Gulf, or taken a summer course in Arabic in Cairo or Damascus, knows that the most racist, most skin-color aware societies on earth, are those of the Arabs—despite all the talk of a "universalist" religion. One student of my acquaintance, who had taken courses with, and been brainwashed by, Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, to regard Islam as a great thing, then spent a summer in an Arab country. He came back completely disabused—no greater racists, he insisted, had he ever met in his life. He was from rural South Carolina.

Why this information is not more widely written about in the press, including the black press, by black ministers who should try to hold onto their flocks and not let wanderers be seduced by the siren-song of Islam, which for more than a thousand years has meant nothing but kidnapping followed by enslavement or death at the hands of Arab slavers, is beyond me. And even today Arabs continue to show their contempt and hatred for blacks, not only in the enslavement of black Africans by Arabs in Mali and Mauritania, but by the Libyan mobs that attacked black African students and lynched a black diplomat a few years ago; by the Moroccans who have been known to deal with black African migrant workers by taking them and dropping them in the middle of the desert with no possible way of survival; and of course by the behavior of that member in good standing of the Arab League, the government of the Sudan, which over 20 years, killed or starved to death nearly 2 million black Africans in the southern Sudan, with survivors often enslaved.

Ask Francis Bok, ask all the "Lost Boys" now in the United States. Now they have extended their genocidal campaign to fellow Muslims in Darfur—fellow Muslims, but black Africans, and so dispensable. As the Egyptian Zaki Badawi recently said, "they were not real Muslims." And that was the end of his comment—apparently that was enough for him to lose any interest in their being victims of mass murder.

There's much more to add. But the Islamic Da’wa campaign in America involves the clever targeting of blacks. The Boston Mosque was placed right across from Roxbury Community College, and part of the "deal" was for the mosque members to offer "free lectures" to students at Roxbury Community College and 2,500 "books on Islam" (you can guess which kind) for the college's library. In other words, the Mosque's backers were planning on using it as a center for conducting Da'wa among the black population of Boston. One wonders if the Rev. Eugene Rivers, or other ministers, have taken note of the history of Islam, of the tenets of Islam, of the menace of Islam to the wellbeing of those whom they instruct and guide and elevate and offer solace to.

Begin with slavery. Slavery was implicitly recognized by the American Constitution. But it is so no longer. Fortunately, the Constitution has always been subject both to formal modification (amendments) through the express will of the people, and to judicial interpretation ("It is a constitution we are expounding" wrote Chief Jusice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison). There is no way to modify the passages in Qur'an, the sayings and acts of Muhammad in the Hadith and Sira, that allow, permit, even offer rules for, the institution of slavery.

Muhammad himself, and his Companions, owned slaves—the slaves taken in battle. It is not possible, therefore, for any Believer to denounce slavery as a moral evil, for that would be to condemn Muhammad. And he is uswa hasana, the Model for All Mankind. So it just can't be done.

Within recent months, lest anyone forget, a leading Saudi imam wrote that slavery is an essential part of Islam, recognized and accepted, and to abandon that idea is an insult to Islam. Believers know, though they will not always talk about (they are engaged in deception about the nature of Islam, concious or semi-conscious, round-the-clock—sometimes not only to Infidels, but even to themselves), the fact that under Islam, slavery has a place that cannot be denied. Slavery has received permanent textual justification—and those texts, deemed sacred by Believers, are also immutable.

Black Americans, like other Americans, like Infidels everywhere, who because of the actions of Muslims themselves, and despite the efforts of the political leaders in the Western world to repeat pious nonsense about the real nature of Islam, are beginning to realize that as a vehicle for the expression of discontent, Islam is not exactly ideal. For Islam represents the greatest successful imperialism—Arab imperialism—in human history.

After those it directly conquered in the Middle East and North Africa and Hindustan, the greatest victims have so far not been white Europeans, but black Africans, hideously seized, castrated, dragged to the Muslim slave markets by coffle and dhow, with 90% of them dying on the way. Islam demands that converts ("reverts") simply regard with indifference or hostility their entire non-Islamic past. That leaves the non-Arab convert alone—with no music, no art, no history, with essentially nothing but Islam.

There are many available vehicles of protest—of expressing, articulately, discontent or dismay. The ballot box is possibly the best. There are ways to protest effectively things as they are, including the cult of Growth and of the "free market" as the answer to everything, and the grotesque elevation of Homo Economicus, Economic Man, narrowly conceived, as the new Golden Calf. It is possible to be enraged by illegitimate disparities of wealth (and nowhere are such disparities of wealth more obvious than within the Arab Muslim lands).

But Islam is not a vehicle of protest. Rather, it is an expression of total alienation, of giving up entirely from the circumambient society, and cutting oneself off from one's history. And practitioners of Da'wa in this country have, it should be obvious, certain identifiable target populations, starting with black Americans—especially those in prisons, for whom a center of stability and cultural life has been the church. Causing people to cut themselves off from that center of black life and culture would cruelly do more than merely "change their faith." It might just possibly undo them altogether, leaving them as recruits for the Army of Islam, deliberately alienated from their own past.

It is important to keep in mind the nature of Islam as a vehicle of Arab supremacism, of cultural and linguistic imperialism as well as of economic and poltical imperialism. Look at the historic treatment of black Africas by Arabs—look at the slave entrepot of Zanzibar, the seizure even today of black oil wealth in the Sudan, the massacres of the Ibos in the Biafra War by Egyptian pilots strafing villages, the history of Arab slavers over a thousand years, and the open, rampant racism of Arab societies, which so surprised and horrified Eldridge Cleaver during his stay in Algeria.

Those attitudes of racism, that use of Islam as a vehicle for Arab supremacism—not only against black Africans, but also against Kurds, Berbers, and all other non-Arab Muslims as well—should be the object of careful study, by all those who are tempted by the siren-song of Islam. And the long history of Arab enslavement of black Africans that continues to the present day and has no end, should not be put out of sight, or out of mind."