Golden Age

The House: Dar, Bayt, Manzil and Maskan

Posted on August 1, 2019 Updated on August 1, 2019

Islamic housing is a symbiosis of heavenly and terrestrial dimensions. Both sides are extremely important, playing their respective roles. They finely complement and add to each other’s strength and operation. Neglecting either of the two poles in Islamic housing inevitably leads to a serious damage in the latter’s fundamental nature, either at a conceptual or a practical plane.

The significance of a house in Islam can easily be discerned from the Arabic words used for it that are dar, bayt, manzil and maskan.

Dar

The term dar is derived from an Arabic verb dara which means, among other things, to circulate, to take place, to go on, to be held, and to centre on or around. The house is called dar because it is the physical locus of the family institution and its manifold activities. An Islamic house is seldom devoid of family activities which include promoting and upholding the family unit as well as educating and preparing individuals for the challenges of the world. The author of an Arabic lexicon Lisan al-‘Arab (The Language of the Arabs), Ibn Manzur stated that the word dar is drawn from the verb dara/yaduru (see the translations given above), because of the numerous human activities that take place therein.

The Islamic home is a framework whose plan, spatial arrangement, and form facilitate and further encourage worship practices that are expected of its inhabitants. The entire life of a believer is a form of total submission and service to the Creator and Lord of the universe. As such, an Islamic home can also be described as a place of worship (mosque). If a mosque serves as a community development centre, then a home, certainly, plays the role of a family development centre. The two roles complement and support one another.

Due to the significance that Islam attaches to the social and educational role of a home, Muslims plan an interesting and highly effective spatial distribution within their residence, concentrating on accommodating guests, visitors, children and adults (male and female).

An Islamic home should have a designated space, irrespective of its form and size, to function as a mosque or musalla (a place where prayers are performed). In it the daily prayers, collective study of the Qur’an, meditation, religious discussions, study circles, and spirituality enhancement sessions should be conducted individually and collectively among family members or with relatives and neighbours.

The Prophet (sa) is reported to have directed his Companions to have mosques in their quarters; to cleanse and deodorise them on special religious occasions. (Recorded by Tirmidhi)

Also, he consented to the idea of his Companions earmarking spaces for worship in their private dwellings. He is said to have graced some dwellings by personally praying in them. (Recorded by Ibn Majah)

The Prophet (sa) encouraged his Companions to perform their voluntary prayers at home so as to reinforce the honourable role the latter plays in their religious development. He said that mosques are only for obligatory prayers. (Recorded by Muslim)

In one of his statements, the Prophet (sa) went so far as to say that the prayer which a man offers in his home is superior to that offered in the Prophet’s mosque, except the obligatory prayers. (Recorded by Abu Dawud)

For Muslim women, however, performing even mandatory prayers at home, along with the voluntary ones, is more auspicious. The enormity and significance of a woman’s role in enlivening and utilizing the house, as advocated by Islam, is illumined here because women also procure all the rewards which men obtain for performing collective prayers in mosques, but on account of their staying behind at home and attending to the matters they have been requested to.

According to a hadith of the Prophet (sa), while men are guardians of their families in general terms and are responsible for them, women are guardians of their husbands’ houses and children, and are responsible for them. (Recorded by Bukhari)

Indeed, women have a variety of roles to play both outside and inside the house; yet their role inside the house remains a paramount priority. If, for any reason, a woman’s household responsibilities are affected negatively due to her role outside the house, her duties at home take precedence.

In a hadith, the Prophet (sa) explicitly encouraged women to participate in good deeds as well as the religious gatherings/activities of the Muslims. (Recorded by Muslim)

This remains the case so long as the prescribed rules and regulations are observed and their fundamental roles as mothers, wives, and household and family guardians are not neglected.

The Prophet (sa) likewise stated that homes, where the inhabitants neither pray nor read the Qur’an [devoid of good deeds], are like graves and Satan loves to patronize them. (Recorded by Muslim)

Bayt

The term bayt is derived from an Arabic verb bata which means, among other things, to spend, pass the night, or to stay overnight. A house is called bayt because when the bustle of the day starts fading away with the arrival of the night, humans, just like most terrestrial creatures, hasten to withdraw to their sanctuary to take rest, enjoy tranquillity and seek refuge from the disadvantages, and even perils associated with the night.

In the Noble Qur’an, Allah (st) refers to night as sakan (Qur’an 6: 96), which means rest and tranquillity; libas (Qur’an 25: 47), which means robe, and subat, which means repose and tranquillity.

In order to explicate the major natural laws that govern human existence, Allah refers to the day as nushur, which means resurrection. The relationship between house, on the one hand, and night and sakan, or rest and tranquillity, on the other becomes clearer if we recall that one of the Arabic expressions for the house is maskan, which is derived from sakan, as is explained later on.

However, the significance of the word bayt must be viewed from a much wider perspective. Bayt does not just refer to a place where one takes refuge overnight. Rather, it implies a place where, whenever necessary, one takes refuge from all the hazards of the outside world. The word ‘night’ in the connotation of ‘bayt’ is rather symbolic. A home can be seen as a retreat or a safe haven that offers total and endless warmth, privacy, refuge, security and protection at all times. It is a sanctuary where one can live and enjoy without being affected by a great many rules and regulations, except for those set by its inhabitants.

Since it is a refuge from the discomfort of life outside it, an Islamic house with its plan, design and form, lays great emphasis on a definite separation between the inner and outer realms. So important is such a separation in Islam that the same has been buttressed even with the power of law. As a result, an Islamic home, by and large, appears to be an inward-looking structure with minimum openings in the walls which divide the private and public domains. Likewise, beautifying houses, in Islamic domestic architecture, focuses on the enclosed interior space as opposed to the general exterior of a building. By its blank facade with minimal openings, an Islamic house signals to the outsiders that unless invited or given permission, they have no access to it. They have no business to be even in close proximity to it, let alone inside it. Furthermore, curious strangers and passers-by are thus discouraged from stopping, gazing and exploring the home. This way, accidental intrusion is easily warded off and unnecessary security concerns are mitigated. Hence in its outward appearance, an Islamic home signals the unwillingness of its occupants to interact freely with the life outside.

The interior of an Islamic home is designed according to Islamic values and principles. It is planned and designed to give the utmost required attention and hospitality to all its guests and visitors. This is, in fact, a religious requirement derived from several of the Prophet’s traditions. (Recorded by Bukhari)

It is for this reason that the guest room, in many Islamic homes, is highly decorated as compared to other rooms and is typically located adjacent to the entrance lobby, away from the main sitting area to make it directly accessible.This is, of course, only possible where there is a separate guest room in a home; however, if a household is unable to afford one, then the men’s sitting room, study or grandparent’s room (in certain cultures parents live with their son and his family after his marriage) likewise located near the entrance, is chosen to serve the same purpose. Most of the time, the guest room has a separate lavatory either en suite or immediately outside it.

Taking into account a host’s privacy, a guest would not be at liberty to wander around the house unaccompanied. Guests and visitors are thus bidden, so to speak, to enjoy without undue reservation all the attention and kindness given to them by the host, and at the same time, to exercise maximum self-restraint, thoughtfulness, politeness and timidity if they have to deal with the rest of the house interior.

Entrances to an Islamic home serve as a transit point between the private and public realms. Therefore, a full view of the home from the main door is purposely restricted. This type of entrance is called a ‘side entrance’. Quite often, the entrance door does not give immediate access to the domestic spaces.

Another option is to have a small entrance into the house constricting view of the interior, or, a large main entrance, and then a small entrance leading into the main part of the house.

Leaving the comfort zone of one’s house can be stressful as the world within and that outside it is very different. Hence, having a transit point between the two worlds in the form of distinct entrances helps the users to prepare for what lies beyond. Furthermore, the Prophet (sa) taught a supplication to recite while entering or leaving a house that helps in facing the awaiting changes and challenges.

The same rationale underlines the existence of having few windows that are fitted with lattice screens called mashrabiya made of small wooden bars. Mashrabiya offers effective lighting, ventilation, shading and visual privacy. It symbolizes a reluctant and intensely monitored interaction between the private and public spheres in Islam.

Since an Islamic house is a sanctuary, it is obligatory to seek permission from its inhabitants three times before entering, as taught by the Prophet Muhammad (sa). If, after the third time, permission is not granted, the visitor should leave, even if he knows that the occupants are inside. Allah (st) mentions:

{O you, who have believed, do not enter houses other than your own houses until you ascertain welcome and greet their inhabitants. That is best for you; perhaps you will be reminded. ۞And if you do not find anyone therein, do not enter them until permission has been given you. And if it is said to you: Go back, then go back; it is purer for you. And Allah is Knowing of what you do.} (Qur’an 24: 27-28)

Before the advent of Islam, in the whole region of Arabia, house entrances often had no doors. There were only curtains hanging in the doorway to mark the entrance. Seeking permission prior to entering a house was nonexistent in the culture of the ignorant Arabs. Seldom was somebody seriously concerned about the subject of privacy. Running into a husband and wife, and finding them indulged in some intimate affair may have been an occasional consequence. The most that one was expected to say upon entering was, “I am in,” or “Here I am,” and similar phrases. Following the advent of Islam, which lays special emphasis on honouring human privacy, appropriate entrance screen was soon put in practice. Even Satan is not granted access to a house if its inhabitants forbid it, as reported in many traditions of the Prophet (sa). (Recorded by Muslim)

Islam is so concerned about the subject of privacy that according to it, a house plan and design must not lead to, or encourage, intrusion of privacy even among family members. Allah mentions in the Qur’an:

{O you who have believed, let those whom your right hands possess and those who have not [yet] reached puberty among you ask permission of you [before entering] at three times: before the dawn prayer and when you put aside your clothing [for rest] at noon and after the night prayer. [These are] three times of privacy for you. There is no blame upon you nor upon them beyond these [periods], for they continually circulate among you – some of you, among others. Thus does Allah make clear to you the verses; and Allah is Knowing and Wise. ۞ And when the children among you reach puberty, let them ask permission [at all times] as those before them have done. Thus does Allah make clear to you His verses; and Allah is Knowing and Wise.} (Qur’an 24: 58-59)

This is one of the reasons behind assigning separate rooms to children when they come of age if they are of different genders.

Manzil

The word manzil is derived from an Arabic verb nazala which means, among other things, to come down; to disembark; to make a stop at; to camp at; to stay at; to lodge at; to settle down in, and to inhabit. A house is called manzil because it shows that one has started to or has already settled down in a community. It also symbolizes the fact that one has full comprehension of his/ her role, orientation and life goals. A house is a station or a centre from which one ventures out and to which one returns, having successfully dealt with the challenges of the outside world or after taking a break before finally prevailing over them. That is why in many cultures across the globe we hear people saying, “No matter where and how far one goes, to his home is his ultimate return.”

On the other hand, homelessness is one of the most devastating problems that individuals and societies face. Due to it, individuals might suffer from anxiety, stigma, apathy, emotional instability, and similar conditions. As far as societies are concerned, homelessness contributes to delinquency, insecurity, disorder, decline in morality, slow economic growth, and so forth.

Being central to a person’s existence and identity, home is the only space in the entire universe that one can regard as his/her own. Through self-expression and personalization, a home represents its dwellers and signifies continuity of life.

Maskan

The term maskan is derived from an Arabic verb sakana which means, among other things, to calm down; to repose; to rest; to become quiet and tranquil, and to feel at ease with. Hence, the words sukun and sakinah mean calmness, tranquillity, peacefulness, serenity, and peace of mind.

A home is called maskan or maskin because it offers its inhabitants a chance to take a break from the demands and pressures of the outside world, and concentrate on their physical, mental and even spiritual recuperation. An Islamic home is a retreat, sanctuary and a source of rest and leisure. Whoever has the privilege of living in a home that fulfils all the aforementioned characteristics does not need to take holidays frequently in order to escape from the strain and pressure of work and everyday life. The blessing of a blissful home and a deep affection for it causes travellers to keenly look forward to their return. Holidays can sometimes be disappointing and not up to the traveller’s expectations. A home, on the other hand, is built around its inhabitants’ preferences. It keeps at bay anything displeasing to them hence the maxim, “My house is my paradise.” It is also often stated that there is no place like home, reinforcing the fact that one’s home is the best place to be.

Due to the presence of one’s closest family members with whom one shares the same vision and life objectives, and the way an edifice has been designed and planned to ensure comfort and privacy, an Islamic house enables its users to unwind and relax. Its dwellers rarely have to show any serious worry or concern about their peace, serenity and privacy being jeopardized, intentionally or otherwise, by neighbours, passers-by and uninvited visitors. This way, an Islamic house helps its dwellers safeguard their spirituality, mental strength, self and family. Hence it is a fortified, private paradise on earth, the best and the most valuable gift granted by Allah in which joys and pleasures of this life can be enjoyed. Allah (st) mentions in the Noble Qur’an:

{And Allah has made for you from your homes a place of rest…}(Qur’an 16: 80)

Allah also mentions:

{Say: Who has forbidden the adornment of Allah Which He has produced for His servants and the good [lawful] things of provision? Say: They are for those who believe during the worldly life [but] exclusively for them on the Day of Resurrection. Thus do We detail the verses for a people who know.} (Qur’an 7: 32).

Citation: “The House: Dar, Bayt, Manzil and Maskan,” by Dr. Spahic Omer, Associate Professor, Kulliyyah of Architecture and Environmental Design International Islamic University Malaysia, Email: spahico@yahoo.com: https://medinanet.org/2014/08/the-house-dar-bayt-manzil-and-maskan/

The following, is a separate note, apart from the above paper written by Dr. Spahic Omer:

Dar es Salaam

In the 19th century, Mzizima (Swahili for “healthy town”) was a coastal fishing village on the periphery of Indian Ocean trade routes. In 1865 or 1866, Sultan Majid bin Said of Zanzibar began building a new city very close to Mzizima and named it Dar es Salaam. The name is commonly translated as “abode/home of peace”, based on the Arabic dar (“house”), and the Arabic es salaam (“of peace”).

ZAKAH, WEALTH DISTRIBUTION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Posted on June 27, 2019 Updated on June 30, 2019

DEVELOPMENT

1. Some scholars opine that mere refusal to pay zakah ejects a person out of the fold of Islam.  The strong view however is that it is only when one denies its obligation that one commits apostasy, but refusal to pay it while believing in it as a pillar of Islam is a great sin that lead a person to the hell fire. See al-Uthaimin (2004) and Sabiq (2004) for details.
2. “Take (O Muhammad), from their wealth a charity by which you purify them and cause them increase” (Qur’an 9:103).
3. In Surah 6:141, Allah says regarding the zakah of agricultural products that  “…and give its due (zakah) on the day of its harvest….”
4. The Qur’an says: “Certainly will the believers have succeeded. They who are during their prayers humbly submissive…. And they who are observant of zakah…. Those are the inheritors. Who will inherit Al-Firdaus. They will abide therein eternally.” (23:1-11).
5. Qur’an 3:4-35
6. See Sabiq (2004) Examples include 2:43; 2:77 and 9:11
7. Reported by Bukhari (No. 1,399 and 1,400); Muslim (20); Abu Dawud (1,556); Tirmidhi (2,606); Nasa’i (5/15) and Ahmad (2/58).
8. See Mursi (2007)
9. All Muslim scholars are unanimous on the fact whoever does not believe in the obligation of zakah is not a Muslim
10. Qur’an 3:34-35
11. In a Hadith narrated by Ibn Abbas, the Prophet (SAW) told Mu’adh Ibn Jabal when he sent him as a caller and leader to Yemen, that “….teach about an (obligatory) charity (i.e zakah) which would be collected from the rich among them and distributed to the poor among them.” The Prophet’s (SAW) singling the poor as those to be given zakah proceeds does not in anyway make the poor the only eligible recipients of zakah as there are seven other categories of beneficiaries enumerated in the Qur’an. Here the Prophet (SAW) only wanted to emphasize the poor as the most important of all categories of zakah beneficiaries.
12. Among the major benefits of zakah as pointed out by Al-Uthaimin (2004) is that it unites the Muslim community and makes it like a single family where love an affection between different classes of the society will be increasingly growing stronger by the day.
13. Al-Qaradawi (2011), in trying to explain how the Sunnah accords importance to the institution of zakah indicates that “In Sahih al-Bukhari alone, the chapter on zakah contains 172 hadiths attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (s). (Imam) Muslim agreed with him on almost all of theses Prophetic sayings.”
14. Bukhari (No. 1389 and 1425) and Muslim
15. Reported by Muslim from Abu Hurairah. See also Al-Uthaimin (2004).
16. Allah declares that: “It is He who created for you all of that which is on the earth…”  He also says: “It is He who made the earth tame (i.e. stable and subservient) for you – so walk among its slopes and eat of His provision” (67:15).
17. Consult for instance Al-Qaradawi (2003); Ahmad (2006); Haq (1995); and Bazimul (2011).
18. See for instance Quraishi (1999)
19. Jhingan (2008), comments that “GNP as an index of economic development has not been successful in reducing poverty, unemployment and inequalities, and raising living standards in developing countries.”
20. A lot of jurists and Islamic Economist would be more comfortable with the direct distribution of zakah proceeds for greater impact on the poor or for the provision of certain essential infrastructure. Many contemporary jurist and Islamic economist however believe that given the wide objectives of zakah, it is allowed to invest its proceeds so as to multiply its benefits. For a discourse on this consult Al-Qaradawi (2011).
21. This view has also been promoted by Ai-Qaradawi (2011) among other scholars.
22. By proper utilization of zakah I mean educating the nisab owner about the necessity of its payment, establishing proper institutions for its effective collection and management, among many other steps.
23. As a departure from the previous ways of looking poverty, Sen (1999) contends that ‘poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as lowness of incomes”. He argues that freedom is what defines development saying that “expansion of freedom is viewed…as both the primary end and as the principal means of development…The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development.”
24. See Jhingan (2008) for collaborative discussions on this.
25. The is not to suggest simplistically that zakah alone was used as the instrument of income distribution or economic development. Other important Islamic economic institutions such as waf also played a significant role in that direction but zakah has played a leading role in the drive towards addressing the economic problems of the Muslim societies.
26. Based on decades of experience working with the poor in Bangladesh, Yunus (2007) concludes that, “the unique problem of the poor is that there is no institution to bring money to them”.
27. By the principle of  sufficiency  I am referring to the statement by Umar Bin al-Khattab when he told zakah administrators “When distributing zakah, enrich the recipient.”

References

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• Al-Qaradawi, Y. (2011), Fiqh al-Zakah: Al-Sharh al-Mumti’ ala Zad al-Mustaqni’, Maktabat al-Sunnah, Cairo.
• Bazimul, Muhammad U.S. (2011), Ahkam al-Faqirwa al-Miskin fi al-Kitab al-Azimwa al-Nabawiyyah, Darul Athar, Cairo.
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• Haq, I. (1996) Economic Doctrines of Islam: A Study in the Doctrines and Their Implications for Poverty, Employment and Economic Growth, International Institute of Islamic Thought, Herndon.
• Jhingan, M.L. (2008), The Economics of Development and Planning, 39th Revised and Enlarged Edition, Vrinda Publications, Ltd., Delhi.
• Kahf, M. (2007), “Islamic Economic System: A Review” in Agil SOS and Ghazali A (2007) eds. Readings in the Concept and Methodology of Islamic Economics, CERT Publications, Kaula, Lumpur.
• Karwai, S.A. (2012), “Islamic Economic Development”, Karai, S.A. et al (2012), Islamic Economics: A Book of Readings, International Institute of Islamic Thought, Nigeria Office, Kano.
• Khan. M.F. (1995), Essays in Islamic Economics, Islamic Foundation, Leicester.
• Meidugu, A.A. (2002), ‘An Islamic Synthesis of Western Conceptualization and Alleviation of Poverty,” in
• Maududi, A,A. (2005), Islamic Economic System: Principles and Objectives, Markazi Maktaba, Islamic Publishers, New, Delhi.
• Mohammadi, A. and Ahsan, M. (2002), Globalization or Recolonialization?: The Muslim World in the 21th Century, Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., London.
• Mursi, H.M. (2007), Al-Manhaj al-Islami Li ‘ilaj Mushkilat al-Faqr, Dat al-Tala’i, Cairo.
• Quraishi, M.A. (1999), ‘The Institution of Zakah and its economic Impact on Society”, in Proceedings of the Second Harvard University Forum on Islamic Finance: Islamic Finance into the 21th Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University 1999, pp. 77-81
• Sabiq, S. (2004), Fiqh al-Sunnah, Maktabat al-Ma’arif, Riyad.
• Sadeq, A.M. (2006), “Distribution Through Transfer and Other Measures”, in Sadeq, A.M. (2006), ed. Development Issues in Islam, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kaula, Lumpur.
• Sen, A. (1999), Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press.
• Spratt, S. (2009), Development Finance: Debates, Dogma and New Directions, Routledge, New York.
• Todaro, M.P. and Smith, S.C. (2009), Economic Development, 10th Edition. Pearson Education Limited, England.
• Yunus, M. (2007), Creating a World without Poverty, Public Affairs, New York.

Citation:

https://www.academia.edu/26260645/ZAKAH_WEALTH_DISTRIBUTION_AND_ECONOMIC_DEVELOPMENT

Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary, by Hamid Dabashi

Posted on June 26, 2019 Updated on June 26, 2019

Islamic Liberation Theology:
Resisting the empire
Hamid Dabashi

Are we today witness to a renewed confrontation between ‘‘Islam and the West’’ or are the signs of an imperial domination of globalized capital versus new modes of resistance to it already evident?
This book is a radical piece of counter-intuitive rethinking on the clash of civilizations theory and global politics. In this richly detailed criticism of contemporary politics, Hamid Dabashi argues that after 9/11 we have not seen a new phase in a long-running confrontation between Islam and the West, but that such categories have in fact collapsed and exhausted themselves. The West is no longer a unified actor and Islam is ideologically depleted in its confrontation with colonialism.
Rather, we are seeing the emergence of the United States as a lone superpower, and a confrontation between a form of imperial globalized capital and the rising need for a new Islamic theodicy.

Expanding on his vast body of scholarship in reading political Islamism during the last quarter of a century, Dabashi here lays the groundwork for a progressive rethinking of the place of Islamic cosmopolitanism in navigating modes of legitimate resistance to globalized imperialism.
The combination of political salience and theoretical force makes Islamic Liberation Theology a cornerstone of a whole new generation of thinking about political Islamism and a compelling read for anyone interested in contemporary Islam, current affairs and US foreign policy. Dabashi drives his well-supported and thoroughly documented points steadily forward in an earnest and highly readable style.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, USA. He is the author of several books including: Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads (1989/1992); Iran: A People Interrupted (2007); Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the
Islamic Revolution in Iran (1993/2005); Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (edited with an Introduction, 2006); and Close up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future (2001)

“The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia and of the
Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash like
falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their
brightness,” W. E. B. Du Bois

Islamic Liberation Theology: Chapter 7

Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary,

by Hamid Dabashi,

I write this chapter under the bright light of a single shining star – the memory of Malcolm X and his dazzling flash of memorial insight into our collective predicament – not just as Muslims, or Americans, but for the historically disenfranchised and the defiantly determined peoples around the
globe, and all of that from a decidedly Muslim perspective.  To pave my way to this point, my principal concern in the previous chapter was for us to see through the false binaries – such as the Sunni–Shi’i divide – that have succeeded that of ‘‘Islam and the West’’ and continue to maim and mark the terms of a new revolutionary dispensation in which Islam (re-imagined) will have a positive role to play. Today Islam – in its global public perceptions – has been effectively degenerated into a whimsical plaything between Bush and Bin Laden, Blair and Berlusconi, Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi, Irshad Manji and Ibn Warraq – defining the terms of an ancient civilization and the pieties that define millions of human beings around the globe. Islam though at the very same time is also a freed and emancipated signifier (a moment that we should happily embrace and celebrate) – waiting to be renamed, reclaimed, resignified, placed squarely at the service of a legitimate resistance to an illegitimate imperial disposition that uses and abuses native informers and their white supremacist employers alike. Today, Islam has been narratively placed outside the world, in the contested rhetorical domain of the American neoconservatives and their terrorist cohorts –
Bernard Lewis and Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi are the mirror image of each other, as are Osama bin Laden and Hirsi Ali. Islam though at the very same time is also the emerging sign of a Muslim participation in a global struggle – from Asia to Africa to Latin America to the very heart of the US and Europe – that will have to abandon all its absolute and absolutist terms of self-righteous assertions if it is to reach for a more open-ended and cosmopolitan conception of itself, of the very foundation of any religion, any culture, any claim to worldly reason and social justice.

In the previous chapter I wanted to dwell on the climactic closure of ‘‘Islam and the West,’’ for the simple reason that the ‘‘Islam’’ that ‘‘the West’’ had colonially crafted by forceful interlocution has now ended, as has that ‘‘West’’ that occasioned it. Under conditions code-named globalization, the rise of a renewed Islamic liberation theology, or an Islamic liberation theodicy, to be more exact, I wanted to argue, will have to be worked out from the ground zero of the most vital battlefields of our contemporary history – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon in particular. A realistic dream for Islam to have a positive and emancipatory role to play in these adjacent and interrelated regions will have to be integral to a cosmopolitan political culture in which Islam will remain integral but never definitive – as in the catastrophic case of the Islamic Republic of Iran – to the entirety of a political culture. This is one crucial lesson that Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon can learn from the criminal takeover of power by the Islamists in Iran against all other alternatives to their theocratic reign – and thus seeking to dismantle an entire cosmopolitan political culture. An Islamic republic is as, if not more, catastrophic in its essence and attributes than the Jewish state and the Christian empire it may pretend to fight but in effect mirrors, corroborates, and authenticates. Islam-in-the world is the worldly Islam in which Muslims re/think their most sacrosanct otherworldly tenets for a place in the world in which the face of their enemies – in a manner in which Emmanuel Levinas becomes a Muslim theologian – is the principal site of their emancipatory and embracing theodicy.
An Islam in which a Muslim cannot look straight at the face of a Jewish Zionist settler in the occupied Palestine and see the face of his own brother and the countenance of her own sister, and the fate of their common folly, and then factor in and incorporate in the vision of its future the fact of their common claim to humanity, is an already discredited and lost Islam. When Islam is thus located in the world, the only Islamic liberation theology that makes perpetual sense is a cultivated theodicy that is always on the case of power but never in power, and in the liberating dialectic of that paradox dwells the share of an Islamic liberation theodicy for a global resistance to the persistent US imperial proclivities.

For Islam once again to become a theology of liberation, it first had to be liberated from the paralyzing binary of ‘‘Islam and the West.’’ As a dialogical dyad, ‘‘Islam and the West’’ has ended, ‘‘the West’’ has imploded, and Islam is now a free and floating signifier in search of its own meaning and significance – with a much maligned countenance and in a much troubled world. Bush and Bin laden are too ephemeral historical nuisances to define anything, let alone the economy of meaning in the enormity of an ahistorical claim on history – for which purpose we need to pull back and look at one occasion when the fate of Islam and the fact of a visionary Muslim became one and the same.

How would have Malcolm X read the current world condition and explained it to an African American soldier serving in the US military and stationed somewhere in Iraq? This simple exercise is not too hard to imagine or too futile to undertake. Resurrecting the defiant soul and the probing intellect of Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary, the problems that the word faces today have increasingly assumed an Islamic disposition, though they are not all of an Islamic provenance. The presence of the US-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the predominance of the Israeli military
adventurism in the very same region spell out the modes of resistance to both in precisely Islamic terms. The persistence of a Jewish state, the vagaries of a Christian empire, and the belligerence of a Hindu fundamentalism cannot but color any mode of resistance to any and all of these adventures
as Islamic. The systematic transmutation of American civil liberties, the overwhelming presence of African American and members of other disenfranchised communities in the US army, the evident racism at the root of American poverty, as best evident in the course of the Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, would have been the principal point of contact and conversation between Malcolm X and any African American soldier now serving in the US military.

First and foremost, there is no face-saving scenario for the USA or its European allies to pack and leave Iraq – the Baker–Hamilton report of the Iraq Study Group notwithstanding, and while the astounding accumulation of lies and deception at the commencement of this war are staring glaring
at any casual observer. The potential US/Israel invasion of Iran or Syria, and the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine and its warring posture against Lebanon are bound to exacerbate this state of war. The US-led invasion of Afghanistan was equally wrong and targeted the wrong people
for the atrocities of 9/11 – the perpetrators of which had all perished along with their victims. Premised on that ill-fated invasion, in Afghanistan, the US/NATO/ISAF forces are entirely useless (except for periodically managing to kill scores of Afghan civilians)1 and may indeed be forced to accept another exercise in futility, thousands of Afghan lives and millions of refugees in surrounding countries and around the globe later.

As George W. Bush’s ‘‘long war against Islamofascism’’ (a term the powerful Zionist contingency of the US neocons has successfully sold him moves on from one disastrous year to another, the attention span of Americans is subdivided into an Osama bin Laden for their breakfast cereal, a Saddam Hussein for their sandwich at lunch, and an Ahmadinejad for their dinner table. In Iraq, the USA might in fact opt to side with the Shi’a faction led by Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic revolution in Iraq in order to opposes the rabble rousing threats of Muqtada Sadr, in an ill-fated attempt to face the Sunni-side of the anti-American insurrection – and thus effectively give birth to an Islamic republic of Iraq, right next to the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is of course in case the Saudi government (along with those of Egypt and Jordan) will abandon the Sunnis of Iraq to their own devices – a quite unlikely scenario, and thus the catastrophic prospect of the Iraqi civil war. The US-led departure from Iraq will certainly diminish the anti-colonial insurgency of the Iraqi resistance, but it is bound to procure even more sectarian violence, looming large on the horizon of an Islamic republic of Iraq. What did the Bush administration achieve in Iraq – Malcolm X would have likely asked and wondered: a mega-billion dollar military adventurism indefinitely casting the whole world into a perilous disposition – for which the world is infinitely less safe and Americans (innocent or guilty) infinitely more despised.

The catastrophic consequences of US/Israel military adventurism is not limited to Iraq of course and is cast widely over the entire region – not as the ‘‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’’ as the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it in a moment of hyperbolic mendacity, but in fact in its exact metaphoric opposite and as the death trap of everything decent and hopeful in the region. The uncharted and miasmatic violence that the US led invasion and occupation of Iraq has caused, conditioned, and sustained is in danger of spreading widely in the region. Afghanistan is still simmering with the violence that the US-led invasion in October 2001 had generated, sustained, and prolonged. As a major military subcontractor for the USA and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is itself full of political and religious tension – both within itself and vis-a`-vis India. The same is true about the Islamic Republic of Iran, fearful of a US/Israel invasion, exceedingly intolerant of reformist moves by its own citizens. Palestine continues to be the killing field of Israel, with Lebanon always at the mercy of the Jewish state and its military whims. The Turkish repression of its Kurdish population, its denial
of the Armenian genocide, and its wishes to be included as part of EU all go hand in hand. The degenerate and backward conglomerate of Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, Kuwait, and Jordan suffer under medieval potentates masquerading as modern nation-sates. The rest of the Arab and
North African scene continues to defy the will of its progressive and cosmopolitan cultures under one form of authoritarian regime that the US fully endorses (Egypt and Morocco) or another that it does not (Syria, Sudan, or Libya). Thus the war in Afghanistan is organically connected to
the war in Iraq, each exacerbating the other, most probably dragging Iran into the quagmire, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and all other illegitimate state apparatus like them as the sole beneficiaries of any scenario of conflict and mayhem. The theater of warfare may well extend into Africa, with Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and Chad as the most obvious sites of confrontation between a senseless and miasmatic Islamist adventurism and the US-led war of terrorism that in fact generates and exacerbates that very Islamism it that very Islamism it claims to oppose.

The legacy of the Bush administration in the region, all articulated, theorized, and executed with the intellectually bankrupt and morally degenerate ideologies of the US neoconservative movement, is going to wreak havoc – and the USA and its European and regional allies are singularly responsible for the calamity. Starting from the East, nobody is now holding successive American administrations responsible for (along with the Saudis) funding, arming, and managing the anti-Soviet Afghan Mojahedin, including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Pakistani intelligence was chiefly responsible for the creation of the Taliban. Despite its long and proud anti-colonial history and widely held cosmopolitan culture, Pakistan is reduced to a military client state of the USA, performing military duties and getting paid for it. The same ignoble record is the history of the USA in Afghanistan, where the US-manufactured Taliban and al-Qaeda are now poised to stage a comeback and put their perfected tactics in Iraq to effective use in ousting the ridiculous puppet regime of Hamid Karzai, ‘‘the Mayor of Kabul.’’ The woes of Afghanistan meanwhile have intensified – poor, desolate, riddled with tribal factionalism of the most retrograde and criminal sort, all endemic to a colonially manufactured state and yet all radically intensified in the aftermath of the first Soviet and now the US-led invasion – with the civilian population the principal victim of all these varied forms of military thuggery. Every inch of any infrastructure of a civil society or even a hope for a cosmopolitan political culture have been systematically destroyed, if not by the Soviets then by the Taliban, if not by Taliban then in the aftermath of the US-led invasion and NATO-led occupation, and by the reckless and enduring legacy of the globalized al-Qaeda, headquartered on the ruins of Afghanistan. Every single American who voted for President Bush, including those who did not and yet thought the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was a ‘‘just war’’ is responsible for the total destruction of a nation-state and the subsequent creation of a globalized terrorist network. Half a decade into its ‘‘liberation,’’ Afghanistan is a zest pool of religious fanaticism, tribal conflict, peppered with US-led torture chambers, a thriving narcotic terrain of warlords whose sense of morality is only slightly better than American and European corporate chief executive officers. The US–NATO forces will be defeated there, as were the Russians – and Afghanistan will be back where it was, a desolate landscape of poverty and fanaticism, a major supplier of hashish and heroin for the suburban boredom of Europe and the USA.

The fate of 70 million Iranians and their continued struggles for political liberty and economic justice has suffered a major setback precisely in the aftermath of the US-led military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the eyes of the US military analysts (e.g. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr of the US
Naval Postgraduate School), the entire moral and political universe of Iran is now reduced to a Shi’i state apparatus hunting for power in the region. The only manner that the illegitimate reign of the clerical clique can be sustained, throughout its beleaguered recent history, has been via an assumption of a warring posture vis-a`-vis the USA and/or Israel, an excuse that the US neocon imperialism has offered on a silver plate to their clerical counterparts in the Islamic Republic. Whether via economic embargo, military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, or insidious instigation of ethnic unrest in southern provinces, the USA is pulling out some of the oldest colonial tricks in the British hat to weaken and or/intimidate the Islamic republic.

Moving westward from Iran, Iraq is the singular site of shame if those responsible for this egregious act of criminal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation-state were to have any notion of shame. Malcolm X would have had no difficulty demonstrating to an African American soldier serving in Iraq that Iraq is now reduced to nothing more than a constellation of US military bases guarding the flow of oil to provide gas to the alleviation of its bored suburban population getting into their SUVs and going for a ride. First Afghanistan and now Iraq, the region is one sovereign nation state at a time being reduced to a shooting gallery for the enduring entertainment of Zach Snyder’s generation of computer-generated imagery (CGI)-infested militarized imagination.

Meanwhile Palestine remains the killing field of a racist, supremacist, apartheid Jewish state systematically stealing, occupying, and appropriating the homeland of another people. The principal partner of US imperialism in the region and beyond, the European colonial settlement wants to reduce the entire region into medieval sectarian division on its own fanatic image –
Islamic republics, a Christian empire, and a Hindu fundamentalism that makes the Jewish state feel at home in its neighborhood. Extending its thuggish operation beyond Palestine and into Lebanon, Syria, and possibly even Iran, the historical calamity called ‘‘Israel’’ is now completely divorced even from its own original Zionist ideals and degenerated into the military extension of the USA’s imperial operations in the region.

The circle of misery that the US-led militarism in the region has drawn, Malcolm X would explain, is not limited to what Bernard Lewis has taught them to call ‘‘the Middle East.’’ The USA is now actively aiding the corrupt leadership of Ethiopia (the Pakistan of North Africa) so that it does its dirty work in Somalia (the Afghanistan of North Africa). The result is simple and obvious: more battle zones, more overt and covert US operations in North Africa, more civilian deaths, more millions of refugees – on yet another ‘‘front in the war on terrorism.’’

What about Europe – the cradle of civilization? How would Malcolm X see Europe today? The blatantly racist policies of the EU, exacerbated by massive labor migrations into its aging population, and its unfailing support for (and hidden rivalries with and within) the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have made it a solid accomplice in warmongering and thus in part explains the attraction of the disenfranchised, anomie-ridden youth of the immigrant communities to al-Qaeda-like cells. While Europe is going Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary 239 through what its philosophers and public intellectuals – from Julia Kristeva to Etienne Balibar to Ju¨rgen Habermas – see as its identity crisis, waves of immigrant laborers have tested the thin veneer covering its endemic racism. Steadily falling birthrates, unsustainable welfare systems, major waves of labor migration, consistently resurfacing European racism (once against Jews and now against Muslims) and a contingency of Islamist militancy are now fast upon Europe. As if it did not have enough trouble with admitting Romania and Bulgaria into its civilizing bosoms, now even Turkey wants to
be European too. Meanwhile even the European nation-states are themselves in danger of disintegration – from the Scots in the United Kingdom to the Flemish nationalists in Belgium. The racist attempts to keep Turkey out of the EU inevitably alienates European Muslims and makes evident the ludicrous attempts of people like Tariq Ramadan who are trying to define a place of dignity for ‘‘European Muslims’’ in that racist context. In these circumstances, the future of France is an index of what Europe holds in its days to come. That future was very much contingent on the presidential election 2007, when the outright fascist aspirations of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the neocon look-alike Nicolas Sarkozy defined the terms of the debate, where the centrist Francois Bayrou and the socialist S’egole`ne Royal needed to place themselves. The victory of Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential election of 2007 goes a long way to eradicate any delusion people might have about the constitutional racism that underlies French society and its anti-immigrant chauvinism. These immigrants, those from Africa in particular, did not fall from the sky, nor are they attracted to France because of its splendid weather. They are the children of French colonialism coming home to roost – as Malcolm X was wont of saying. In this context, the hypocrisy of Europeans (who actually perpetrated the Holocaust) in pointing the finger at the Islamic republic for denying it – as if that conference that Ahmadinejad convened to distract the world’s attention from
his faction’s miserable failures at the municipal elections was anything but a subterfuge for a far more endemic disaster. But the stratagems of the clerical cliques in the Islamic republic can always rely on the hypocrisy, racism, and guilty conscience of Europeans – who will do anything to distract
attention from the facts of their own history by shifting the attention somewhere else.

Inside the USA proper, Malcolm X would further add, the catastrophic consequences of the neoconservative project are yet to be mapped out and thoroughly assayed. What the neocons have done to the USA and its political culture would be something beyond Malcolm X’s measures of expectation. So much flagrant thuggery around the globe might be identical with what the US
did in Vietnam – but where is the antiwar and civil rights movement that it also engendered at the time? With what imperial audacity and self-righteous hubris did this band of militant fanatics take over the democratic institutions of a nation-state and allow themselves the mendacity of pre-emptive war, changing regimes, ending states, moral and intellectual parochialism running amuck, a
global gangster mentality standing for international diplomacy, and promoting neoliberal thievery of the poor world for the benefit of the rich? Thus limited by terms domestic to their own moral and imaginative provincialism, Americans were getting ready for the presidential election of 2008
with their leading choices in ever more narrower and impoverished terms. The democratic victory in the 2007 midterm elections amounted to absolutely nothing when it came to the congressional allocation of yet another gargantuan military budget (US$100 billion) to President Bush to do as he
pleases in/to the utterly annihilated Iraq. The picture of the world at large framing this state of affairs befits its crocked timber. A desperate and disparate population almost the size of the
USA’s is now roaming the earth as migrant laborers. As many Indians live in desperate poverty in what advertises itself as ‘‘the greatest democracy in the world.’’ The overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims living in rural areas are in fact landless laborers, while more than half of the urban Muslims in India lives under the poverty line. The influx of African and Asian migrant laborers into Europe has caused massive manifestations of European racism, while the flow of Asians and Latinos into the USA has already given rise to such racist vigilante groups as the Minutemen. That influx of migrant workers around the globe is the gateway of potential troubles on both sides of any border they cross, with catastrophic global consequences far beyond the ability or willingness of the World Bank or the IMF to address. Thus a mobile army of homeless laborers, war and terrorism in the Middle East, hunger and AIDS in Africa, imperialist hubris and religious fanaticism in the USA, belligerent military thuggery of Israel, rampant racism in Europe are the most compelling signs of the new century. Add to these the fact that according to the most recent scientific reports (February 2007), there is now incontrovertible evidence that the Arctic is irrevocably melting away and by the year 2040 global summers will be entirely ice-free. Instead of waiting for Doomsday, the logic of capitalism is already thinking of how to bank on this thing called climate change and turn it into a business proposition. These facts and the human cost of their consequences would be on Malcolm X’s mind were his noble and defiant soul still with us, and were he to begin from the ground zero of our evident history and think through the otherwise than what we have now inherited on this earth.

In 1948, a young Egyptian intellectual named Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) came to the USA for his higher education and went to Greeley, Colorado, where he enrolled at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado. By the time he received his degree in education and went back to Egypt in 1951, Sayyid Qutb was convinced that American society was fundamentally corrupt, decadent, and irredeemable. In part because of this American sojourn and his hasty conclusions, as soon as Sayyid Qutb arrived in his homeland he joined a thriving Islamist organization called Muslim Brotherhood. For the rest of his life, Sayyid Qutb had a lasting influence on the rise of militant Islamism in the Arab and the Muslim world.

As historical fate would have it, and by way of a strange historical coincidence, precisely in the same year that Sayyid Qutb came to the USA, a young delinquent African American who would later be known as Malcolm X (1925–1965) was introduced to and converted to Islam while serving time at Concord Reformatory in Massachusetts on charges of grand larceny and breaking and entering. Almost exactly at the same time that Sayyid Qutb was a student in the USA (1948–1951), Malcolm X was in various US jails (1946–1952). And there is the paradox: Sayyid Qutb came to the USA and
there in complete freedom became increasingly incarcerated inside a tunnel vision of his own faith, while imprisoned inside a jail at the very same time, Malcolm X discovered an emancipatory vision of Islam far more liberating and entirely outside the limits of the great Egyptian Islamist’s horizon. A
year after Sayyid Qutb returned to Egypt and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, Malcolm X was freed from prison and joined the Nation of Islam as a devout Muslim and began a valiant, however brutally short, career as a revolutionary vanguard of increasingly more global horizons. One can look
forward to the future of Islam in the twenty-first century by a comparison and contrast between these two Muslim revolutionaries, one, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian militant Islamist who came to the USA and his encounter with America led him and the brand of Islamism he represented to an entrapment of his faith in a self-defeating ideology; and the other, Malcolm X, an African American Muslim who increasingly left the USA for the world and his liberating reading of Islam led to an emancipation of his faith in a progressively revolutionary direction.

Revisiting the extraordinary life and the short career of Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary is important not despite his flaws and missteps, but in fact precisely because of them. From the heart of his and his people’s entrapment in misery, Malcolm X resurrected hope and cultivated a vision of the world at once fully cognizant of its factual flaws and yet charged with a determination to set it right. Malcolm X was both a victim of racism and had to overcome his own reverse racism to reach the moment of liberation for Muslims at large. In many ways, Muslims around the world today are where Malcolm X was just before his historic Hajj pilgrimage, and as historical fate would have it, Muslims too, in their millions seem to be in need of not just a regular and habitual Hajj pilgrimage, but a pilgrimage that cleanses their own soul of much malady that has afflicted them, and if they are to face the abuse of power by warmongers outside and descending upon them they will have to first and foremost face their own innate enduring fallacies and endemic faults. In a long and arduous conversation with a barbaric European colonialism that ravaged the earth, Muslims effectively turned their own faith into the split image of the ideologies of their enemies – intolerant, abusive, fanatical, single-minded.

As Sayyid Qutb abandoned his earlier literary career and commenced his life as a Muslim revolutionary, he was instrumental in leading Islam of his time (with the best of intentions) into the cul-de-sac of a militant politics trapped inside a binary opposition with its arch nemesis, ‘‘the West.’’
Exactly in the opposite direction, Malcolm X shed one revolutionary skin after another, reaching out for nothing but a consistently emancipatory project, seeing in Islam not a matter of identity politics but a manner of liberating promises. His was the zeal of a new convert and the vision of a
world revolutionary in tune with the spirit of his time. The more Sayyid Qutb vilified the USA blindly (including some of his racist comments about African Americans and about jazz, from which he understood absolutely nothing – and from whose democratic spirit he could have learned much),
the more he was trapped into a blindfold celebration of an intolerant, belligerent, and combative Islam. Islam for Malcolm X was an equally combative occasion, but as an infinitely more liberating, progressive, alive, and living organism. In more than 200 years of encounter with colonial modernity, and literary hundreds of radical Muslim thinkers, no Muslim revolutionary comes even close to Malcolm X in the liberating, global, and visionary grasp of his faith and its place in facing the barefaced barbarity of economic and military world domination. Perhaps because he emerged from
the heart of that barbarity, perhaps because he was the direct target of its most racist ideas and practices – Malcolm X personified the life of a Muslim revolutionary for generations after ‘‘Islam and the West’’ had exhausted its historical calamities.

There is much need of soul-searching in and about Islam. If a religion at its current stage has managed at one and the same time to produce a Mullah Omar and a Hirsi Ali, an Osama bin Laden and an Ibn Warraq, an Ayman al-Zawahiri and a Fouad Ajami, an Ayatollah Khomeini and an Azar Nafisi (identical fanaticism in different buckets), that religion then is indeed in dire need of soul-searching. Beginning with juridically stipulated gender apartheid constitutional to Islamic law, Muslims today face a range of moral and political dilemmas at the root of the systematic mutation of their collective faith into a singular site of political resistance to imperialism at the heavy and unacceptable price of leveling their own religion to the ground of the imperial assault against Muslims. The monocentricity of Islamic law has historically been checked and balanced by the logocentricity of its philosophy and the anthropocentricity of its mysticism – and all of that by the literary humanism definitive to Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu languages. All the polyvocality of voices with which Islam has historically spoken has over the last 200 years been systematically muted and silenced by the aggressive formation of a singularly juridical fanaticism, hitherto justified
by virtue of an all-out war against a predatory European colonialism and American imperialism – with the Jewish state of Israel linking the heritage of one to the calamities of the other. What Muslims need is not a reformation (for which neoliberal European and American journalism have created a few would-be ‘‘Muslim Martin Luthers’’) but in fact a restoration of the classical polyvocality of their worldly religion, before it was aggressively mutated into a singular site of contestation against colonialism. The unconditional equality of men and women in all matters of legal, social, economic, and political domains is not something that needs to await a ‘‘modernization’’ or ‘‘reformation’’ of Islamic societies, but a matter soundly at the root of the democratic polyvocality of Islamic intellectual history. The unconditional freedom of expression for all political positions and parties, entirely independent of their compatibility with Islamic legal precepts, is the only way in which Muslims can remain Muslims but within a larger normative polity that embraces them but is not embraced by them. Reaching for a complete acknowledgment of the ideological and normative variations at the root of contemporary societies is not inimical but in fact entirely normative to Islamic intellectual history. The moral autonomy of the creative soul, at the widest spectrum of its worldly presence, is constitutional to the lived experiences of Muslims the world over – lost all but entirely through the vapid ideologization of Islam by Muslim thinkers themselves. A historic return to their own worldly and cosmopolitan cultures (in liberating plurals) is the swiftest manner in which Muslims can remember and re-enact the polyvocality of their own faith. Muslims have always had this cosmopolitanism but never seen it in toto because they have seen it through the lenses of extreme close-ups of their own angle on reality. What they need today is a long take/long distance shot of their own cosmopolitan culture, a frame that remembers and embraces all their historical differences, without eradicating them – their philosophers, mystics, jurists, and literary humanists standing at large and in adjacent proximity of their enduring differences. At the threshold of that recognition is where Malcolm X has left us, and it is at the threshold of his unfinished project and that universal conception of Islam that we need to pick up our senses and come up with a mode of liberation theodicy that does not dismiss but in fact wholeheartedly embraces and lovingly welcomes all the shades and shadows of its differences. What Islam needs, in short, is a Levinasian phenomenology wedded to the unfinished revolutionary project of Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary.

Retrieving the legacy of Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary in the heart of the globalizing empire shows how in his character and culture he represents a radical epistemic shift in the manufactured opposition between ‘‘Islam and the West.’’ No globally minded liberation movement will have any legitimacy without categorically including the disenfranchised communities within the USA (or within the so-called ‘‘West’’) – in the very heart of the globalizing empire. Contrary to what Sayyid Qutb perceived, and exactly as Malcolm X realized, the USA is a microcosm of the world at large – there is already a Third World in that part of the First World: they are the poor and the disinherited among the Native Americans, African Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian Americans, and then among a rainbow of new – legal and illegal – immigrants from around the globe. If Islam does not have anything to say or to offer to these disenfranchised communities – the legal and illegal immigrants at the mercy of Minutemen sharpshooters – without asking them to convert to Islam, then it is nothing but the fatuous faith of the Khaliji, Kuwaiti, and Saudi sheikhs having difficulty bending over their overfed bellies when pretending to prostrate to pray, or else the rambling gibberish of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar when replicating the American neocons in their advocacy of terror. There is another Islam unknown to those crooked bodies – the Islam of South Asian migrant laborers in the United Arab Emirates, the Islam of Malcolm X – the Islam that knows how to speak to those multitudes of misery without asking them first to believe in Allah (for they already do, in their own mind and manner). In his revolutionary character and iconoclastic legacy, Malcolm X links any global conception of an Islamic liberation movement to the heart of the most progressive uprising of the wretched of this earth. As such, Malcolm X is a singularly important rebellious character whose conversion to Islam and the massive epistemic shift that it occasioned in the course of his revolutionary career is yet to be properly understood and thoroughly theorized. In the revolutionary character of Malcolm X is gathered the most critical link necessary between the alienated colonial corners of capitalist modernity and the disenfranchised communities within its metropolitan center. The significance of Malcolm X is that he rises from the heart of the metropolitan disenfranchised poor and moves out to reach one of the most massively manufactured civilizational others of ‘‘the West’’ in the Islamic world. In his revolutionary legacy, as a result, we already have a radical bridge connecting the center and periphery of a globe that is no longer thus
divided. Retrieving his critical character as a Muslim revolutionary is thus quintessential to any assessment of an Islamic liberation project.

The most pernicious achievement of Orientalism was not that it was a discourse of domination – but that it was a discourse of alienation. Through the generation of a false consciousness in the form of civilizational divides, Orientalism has been instrumental in alienating the colonial corners of capitalist modernity from their integral connection to the vicious cycle of capital. By summoning and dispatching the colonial world into a manufactured civilizational other – Islamic, African, Chinese, Indian, etc. – Orientalism was the most insidious ideological force at the service of colonial modernity, systematically alienating the living labor of the colonials from their accumulated labor coagulated in the heartlands of metropolitan capital. A false categorical distinction was thus generated and sustained between the working class in the heart of capitalism and those in its colonial periphery, because they were assigned to two colonially fabricated civilizations – ‘‘the West’’ versus ‘‘the Rest.’’ It is not until the dawn of the so-called globalization that the sheer inanity of this fabricated distinction between metropolitan capital and colonial labor has been ipso facto bridged.

The significance of Malcolm X is that he rises from the heart of the metropolitan disenfranchised poor in the USA and moves out to reach one of the most massively manufactured civilizational other of ‘‘the West’’ in the Islamic world. In his revolutionary character, as a result, we already have a
transgressive bridge connecting the wretched of the earth otherwise treacherously separated by the project of Orientalism (squarely at the service of European colonialism) into two false civilizational camps – a project initiated and sustained by European colonialism (and followed by American imperialism) to divide the world in order to rule it better. If Bernard Lewis has spent a long life manufacturing and perpetuating a division between ‘‘Islam and the West,’’ Malcolm X spent a short but fruitful life linking that binary opposition and proving Bernard Lewis and his band of Orientalists
wrong. Malcolm X successfully crossed the powerful psychological divide that Bernard Lewis and a whole herd of like-minded Orientalists spent manufacturing. There is no other revolutionary figure who like Malcolm X so gracefully and courageously climbs over that dilapidated wall that mercenary Orientalists have constructed between the Western part of their own perturbed imagination and the rest of the world to separate the poor and the working class into the colonially engineered cultures and civilizations – in order to be able to dispatch impoverished Americans to maim and murder their own brothers and sisters halfway around the globe. Retrieving the critical character of Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary is quintessential to any Islamic liberation theodicy that must by definition include the ailing heart of this empire.

In any assessment of Malcolm X’s life and revolutionary appeal, one must pay close attention to his episodic changes and epistemic shifts. In his own autobiographical account, Malcolm X divides his life into the period before his conversion to Islam and the period after that. One might further extrapolate the periods after his historic Hajj pilgrimage that resulted in abandoning the racist assumption that only black people could be Muslim (a natural but fallacious reaction to the endemic racism he faced in the USA), and soon after that his break with the Nation of Islam and the establishment of his own mosque. This period is marked by an expansive contact with the most progressive revolutionary movements of his time. The closer we look at the episodic moves in Malcolm X’s short but tumultuous life the more we notice the heroic shifts that he initiated in his thinking and activism. With each move, he expanded his horizons, widened his vision, and embraced a more global conception of what needed to be done. With every move, he became less authentic in any identity claim to his character – black, American, or even a Muslim – and more of a revolutionary in his commitments to a global uprising against the moral decadence that underlined the political domination of a few over the historic fate of the overwhelming majority of the inhabitant of the globe. With every move, he expanded what it meant to be a Muslim revolutionary, in terms tolerant of  diversity and dissent, intolerant of dogmatism and essentialism. In his identitarian in authenticities (for he ran away from many stereotypes) he was far more of an authentic revolutionary, his religious monotheism always seasoned by a political polytheism. For Islam in its widest and most global reach to become a relevant force in the age of rapid globalization, this
expansive, tolerant, self-transformative, and auto-critical legacy of Malcolm X will have to become exemplary. Malcolm X had a reckoning with Islam. It is time Islam had a reckoning with Malcolm X.

In the biographical account now available through the monumental Malcolm X Project at Columbia University, we read a far more nuanced distribution of the varied phases of his life. Predicated on an early and brutal exposure to violent racism (1925–1940), Malcolm X witnessed the murder
of his own father, Earl Little, in the hands of a gang of Ku Klux Klan in 1931 when he was only six years old. In his youthful years, Malcolm X moved to Boston and led the life of a small time hustler (1941–1946), was arrested, and jailed. It was during his prison years (1946–1952) that Malcolm X successfully broke through the cycle of racism and violence that had so far defined his young life. His conversion to Islam, membership in the Nation of Islam, and subsequent political activism took shape right here and far into future. After he was released from prison, Malcolm X spent the
next five years (1952–1957) transforming the Nation of Islam from its limited, ghettoized, and parochial vision into a vastly popular and increasingly revolutionary movement among African Americans. The next four years of Malcolm X’s life (1957–1961) marked two crucial encounters that amount to a major epistemic shift in his revolutionary thinking: one was his trip in July 1959 to the Arab and Muslim world – he traveled to Egypt on an invitation of Gamal Abd al-Nasser and from there he went to Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana; and the other was in September 1960, when he met with Fidel Castro at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa. These two events, plus the July 1959 broadcasting of a five-part television report called ‘‘The Hate That Hate Produced’’ (by journalists Louis Lomax and Mike Wallace) effectively turned Malcolm X into a national figure with a global perspective to his revolutionary politics. He now defined the Nation of Islam, but the Nation of Islam did not define him.

The next two years of Malcolm X’s life, (January 1961 to December 1963)
marked the end of his involvement with the Nation of Islam, and his increasingly militant disposition against racist violence targeted towards blacks and Muslims. The assassination of President Kennedy on Friday November 22 1963, and Malcolm X’s dismissal of the national tragedy as
‘‘chickens coming home to roost,’’ resulted in his eventual banishment and his own subsequent official resignation from the Nation of Islam on March 8 1964. The period between March and June 1964 marked the most important emancipatory move of Malcolm X away from the limited provincialism of the Nation of Islam and toward the articulation of a more global revolutionary agenda – all occasioned by his historic Hajj pilgrimage. Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary 247
His break from the Nation of Islam and his Hajj pilgrimage point to the expansion of a far wider circle of revolutionary commitments that certainly embrace but are not limited by the suffocating parochialism that forced him out of his debilitating entanglements with his American Muslim brothers. He was already, by the time he left the Nation of Islam, looking at a revolutionary prospect far wider and more radical than what the American version of ‘‘Muslim Brotherhood’’ could possibly sustain or even imagine or represent. This larger and more global vision, and certainly not merely his disillusion with Elijah Muhammad, was at stake when he finally broke away from the Nation of Islam.

After he performed his Hajj pilgrimage, Malcolm X’s life yet again assumes an expansive horizon towards a larger frame of revolutionary references. He went on a whirlwind tour in April and May 1964, traveling all the way from New York to Beirut, and from there to Cairo, and then to Lagos, Nigeria and from there to Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, etc. Everywhere he went he was widely received by the most progressive forces in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as in Africa. It was after this trip and in the following summer, in June 1964, that Malcolm X announced the establishment of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), an organization that was no longer limited to Muslims or Americans in the range of its ambitious projects, linking, in effect, the freedom of African Americans to those of Africans at large. He formulated a wide ranging social and political agenda for OAAU, and established its branches in Asia, Africa, and Europe. When by January 1965, he was forced by the Nation of Islam to leave his home in East Elmhurst, he no longer needed a home. The world was his home.

What was he doing on these trips, navigating one political clime and country after another? Without abandoning his base as a Muslim revolutionary, he used these trips to expand the moral domain of his concern to even larger global perspectives. By the time that in December 1964 Malcolm
X spoke before 500 people alongside the Tanzanian revolutionary Abdul Rahman Mohammad Babu and read a message to the audience from none other than Che Guevara (who had been invited but could not attend), his stature and message as a global revolutionary had reached a far more embracing horizon than any Muslim revolutionary of his (or any other) time. By the time that in February 1965 he took his revolutionary message to Europe, he spoke for the universality of a global uprising on par with anyone, ranging from Lenin and Trotsky to Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. He was and he remained a Muslim, but the Islam of Sayyid Qutb and that of generations of other Muslim revolutionaries trapped inside a binary opposition between two false consciousness, ‘‘Islam and the West,’’ no longer limited, defined, or confined him. He globalized the revolutionary
quintessence of Islam long before globalization became a fashionable catchword. When early in February 1965 Malcolm X turned his attention to domestic American issues and went to Alabama for a series of lectures, he was no longer a mere national figure. His global vision had already wedded
domestic American issues to larger revolutionary projects. His trip later that month to London and Birmingham and his denial of entry into Paris were the further indices of his global stature. The more this revolutionary message becomes global, the less Malcolm X has a claim even to a home for his
family in New York. Soon after his return from Europe, early in the morning of February 14 1965, his home, with his entire family in it, was firebombed. Soon after this bombing, the title of his talk at Colgate Rochester Divinity School on February 16 1965, ‘‘Not Just an American Problem, but a World Problem’’ pretty much sums up his state of mind at this point. When in the afternoon of February 18 1965 he delivered a lecture to about 1500 Barnard and Columbia students, he may have had no clue that this was the last speech he was to give, but he knew full well of his global significance. Is it then accidental, or merely symbolic, that he spent the last night of his life on February 19 1965 homeless and in a hotel room? On February 21 1965 Malcolm X’s earthly life was abruptly ended and he became a legend.

Paramount in my conception of Islam in its encounter with colonial modernity is a dialogical reading of any world religion in active conversation with its location in history. The Islam of the last 200 years was the result of a combative conversation between Muslims and their European colonial
occupiers. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, when this particular Islam has ended by virtue of both its own internal contradictions (radically mutating its own multifaceted visions of reality into a singular site of absolutist ideological resistance to colonial modernity) and also because ‘‘the
West,’’ as its principal interlocutor that had teased out of Muslims a particularly combative reading of their own faith has ended. That Islam has come to an end because the ‘‘Western modernity,’’ with which it was in a prolonged, combative, and collective conversation has self-imploded, ended
under the pressure of its own contradictions – as outlined, argued, and demonstrated by European philosophers all the way from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to Adorno and Horkheimer and down to Deleuze and Guattari.

The dialogical disposition of Islam, or any other world religion for that matter, is not manifested only in its encounter with colonial modernity. Throughout its long and languid history, Islam has always been the dialectical outcome of a creative encounter between the Qur’anic revelation and Hadith narratives on one side and the social, intellectual, moral, and political powers that have come to face, challenge, augment, or else to contradict it. From Greek philosophy to the Persian empire, from Jewish theology to Christian monasticism, from Chinese astronomy to Indian mathematics – historically a succession of intellectual and political forces have been formative in negotiating out of Muslims particular readings of their own collective faith. The same is true with the European colonial modernity over the last 200 years, both in terms of the brute colonial power that dispatched Europeans around the world to plunder, maim, and murder people, and their Enlightenment project that commenced, coincided, and concurred with these globe-trotting adventures, putting an inordinate amount of pressure on Christianity to hurry up, revise its medieval doctrines, dogmas, and practices and prove more useful to European colonialism. Thus began the Muslim dialogical encounters with ‘‘Western modernity.’’ This dialogical disposition extended from a combative conversation with ‘‘the West’’ – a figment of imagination that this particular Islam epistemically corroborated by being its mirror image – to an equally belligerent dialogue with rival ideologies, competing for the strategic alliances of classes and masses for political resistance to colonialism. Islamism thus joined nationalism and socialism and formed the three most dominant political ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth century in Muslim lands. Islamism was as much
influenced by anti-colonial socialism and nationalism, as these two ideologies in their Muslim mutations were by Islam. The result of this vertical (colonial) and horizontal (in competition with nationalist and socialist ideologies) is that Islamism itself freely and unconsciously partook not only
in the nationalist rhetoric and socialist agenda, but ipso facto (albeit negationally) corroborated the globalizing project of ‘‘Western modernity.’’

The manufacturing of this ‘‘Western modernity’’ corresponded to a particular phase of European capitalism, and the advent of postmodernism, correlated to what Frederic Jameson calls, ‘‘the cultural logic of late capitalism,’’ has radically changed the innate correspondence between Eurocentric capital, manufacturing of ‘‘the Western civilization,’’ and the Orientalist engineering of pre-modern civilizations as ‘‘Islamic, Chinese, Indian,’’ by way of corroborating ‘‘The West’’ as the Hegelian promise of history. In this schemata, while the Eurocentric operation of capital was culturally code-named ‘‘the West,’’ all its colonial peripheries were delegated to ‘‘the East’’ or the Orient, which for the father of European Enlightenment Immanuel Kant extended from the East of Danube, all around the globe, to the west of the British Isles. The postmodern condition of the late capitalist dismantling of ‘‘the West,’’ corresponding to the amorphous nature of a globalized capital that is no longer in need of civilizational divides will have to face alternative modes of dividing the world to conquer it – for the axis of East and West, or even North and South, have now melted down to a shapeless and amorphous world. In this context, Islam is no longer in combative conversation with ‘‘the West,’’ for ‘‘the Western modernity’’ itself, as the logic of early capitalism, has been superseded by that very logic that once created it – and thus Islam has lost its principal colonial interlocutor of the last 200 years. In the aftermath of the current phase of iconic and spectacular violence – code-named Osama Bin Laden – the world will have to face an amorphous capital, a predatory empire with no hegemony, and thus necessarily pockets of regional, cross-cultural resistance to this empire; in this world, the future Islamic liberation theology will have to face not a concrete ‘‘West,’’ for it no longer exists, but an amorphous capital and a shapeless, graceless, brute, and naked predatory empire (with no hegemony).

Under these circumstances and against a nebulous empire, global and always tenuous, there is only one way of resistance – regional and cross cultural. Islamic liberation theology must learn from Christian liberation theology, and vice versa – and they must account for the existence of what in the language of political tolerance will have to be named alternative ideologies of resistance, with which any liberation theology (Islamic or otherwise) must come into coalition and conversation, not combative rivalry. This is the singular lesson of Islamic revolution in Iran and if from the ashes of that failed revolution the fire of a new liberation theology is to emerge it is though a theodicy, a liberation theodicy, a mode of theology that embraces its own opposites and alternatives. Examples in our contemporary world abound. Hamas in Palestine cannot be a legitimate component of the Palestinian national liberation movement unless and until it learns the art of compromise with its Fatah rivals. The Hezbollah in Lebanon cannot be a bona fide force in the emergence of Lebanon as an enduring nation-state unless and until it accepts the legitimate presence of non-Shi’i and particularly non-Islamic and non-religious forces in the Lebanese polity. The same is true of the Shi’is in Iraq who will have to, when the occupiers of Iraq have collected their belonging and left, enter into negotiation with non-Shi’i, non-Islamic, and non-religious factions and forces in Iraq. In this respect, the increasing presence of Muslims in Europe is equally crucial for the rise of a mode of resistance to the predatory powers of empires – American or European in denomination – that is not reducible to one religious or ideological denomination or another. By way of correcting their own blind spots and becoming part of not just national but also regional and cross-cultural liberation movements, no liberation movement can any longer afford tribalism of the sort that the Islamic republic of Iran, the Jewish state of Israel, and the Christian empire of the USA now collectively espouse, despite their outward protestations.

Both the US empire and the emerging pockets of resistance to it will have to cross over presumed cultures and their corresponding countries. With the massive presence of Muslim migrant laborers throughout the globe, Islam is now irreversibly globalized as is its very sacred language spoken with a solidly American English intonation and with neologisms on al-Jazeera. The globalized empire has arisen from the same material forces that have occasioned the globalization of Muslim migrant laborers and thus the emerging Islam itself. The beneficiaries of globalized capital are no longer (if they ever were) some fictitious white Euro-Americans, nor indeed are those disenfranchised by it are all Muslims, Orientals, or colored. The Saudi and Khaliji Sheikhs are as much the beneficiaries of globalized capital as more than 35 million US citizens who live under the poverty line are disenfranchised by it. The color line is no longer the defining moment of the twenty-first century, even if it were in the twentieth. An Islamic liberation theology that still divides the world into an East–West, or Muslim–non Muslim, believer–non-believer, practicing–non-practicing will mean nothing in the troubled years ahead. The inanity of Christopher Hitchens writing a book and calling it God is not Great (2007), mocking the Muslim creedal concept ‘‘The God is Great,’’ may indeed entertain some in Washington DC but is of no consequence to the fate of millions of believing and unbelieving Muslims and non-Muslims roaming the earth in search of sober decency. The only liberation movement against the terror of a globalizing empire that will be meaningful and mobilizing will have to be cross-cultural and global precisely in the same way that the empire it must oppose and the capital it must curtail are global. That liberation movement will have to account for the existence and accommodate the inclusion of the non-Islamic and as a result be more than a liberation theology but a liberation theodicy that at once recognizes and celebrates diversity. The only way that the innate paradox at the heart of Islam can be put to work for a permanent good is for Islam no longer to be triumphalist but tolerant, and in that tolerance not just to resist the abuse of power but also the temptation of power. The massive globalization of Islam by Muslim labor migrations throughout the world now provides for the former, its liberation theodicy
for the latter.

No globally minded liberation movement will have a spec of legitimacy without categorically including the disenfranchised communities within the USA in the very heart of the empire. The fat beneficiaries of globalized capital in the USA cannot and must not be allowed to appropriate its
revolutionary history. The anti-colonial history of the USA needs to be retrieved in the name and for the cause of its poor, sick, homeless, unemployed, uninsured, illegal immigrants, and other massively impoverished communities. The revolutionary disposition at those colonies that once
fought the British Empire is not a distant and forgotten memory. It has a glorious paragon of hope, and his name is Malcolm X. In his defiant character and revolutionary legacy, Malcolm X can link any global Islamic liberation movement to the heart of the most progressive uprising of the
wretched of this earth against their obscene oppressors. But that Islam is not the Islam of a pathological mass murderer like Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. That Islam has the resolute history of an American Muslim revolutionary written all over its future countenance.

The campaign of shock and awe that announced the commencement of the US war against Iraq in Spring 2003, combined with the mind-numbing theft and destruction of world cultural heritage in Mesopotamia that it occasioned, have indeed frightened us all out of our wits. Artifacts that were testaments to the very alphabets of our humanity and had survived from Chengiz Khan to Attila the Hun, from Tamerlane to Hitler, finally collapsed at the foot of Donald Rumsfeld. The whole world is indeed in a state of shock and awe at the sheer enormity of this unforgivable crime against
humanity – with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives perished and millions more maimed for life or dispatched into the indignity of exile. Today more than ever, voices of reason and visions of sanity must prevail. We are no longer safe in the serenity of our professional careers. We must
speak truth to power in a clear and concise language. Reading the history of our vanishing present is now more than ever the guiding light of our future. I have written this book as a sustained moment of pause to reflect against the grain of that speed with which our historical memory is being corroded. How and why did militant Islam begin to converse with colonial modernity?
When and why did it run out of ideological energy? And ultimately what are the emerging forces of discontent that seek and must liberate Muslims from their own local tyranny in face of the predatory global empire in terms domestic to their hopes, loyal to the best in their character and culture?
Posing these questions and seeking to answer them is no longer limited to Muslims or non-Muslims. We are all trapped. The cycle of violence benefits the worst among us and destroys the best. We must be put on reverse gear to maneuver out of this nasty spot and then move on.

Moors (Moorish)

Posted on May 19, 2019 Updated on May 19, 2019

The term “Moors” refers primarily to the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages.  The Moors initially were the indigenous Berbers. The name was later also applied to Arabs.

Apart from historic association and context, Moors are not a distinct or self-defined people, and the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica observed that “The term ‘Moors’ has no real ethnological value. Europeans of the Middle Ages and the early modern period variously applied the name to Arabs, north African Berbers, and Muslim Europeans.

The term has since been appropriated by some African American Muslims as an endonym, with many self-identifying as Moorish-Americans.

In North America, the term Moor or Moorish is associated with the American national and religious organization, “Moorish Science Temple of America,” founded by “The Noble Drew Ali” (born Timothy Drew, Jan 8, 1886 and died July 20, 1929).  In 1913, Noble Drew Ali established the Canaanite Temple in Newark, New Jersey, before relocating to Chicago, where he gained a following of thousands of converts.

Ali based the tenets of Moorish Science on the premises that African Americans are descendents of Moabites, from the Kingdom of Moab, attested to by numerous archaeological findings, most notably the Mesha Stele, which describes the Moabite victory over an unnamed son of King Omri of Israel. One primary tenet of the Moorish Science Temple is the belief that African Americans are of Moorish ancestry, specifically from the “Moroccan Empire,” an area that, according to Ali, included other countries that today surround Morocco.

During the classical period, the Romans interacted with, and later conquered, parts of Mauretania, a state that covered modern Morocco, western Algeria, and the Spanish cities Ceuta and Melilla. The Berber tribes of the region were noted in the Classics as Mauri, which was subsequently rendered as “Moors” in English and in related variations in other European languages. Mauri (Maupoi) is recorded as the native name by the Greek geographer, philosopher, Strabo.

In 711 CE, Islamic Arabs and Moors of Berber descent in North Africa, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar onto the Iberian Peninsula, and in a series of raids they conquered the Visigothic Christian Hispania. Their Berber general, Tariq ibn Ziyad, brought most of Iberia under Islamic rule in eight years. Though the number of Moorish colonist was small, many native Iberian inhabitants converted to Islam. By 1000,, according to Ronald Segal, some 5,000,000 of Iberia’s 7,000,000 inhabitants, most of them descended from indigenous Iberbian converts, were Muslim.

The Maghreb fell into a civil war in 739 that lasted until 743 known as the Berber revolt. The Berbers revolted against the Umayyads, putting an end to Eastern domination over the Maghreb. Despite racial tensions, Arabs and Berbers intermarried frequently. A few years later, the Eastern branch of the Umayyad dynasty was dethroned by the Abbasids and the Umayyad Caliphate overthrown in the Abbasid revolution (746-750). Abd al-Rahman I, who was of Arab-Berber lineage, managed to evade the Abbasids and flee to the Maghreb and then Iberia, where he founded the Emirate of Cordoba and the Andalusian branch of the Umayyad dynasty. The Moors ruled Northern Africa and Al-Andalus for several centuries thereafter. Ibn Hazm, the polymath, mentions that many of the Caliphs in the Umayyad Caliphate and Caliphate of Cordoba were blond and had light eyes. Ibn Hazm mentions that he preferred blondes, and notes that there was much interest in blondes in al-Andalus amongst the rulers and regular Muslims.

The Caliphate of Cordoba collapsed in 1301 and the Islamic territory in Iberia fell under the rule of the Almohad Caliphate in 1153 ( a Moroccan Berber Muslim movement and empire founded in the 12th century). This second stage was guided by a version of Islam that left behind the more tolerant practices of the past. Al-Andalus broke up into a number of taifas (fiefs), which were partly consolidated under the Caliphate of Cordoba.

Mauri (from which derives the English term “Moors”) was the Latin designation for the Berber population of Mauritania. It was located in the part of Africa west of Numidia (202 BC -40 BC), an ancient Berber Kingdom, located in what is now Algeria and a smaller part of Tunisia, Libya and Morocco in the Berber world. Mauri is recorded by Strabo, who wrote in the early 1st century, as the native name wich was also adopted into Latin, while he cites the Greek as Maurusii. The name Mauri as a tribal confederation or generic ethnic designator thus seems to roughly correspond to the people known as Numidians in earlier ethnography; both terms presumably group early Berber speaking populations ( the earliest Tifinagh epigraph dates to about the third century B.C..

Tifnagh (Berber pronounced Tifinay) in Tamazight, is an abjad script used to write the Tamazight (Afro-Asiatic) language family.

333 Saints of Timbuktu

Posted on September 28, 2016 Updated on September 28, 2016

On 30 June 2012, it was reported that the tomb of Sidi Ben Amar had been destroyed by Ansar Dine, a fundamentalist rebel group affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Maghrib, following the Battle of Gao, as it contravened sharia or Islamic law, as interpreted by Ansar Dine.  These attacks resemble the attacks that were carried out by the wahhabist movement on the Arabian peninsula during the late 18th century.

Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar (also known as Sidi Amar, Cadi Sidi Mahmoud, or Sidi Mahmoud) was a revered Muslim scholar who is one of the 333 Sufi saints said to be buried in Timbuktu.  The tomb of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar is among 16 cemeteries and mausolea that are a part of Timbuktu, which is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  

According to tradition the Cadi Sidi Mahmoud belonged to a Berber tribe of the Godala in Northern Africa, that lived along the Atlantic coast in present day Mauritania..  His forebears moved to Timbuktu after living in Macina and Qualata. Macina is a small town and rural commune in the Cercle of Macina in the Segou Region of Southern-Central Mali. The town of Macina lies on the north (left) bank of the Niger River. Qualata or Walata is a small oasis town in Southeast Mauritania, located at the eastern end of the the Aoukar basin, Qualata was important as a caravan city in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the Southern terminus of a trans-Saharan trade route and now it is a World Heritage Site.

Sidi Mahmoud was born in 1463 or 1464 and was named Cadi in 1498 or 99 and died in 1548.  Side Mahmoud was Ahmed Baba’s great uncle.  The Tarikh al-sudan (histories) of Timbuktu attributed him with numerous legends.  His tomb is a place of pilgrimage and his descendants count many scholars.  The tomb of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar is visited by local people who believe he has the power to bring rain, through the blessing of God.

As reported by Canadian American Miranda Dodd, “according to the most learned men in Timbuktu, the number of Saints buried in Timbuktu is far greater than 333; it is a symbolic number and represents the greatest of the saints. For every great saint there are several lesser ones now completely forgotten or unknown.

“The Saints of Timbuktu possessed exceptional wisdom, kindness, scholarship, and generosity. Many of the great scholars or Ulama have been named saints, but not all. There are many non-saints that are still remembered and respected as great scholars.”

The following is a partial list, compiled by Dodd; listing where many of the 333 Saints are buried, their names and stories:

• Diamune Hanane Cemetery just north of the petit marche.
• Unenclosed cemetery to the NE of town past the Sidi Mohamed Cemetery, near the Orange cell tower.
• 40 plus a set of twins who were given sainthood when killed by falling material during the construction of the mosque: Djingere Ber mosque.
• Cemetery of Three Saints on the SW corner of town behind the military camp : Cheikh Sidi Ahmed Ben Amar and 2 others
• Sidi Mohamed Cemetery NE corner of Abaradiou quartier: Sidi Mohamed and Moulaye Arby
• Boucou and one other are buried in the cemetery carrying his name
• Sankore mosque In fact an unknown number of saints are said to be buried here; only one is known.
• Sidi Yaha is buried in his mosque, also an unknown number of other saints.
• Sidi el Wafie is in the cemetery carrying his name
• Alfa Moya is in his cemetery
• Between the homes of Rene Caillié and Gordon Lang
• In front of the home of Gordon Lang
• Between Henrich Barth’s house and the Sidi Yahya mosque: Mohamed Baragha
• Between the Carpenters after Heinrich Barth and the Tijaniya Aferu Ber Mosque
• In front of the Direction Régional de Jeunesse near the post office
• The shadow of the old water tower.
• Behind the east wall of the Palais du Justice
• In the Military Camp
• On the road between the entry to town and the airport road
• In Kabara, Timbuktu’s former port town

Here are the stories of a few of the prominent Saints of Timbuktu:

Abu Alkassim Attouatti (Abou-‘l Qâsem et-Touati)

Abu al-Kassin at-Toutti was an Imam of the grand Mosque Djingere Ber, only a small path separated his home from the mosque. He was the one who instituted the celebration of Maouloud (the birth of the Prophet Mohammed) in Timbuktu. He was a great mystic and consecrated his life to the faith and the creation of pious acts: complete reading of the koran on Fridays, creation of a cemetery around the mosque. He is most famous for always having dates and bread in his pockets which he distributed to koranic students. No matter the time of day or the amount he already gave he would still have some to give to the next person. And the bread was alway hot and fresh. Another well known event is that one day when he went to the mosque to pray and at the end of the prayer his boubou was all wet. His companions asked him how he managed to get so wet while praying. He explained that a pirogue had capsized in lake Debo and one of the drowning men called out to be saved in the name of God and his saints. God sent him to save the men. He died in 1528-29 (935 islamic year) at the age of 33. Sidi Mahmoud presided over his burial in the new cemetery. His tomb is located 100m to the west of town.

Ahmed Baba Ed-Doudani

Son of Alhaji Ahmadu, Ahmad Baba’s tomb lies between that of his father and the mausoleum of his uncle Sidi Mahmoud. A veritable well of science, Ahmed Baba is one of the most well known and greatest scholars of Timbuktu and left a colossal and varied work behind him. His works include commentaries on the “kalil” and on the hadiths, praises of the Prophet, books of history, and much more. Like his uncle, Ahmed Baba is credited with many spectacular miracles. On famous one took place during his detention in Marrakech. During the course of a discussion between himself and some learned Moroccans, Ahmed Baba caused a book from Timbuktu to appear at the moment he needed it. It was a book that gave the definitive verdict that was to resolve their disagreement. His adversaries saw a woman’s hand appear and offer the desired volume. Ahmed Baba died in 1631 (1035) at the age of 73 years shortly after being liberated to return to Timbuktu.

Alfa Moya Lamtouni

A great Saint and great philosopher Alfa Moya had many disciples. He was assassinated along with ten other saints in 1605 (1010) by spanish troops of the Jaoude who came from Andalousie. He was 55 when he died. His tomb is located east of town.

Alhadi Ahmadou

Al-hadji Ahmadu was a juris consultant. Some sources would have him be the german cousin of Sidi Mahmoud. The Tarikh es-Soudan names him as brother to both Sidi Mahmoud and another juris consultant Abdallah. It states that “Ahmed was a saint, Mohammed was a saint, Abdallah was a saint” and gives his lineages as Al-hadji Ahmed ben Oumar ben Mohammed-Aquit ben Oumar ben Ali ben Yahia ben Godala and states that he was buried about 100m from the mausoleum of this last.

Amar Ben Mohammed Aquit

The Father of Sidi Mahmoud, was also a great Saint. He died in Oualata where he emigrated to escape persecution by Sonni Ali-Ber. The Tarikh al Fattash as well as the Tarikh es-Soudan describe his encounter with the Touaregs and with Sonni Ali-Ber and the consequences of his flight, frightened by the Songhai King’s reputation, to Oualata at the time of Timbuktu’s conquest, even though it was Amar himself who had called him for help.

Cheikh Sidi El Mokhtar Ben Sidi Mohammed

Otherwise known as Sidi Khiar, he was a great saint of Timbuktu and great Philosopher. He knew Heinrich Barth during his passage through Timbuktu. He died at age 80 around 1853.

Djamane Hana

is an ancient mosque whose construction dates to 1542-43. There are forty saints buried here. It is found to the North of the Petit Marche. One side abuts the paved road.

El Imam Ismail

Originally from Djenne, Ismail came to Timbuktu to take a rest and visit the town. Unfortunately he never arrived. He died three kilometers from town. When there is a serious drought in Timbuktu all the imams, muezzins, learned men and other great personages gather together to pray to God for water. They go to each mosque and the tombs of the saints and finish by going to Ismail’s tomb 3km from town. When they finish the prayer here rain invariable follows. There are living today people who have assisted at this ceremony who swear to its authenticity.

Mohammed Aquit

Mohammed Aquit was the grandfather of the famous Sidi Mahmoud. He lived in Macina. After a misunderstanding with the Peuls of Macina in a question of marriage, he moved to Oualata. He wanted to establish himself in Timbuktu but it was under the reign of chief Tenguereche Akil, his enemy. He did not dare enter the city so he installed himself between Birou and Raz el-ma. His friend the grandfather of Masira-Anda Oumar, the juris consultant negotiated with the Tuareg chief Akil so that he and his large family could move to Timbuktu. He is buried about 100 m to the north of Sidi Mahmoud tomb.

Mohammed el-Micki

Sidi Mohammed el-Micki was very pious and could easily go three days neither eating nor drinking. He died at the age of 80 in the year 1844. His tomb is about 30 m to the south of the Abu-Kassim.

Sidi Yahya

Djinguereber was, for a long time, the only mosque in Timbuktu. When Sankore was first built it was not a mosque but a centre of learning, a university. So all the great scholars had to leave the university, cross the river, which at the time cut through the area in order to go pray at Djinguereber. One man had a dream in which the prophet appeared to him and told him to construct a second mosque halfway between the Mosque and the University.

As in Muslim tradition anything that comes via the Prophet Mohammed in a vision or dream etc. is considered to be from God Himself, and should be heeded. So they constructed the mosque. The question remained who would serve as Imam? The most learned among them said well, if this is truly the design of God, the Imam will come without our interference. So they shut the mosque and locked it.

A few months later a man from Oualata, in Mauritania, showed up in front of the Mosque and asked for the keys. The neighbours to the mosque gave him the key and he opened the mosque and went in. He said his prayers and sat and began reading the Koran. Sidi Yahya, the imam, had arrived.

He since performed many miracles.

Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar Ben Mohamed

According to tradition the Cadi Sidi Mahmoud belonged to a Berber tribe of the Godala. His ancestors moved to Timbuktu after living in Macina and then Oualata. He was born in 1463 or 1464 and was named Cadi in 1498 or 99 and he died in 1548. Sidi Mahmoud was Ahmed Baba’s great uncle. The Tarikh (histories) of Timbuktu attributed him with numerous legends. His tomb is a place of pilgrimage and his descendants count many scholars.

Mohammed Bagayogo

He was Ahmed Baba’s instructor, most famous for the following legend: when Ahmed Baba was in exile in Morocco he ended up teaching and advising many people there. Someone made reference to his being the most knowledgeable person and in his modesty he declined the honours saying it went instead to his teacher. When asked the name of this erudite he gave it. According to legend Mohammed Bagayogo in Timbuktu sat up in his yard where he was surrounded by young scholars and said Ahmed Baba sold me to the Moroccans. They will come here to seek me but will never find me. Sure enough the Moroccans did come seeking him out, but the day they entered town by the north Mohammed Bagayogo was leaving it by the south. He was on his way to his funeral, so the Moroccans never did find him. He is buried today …

Sane Haji

This is the first saint venerated in Timbuktu. He was born in Timbuktu in 868 of the Hegire (1490). He had four sons who were well educated and wrote several books. It is said of Sidi Mohammed that at the burial of his brother al-Hadji Amadou, he remained prostrate during the presentation of condolences. When he regained control of his faculties he excused his muteness explaining that he was following the soul of his cousin all the way till he was delivered to the angels. He died in 956 and was buried about 150m north of town.

Sidi Ahmed ben Raggadi

Sidi Ahmed was a great philosopher. He had numerous disciples who were very well educated. He died in 1718 at the age of 85. His tomb is 100 m west of town.

Mohammed Tamba-Tamba

Mohammed was a member of the tribe of Kel-es-Souk who lived north of Gao. He came to Timbuktu to perfect his knowledge. He died in the year 1210 of the hegire (1832) and was buried to the south west of town on the Route to Kabara. His tomb is now within the boundaries of the fort Sidi-el-Bekkaye.

Al-Imam Said

The Cheikh al Imam Said was a native of Timbuktu. He died in 1260 (1882) at the age of 70. He tomb is next to the Pharmacie Populaire.

Sidi Mohammed Boukou

Boukou lived at the beginning of the 16th century. He was part of the tribe Id Ouali of Chinguetti (in Mauritania). He has relatives in Touat to this day. He is buried to the east of town.

Sidi el-Wafi el-Araouani

Sidi el-Wafi lived in the 17th century. He came to Timbuctoo with two goals. To take a retreat and to improve his knowledge. He died in 1121 (1743). His tomb is found about 25m to the east of town.

Mohammed Sankare

He came to Timbuktu to study. He died at the beginning of the 17th century at the age of 60. His tomb is at the east of town.

Destruction of the Tombs of the Saints of Timbuktu

The destruction caused by Ansar Din’s in Timbuktu have been compared to the destruction carried out by the followers of ad Dawa al-Wahhabiyya in the 19th century.

In the 1800’s, followers of Ad Dawa al-Wahhabiyya or Wahhabism, named for its founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703 -1792), carried out similar attacks on the shrines of venerated Saints in the Arabian deserts. Wahhabism is a religious movement or branch of Sunni Islam.  It has been variously described as ‘ultra conservative”, austere”, ‘fundamentalist”, “puritanical” or “puritan”and as an Islamic “reform movement” to restore “pure monotheistic worship” (tawheed) by scholars and advocates, and as an “extremist pseudo-Sunni movement” by opponents.  Adherents often object to the term Wahhabi or Wahhabism as derogatory, and prefer to be called Salafi or Muwahid. The movement emphasises the principle of tawhid (the “uniqueness” and “unity” of God).  Its principal influences in Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855) and ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328).

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab started the revivalist movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd, advocating a purging of practices such as the popular “cult of saints”, and shrines and tomb visitation, widespread among Muslims, but which he considered idolatry (shirk), impurities and innovations in Islam (Bid’ah).  Eventually he formed a pact with a local leader Muhammad bin Saud offering political obedience and promising that protection and propagation of the Wahhabi movement mean ‘power and glory” and rule of “lands and men.”

The alliance between the followers of ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud’s successors (the House of Saud) proved to be a durable one. The House of Saud continued to maintain its political-religious alliance with the Wahhabi sect through the waxing and waning of its own political fortunes over the next 150 years, through to its eventual proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, and then afterwards, on into modern times.  Today, Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab’s teachings are the official, state-sponsored form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia. With the help of funding from Saudi petroleum exports (and other factors), the the movement underwent “explosive growth” beginning in the 1970s and and now has worldwide influence. The “boundaries” of Wahhabism have been called “difficult to pinpoint,” but in contemporary usage, the term Wahhabi and Salafi are often used interchangeably, and they are considered to be movements with different roots that have merged since the 1960s. But Wahhabism has been called “a particular orientation within Salafism,” or an ultra-conservative, Saudi brand of Salafism.  Estimates of the number of adherents to Wahhabism vary, with one source (Mehrdad Izady) giving a figure of fewer than 5 million Wahhabis in the Persian Gulf region (compared to 28.5 million Sunnis and 89 million Shia). Many Sunni and Shia Muslims disagree with the Wahhabi  of the Ottoman empire movement, and a widely circulated conspiracy theory holds it to have been a product of British secret service efforts for causing the demise of the Ottoman empire. Ulema, including Al-Azhar scholars, regularly denounce Wahhabism in terms such as “Satanic faith”. Wahhabism has been accused of being “a source of global terrorism,” inspiring the ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and for causing disunity in Muslim communities by labelling Muslims who disagreed with the Wahhabi interpretation of monotheism as apostate (takfir) and justifying their killing. It has also been criticized for the destruction of historic mazars, mausoleums, and other Muslim and non-Muslim buildings and artifacts.

The World Heritage Significance of The Saints Of Timbuktu

Some of the ancient mausoleums of Timbuktu, shrines and tombs of Sufi saints which were a place of pilgrimage for centuries have been restored through a local and international project, three years after they were deliberately destroyed by armed groups linked to al-Qaida.

The director general of Unesco, Irina Bokova, visited the city in Northern Mali, praising the reconstruction work as “an answer to all extremist whose echo can be heard well beyond the borders of Mali”. The 16 tombs, the treasures of a place known as “the city of 333 saints”, some dating back to the 13th century, were believed by the local people to protect their city from danger.  The saints were renowned for their scholarship as well as their piety, and their memorials formed part of the Timbuktu World Heritage Site, the Unesco list of the world’s most important monuments.

The work has been carried out by local masons using traditional building techniques, collecting old photographs and surviving fragments of the walls as patterns to rebuild using the local stone mortared with banco, a mixture of clay and straw.  The first monuments chosen for restoration were to three saints from different regions, one from Timbuktu, one from Algeria, and on from Djenne in the Niger delta.

Timbuktu has been known since ancient times as a centre of learning and trade.  In the 12th century it became the site of one of the world’s earliest universities, which at its height in the 15th century is said to have had 25,000 students.

Recognising its significance as a site of African architecture and its scholarly past, UNESCO declared Timbuktu a World Heritage Site in 1990.

The city and its desert environs are an archive of handwritten texts in Arabic script, produced between the 15th and the 20th centuries. The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu are significant repositories of scholarly production in West Africa and the Sahara. The manuscripts were precious for what they said more broadly about Africa’s history. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who visited Timbuktu in 1996, explains that Hegel, Kant, and other Enlightenment philosophers contended that Africa had no tradition of writing, and therefore no history and no memory.  “And unless you have those, you are not a civilization, which was a pernicious argument that provided justification for the slave trade,” Gates said in a recent interview.  ‘The absence of writing, of books, was seen as a reflection of the subhuman position of the Africans.  So the presence of these books had high, high stakes, going back to the 18th century.  Kant and Hegel and Hume did not know anything about this.”

The Meaning of the Saints or Awliya In Sufism

A hierarchy of Awliya and their functions are outlined in the books of Sufi masters.  There is some controversies as to the terms used for each rank, but there is general agreement about the numbers and functions of each level starting from the top downwards:

• One – Ghawth (Guide)
• Three – Qutb (World Pillar)
• Three – Nuqaba (Watchman)
• Four – Awtaad (Pegs), Aqtab (Poles)
• Seven – Abraar (Pious)
• Forty – Abdal ( Substitutes)
• Three Hundred – Akhyaar (Chosen)

Description of the Qutb.

Qutb, Qutub, Kutb, Kutub, or Kotb, means “axis”, ‘pivot”, or “pole”.  Qutb can refer to the celestial movement and used as an astronomical term or a spiritual symbol.  In Sufism, a Qutb is the perfect human being, al-Insan al-Kamil (Universal Man), who lead the saintly hierarchy.  The Qutb is the Sufi spiritual leader that has a divine connection with God and passes knowledge on which makes him central to, or axis of Sufism, but he is unknown to the world.  There is only one Qutb per era and he is an infallible and trusted spiritual leader.  He is only revealed to a select group of mystics because there is a human need for direct knowledge of God”

According to the Institute of Ismaili Studies, “In mystical literature, such as the writings of Al-Tirmidhi, Abd al-Razzaq and Ibn Arabi, Qutb refers to the perfect human being who is thought to be the Universal Leader of all saints, to mediate between the divine and the human and whose presence is deemed necessary for the existence of the world.

“The Cultural Renaissance Of Timbuktu”

Posted on March 19, 2016 Updated on March 19, 2016

Timbuktu (Mali) (04/02/2016) © UNESCO / Lazare Eloundou Assomo | Image Source: Lazare Eloundou Assomo

Timbuktu (Mali), February 4 – A consecration ceremony of the Timbuktu mausoleums, last held in the 11^th century, was held at the initiative of the local community. This is the final phase of the cultural rebirth of the Timbuktu mausoleums after their destruction by the armed groups who occupied the city in 2012.

Black Life in The Arab World

Posted on January 25, 2016 Updated on January 30, 2016

A Legacy hidden In Plain Sight

By Theola Labbe

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, January 11, 2004

BASRA, Iraq — The word was whispered and hurled at Thawra Youssef in school when she was 5 years old. Even back then, she sensed it was an insult.

Abd. Slave. “The way they said it, smiling and shouting, I knew they used it to make fun of me,” said Youssef, recounting the childhood story from her living room couch. “I used to get upset and ask, ‘Why do you call me abd? I don’t serve you,’ ” Youssef said.

Unlike most Iraqis, whose faces come in shades from olive to a pale winter white, Youssef has skin the color of dark chocolate. She has African features and short, tightly curled hair that she straightens and wears in a soft bouffant. Growing up in Basra, the port city 260 miles southeast of Baghdad, she lived with her aunt while her mother worked as a cook and maid in the homes of one of the city’s wealthiest light-skinned families. Dark-skinned complexion Iraqis say the word may or may not be considered an insult, depending on how it is used and the intent of the speaker.  “We use the word abd in the black community,” said Salah Jaleel, 50, one of Youssef’s cousins. “Sometimes I call my friend ‘abd.’ Of course he knows that I don’t insult him, because I’m black also, so it’s a joke. We accept it between us, but it is a real insult if it is said by a white man.”

In the United States, Youssef’s dark skin would classify her as black or African American. In Iraq, where distinctions are based on family and tribe rather than race, she is simply an Iraqi.

The number of dark-skinned people like Youssef in Iraq today is unknown. Their origins, however, are better understood, if little-discussed: They are the legacy of slavery throughout the Middle East.

Historians say the slave trade began in the 9th century and lasted a millennium. Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from present-day Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa to Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East. “We were slaves. That’s how we came here,” Youssef said. “Our whole family used to talk about how our roots are from Africa.”

Though centuries have passed since the first Africans, called Zanj, arrived in Iraq, some African traditions still persist here. Youssef, 43, a doctoral candidate in theater and acting at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts, is writing her dissertation about healing ceremonies that are conducted exclusively by a community of dark-skinned Iraqis in Basra. Youssef said she considers the ceremonies — which involve elaborate costumes, dancing, and words sung in Swahili and Arabic — to be dramatic performances.

“I don’t complain about being called an abd, but I think that’s what provoked me to write this, perhaps some kind of complex,” said Youssef, who began researching and writing about the practices of Afro-Iraqis in 1997, when she was studying for a master’s degree. “Something inside me that wanted to tell others that the abd they mock is better than them.”

“By the 9th century, when Baghdad was the capital of the Islamic world, we do have evidence of a large importation of African slaves — how large is anyone’s guess,” said Thabit Abdullah, a history professor at York University in Toronto.

In a country that revolves around religion rather than race, the term “Abd” may be used by light-skinned Iraqis in a matter-of-fact way to describe someone’s dark skin.

In many ways, the low visibility of dark-skinned Iraqis has been a blessing. During his 35 years in power, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party government killed and tortured thousands of people based on ethnic and religious affiliations. Ethnic Kurds in the northern reaches of the country, and Shiite Muslims — particularly the so-called Marsh Arabs — living in the south all suffered. The dark-skinned Iraqis were spared Hussein’s wrath.

Her mother was disappointed in her choice. Her husband’s mother objected to the union. Sabty said Mousa’s family even tried to intimidate her with threatening phone calls. Now she shakes her head and dismisses it all as long-ago history. “Objections and barriers exist, but in the end it’s all solved,” she said in her soft voice, smiling.

Her middle-class home in Basra’s Abbasiya district has painted concrete walls and two televisions and is immaculate. Sitting on a couch draped in white protective cloth, Sabty explained that intermarriages like hers are common in Iraq: “We don’t have a problem with color, and we don’t deal with someone based on color.”

For instance, she said, her older sister married a light-skinned Iraqi and has a daughter with blond hair. Her brother married a dark-skinned woman and their child is dark-skinned. Sabty’s two young children have olive complexions and straight, shiny hair, showing no trace of Sabty’s caramel coloring.

Suddenly she paused. “In the coming generations we will have fewer dark-skinned children, and this pains us,” she said. “We are proud of this color because people of this color are a minority in Iraq. Maybe DNA will bring us the color again.” 

Hashim Faihan Jimaa, 78, is more concerned with survival than color. He has no income and lives with his ailing wife, Dawla Shamayan, 68, who recently had gallbladder surgery. Jimaa says he believes in the African-inspired healing ceremonies. He used to participate many years ago when they were more frequent; the number of ceremonies has decreased since the start of the U.S. occupation because of fear of performing outside. 

“These came from Africa and they are very important to us, the abds,” he said. Just as he used the Arabic word for slave to refer to himself, Jimaa sometimes referred to light-skinned Iraqis using the term for a free person.

His wife, sitting across from him with about a dozen of their children and grandchildren, gingerly suggested that perhaps his grandfather or another relative had been slaves from Africa.

Jimaa glanced down at the back of his dark-brown hand. “You can’t depend on someone’s color, because maybe a black man married a free woman and the children will come out lighter than me,” he said. To seal his argument, he pointed to his caramel-colored daughter and then his granddaughter, who was darker than her mother.

Jimaa’s wife and others continued to probe Jimaa’s answers. He grew exasperated. “I have nothing to do with Africa, I don’t know where it is or even what it is,” Jimaa said. “But I know that my roots are from Africa because I am dark-skinned.”

Few local government leaders in Basra, some of whom were selected by the U.S.-led occupation authority, are dark-skinned. In Hakaka — a poor neighborhood of 600 families, about 100 of them dark-skinned — town council members elected last August vowed to make changes. All of the eight council members are light-skinned. “People applied to be members, and no one black applied,” said council President Abdullah Mohammed Hasan, 54, in the narrow sandwich and snack shop that serves as the council’s headquarters. Hasan has two wives, one of them dark-skinned. “They have good manners and are very easy to deal with,” Hasan said of dark-skinned Iraqis. “It would be better if they were members.”

Youssef, the doctoral candidate, grew up in Hakaka. When she was a child her family did not have much money, but the modest neighborhood was clean. Now it lacks a septic system and reeks of waste because there is no garbage pickup.

Youssef goes back at least once a month to see her 74-year-old father, who sometimes needs her help because of his failing eyesight. She also visits with her brother, Sabeeh Youssef, and his family.

Sabeeh Youssef, 47, dropped out of school early to help support the family. He works fixing broken lighters since losing his job at an oil company in 1989. But he is a self-taught carpenter, capable of carving elaborate antique cars and miniature ships. He proudly showed the objects lining the walls of his modest home, which lacks running water. He would love to have his own shop, “but I don’t have the materials and I don’t have the money to buy them,” he said, as his daughter Duaa Sabeeh, 5, grew restless in his lap.

“I’m very happy and proud of my sister,” he added. “She did the things that I couldn’t do, or that my father couldn’t do. She did it.”

“I don’t feel like a stranger here,” she said one day, stepping carefully to avoid the sewage as eager children followed her. “I have something deep inside of me that is connected to the local Basra ceremonies. I can’t abandon them.” The practices, she said, came from “the motherland where we came from: Africa.”

In her dissertation, Youssef mentioned seven open fields in and around Basra where ceremonies take place. The field in the Hakaka section is a dusty, hard-packed courtyard with houses clustered around it. Drums, tambourines and other instruments are stored in a closet. Youssef said that only a local leader named Najim had a key. Youssef had to seek his permission to write about the ceremonies. Najim declined to talk about them.

In her dissertation Youssef describes a song called “Dawa Dawa.” The title and words are a mix of Arabic and Swahili. The song, which is about curing people, is used in what Youssef calls the shtanga ceremony, for physical health. Another ceremony, nouba, takes its name from the Nubian region in the Sudan. There are also ceremonies for the sick, to remember the dead and for happy occasions such as weddings.

“The ceremonies are our strongest evidence of our African identity,” she said.

Youssef said she was raised to be a proud Iraqi and Muslim, but that her mother also stressed the family’s roots in Kenya. Her grandfather and his relatives came from Africa through slavery, her mother said. “I knew that the word abd was used to refer to black people, and I know that it was something embarrassing that my mother was working in a white person’s house,” Youssef said. “I remember that if their son hit me, I couldn’t even push him. So that hurt me, that stuck in my mind.”

When she was 9, her mother sent her to stay with an aunt, Badriya Ubaid. She lived in a more upscale neighborhood and was the lead singer in the nationally acclaimed band Om Ali.

“My aunt, she was the first one pushing me to study,” Youssef said. “She said, why do we let them say that black people can only do dance and music? Why don’t we show them that they can be an important part of the community, that they can study? She wanted me to answer this question.”

In college and graduate school, as she studied theater and dance, Youssef also sang with Om Ali. If someone said that the dark-skinned Iraqis were only good for entertainment, Youssef said, her aunt was quick to point out that her niece was in graduate school studying for an advanced degree. When Ubaid died, Youssef sang regularly in the band but quit in 1999 to pursue her doctorate full time.

Youssef also danced with a local arts troupe. She found the moves reminiscent of the dances in the ceremonies. She wrote her master’s research on body movement, and when it was time to pick a topic in 2000 for her dissertation, she decided to look at her community’s healing ceremonies.

“It’s not only going to give ideas about dark-skinned people, it will give an idea about our inherited ceremonies, which we have to protect,” said Youssef. She wants to teach and to publish her work in a book. “The most important thing is that I started it,” said Youssef. “People will come after me, God willing.

Being Black In Yemen

RNW Archive

This article is part of the RNW archive.  RNW is the former Radio Netherlands Worldwide or Wereldomroep, which was found as the Dutch international public broadcaster in 1947.  In 2011, the Dutch government decided to cut funding and shift RNW from ministry of Education, Culture and Science to the ministry of Foreign Affairs.  More information about RNW Media’s current activities can be found at https://www.rnw.org/about-rnw-media.

Many Africans from war-torn Somalia and Ethiopia seek their luck across the sea in Yemen.  Luck can be hard to find – but racism is not

By Judith Spiegel in Sana’a A black man on the bus.  They pat him on the head and shove him in the back.  They make jokes about his pronunciation of the name of the market he is going to.  The black man doesn’t.  He sits still and waits for the humiliation to pass. Probably he has experienced it many times before.  The Somali man who is beaten at the bus station because he allegedly stole somethin doesn’t fight back.  he cries.  Passers-by look the other way.  A few minutes later, a woman is ignored by the bus driver because he doesn’t wANT aFRICANS IN HIS BUS.  She patiently waits for a next bus.

Everyday racism

A day or two using public transport in the Yemeni capital Sana’a makes it clear just how widespread anti-African  feeling is.  There are no official numbers, but Yemen is home to hundreds of thousands of African immigrants (refugees and non-refugees).  Most of them come from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and racism is an everyday part of their life. 

“Its is a cultural thing in this region to treat non-citizens who are poor like this.  People think they bring, although this has never been proven”, says Fouad Alalwi, head of the Sawa’a Orgganization for Anti-Discrimination. “They see them as a burden on society, and for Ethiopians there is also an historical explanation.”

The history Alawi is  referring to dates back to the early Christian era when Yemen was invaded a number of times by Ethiopians who tried to convert the Yemenis.  Eventually, Yemen was one of the first countries to adopt Islam, and the Ethiopians were kicked out. Those who remained behind were enslaved and, explains Alawi, “until today, some Yemenis still believe they can use Ethiopians as slaves”. 

Foreigners to blame

“Almost every day people call me a dag. They ask what I’m doing here, and say we’ve changed their country”, says Tiggist Addisi. She is Ethiopian and has been living in Yemen for 18 years working long hours as a cleaner. After all these years she has not a single Yemeni friend, and she sends her daughter to an Ethiopian school. “They say that women now go out, smoke shisha   (waterpipe, ed) and war pants because of us”, Addisi says, making Ethiopian coffee in her small room in the basement of an apartment building in Sana’a.  On Fridays, she dresses up in white to go to her orthodox church.  “I hurry through the streets.  When people ask me where I am going, I say I am going to school.”

Mixed welcome

Oddly enough, Yemen is actually more open to foreigners than other, much richer countries in the region.  Churches are accepted as long as they are not publicly visible, and Yemen has a generous attitude towards refugees. Somalis refugees are automatically given asylum status.  But once in the country, the streets turn out not to be so welcoming. Racism is not often discussed in yemen.  Organisations like Sawa’s mainly deal with discrimination against minorities by the government but don’t tackle everyday racism on the streets.  The country faces a huge array of problems, and some of these – such as endemic unemployment – feed resentment against immigrants.  it’s easy for people to blame foreigners for taking jobs even when this is not the case.

“What you see in the street are reactions from people who are frustrated they do not have jobs or a good house”, says Alawi.  But he wants to emphasise that it is only a small percentage of Yemenis who behave like this.  “Educated people wouldn’t do this.  it is against Islam, which teaches us that all are equal, black or white.”

In her basement room Al Addisi shrugs; her experience is different.  “They always ask me why I am a Christian.” She is used to it, sticks to her own people and prays in front of an enormous poster of  Jesus Christ every day.  And, she admits, “In Ethiopia we do not treat the Arabs very well either.”

Al-Akhdam

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Al-Akhdam, Akhdam or Achdam (singular Khadem, meaning “servant” in Arabic; also called Al-Muhamasheen, “the marginalized ones”) is a minority social group in Yemen. Although the Akhdams are Arabic-speaking Muslims just like any other Yemeni, they are considered to be at the very bottom of the supposedly abolished caste ladder, are socially segregated, and are mostly confined to menial jobs in the country’s major cities.According to official estimates, the Akhdam numbered between 500,000 to 3,500,000 individuals.

generally shorter and darker than typical Yemenis, and can also be distinguished from the majority by its members’ Veddoid-like physical features and stature. The exact origins of Al-Akhdam are uncertain. One popular belief holds that they are descendants of Nilotic Sudanese people who accompanied the Abyssinian army during the latter’s occupation of Yemen in the pre-Islamic period. Once the Abyssinian troops were finally expelled at the start of the Muslim era, some of the Sudanese migrants are said to have remained behind, giving birth to the Akhdam people. This belief, however, was denied and described as a myth by Hamud al-Awdi, a professor of sociology at Sanaa University.

Another theory maintains that they are of Veddoid origin. The Akhdam are Genetic studies by Lehmann (1954) and Tobias (1974) further noted the sickle cell trait at high frequencies amongst the Akhdam. According to Lehmann, this suggests a biological link with the Veddoids of South Asia, who also have a high incidence of the trait.

Anthropologists such as Vom Bruck postulate that Yemen’s history and social hierarchy that developed under various regimes, including the Zaydi Imamate, had created a hereditary caste-like society. Till today, the Al-Akhdam people exists at the very bottom of Yemeni social strata. The Al-Akhdam community suffers from extreme discrimination, persecution, and social exclusion from the mainstream Yemeni society.  The contempt for the Akhdam people is expressed by a traditional Yemeni proverb:

“Clean your plate if it is touched by a dog, but break it if it’s touched by a Khadem.″

Though their social conditions have improved somewhat in modern times, Al-Akhdam are still stereotyped by mainstream Yemeni society; they have been called lowly, dirty and immoral. Intermarriages between the conventional Yemeni society with the Akhdam community are taboo and virtually prohibited, as the Al-Akhdam are deemed as untouchables. Men who do marry into the community risk banishment by their families.

Many have settled in Sana’a hub, and claim that participation in the 2011 uprising, among other factors, has given them a level of acknowledgment—or at least indifference—by the country’s lighter-skinned citizens.

Yemen’s society has traditionally been divided into highly endogamous social groups that are mainly based on genealogical factors. Until today, the group of sayyids (who claim lineage to the Prophet), judges, sheikhs, and even the “lower” social groups like butchers and ironworkers, continue to play an important role in Yemeni society. Similarly, Yemen’s labor market remains highly stratified and linked to geographic criteria. Intellectuals are believed to come from Taiz, those who work with hand-carts come from Raima governorate, whereas painters are known to be from Al-Baida governorate.

The term “akhdam” began to be used almost 1,000 years ago to describe dark-skinned people in Yemen. “However, their ethnic origins are still unclear and there is no indisputable evidence which proves their lineage,” says Mohammed Saeed Aref, a sociology professor at Aden University.   

When the term “akhdam” is used by Yemenis, it is not directed towards everyone darker than a certain shade. It is specifically directed at the Muhamasheen. A tourist or migrant with a similar skin color is not likely to be addressed by the derogatory name.  However, the lines are blurred, as it is often impossible to tell whether a black person is a visiting foreigner or businessman, a refugee, or a citizen.

Appearance and occupation tend to be important determinants of whether a black Yemeni is seen as a “khadim,” the singular of “akhdam,” or not. A black Yemeni with a “respectable” job—i.e. high paying—who is well-dressed will often be treated much better.

While “akhdam” refers specifically to black Yemeni citizens. Another racist term, “zinji,” is commonly used by Yemenis when referring to black people, whether tourist, migrant or refugee. One of the narratives explaining the term’s origin can be traced back to the region’s slave trade between the seventh and the ninth century. At that time, the argument was, slaves were brought to the Arab world from slave markets on the island of Zanzibar (Zinjibar in Arabic), hence the name “zinji.”

Human Rights Investigations

evidence-based, independent and rigorous investigation of human rights abuses

Ethnic cleansing, genocide and the Tawergha

Human Rights Investigations has been following the situation of the Tawergha closely and here we draw the information together and find, based on the reports of witnesses, journalists and human rights workers, the situation of the Tawergha is not just one of ethnic cleansing but, according to the legal definition, genocide.

HRI has grave concerns, not only for dark-skinned people in Libya generally, but also for pro-Gaddafi tribes including the Gaddafi and al-Meshashyas. We also have particular concern for the Tuareg of southern Libya who are being accused of being ‘mercenaries’ and under attack from NATO and rebel forces. But the greatest concern is perhaps for the Tawergha.

The Genocide Convention

Article 2 of the United Nations issued Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states:

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Article 4 states:

Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

The Tawergha have been ethnically cleansed

The main town of the Tawergha region, Tawergha itself (aka Tawergha, Tawergha. Arabic: تاورغاء), was a town of an estimated 31,250 people (United Nations Environment Program, 2005).  It has been emptied of its entire population: its people having either been killed or fled, amidst reports the remaining population in the area are being picked off as they try to find water and food. The town of Tawergha lies about 30-40 miles south of Misrata/Misurata,  along the western coast of the Gulf of Sirte. Areas of Misrata occupied by the Tawergha have also been ethnically cleansed, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Amnesty has  reported on the allegations ‘that members of the Tawargha tribe’ have fled their homes and:

Tens of thousands are now living in different parts of Libya – unable to return home as relations between the people of Misrata and Tawergha remain particularly tense. Residents of makeshift camps near Tripoli, where displaced people from Tawergha are sheltering, told Amnesty they would not go outside for fear of arrest. They told how relatives and others from the Tawergha tribe had been arrested from checkpoints and even hospitals in Tripoli.

On 29 August, Amnesty delegates saw a Tawergha patient at the Tripoli Central Hospital being taken by three men, one of them armed, for “questioning in Misrata”. The men had no arrest warrant. Amnesty was also told that at least two other Tawergha men had vanished after being taken for questioning from Tripoli hospitals…

Even in the camps, the Tawergha are not safe. Towards the end of last month, a group of armed men drove into the camp and arrested about 14 men. Amnesty spoke to some of their relatives; none knew of their fate or whereabouts. Another woman at the camp said her husband has been missing since he left the camp to run an errand in central Tripoli, about a week ago. She fears he might be have been detained.

Tawergha who fled to refugee camps have been chased down by rebel groups, taken away and disappeared. There are credible reports of Tawerghans being raped, disappearing and being killed. Tawerghans have even been witnessed being dragged out of hospitals in Tripoli to unknown fates.

Human Rights Investigation

September 26, 2011

The early genocidal threats to Tawergha

In a June 21 article in the Wall Street Journal, Sam Dagher described Tawergha as a  town inhabited mostly by black Libyans, a legacy of its 19th-century origins as a transit town in the slave trade. He quoted one of the rebel commanders from the rebel Misrata brigade:

Ibrahim al-Halbous, a rebel commander leading the fight near Tawergha, says all remaining residents should leave once if his fighters capture the town.  “They should pack up,” Mr. Halbous said. “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.”

Other rebel leaders are reported as: “calling for drastic measures like banning Tawergha natives from ever working, living or sending their children to schools in Misrata.”

In addition, according to the article, as a result of the battle for Misrata:

nearly four-fifths of residents of Misrata Gohoushi neighborhood were Tawergha natives. Now they are gone or in hiding, fearing revenge attacks by Misratans, amid reports of bounties for their capture.

The demonization of the Tawergha

An important part of any genocide is the demonisation and dehumanisation of the victims and this continues to be the case for the Tawergha. As part of the information war NATO and the rebels have described all loyalist black fighters, guest workers from sub-Saharan Africa and even black skinned inhabitants of Libya as ‘mercenaries’ [Arabic:  مرتزقة Romanisation:mertezqhor ‘murtazaka‘].

The Tawerghans have been accused of mass rape, of being collectively responsible for the battle of Misrata and are invariably described in racist terms. As Sam Dagher reported:

Some of the hatred of Tawergha has racist overtones that were mostly latent before the current conflict. On the road between Misrata and Tawergha, rebel slogans like “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin” have supplanted pro-Gadhafi scrawl.

It is worth noting that this demonisation of black people has led to widespread atrocities including lynchings and beheadings in which the highest echelons of the National Transitional Council have been complicit.

Tawergha is captured by the rebels

As we reported at the time, the town of Tawergha was taken by the rebels on 13 August in an assault which was closely coordinated with NATO and featured the use of aerial bombing and of heavy weaponry against the town. A report of the fall by Andrew Simmons for Al Jazeera, unfortunately lacking context, shows at least one of the large residential blocks in Tawergha alight, prisoners packed inside a freight container (who the rebels didn’t want filmed), an injured man in civilian clothes and the rebel fighters evicting an Egyptian woman who has lost her 9 children under 12 who ran away during the attack from her home.

At this stage the last remaining civilians and defenders of the town were reportedly surrounded.

The attack on Tawergha was also reported by Orla Guerin of the BBC who also, disgracefully, failed to give the ethnic cleansing context despite actually interviewing Ibrahim al-Halbous, the very commander who had earlier threatened to wipe the town off the map.

NATO air support for the assault on Tawergha

The NATO bombing in support of the attack is recorded in the NATO press releases from the time:

10 August: In the vicinity of Tawergha: 3 Command and Control Nodes, 2 Military Storage Facilities.

12 August: In the vicinity of Misrata: 1 Military Facility, 1 Ammo Storage Facility.

13 August: In the vicinity of Misrata: 4 Anti-Aircraft Guns.

13 August: In the vicinity of Tawarah: 2 Military Vehicles, 1 Anti-Aircraft Guns.

The actual assault was from 10-13 August so we can see NATO played an important role in the ethnic cleansing of this town, an ethnic cleansing of which they had been forewarned and in which they decided, nonetheless, to participate.

Reports indicate the rebels were ordered by NATO to paint their vehicles red and yellow just prior to the assault.

The ethnic cleansing of Tawergha

It is highly likely many black refugees from Misrata fled to the town of Tawergha. Many of them and the original residents may have moved on prior to the actual assault, especially as the Misrata brigades were firing Grad rockets at the town. It also seems likely some of the fighters may have escaped to Sabha, Sirte or Bani Walid, where they are currently making a last stand, sure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to survive capture.

However, a report by David Enders, reporting from an empty Tawergha, indicates ethnic cleansing occurred after the rebels took full control:

According to Tawergha residents, rebel soldiers from Misrata forced them from their homes on Aug. 15 when they took control of the town. (Our emphasis)

This would have been 2 days after the fall of the town and after Orla Guerin and Andrew Simmons had left. The fate of the prisoners loaded into the shipping containers, as well as the population as a whole remains unknown.

Following the trail of the last of the Tawerghans

To his great credit David Enders follows up on the story of the Tawerghans, (17th September) trying to trace their current location:

The residents were then apparently driven out of a pair of refugee camps in Tripoli over this past weekend.

“The Misrata people are still looking for black people,” said Hassan, a Tawergha resident who’s now sheltering in a third camp in Janzour, six miles east of Tripoli. “One of the men who came to this camp told me my brother was killed yesterday by the revolutionaries.”

The evidence that the rebels’ pursuit of the Tawerghis did not end with the collapse of the Gadhafi regime is visible, both in the emptiness of this village and that of the camps to which the residents fled.

At one, in a Turkish-owned industrial complex in the Salah al Deen neighborhood of southern Tripoli, a man looting metal from the complex simply said that the Tawerghis had “gone to Niger,” the country that borders Libya on the south where some Gadhafi  supporters, including the deposed dictator’s son Saadi, have fled.

It is worth noting that to get to Niger, any refugees would have had to make an extremely hazardous journey to Sabha first. From there it would have been a further week’s journey by bus into Niger, across the Sahara: another very dangerous journey which it is highly unlikely any of the refugees would have even attempted let alone survived.

David Enders report continues:

Lafy Mohammed, whose house is across the road from the complex, said that on Saturday a group of revolutionary militiamen from Misrata, 120 miles east of Tripoli, had come to the camp and evict its tenants.

“They arrested about 25 of the men,” Mohammed said. “They were shooting in the air and hitting them with their rifle butts.”

“They took the women, old men and children out in trucks,” he said.

Mohammed said that it was not the first time the revolutionaries from Misrata had come after the people in the camp.

“A week ago they were here, but (the people in the neighborhood) begged them to leave them alone,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed said some of the Tawerghis may have been taken to another nearby camp, in a Brazilian-owned industrial complex. On Tuesday, that camp was empty as well, with the gate locked.

Reached by phone at the camp in Janzour, Hassan, who did not want his last name used, said he had escaped from the Brazilian company camp on Saturday, when it, too, was raided. He said about 1,000 Tawerghis were now at the Janzour camp.

“They arrested 35 men, but they let me go because I was with my family,” Hassan said. He blamed a brigade of fighters from Misrata.

In Tawergha, the rebel commander said his men had orders not to allow any of the residents back in. He also said that unexploded ordnance remained in the area, though none was readily apparent.

Most homes and buildings in the area appeared to have been damaged in the fighting, and a half-dozen appeared to have been ransacked. The main road into the village was blocked with earthen berms. Signs marking the way to the village appeared to have been destroyed.

On the only sign remaining “Tawergha” had been painted over with the words “New Misrata.”

On one wall in Tawergha, graffiti referred to the town’s residents as “abeed,” a slur for blacks.

Prophet Muhammad, the Arabs and the Many Shades of Blackness

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD

Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Minhaji al-Asyuti (d. 1475) in his Jawahir al-’uqud wa-mu’in al-qudat wal-muwaaqqi in wal-shuhid (II:574), whis a two volume composition of principles and models to be followed by judges, notaries and witnesses in drafting legal decisions, has a section on human complexions in which he reports about the many shades of blackness (and whiteness) and their technical legal descriptions:

“If a person’s complexion is intensely black (shadid al-sawad), he is described as halik.  If his/her blackness has a red hue, he/she is daghman.  If his complexion is lighter than that, he is asham.  If the blackness has a yellow hue, he is ashum.  If his complexion in dark (kudra), it is described as arbad.  If the complexion is lighter than that (i.e. arbad), it is abyad.  If there is less of a yellow hue and the complexion inclines toward black (al-sawad), it is adam.  If it is lighter than arbad and darker than adam, it is shadid al-udma.  If it is lighter than adam, it is shadid al-sumra (‘intensely dark brown”).  If lighter than that, it is asmar (dark brown).”

In Classical Arabic Tradition several shades and hues of blackness, several shades of brownness, and several shades of whiteness were distinguished.  There are very black complexions with red hues (e.g. daghman) and very black complexions with yellow hues (e.g. asham).  Both of these complexion-types exist in Africa today, as elsewhere.  The most extreme degree of blackness is halik, ‘pitch-black’.  The last stage of blackness is asmar, which is actually a brown.

The question is thus not whether or not the ancient Arabs, and thus the Arab Prophet, were black or not.  They clearly self-identified as black.  The question is: which shade of black were they?

The Arabs generally self-identified as akhdar, adam, and asmar which range from very dark brown to normal brown (which is a much darker color than tan).  They tended to disparage and distance themselves from extreme pitch-blackness like halik and attributed this to certain African groups.

Regarding the prophet Muhammad, Al-Tirmidhi, in his Jami’ al-Sahih (VI:69 no. 1754), reports on the the authority of the famous Companion of the Prophet, Anas b. Malik:

“The Messenger of Allah was of medium stature, neither tall nor short, (with) a beautiful, dark brown-complexioned body (hasan al-jism asmar al-lawn).  His hair was neither curly nor completely straight and when he walked he leant forward.”

Al-Tirmidhi reports in his al-Sham’il al-Muhammadiyyah (#1), also on the authority of Anas b. Malik:

“The Messenger of Allah (s) was neither tall, such that he would stand out, nor was he short.  He was not albino-white (al-abyad al-am haq), nor was he deep dark brown (adam).  His hair was neither very curly nor completely straight.  Allah commissioned him towards the end of his fortieth year.  he remained in Mecca for ten years and in Medina for ten years.  Allah caused him to pass away at the turn of his sixtieth year and there was not found on his head and beard (as much as) twenty white hairs.”

This report does not stand in contradiction to the other reports according to which the Prophet was dark brown-skinned, because asmar is not adam.  According to classifications of the Arabic linguists such as al-Tha’labi, adam is a more excessive blackness than asmar.  What is therefore denied is that Muhammad was one of the more excessively black Arabs, like the Banu Sulaym maybe.

Hālik African

Ādam Arab

An Asmar Arab (right) as depicted in Michel Ocelot’s animated feature film Azur & Asmar, telling the story of an Arab boy named Asmar, representing the Arab World, and a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy named Azur, representing the West. Posted by Black Arabia

How Did the Black Arabs Become White?

Lucien Herault, writing about the white slave-trade into North Africa in the 17th century, observes: In the first half of the seventeenth century, the number of (white) captives held itself around a fluctuating population figure of around 20,000, that, joined to the 20,000 renegades (i.e. European converts to Islam) and to the numerous contingents of Albanians and Bulgarians serving in the militia, made of Algiers a white city, approaching closer (in terms of ) blood and of race to various European ports on the other bank of the Mediterranean) than to all the other Moorish or Turkish cities. This is no doubt the significance of the Prophet’s words:

Zayd b. Aslam related that the Prophet (s) saw a vision and told his companions about it.  He said:  “I saw a group of black sheep and a group of white sheep then mixed with them (until the white sheep became so numerous that the black sheep could no longer be seen in the herd of sheep).  I (or Abu Bakr with angelic approval) interpreted to mean that ( the black sheep are the Arabs.  They will accept Islam and become many.  As for the white sheep, are the non-Arabs (i.e. Persians, Turks, Byzantines, ect.) They will enter Islam and then share with you your wealth and your genealogy (and become so numerous that the Arabs will not be noticed amongst them.)”  

Just to be clear, the Black Arab shown above is a Mahra Arab.  The Mahra are indigenous Arabs of southern Arabia who are believed to be the living remnant of the Banu Ad Arabians who likely built the fabled but recently discovered Imran civilization in south-east Arabia some five thousand years ago.  

The family of King Abdullah, of Saudi Arabia, is from Banu Murad, from Anaz b. Wa’il, which in pre-Islamic and early Islamic days was a tribe of black-skinned like the Mahra.

The indigenous peoples of Arabia, including the Arabs, are African peoples.  The Encyclopedia Britannica (9th Edition) correctly points out:”(Regarding) the origin of the Arab race… the first certain fact on which to base our investigations is the ancient and undoubted division of the Arab race into two branches, the ‘Arab’ or pure; and the ‘Mostareb’ or adscititious … A second fact is, that everything in pre-Islamic literature and record… concurs in representing the first settlement of the ‘pure’ Arabs as made on the extreme south-western point of the peninsular, near Aden, and then spreading northward and eastward… A  third is the Himyar, or ‘dusky’… a circumstance pointing, like the former, to African origin… A fourth is the Himyaritic language… (The preserved words) are African in character, often in identity.  Indeed, the dialect commonly used along the south-eastern coast hardly differs from that used by the (Somali) Africans on the opposite shore… Fiftly, it is remarkabke that where the grammer of the Arabic, now spoken by the ‘pure’ Arabs, differs from that of the north, it approaches to or coincides with the Abyssinian… Sixthly, the pre-Islamic institutions of Yemen and its allied provinces-its monarchies, courts, armies, and serfs-bear a marked resemblance to the historical  Africao-Egyptian type, even to modern Abyssinian.  Seventhly, the physical conformation of the pure-blooded Arab inhabitants of Yemen, Hadramaut, Oman, and the adjoining districts-the shape and size of head, the slenderness of the lower limbs, the comparative scantiness of hair, and other particulars-point in an African rather than an Asiatic direction.  Eightly, the general habits of the people,-given to sedentary rather than nomade occupations, fond of village life, of society, of dance and music; good cultivators of the soil,toerable traders, moderate artisans, but averse to pastoral pursuits-have much more in common with those of the inhabitants of the African than with those of the western Asiatic continent. Lastly, the extreme facility of marriage which exist in all classes of the southern Arabs with the African races; the fecundity of such unions; and the slightness or even absence of any caste feeling between the dusky ‘pure’ Arab and the still darker native of modern Africa… may be regarded as in the direction of a community of origin”

The Pure Arabs and the East Africans are indeed kith and kin.  Bertram Thomas, historian and former Prime Minister of Muscat and Oman, reported in his work ‘The Arabs’:

“The original inhabitants of Arabia… were not the familiar Arabs of our time but very much darker people.  A proto-negroid belt of mankind strected across the ancient world from Africa to Malaya.  This belt… (gave) rise to the Hamitic peoples of Africa, to the Dravidian peoples of India, and to an intermediate dark peopl inhabiting the Arabian peninsula.  In the course of time two big migrations of fair-skinned peoples came from the north… to break through and tranform the dark belt of man beyond India (and) to drive a wedge between India and Africa… The more virile invaders overcame the dark-skinned peoples, absorbing most of them, driving others southwards… The cultural conditions of the newcomers is unknown.  It is unlikely that they were more than wild hordes of adventurous hunters.”  

The Mahra Arabs, like the other northern and southern Black Arabs, are descendents of the aboriginal Africoid Arabians or Afrabians. they are not, as some would like to believe, descendents of “slaves and concubines.”

Wesley Muhammad, “Anyone who says that the Prophet is black should be killed”: The De-Arabization of Islam and the Transfiguration of Muhammad in Islamic Tradition.  http;//drwesleywilliams.com

The Secret Of Secrets by Hadrat Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani

Posted on December 23, 2015 Updated on December 23, 2015

“O my dear son! You must accustom yourself to solitude. You must be lonely, separate, attentive to your heart because of the fear of Allah.  You must acknowledge the generous favors of Allah (Exalted is He).  You must live your life in this world as if you were a stranger in exile, and then depart from it as you came into it, for you have no way of knowing what your tomorrow has in store for you at the Resurrection”  Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani  MAY GOD BE PLEASED WITH HIM

An interpretative translation by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak of Sirr al-Asrar by Hadrat ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (1077-1166AD), considered by many to be one of the greatest saints of Islam and the eponymous founder of the Qadiriyya order. This book, appearing in English for the first time, contains the very essence of Sufism, giving a Sufi explanation of how the outward practises of Islam – prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage – contain a wealth of inner dimension which must be discovered and enjoyed if external actions are to be performed in a manner pleasing to God. When this is achieved the soul finds true peace and the spiritual life becomes complete.

Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, born near the Caspian Sea, was the son of the great saint Fatima bint Abdullah al-Sawma’i. After a period of intense intellectual and mystical training he received the khirqa (robe of initiation) and was soon recognised as a saint and scholar, consulted, loved and revered by caliph and pauper alike. As one of the most venerated figures in Sufism, his burial place in Baghdad still attracts numerous visitors from many countries.

‘This work, which contains a biographical introduction to one of the author’s least-known works, represents a valuable contribution to the field … The translator’s introduction provides an insight into the various personal qualities and divine graces which are recognised in combination as a proof of sainthood … It is clearly and elegantly presented, accessible, and has the merit of combining metaphysical doctrine with devotional ethics as encapsulated in the life and work of one of the most endearingly popular Sufis of all time.’
Journal of Islamic Studies

‘A book of great importance to Sufism…Sheikh Tosun has done an admirable job in presenting not only a translation but a lucid interpretation of one of Jilani’s most important works.’ Gnosis.  http://www.its.org.uk/catalogue/the-secret-of-secrets-paperback/

Excerpt –

On the Vision of Allah: Arriving at the Level of Seeing the Manifestation of the Divine Essence

The vision of Allah is of two kinds: one is seeing the manifestation of Allah’s attribute of Perfect Beauty directly in the hereafter, and the other is seeing the manifestation of the divine attributes reflected upon the clear mirror of the pure heart, in this life, in this world. In such a case the vision appears as the manifestation of light emanating from the Perfect Beauty of Allah and is seen by the eye of the essence of the heart.

Allah describes the vision seen by the eye of the heart: The heart did not deny what it saw. (Sura Najm, 11)

On seeing the manifestation of the divine through an intermediary the Prophet says, ‘The faithful is the mirror of the faithful’. What is meant by the first ‘faithful’, the mirror in this phrase, is the pure heart of the believer, while the second ‘faithful’ Who sees His reflection in that mirror is Allah Most High. Whoever arrives at the level of seeing the manifestations of Allah’s attributes in the world will certainly see the Essence of Allah in the hereafter without shape or form.

The reality of this has been confirmed by many of the beloved and the lovers of Allah. Hadrat Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, said, ‘My heart saw my Lord by the light of my Lord’. And Hadrat Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, said, ‘I will not pray to Allah unless I see Him’. They both must have seen the manifestation of divine attributes. If someone sees sunlight coming through the windows and says, ‘I see the sun!’ he is telling the truth.

Allah gives the most beautiful example of the manifestation of His attributes.

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp, the lamp enclosed in glass, the glass as it were a brilliant star lit from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil is wellnigh luminous, though fire scarce touches it; light upon light! Allah doth guide whom He will to His light. (Sura Nur, 35)

The meaning of the niche is the faithful heart of the believer. The lamp enlightening the niche of the heart is the essence of the heart, while the light that it sheds is the divine secret, the sultansoul. The glass is transparent and does not keep the light within, but protects it and allows it to spread, which is why it is likened to a star. The source of the light is a divine tree. That tree is the state of unity reaching out with its branches and its roots, inculcating the principles of faith, communicating without any intermediary in the language of purity.

It is directly in this language of purity that our Master the Prophet received the Qur’anic revelations. In reality, the angel Gabriel brought the divine messages only after they had already been received—this for our benefit, so that we might hear in human language. This also made clear who were the hypocrites and non-believers by giving them the occasion to deny, as they would not believe in angels.

The proof that the Holy Qur’an was revealed directly to the Prophet is in the Qur’an itself.

And thou art surely made to receive the Qur’an from the AllWise, the AllKnowing. (Sura Naml, 6)

Since the Prophet received revelation before the angel Gabriel brought it to him, each time Gabriel delivered the holy verses, the Prophet found them in his heart and recited them before they were given. That is the reason for the verse:

And make not haste with the Qur’an before its revelation is made complete to thee … (Sura Ta Ha, 114)

This situation is made clear by the fact that when Gabriel accompanied the Prophet on the night of his ascension, he could not go any further than the seventh heaven, and saying, ‘If I take another step I will burn to ashes’, he left our Master to continue on his own.

Allah describes the blessed olive tree, the tree of unity, as being neither of the East nor of the West. In other words, it has neither a beginning nor an end, and the light of which it is the source has no rising or setting. It is eternal in the past and neverending in the future. Both Allah’s Essence and His attributes are ever-existent, because His attributes are light generated from His Essence. Both the manifestation of His Essence and the manifestation of His attributes are dependent on His Essence.

True worship can only be performed when the veils hiding the heart are lifted so that that eternal light shines upon it. It is only then that the heart is enlightened by the divine light. It is only then that the soul sees the truth through that celestial niche.

The purpose of the creation of this universe is to discover, to see that hidden treasure. Allah says through His Prophet, ‘I was a hidden treasure, I willed to be known. I created the creation so that I would be known.’ That is to say, that He would be known in this material world through His attributes manifested in His creation. But to see His very Essence is left to the hereafter. There, the vision of Allah will be direct, as He wills, and it will be the eye of the child of the heart that sees Him.

On that day some faces will beam (with joy and beauty), looking at their Lord. (Sura Qiyama, 223)

Our Master the Prophet says, ‘I have seen my Lord in the shape of a beautiful youth.’ Perhaps this is the manifestation of the child of the heart. The image is the mirror. It becomes a means, rendering visible that which is invisible. The truth of Allah Most High is exempt from and free of any kind of description or any kind of image or form. The image is the mirror, though what is seen is neither the mirror nor the one who is looking into the mirror. Ponder on that and try to understand, because that is the essence of the realm of secrets.

Yet all this is happening in this world of attributes. In the realm of the Essence all means disappear, burn into thin air. The ones in that realm of Essence themselves do not exist, but they feel the Essence and nothing else. How well the Prophet explains this when he says, ‘I knew my Lord by my Lord’. In His Light, by His Light! The truth of man is the secret of that light, as Allah says through His Prophet: ‘Man is My secret and I am his secret’.

The place of the Prophet Muhammad, whose light is the first of Allah’s creation, is described in his own words, ‘I am from Allah and the believers are from me’. And Allah, speaking through His Prophet, says: ‘I have created the light of Muhammad from the light of My own existence’. The meaning of Allah’s own existence is His divine Essence manifested in His attribute of the Most Compassionate. This He declares through His Prophet, saying: ‘My compassion far surpasses My punishment’. The beloved Messenger of Allah is the light of the Truth, for Allah says, We sent thee not but as a mercy to the whole creation. (Sura Anbiya’, 107) and

Indeed Our Messenger has come to you, making clear to you much of that which you concealed of the Book and passing over much. Indeed, there has come to you from Allah a light … (Sura Ma’ida, 15)

The importance of the beloved Prophet of Allah is made clear when Allah speaks to him and says: ‘But for you, I would not have created creation’.

 

Thomas Jefferson’s Qu’ran: Islam And Religious Freedom

Posted on October 3, 2015 Updated on October 5, 2015

The inscription on Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone, as he stipulated, reads  Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of american Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13 April 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). He was an ardent proponent of democracy and embraced the principles of republicanism and the rights of the individual.

A champion of the Age of Enlightenment, Jefferson was a polymath in the arts, sciences, and politics. He was a proven architect in the classical tradition, and designed his home Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, Virginia’s state capitol and other important buildings. He was keenly interested in science, invention, architecture, religion, and philosophy, and served as president of the American Philosophical Society. Besides English, he was well versed in Latin and Greek, proficient in French, Italian, and Spanish, and studied other languages and linguistic. He founded the University of Virginia after his presidency. Although not a strong orator, Jefferson was a skilled writer and corresponded with many influential people in America and Europe.

Jefferson’s religious and spiritual beliefs were a combination of various religious and theological precepts. Around 1764, Jefferson had lost faith in “orthodox” Christianity after he had tested the New Testament for the consistency of its teachings, and found it to be severely lacking. Jefferson later wrote that he found two strains within the Bible, one that was as “diamonds” of the “purest moral teaching”,and one that was as a “dunghill” of “priest-craft and roguery”. After leaving “Christian orthodoxy” behind, he continued to refer to himself as a “Christian,” though no longer as an “orthodox Christian”.

Jefferson praised the morality of Jesus and edited a compilation of his teachings, omitting the miracles and supernatural elements of the biblical account, titling it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.This book is now most popularly known as the Jefferson Bible. He claimed that Christianity possessed, “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Jefferson was firmly anticlerical saying that in “every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty … they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.”

Jefferson’s form of Christianity included a stern code of personal moral conduct and also drew inspiration from classical literature. While his new belief system retained some Christian principles it rejected many of the orthodox tenets of Christianity of his day and was especially hostile to the Catholic Church as he saw it operate in France. Jefferson advanced the idea of Separation of Church and State, believing that the government should not have an official religion while at the same time it should not prohibit any particular religious expression. He first expressed these thoughts in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut.

Throughout his life Jefferson was intensely interested in theology, biblical study, and morality. As a landowner he played a role in governing his local Episcopal Church; in terms of belief he subscribed to the moral philosophy of Jesus, but he did not subscribe to much of what he described as the “dung” of popular Christian theology. When he was home he attended the Episcopal church and raised his daughters in that faith. Over time, some have described Jefferson as a Deist; however, due to his belief in a God which is actively involved in the guidance of human history, the modern understanding of the word “Deism” may not entirely describe Jefferson’s system of beliefs.

In a private letter to Benjamin Rush in 1803 Jefferson explained some aspects of his own personal belief system regarding Christianity: “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence…” Jefferson noted both benevolence and contradictions in Christian doctrine.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was drafted in 1777 (however it was not first introduced into the Virginia General Assembly until 1779) by Thomas Jefferson in the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia.  On January 16, 1786, the Assembly enacted the statute into the state’s law. The statute disestablished the Church of England in Virginia and guaranteed freedom of religion to people of all religious faiths, including Catholics, Jews, Muslims as well as members of all Protestant denominations. 

The statute was a notable precursor of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Statute for Religious Freedom is one of only three accomplishments Jefferson instructed be put in his epitaph.

Text of the Statute:

“An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacities tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercion on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;

That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injurious of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;

That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;

That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;

And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.”

Jefferson’s political ideals were greatly influenced by some of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment; John Lock (1632-1704), Francis Bacon (1562-1626), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), whom he considered the three greatest men that ever lived.

The Age of Enlightenment or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason is an era from the 1620’s to the 1780’s in which cultural and intellectual forces in Western Europe emphasized reason, analysis, and individualism rather than traditional lines of authority. It was promoted by philosophies and local thinkers in urban coffee houses, salons, and Masonic lodges. It challenged the authority of institutions that were deeply rooted in society, especially the Roman Catholic church; there was much talk of ways to reform society with toleration, science and skepticism.

Jefferson was also influenced by the writings of Gibbon, hume, Robertson, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire.  But it was the writings of Voltaire that created an adverse opinion of Muhammad in Europe and by extension America.

It may not have been a coincident that the 3 million people strong anti-Islam, anti-terrorism protest in Paris was held on Boulevard Voltaire, named in honor of the French playwright and philosopher Voltaire. Some of the participants interviewed by BBC said Voltaire had a deep significance to them both in relation to the subject and to history. Voltaire found prophet Mohammed grotesque in character and conduct.

Mahomet (Play)

Mahomet (French: Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète, literally Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet) is a five-act tragedy written in 1736 by French playwright and philosopher Voltaire. It received its debut performance in Lille on 25 April 1741.

The play is a study of religious fanaticism and self-serving manipulation based on an episode in the traditional biography of Muhammad in which he orders the murder of his critics. Voltaire described the play as “written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect”.

The story of “Mahomet” unfolds during Muhammad’s post exile siege of Mecca in 630 AD, when the opposing forces are under a short term truce called to discuss the therms and course of the war.

In the first act the audience is introduced to a fictional leader of the Meccans, Zopir, an ardent and defiant advocate of free will and liberty who rejects Mahomet. Mahomet is presented through his conversations with his second in command Omar and with his opponent Zopir and with two of Zopir’s long lost children (Seid and Palmira) whom, unbeknownst to Zopir, Mahomet had abducted and enslaved in their infancy, fifteen years earlier.

The now young and beautiful captive Palmira has become the object of Mahomet’s desires and jealousy. Having observed a growing affection between Palmira and Seid, Mahomet devises a plan to steer Seid away from her heart by indoctrinating young Seid in religious fanaticism and sending him on a suicide attack to assassinate Zopir in Mecca, an event which he hopes will rid him of both Zopir and Seid and free Palmira’s affections for his own conquest. Mahomet invokes divine authority to justify his conduct.

Seid, still respectful of Zopir’s nobility of character, hesitates at first about carrying out his assignment, but eventually his fanatical loyalty to Mahomet overtakes him^[4] and he slays Zopir. Phanor arrives and reveals to Seid and Palmira to their disbelief that Zopir was their father. Omar arrives and deceptively orders Seid arrested for Zopir’s murder despite knowing that it was Mahomet who had ordered the assassination. Mahomet decides to cover up the whole event so as to not be seen as the deceitful impostor and tyrant that he is.

Having now uncovered Mahomet’s “vile” deception Palmira renounces Mahomet’s god and commits suicide rather than to fall into the clutches of Mahomet.

Analysis and Reception

The play is a direct assault on the moral character of Muhammad. Omar is a known historical figure who became second caliph; the characters of Seid and Palmira represent Muhammad’s adopted son Zayd ibn Harithah and his wife Zaynab bint Jahsh. The play’s plot contradicts the version of the respective Surah in the Qur’an.

Pierre Milza, posits that, it may have been “the intolerance of the Catholic Church and its crimes done on behalf of the Christ” that were targeted by the philosopher, Voltaire’s own statement about it in a letter in 1742 was quite vague: “I tried to show in it into what horrible excesses fanaticism, led by an impostor, can plunge weak minds.”

It is only in another letter dated from the same year that he explains that this plot is an implicit reference to Jacques Clement, the monk who assassinated Henri III in 1589.

However, it was considered that Islam wasn’t the only focus of the plot and that his aim when writing the text was to condemn “the intolerance of the Church and the crimes that have been committed in the name of the Christ”.

Napoleon during his captivity on St Helena criticized Voltaire’s Mahomet, and said Voltaire had made him merely an impostor and a tyrant, without representing him as a “great man”:

“Mahomet was the subject of deep criticism. ‘Voltaire,’ said the Emperor, ‘in the character and conduct of his hero, has departed both from nature and history. He has degraded Mahomet, by making him descend to the lowest intrigues. He has represented a great man, who changed the face of the world, acting like a scoundrel, worthy of the gallows. He has no less absurdly travestied the character of Omar, which he has drawn like that of a cut-throat in a melo-drama.'”

 Excerpt: Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an

The political aspects of Islam 

The first mention of the Shura in the Qur’an comes in the 2nd Sura of Qur’an 2:233 in the matter of the collective family decision regarding weaning the child from mother’s milk. This verse encourages that both parents decide by their mutual consultation about weaning their child.

The 42nd Sura of Qur’an is named as Shura. The 38th verse of that Sura suggests that shura is praiseworthy life style of a successful believer. It also suggests that people whose matter is being decided be consulted. It says: “Those who hearken to their Lord, and establish regular Prayer; who (conduct) their affairs by mutual consultation among themselves; who spend out of what We bestow on them for Sustenance” [are praised] The 159th verse of 3rd Sura orders Muhammad to consult with believers. The verse makes a direct reference to those (Muslims) who disobeyed Muhammad, indicating that ordinary, fallible Muslims should be consulted. It says: Thus it is due to mercy from God that you deal with them gently, and had you been rough, hard hearted, they would certainly have dispersed from around you; pardon them therefore and ask pardon for them, and take counsel with them in the affair; so when you have decided, then place your trust in God; surely God loves those who trust.

The first verse only deals with family matters. The second proposed a lifestyle of people who will enter heavens and is considered the most comprehensive verse on shura. The third verse advices on how mercy, forgiveness and mutual consultation can win over people.

Muhammad made all his decisions in consultation with his followers unless it was a matter in which God has ordained something. It was common among Muhammad’s companions to ask him if a certain advice was from God or from him. If it was from Muhammad, they felt free to give their opinion. Some times Muhammad changed his opinion on the advice of his followers like his decision to defend the city of Madinah by going out of the city in Uhad instead of from within the city.

Arguments over shura began with the debate over the ruler in the Islamic world. When Muhammad died in 632 CE, a tumultuous meeting at Saqifah selected Abu Bakr as his successor. This meeting did not include some of those with a strong interest in the matter—especially Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law; people who wanted Ali to be the caliph (ruler) became known as Shia ul-Ali (party of Ali) still consider Abu Bakr an illegitimate leader of the caliphate.

Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church: A World Heritage

Posted on June 20, 2015 Updated on July 9, 2015

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

On June 17, 2015, during a routine Bible study at the church, a white man about 21 years old, later identified as Dylan Roof,  purportedly said: ” I come to kill black people.” before opening fire at close range killing nine people including the pastor. .  In a manifesto posted on the now defunct (www.lastrhodesian.com), Roof purportedly claimed allegiance to ‘white supremacy’ and the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Roof, unemployed and living in largely African-American Eastover at the time of the terrorist attack, according to a childhood friend, went on a rant about the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the 2015 Baltimore protests that were sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody. He also often claimed that “blacks were taking over the world”. Roof reportedly told friends and neighbors of his plans to kill people, including a plot to attack the College of Charleston, but his claims were not taken seriously.

One image from his Facebook page showed him wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of two nations used as emblems among American white supremacist movements, those of Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa. Another online photo showed Roof sitting on the hood of his parents’ car with an ornamental license plate with a Confederate flag on it. According to his roommate, Roof expressed his support of racial segregation in the United States and had intended to start a civil war.

The following Sunday, June 21, 2015,  ‘Mother’ Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church opened its doors for service. All were welcome.

Charleston, S.C. – Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Southern United States and houses the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, Maryland. Its members met in secret in the years when Black churches were outlawed in the southern slave states before the civil war, and it contains a shrine to Denmark Vesey, a founding member, who helped plan a slave revolt in 1822.  Denmark Vesey’s planned revolt was so well designed that it was kept secret by his executioners for five years out of fear that it would excite slave rebellions throughout the South.

Known affectionately by its member as “Mother Emanuel”, Emanuel African Methodist Church was founded in 1816 by African American former members of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, who left the church because of a dispute over burial grounds.  In 1818 a church leader, Morris Brown, left a white church in protest, and more than four thousand Black members him to this new church.

State and city ordinances at that time limited worship services by black people to daylight hours, demanded that a majority of congregants in a given church be white, and prohibited black literacy.  In 1818. Charleston officials arrested 140 black church members and sentenced eight leaders to fines and lashes.  City officials again raided the church in 1820 and 1821.

In 1822, Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founders, was implicated in an alleged slave revolt plot.  Vesey and five other alleged organizers were executed on July 2 after a secret trial, and the original church was burned down by “white supremacist” before being rebuilt.  However, in 1834 all-black churches were outlawed in Charleston, and the congregation met in secret until the end of the civil war in 1865.

After the war ended, Bishop Daniel Payne installed Reverend Richard H. Cain as the pastor of the congregations that would become Emanuel A.M.E. and Morris Brown A.M.E. In 1872, after serving in the South Carolina Senate (1868-1872), Reverend Cain became a Republican Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives, continuing a tradition of religious leaders serving in political positions.

The congregation rebuilt the church between 1865 and 1872 asa wooden structure, under the lead of architect Robert Vesey, the son of the abolitionist and church co-founder Denmark Vesey.

After an earthquake demolished that building in 1886, President Grover Cleveland donated ten dollars to the church to aid its rebuilding efforts, noting that he was “very glad to contribute something for so worthy a cause.” However, being a Democrat, he also donated 20 dollars to the Confederate Home, a “haven for white widows.” The current building was constructed in 1891. The location of the post-Civil War churches is on the north side of Calhoun Street; blacks were not welcome on the south side of what was then known as Boundary Street when the church was built.