God, Favoritism, and Terrorism: The Historical Roots And Legacy of Religious Terrorism—Part 2
Let’s get to work:
“’The American god’ is a ‘white racist god,’” said Dr. Anthea Butler, associate professor of Religious Studies and African/African American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
“God ain’t good all the time. In fact, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he’s carrying a gun stalking young black men,” Dr. Butler writes on her blog “Religion Dispatches”…”
She continues: “Is God the old white male racist looking down from white heaven…As a historian of American and African-America religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history.”
Dr. Butler concludes: “Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts. When the good Christians of America are some of its biggest racists, one has to consider our moral responsibility to call out those who are not for human flourishing, no matter what the ethnicity a person is. Where are you on that scale? I know where I am.”
“’Is God a White Racist?’” a titular question posed by Rev. Dr. William R. Jones.
“No race, ethnic or religious group has suffered as much over so long a span as blacks have and do still, at the hands of those who benefited…from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it,” writes Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica and author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.”
“Do you remember the days of slavery? And they beat us. And how they worked us so hard…And a big fat bull we usually pull it everywhere. We must pull it with shackles around our necks…History can recall, history can recall. History can recall the days of slavery. Oh slavery days! Oh slavery days,” sings Burning Spear on the track “Slavery Days.”
“Even when you walk into one of the slave castles…men are taken one way and the women the other…they (the white Christian slavers) mention that fifty feet away they’ll rape the women in the presence of the men who were fifty feet from them…they did that for two things. One, your (the enslaved women) men can’t help you, protect you, and two, that you’ve no power here…that power we’ve now taken and broken…As people confused and hoarded naked in these places…The first thing they did was to make them Christians, took away their names, their African names, strip them of African belief systems, religion, traditions and rituals…”
She continued: “So in the middle of Elmina Castle is a Church…right in the middle of the Slave Castle, middle of the Slave Fortress…It’s such a contradiction, such a hypocrisy that you can’t even believe it…Here is the other thing: The Governor…above the dungeon were the living quarters of the officers, the governor, his wife and children…There’s a staircase that the Governor had built from his bedroom to the female slave dungeon, had it built directly to the female slave dungeon so he could have access to the women. And if you had looked across the courtyard you’d see the church…” Portland State University Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary, author of “Post Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing,” speaks of White Christian brutality in Africa with host Gill Noble on “Like It Is.”
“The dispersal of Africans throughout the Arab world, by contrast, the fate of their cultures and their social status in the Arabized parts of the continent and the Middle East, remains as yet largely hidden chapter, yet that very history has assumed a tragic immediacy in parts of the black continent,” writes Wole Soyinka (“Of Africa”).
“The final day of hearings of the Truth Commission in South Africa into the role played by the churches during the Apartheid years has heard an apology from the Dutch Reformed Church which supported the system of racial segregation in the country…The Dutch Reformed Church was the most powerful religious institution in South Africa. Most of the country’s Presidents and Prime Ministers during the Apartheid years were members and it was only in 1992, two years after the release of Nelson Mandela, that the Church acknowledged Apartheid as a sin,” writes Richard Downes, a South African-based BBC correspondent.
“More Africans have been killed in genocidal wars in Sudan than any other country with the exception of Congo. In fact, Arabs who have pursued what is nothing less than a racist war of aggression continue to carry out a massive campaign against Africans in Sudan. However, the Sudanese example has some blunt lessons to teach about the nature of Arab racism…Already the Nubian territory with its ancient monuments, tombs, and temples has been flooded once when the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s; now it’s threatened again with new dam projects funded by the Chinese and new removal programs to make way for Arab immigration,” writes Dr. Asante in “Arab Racism Raises Its Head in Sudan.”
“Discussing the Jewish invention of the Hamitic Myth, Dr. Harold Blackman wrote: ‘There’s no denying that the Babylonian Talmud was the first to read a Negrophobic content into the Biblical story of Noah,’” writes Jackie Muhammad.
“Blackman’s explosive 1977 doctoral dissertation on the history of Black-Jewish relations literally shines a bright light on the mysterious origins of the genocidal belief and philosophy known as the Curse of Ham…The Talmudic glosses of the episode added the stigma of blackness to the fate of enslavement that Noah predicted for Ham’s progeny (“The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black—Jewish Relations Through 1900, Part 1, pages 79—81,” writes Demetric Muhammad.
“To be Arab is to stake out a certain political and cultural history although you may live on the African soil. The culture that identifies Arabs as Arabs originates in Arabia; African culture originates in Africa. To have Arabs in Africa who exercise their Arabness against the people whose land they occupy is to raise a new level of African international debate. Indeed Iran has recently given Sudan 300 million dollars to purchase Chinese weapons to prosecute its war against the Southern Sudan…” writes Dr. Asante in “Genocide in Sudan.”
Let’s go for today’s catch: Frederick Douglas gives his candid opinion on Christianity. He writes in his autobiography: “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, woman-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” Douglass’ “this land” refers to the slavocratic America of his day.
Further, his critique of Christianity isn’t markedly different from Jacobus Capitein’s; Capitein was an 18th Century Holland-educated Ghanaian multiple-degree holder. He, too, once complained about the hypocrisy of white Christian missionaries who refused to allow him to marry a “pagan” African woman but, who themselves, went about having “illegitimate” children by local “pagan” women everywhere. That said, let’s be quick to add that Douglass’ views about the colonial brutality of America was not, again, different from the “brutality” associated with the missionary Christianization of Africa. In other words, missionary Christianization prepared the African mind for easy colonization and the African body for smooth enslavement (See Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Something Torn and New”).
Let’s take a brief detour from the foregoing to consider some questionable remarks made by a few of our greatest scholars as far as Islam, Christianity, Arab and “white” Christian racism are concerned (See Abubakr Ben Ishmeal Salahuddin’s “Islam and the African People”). We quote Prof. Salahuddin verbatim here:
1). Cheikh Anta Diop (“Pre-colonial Black Africa, p. 163): “The primary reason for the success of Islam in Black Africa, with one exception, consequently stems from the fact that it was promulgated peacefully, at first by solitary Arabo-Berber travelers to certain Black Kings and notables, who then spread it about them to those under their jurisdiction…What is to be emphasized here is the peaceful nature of this conversion, regardless of the legend surrounding it.”
2). Edward Wilmot Blyden (“Christianity, Islam, and the Negro”): “Mohammedanism (Islam) found its Negro converts at home in a state of freedom and independence of the teachers who brought it to them. When it was offered to them they were at liberty to choose for themselves. The Arab missionaries, whom we have met in the interior, go about ‘purse or script,’ and disseminate their religion by quietly teaching the Qur’an…These converts, as a general thing, became Muslims from choice and conviction…Christianity, on the other hand, came to the Negro as a slave, or at least as a subject race in a foreign land. Along with Christian teaching, he and his children received lessons of their utter and permanent inferiority and sub-ordination to their instructors, to whom they stood in the relations of chattels…owing to the physical, mental, and social pressure under which the Africans received these influences of Christianity, their development was necessary partial and one-sided, cramped and abnormal.”
3). WEB Du Bois (“The World and Africa”): “In this whole story of the so-called ‘Arab slave trade’ the truth has been strangely twisted…Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne were intellectual centers, and at the University of Sankore gathered thousands of students of law, literature, grammar, geography, and surgery…From this Africa a new cultural impulse entered Europe and became the Renaissance…Modern slavery was created by Christians, it was continued by Christians, it was in some respects more barbarous than anything the world had yet seen, and its worst features were to be witnessed in countries that were most ostentatious in their parade of Christianity.”
4). J.A. Rogers (“Sex and Race”): “In short, the Negro was discriminated against in no phase of Mohammedan life oil (sic, “on”) the ground of color alone. Islam was the greatest and freest of all great melting pots.”
5). Waiter (sic, “Walter”) Rodney (“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”): “As in other parts of the world, literacy in Africa was connected with religion, so that in Islamic countries it was a Koranic education…Moslem education was particularly extensive at the primary level, and it was available at the secondary and university levels. In Egypt there was the Al-Azhar University, in Morocco the University of Fez, and in Mall (sic, “Mali”) the University of Timbuktu…all testimony to the standard of education achieved in Africa before the colonial intrusion.”
5). Ivan Van Sertima (“The Golden Age of the Moor”): “I think it should be pointed out, contrary to myths about the Moslems, that they did not force their religion down the throats of the Christians. John Jackson, in an informative chapter on the Moors, in his book ‘African Civilizations,’ shows us how Christian, Jew and Muslim were treated with equal respect during the dynasty of the Ummayads. We have been given no evidence that this changed dramatically in later Muslim dynasties.”
We have read these authors and more. But are these scholars from whose corpus of work Prof. Salahuddin liberally sampled and quoted from correct? Do they have the interpretive weight of history on their side? Not surprisingly, Drs. John Henrik Clarke, Molefi Kete Asante, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Ama Mazama, Chinwezu, Chancellor Williams, and several others disagree! And with good historical, historiographic, and epistemological reasons (we shall explore some of these in subsequent installments).
Finally, Prof. Salahuddin himself says in “Islam and the African People”: “The role of certain rogue Arabs in the slave trade has been inflated by Christians and Afrocentrists into the lie that ‘Islam enslaved African people.’ History shows that a very small clique of gangster Arabs became involved in the slave trade centuries after the Europeans had been involved in the slave trade for several centuries. The involvement of this (sic) these Arabs had its beginning and ending in the 19th century. The participation of the tiny minority was nothing compared to the massive and centuries-long participation played by the European Christians…So these rogues and immoral Arabs were nothing more than a fluke amongst the many pious Arabs who brought Islam south of the Sahara, and who treated the African people as equals, and whom the African people warmly welcomed as their brothers. These are the facts of history!”
In one sense, Harvard University’s Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Arabs, Christian Europe and America, and the ex-Ahmadi scholar Prof. Salahuddin put the moral-numerical preponderance of evidential burden of the enslavement of Africans on the shoulder of Africa and of Africans! “For it was Pope Nicholas V who, in his Papal Bull of 1454, told Afonso V, King of Portugal, that by papal or Apostolic authority, Portugal seek, capture, and subjugate Saracens, pagans and other non-believers and enemies of Christ. Africans were perceived as pagans and non-believers,” writes Prof. Salahuddin.
Folks, these are some of the facts, please, make your own decisions!
