>Islam and African-Americans
>(from http://www.geocities.com/roots_n_rooted/islam.html)
>
>It almost goes without saying these
>days. Africentric people know better
>
>than to be affiliated with european
>culture or religion. (Sorry for
>my
>candor, but today we are going
>to keep it real.) Most
>people don't realize
>that for over 1,000 years Europeans
>have been trying to subjugate
>Africans.
>Whether it be with war or
>religion, they have been fighting
>to tie our
>minds and confuse us politically and
>spiritually. Am I wrong? Now,
>I
>know this is a generalization. But
>we know that it general,
>this is the
>essence of things. Most of us
>picked that up by studying
>history.
>
>But how did it come to
>pass that more and more
>black people are adopting
>Islam as their faith of choice.
>Why don't we ever talk
>about the role
>that Islam played in destroying Africa?


like what?


Perhaps it is because of
>all
>the positive things that the Nation
>of Islam has done in
>the black community
>that we are now giving the
>entire Islamic community a free
>ride.

okay. what positive things are the noi doing for the community?



For
>sure no other black organization has
>had the commitement to work
>with
>black people from all walks of
>life. (Note that I called
>the Nation of
>Islam an organization, and not a
>religious organization.)
>
>Malcolm X is of course a
>shining example of how the
>Nation worked in
>a positive manner to turn around
>the lives of many people.
>Malcolm X
>was a drug dealer, school drop
>out, pimp, thug and ex-convict
>that was
>transformed into a respectful, intelligent, informed
>voice for Africans
>in America. No denying it, that
>was the doing of the
>Nation of Islam.
>But I just can't get over
>the idea that black people
>are once again taking
>on the ways of people that
>have enslaved, colonized and basically
>disrespected
>us. It was Malcolm's own words
>that got me to thinking
>about whether
>Africans were just trading one master
>for another. "Just because you
>
>put kittens in an oven that
>does not make them biscuits."
>Within the
>context of To me, this meant
>that just because the Nation
>of Islam has
>done many good things in the
>black community this does not
>mean that
>Islam is good for black people.

Malcolm X died as El Hajj Malik El Shabbaz. hmmmm.


Maybe being in the Nation
>got a lot of
>people off the streets, working, organizing,
>but so does the Black
>church.
>So could the United Way or
>a job training program. It's
>does not make
>the United Way or the temp
>agency a source of Black
>culture. And it is
>high time that black people live
>within the confines of their
>own culture.
>* see bottom for further explanation.*
>
>
>Regardless of the good work that
>the Nation of Islam has
>done in the
>black community, it is hard to
>ignore the long history of
>violence and
>racism suffered at the hands of
>Arabs. Arabs were the first
>outside group
>to enslave Africans on a large
>scale. A book worth reading
>is "Two Thousand
>Seasons". It details all the violations
>of African human rights that
>
>took place at the hand of
>Arabs during the times of
>ancient slavery.


who is the author of this book?

Ayi Kwei Armah (1939-)



Ghanaian novelist and poet, known for his visionary symbolism, poetic energy, and extremely high moral integrity of his political vision. Armah's first three novels were hailed as modernistic prose, while his next two were praised for their Afrocentrism. Armah has lived and worked in the different cultural zones of Africa. Much of Armah's earlier work deals with the betrayed ideals of Ghanaian nationalism and Nkrumahist socialism.

...
"Ra's no self-created god
Ra is our self-creation
Ra is us
embracing space
traversing time. So
no my love
whatever we've run short of
this hasty day
its name cannot be
time."
(from 'Seed Time')
Ayi Kwei Armah was born in 1939 to Fante-speaking parents in the twin harbor city of Sekondi Takoradi, in western Ghana. On his father's side Armah was descended from a royal family in the Ga tribe. He attended the prestigious Achimota College. In 1959 he went on scholarship to the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. After graduating he entered Harvard University, receiving a degree in sociology. Armah then moved to Algeria and worked as a translator for the magazine Révolution Africaine. In 1964 Armah returned to Ghana, where he was a scriptwriter for Ghana Television and later taught English at the Navarongo School. Between the years 1967 and 1968 he was editor of Jeune Afrique magazine in Paris. In 1968-70 Armah studied at Columbia University, obtaining his M.F.A. in creative writing.

In the 1970s Armah worked as a teacher in East Africa, at the College of National Education, Chamg'omge, Tanzania, and at the National University of Lesotho. He has also lived in Dakar, Senegal from the 1980s and taught at Amherst, and University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Armah started his career as a writer in the 1960s. He published poems and short stories in the Ghanaian magazine Okyeame, and in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and New African. Armah's first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are not Yet Born, appeared in 1968. The allegorical story depicts the life of an anonymously railway office clerk, simply called "the man," and his daily struggle in the slums against poverty on one side and material greed on the other. He is pressured by his acquisitive family and fellow workers to accept the norms of society, bribery and corruption in order to guarantee his family a comfortable life. His virtues go largely unrewarded, his wife thinks him a fool, and his relatives prosper. At the end of the novel, the moral strength of "the man" is contrasted to a once-powerful politician who has been deposed in a military coup.

In Fragments (1971), the protagonist, Baako, is a "been-to", a man who has been to the United States and received his education there. Back in Ghana he is regarded with superstitious awe as a link to the Western life style. Baako's grandmother, Naana, is a blind-seer, who understands Baako and who stands in living contact with the ancestors. Under the strain of the unfilled expectations Baako finally breaks. As in his first novel, Armah contrasts the two worlds of materialism and moral values, corruption and dreams, two worlds of integrity and social pressure. Why Are We So Blest? (1972) was set largely in an American University, and focused on a student, Modin Dofu, who has dropped out of Harvard. Disillusioned Modin is torn between independence and Western values. He meets a Portugese black African named Solo, who has already suffered a mental breakdown, and a white American girl, Aimée Reitsch. Solo, the rejected writer, keeps a diary, which is the substance of the novel. Aimée's frigidity and devotion to the revolution leads finally to destruction, when Modin is killed in the desert by O.A.S. revolutionaries.

...
"they dream of substituting
another small tight group
for the one serving its bitter time
at the tip of
the overripe colonial abscess
on this sliver of our continental home
we'we been connected into calling
our state."
(from 'News')
Two Thousand Seasons (1973) is an epic, in which a pluralized communal voice speaks through the history of Africa, its wet and dry seasons, from a period of one thousand years. Characterization is concerned only with the representation of the group experience and collective states and feelings. Armah depicts Arab and European oppressors, "predators," "destroyers," and "zombies," and prophesies a new age. The novel is written in allegorical tone, and shifts from autobiographical and realistic details to philosophical pondering. The Healers (1979) mixed fact and fiction about the fall of the celebrated Ashante empire. The healers in question are traditional medicine practitioners who see fragmentation as the lethal disease of Africa. In the 1980s Armah remained silent as a novelist. In 1995 published novel Osiris Rising depicted a radical educational reform group, which reinstates ancient Egypt at the center of its curriculum.

Armah has often been regarded as belonging to the next generation of African writers after Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. At the same time he is said to "epitomize an era of intense despair." Especially Armah's later work have aroused strong reaction from many critics. Two Thousand Seasons has been labelled dull and verbose, although Wole Soyinka considered its vision secular and humane.

As an essayist Armah has dealt with the identity and predicament of Africa. His main concern is for the establishment of a pan-African agency that will rope all the diverse cultures and languages of the continent. Armah has called for the adoption of Kiswahili as the continental language.

For further reading: Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast by Ode Ogede (2000); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 1); Postcolonial African Writers, ed. by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); An African Focus - A Study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Narrative Africanization by Leif Lorentzon (1998); The Existential Fiction of Ayi Kwei Armah, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre by Tommie L. Jackson (1996); The Wisdom of the Ages by Yaa Oforiwaa, Akili Addae (1995); Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah by K. Damodar Rao (1993); Critical Perspective on Ayi Kwei Armah, ed. by Derek Wright (1992); Ayi Kwei Armah's Africa by Derek Wright (1989); The Novels of Ayi Kwei Armah by Robert Frase (1980)
Selected bibliography:

"African Socialism:Utopian or Scientifi", 1967 (Présense Africaine 64)
The Beautyful One Are Not Yet Born, 1968
"The Offal Kind", 1969 (short story)
Fragments, 1970 - suom. Pirstaleita
Why Are We So Blest?, 1972 - suom. Mistä meille tämä armo?
Two Thousand Seasons, 1973
The Healers, 1978
"The Caliban Complex", 1985 (West Africa, March 18 and 25)
"The Festival Syndrome", 1985 (West Africa, April 15)
"Dakar Hieroglyphics, 1986 (West Africa, May 19)
"Doctor Kamikaze", 1989 (short story)
Osiris Rising, 1995



>You could say they provided an
>example for Europeans to follow.
>Africans
>were used for labor and leisure
>throughout the Middle East. Under
>the
>guise of Allah-sanctioned Jihads (holy wars)
>many African nations were
>colonized and enslaved. So, are we
>to believe that God told
>the Arabs
>to enslave us and introduce Islam
>to Africa by way of
>the sword?

very ignorant question.

I doubt
>it. Just like God didn't tell
>the Christians to come to
>Africa and "save
>our souls." Now, I might be
>able to forgive this little
>lie except that
>both christians and muslims continue to
>say that God wants them
>to convert
>the world.

Allah does not want us to convert the world. Allah wants us to introduce Islam to people and also correct many false beliefs stemmed from media exposure and due to lack of education and investigation.


I find it hard
>to believe the God only
>talks to muslims and
>christians.



>There are still reports to this
>day of African slavery in
>the Middle
>East.


Where are these reports please?

Are not the perpetrators of
>these actions Muslims themselves? The
>
>same people that persecute their women
>and encourage chauvinist tendancies
>in their men?

okay. now that is trait up too much tv. whoever wrote this is straight-up ignorant. Who the hell is pursecuting me? Why the hell as a woman would i choose a way of life that persecutes me? Why in the hell would i after being abused by men in this society choose a way that abuses me? that is an insult to ALL women. this person calls muslim men chauvinists(basically)how is this? it sounds as if this person feels that the majority of women who make a consciouse decision to be muslim are sick in the head. but yet this assumtion is extremely sexist when the writer relys on popular belief and not accurate information. i tired of this bs. really tho. it seems like all people are concerned with are women! oh, i cant see her hair and her body! oh! that is oppression! NO. you are the one being oppressed by women who cover because they will not let you get a glance. our body is OUR business. these negros have problems with not being able to see you and judge you by your body instead of your intelligence and they hide behind it with an attack.lame.



This does not
>sound like the west Africa
>from which 90%
>of African-Americans can find their ancestry.
>Are we to give this
>culture
>a free ride because black people
>made something good out of
>it (in spite
>of it's origins?).

Does this person even KNOW Islams origins? obviously NOT.

So here we
>end up asking ourselves another
>question;
>how did black people again >up following the religion] of
>those that
>have enslaved them?

tell me how a religion enslaves me? please. how did it enslave me? you hide the fact that many NON-MUSLIM Africans participated in the slave trade. Get it right or pay the price.


>When you become a muslim exactly
>what do you really become
>anyway? It
>seems that a lot of Africans
>(Blacks) in America sought refuge
>in Islam
>during the conscious movement of the
>60s and 70s. These people
>were looking
>for a way to connect with
>their own culture. Most of
>these people were
>interested in eradicating all the european
>(white) influences in their
>lives and got involved in Islam
>because they mistakingly believed that
>
>Islam was of African origin.


Again
>in the 80s and early
>90s more African
>fled the ways of white america,
>which they considered racist and
>oppressive,
>in favor of Islam and what
>they knew to be a
>different way of doing things.

i guess all of these people are stupid. they are not intelligent and did not investigate the claims of oppression and enslavement. yeah, they stupid too. women and black just don't have brains. when you post and article like this you look like a desperate christian willing to misinterpret ANYTHING to get people to be "on your side". it shouldn't even be about THAT. it should be about encouraging investigation and education.


>These individuals now pray in arabic
>(if they are good muslims),
>they
>(women) wear their hair covered in
>a middle eastern manner

more problems with covered women......

, prescribe
>
>to the thought that Mecca is
>the Holy Land, and use
>traditional, and
>more stoic arabic culture to define
>ediquette and ethics within their
>
>households.

oh i am sorry, please walk into my house with your shoes on...
please, don't eat with your right hand(your hands contain digestive enzymes) eat with your left hand instead(ya know, the one you just wiped your butt with)? Hey! instead of washing the urine a fecal matter off of your body with water(as you would if it landed in your plate) just smear it with some paper or something(as you would do if it landed in your plate?).



While we can say that
>muslims are less than likely
>to be
>drinkers, drug abusers, or social thugs,
>can we say that they
>are expressing
>their pride in being black?

drinking - taught to us by europeans
drug abuse - taught and provided with care from europeans
social thuggery - taught to us and encouraged by europeans



Are
>they any closer to the
>freedom that they
>desired when they left christianity and
>white american values? Maybe
>they are living more clean lives,
>but they can not say
>that they arrived
>at their original objective of knowing
>themselves better.

Knowing myself better? i don't even know who my fathers father is. will i just go and "pick a culture"? no. will i just go and trust anybody from Africa? no. that is ignorant. so what are you trying to encourage people to do? i KNOW that i know more people who have been in Africa than you do. African-American muslims who lived there and had the chance to observe for themselves the things that go on there, in different countries, with different people. As serious as they are about thier heritage and culture, they would have surely denounced Islam if they found that Islam was for oppression and tyranny of non-arabs or arabs.


Or are they
>
>simply trading one master for another?
>


Sounds more like the writer of this OH-SO ignorant article has taken ignorance as his master.