Topic: Muslim/ME regarding Africa and African people
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
For the role Muslim/Middle Easterners have played in Africa&Diaspora and on perception of Africans and Diasporans without mommy's biased hindrance.
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
al~Jahiz was part of 9th century Muslim intelligentsia. He wrote on all kinds of subject matter even a precursor to evolution.
When he collected the Boasts of the Zanj he recorded them in a colloquial Arabic. Many think al~Jahiz is speaking his mind but excerpts from some other writings seem to negate that.
The disrespect of black folk continues. And it continues to be captured on video.
A black woman in Oregon was allegedly called out of her name and assaulted by a food truck owner, all because she tried to pay for her food with change.
According to Willamette Week, Carlotta Washington says she was called a “nigger” by Islam El Masry after she tried to pay for her lunch with quarters (not pennies, mind you).
In a short video provided to the outlet by a bystander, El Masry can be seen telling Washington to “get the fuck out from here” and calling her a “stupid bitch” after throwing a Gatorade bottle at her for confronting him.
In a portion not captured on video, Washington says, El Masry sprayed her with Sriracha, which was confirmed to the news outlet by witness Rachel Good, who said that she found Washington’s shirt, face and shoulders covered with the Thai hot sauce.
"It was in my eyes and all on my skin. It was burning terribly,” Washington says.
After Washington asked that police be called, El Masry was booked into Multnomah County jail on charges of misdemeanor harassment and assault. Bail is set at $4,000.
Criticism was swift on social media, but failed to trigger a deeper discussion on racism in the Middle East.
The shows — one produced in Egypt and the other in Kuwait — also poked fun at Sudanese culture, making a mockery of the Sudanese Arabic dialect and portraying darker skinned people from Sudan as either poor or lazy.
In the Egyptian show called “Azmi We Ashgan,” which aired on the privately owned Al-Nahar channel, comedian Samir Ghanem and his daughter Amy Ghanem wore skin-darkening makeup and wigs with Rastafarian-looking braids.
Amy’s character is a half-Sudanese, half-Malawian housemaid who works for a rich, older Egyptian man who makes unwanted sexual advances toward her. Her father onscreen, played by her real-life father, arrives at the house in hopes he too can live there.
Her boss responds in anger, saying: “Did I get this house for fun or did I buy it to set free some slaves?”
In another sketch aired on state-run Kuwait TV, an ensemble of Kuwaiti actors appear in blackface, wearing traditional Sudanese turbans and jalabeyas, the long garment worn by men in Upper Egypt and Sudan.
In the show, called “Block Ghashmara,” Kuwaiti actor Dawood Hussein’s character lounges around on a daybed and constantly falls asleep. He repeatedly says “ayy” in a horse-like pitch, exaggerating the Sudanese dialect.
The backlash from Sudanese viewers was swift, prompting Hussein to issue an apology for what he said was a “misunderstanding with our brothers, loved ones and family in Sudan.”
“I have the bravery to apologize if this offended people and I don’t want anyone offended by me,” he said. In a nod to Sudan’s often overlooked contribution to Arab Gulf countries, he also noted that he was proud to have been taught by Sudanese teachers in Kuwaiti schools.
Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese political cartoonist living in Denmark who spoke out online against the skits, said it surprised him that so many actors, writers and producers on both shows didn’t stop to question the offensive nature of the scenes before they aired.
“They need to figure out a better way to represent black people,” he told The Associated Press. “It is laziness and a lack of talent that gets an actor to do that.”
When a viewer similarly criticized the Egyptian show “Azmi We Ashgan” on Twitter for relying on old racist tropes for laughs, writer Ahmed Mohy responded that the show did not mean to insult anyone, but he also defended the show’s take on humor.
“There’s no difference between someone who is black or white. It’s normal to also show a white person as a janitor or waiter, just as we can show a black person working in any job,” he wrote on Twitter.
Despite criticism on social media, the exchanges failed to produce a bigger society-wide discussion, analyst Hana Al-Kharmi wrote in an opinion piece for Al-Jazeera.
“There is almost no public debate about it within the wider Arab society. On the contrary, there is a popular outright denial that racist attitudes against black people exist,” she wrote.
After seeing the Kuwaiti show online, Sara Elhassan, a 33-year-old Sudanese-American writer based in Phoenix uploaded videos on Instagram criticizing the show and its depiction of Sudanese people.
“Everybody knows there is a discrimination issue in the Middle East when it comes to black people or darker skinned people,” she told the AP in a phone interview, “but people are still in denial a little bit about it.”
“We like to say: ‘Oh we are all Muslim. We can’t be racist,'” she added.
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Emergence of the Black Youth Movement against ... - Arab States PDF www.arabstates.undp.org › rbas › doc
Leaving the hypocritical pulpits with their accompanying pens and certificates that all agree that racism amongst us only resides in the imagination of those blacks of the Arab world that claim and imagine it, especially in the Western part of the Arab world.
We, the black people, have been silent about a right that is being taken away, a dignity that is being discarded and a citizenship that is being confiscated. We are children of this intractable situation in the Arab mind as well as in the Arab conscience. We are the product of this nation with its problems, features and emissions. This one nation is scattered in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and Palestine. We are some of the heirs of these Arabian camels, together with their burden of silence, satisfaction, acceptance, complacency and grovelling to the level of subservience. I can see blacks being content with silence as the ideal method to mutely express and protest against a shameful reality that concerns them. I can see both blacks and whites together being content with the same silence of blacks over the shameful reality and situations enveloping the country. This silence is from that silence. That’s why our surrender before our issue is from their surrender, and is our surrender altogether before the major and more important issue of the homeland.
[...]
complexities of blacks will never be more embarrassing than the reality of their turning away their faces from the reality that they try to obliterate in various ways. I will remain convinced that a part of Tunisian society is racist, cynical and hostile towards this colour, as long as blacks are in subservient silence that lies in the corner of hesitation and submissiveness.
the nineties and at the start of the third millennium the black artist Salah Misbah1 used to touch on the subject of discrimination when it came up on some television and radio programs but his remarks were not always taken seriously. The magazine “jeune Afrique” 2 in 2004 devoted two of its issues on the theme of racism in North Africa. Mrs. Effat Misbah was one of the educated immigrant women in France who spoke about her experience as a black citizen in her home country, which was not a pleasant experience. In February 2007, the writer was a subjected to a racist attack by a citizen on the train coming from the city of Gabes, south of Tunisian capital, Tunis. This attack was verbally violent and insulted her dignity as a citizen . The abuser was a young man, no older than thirty years old:
“Do not forget that you are a slave and do not think that you are in America, that you can get the same rights as me. Do not forget that you are a slave and I am free.”
On that same day I Mrs Misbah decided to lodge a complaint. At the police station the officer (station chief) tried by all means to find a diplomatic solution without documenting what happened as he wrote in the report, “So and so and so and so appeared before me as result of a misunderstanding that occurred and was resolved." Any person who accesses the archive in the future will not know the reason for the complaint was a racist attack.
1 Salah Misbah is a black Tunisian artist, singer and composer famous for his voice and his brilliant performances. However, despite his successes, he was subject to discrimination in the artistic field and deprived of many titles only because he is black. What distinguishes Salah Misbah from many other artists is the fact that he chose atypical music or as classified by society folklore music for which most black artists such as Alstonbali or Muzawwid are well-known. In fact, he competed with major artists in singing and composing other rhythms closer to the Tunisian non-African heritage. Salah Misbah is regarded as a politicized intellectual and artist. His presence in the front rows on 14 January 2014 in front of the Interior Ministry, his arrest on the night between the 14th and 15th of January in the corridors of the Interior Ministry, and his being subject to beatings and repression did not lift any finger of the press and did not make any ink flow. In fact there was no picture of him with the artists who demonstrated in front of the Interior Ministry on 14 January 2011, bearing in mind that he was raised on the shoulders of his friends, carrying slogans against the regime. (See the picture in the annexure.) 2 Jeune Afrique : « être noire en Tunisie », 2004, N
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Interesting but what are the black north Africans and Arabians supposed to do as they didn't create necessarily their living condition.
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
What?
Did human or divine being create their living conditions?
O I C, the black is just a limp noodle for all others to bend, a non-human tool, no active agency of its own.
Unlike every other color of humanity the black is helpless to apply self-determination. Only the Almighty White Near White Off-white human can determine black destiny.
Gimme a fn break. You believe in white supremacy and black inferiority?!?
Read the whole article. The very point is STRUGGLE not complacency and silent fatalism.
posted
I'm speaking from the perspective of a degraded status, assuming what I read is true that all of humanity practice some kind of slavery because I don't see how Africans subjected to enslavement like everybody else have a lingering sense of degradation when the Turks had a similar situation in terms of timeframe with Africans.
Posts: 1123 | From: New York | Registered: Feb 2016
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
Every other group esteem blacks as less than human
Are you negro/abd with a lingering sense of degradation?
Are you black and others have a lingering sense to degrade you?
And are you kidding? What's degrading about taking over a country as Mamelukes or a whole continental shoreline as Osmons?
What single nationality of blacks did that?
Turks are a stupid example. You are smart. Slavs are the ones to use in comparison. But ALL other peoples never invented and re-enforced a sacred religious principle to enslave them nor are Slavs their own race. Their Jew enslavers did call Slavs Canaanites. So heavily were Slavs into slave culture they sold their own children. Today, how many people worldwide even know that, or the etymology of Slav?
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Activism Race “Arab-Black” solidarity shouldn’t erase Afro-Arabs & the racism they face in the Arab world By The Race Card September 5, 2017
By Lama El-Hanan*, AFROPUNK contributor Note: This article involves a discussion of Afro-Arab identity and experiences. From the outset, I would like to make note of the fact that many Black people within the Arab World as it is defined by the Arab League do not identify as Arab, most notably Somalis and Djiboutians but also to a lesser degree Sudanese and Mauritanians. Many others do however. Whether or not a Black person identifies with Arabness is, in many ways, a very personal choice which depends on such things as their nationality and ethnic/tribal affiliation as well as their individual experiences and politics. To honour this, I ask that you add a mental “self-identified” next to every mention of Afro-Arab in this article as I have opted not to for the sake of style and flow.
Of late, Arab-American activists have made an effort to foster solidarity between Arab and Black communities, asserting that there are commonalities between the two groups’ struggles for civil rights. This effort has involved speaking out against the racism and marginalization that Black people face within the American white supremacist superstructure. It has also included addressing anti-blackness within the Arab-American community by—among other things—calling out the use of racist terms such as abeed (slaves) to refer to Black people. The phenomenon of Arab-Black solidarity has been celebrated in social justice circles as a laudable development which encourages allyship and coalition building across different communities of color. However, the push towards Arab-Black solidarity is not unproblematic. Further examination reveals it as not only hollow and performative in many respects, but also as reinforcing the anti-blackness amongst Arabs that it is purportedly meant to address. Arab-Black Solidarity Contributes to the Erasure of Afro-Arabs
Newsflash! Afro-Arabs exist. While many believe that there are no Black people in the Arab World or that all that are are Sudanese, there is in fact a sizeable minority of Black citizens in most Arab countries, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, U.A.E, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine in large part due to the Indian Ocean Slave Trade but also as a result of religious pilgrimages. This is not to mention people in North-African countries such as Egypt, Morocco, and Algeria who would be racialized as Black in the West as well as self-identified Arabs along the coast of East Africa in places like the Zanzibar Archipelago and coastal Kenya. By echoing the artificial separations between ‘Arab’ and ‘Black’ within Western conceptions of race, White and Brown Arabs cosign and reproduce constructions of Afro-Arabs as ‘racial paradoxes’ which erase our existence and alienate us from our language, cultures, and identities.
Arab-Black Solidarity allows Racism against Afro-Arabs to go Unaddressed
Although Arab-Black solidarity does explore anti-blackness in the Arab community, it is largely done so only in relation to African-Americans. Arab anti-blackness thus becomes configured as something that Arabs adopted as a means of accruing relative privilege within the context of a specifically American white supremacist system in which they are also marginalized. While anti-blackness in the Arab world and the diaspora was undoubtedly reinforced by Western colonialism and racism, it is not in any way its point of origin. Anti-blackness was a problem in the Arab world before Europe’s so-called “Age of Exploration” and is very much tied to the Indian Ocean Slave Trade during which anywhere between 10 and 28 million Africans were enslaved and shipped to different parts of MENA. By contributing to the obscuration of this socio-historical context, the paradigm of Arab-Black solidarity becomes a cop-out for White and Brown Arabs’ racism against Black people in the Arab world. The assertion is that real racism is something that is exclusive to White Westerners. This myth lessens the urgency of countering racism against Afro-Arabs and other Black populations in the MENA region.
It goes without saying that efforts to address anti-blackness in the Arab-American community are important and urgently needed. But when this comes at the expense of (a) erasing Afro-Arab identities and experiences, and (b) literally whitewashing racism and anti-blackness in the Arab World, it reveals itself as a hollow and performative form of solidarity-building. I’m glad you care about Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile and add #BlackLivesMatter and #BlackMuslimLivesMatter to your facebook posts. But if you do not also think critically about making Arab spaces inclusive of and safe(r) for Afro-Arabs, then you unequivocally cannot call yourself an ally to Black people. Being pro-Black means caring about all of us, and not only those of us whose identities fit neatly within your aesthetics of solidarity. Otherwise you are simply exploiting our struggle as Black people—sporting it as an ‘allyship badge’ that you can use to cultivate and project a righteous self image. So yeah…You can keep your Arab-Black solidarity. I can see straight through it. You don’t really care about us.
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Maybe I didn't ask the right questions and articulate them well enough but I get the history to some extent of anti blackness,its the perspective of ethnicity,race and the overall connection we have with the others folks of the world is where I'm coming from.looking pass ethnicity it seems the issue is white folks and mulatto types against "pure" black and brown folks plus the relative ignorance of people in their own country without being so cognizant of everybody else. Assuming pan Africanism was strong enough to "cure" the misperception of African people but these "others" continually held this wrong understanding then what are suppose to do? Again assuming we exaughsted every means to convince people, that's what I was trying to say,they didn't create the conditions for this negative feeling.
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I'm not speaking from a theoretical POV because I don't understand how Africans and these African like population have the same problems in relation to white folks and people derived from a black and white union,not saying the other melanated folks will be any better but the issue is ethnic and not so much a color problem.
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Mulatto Mulai Ismail declared every black in Morocco a slave, whether free, a citizen, a Haratin, a foreign national, or whatever. He then rounded them all up.
They became his personal slave corp and Morocco's civil service and engineers, only marrying in-group, developing a pidgin. After the sultan died these Bukhari chose and, if displeased, dethroned the succeeding sherifan sultans.
A nuance of pre-modern Islamic slavery. This instance reminiscent of Circassian and other Turk & Balkan, fiercely white, slave rulers of Egypt.
All of these enslaved foreign whites and both the foreign and the native blacks were Muslim co-religionists of their enslavers.
quote:Originally posted by Thereal: Maybe I didn't ask the right questions and articulate them well enough but I get the history to some extent of anti blackness,its the perspective of ethnicity,race and the overall connection we have with the others folks of the world is where I'm coming from.looking pass ethnicity it seems the issue is white folks and mulatto types against "pure" black and brown folks plus the relative ignorance of people in their own country without being so cognizant of everybody else. Assuming pan Africanism was strong enough to "cure" the misperception of African people but these "others" continually held this wrong understanding then what are suppose to do? Again assuming we exaughsted every means to convince people, that's what I was trying to say,they didn't create the conditions for this negative feeling.
Do they even see themselves as "mulatto?" Even if that's what they really are, it often doesn't seem like they see themselves as mixed but as white cause Europeans say they are...for now. Cause a white Jesus.
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I'm using mulatto as a discription because from what I can infer from videos and other stuff is a distinction between people who are dark skin and conjure up a stereotypical look when thinking of African people vs the mulatto type generally shown as being north African.
I did not mean what JA Rogers calls a fixed mulatto type referring to mixture going on in MENA since Mushabi met Kebbaran 13000 years ago.
In North Africa offspring from 'Black' and 'Arab-Berber' are humra. That is their mulatto, ruddy compared to most 'Blacks'.] Oprn a new thread for mulatto Keep this thread on anti-black racism by Arabs Muslims and Jews. Don't bury the actual topic.
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[Israeli Bedouin anti-black racism.
Keep in mind azrag bedouin cannot be reduced to so-called Afro Bedouin. Check Bedouin A&B genetics which defy three generations of slavery resulted in black bedouin explanations.]
Afro-Bedouins are not treated as equals within Rahat society. Racism towards them is institutionalised. One Afro-Bedouin gentleman spoke about how
everyone treats them as thieves and criminals.
Afro-Bedouin women can marry Arab Bedouin men, but
Arab Bedouin women are forbidden from marrying Afro-Bedouin men.
With so-called honour killings still rife, the penalty is not worth the risk.
An Afro-Bedouin girl of around seven years old was interviewed for the NGO’s documentary, cradling a chocolate marshmallow. When the interviewer asked her what she was eating she instinctively replied “a tea-cake”. After some thought she added “but
they all call it a niggerhead”.
The members of Rahat’s black community trace their ancestry back to Zanzibar Island, off the coast of modern day Tanzania. Its capital Stone Town (now the oldest area of Zanzibar City), was once a thriving centre of the spice and slave trades. According to drawings found documenting the arrival of Arab traders in Stone Town and interviews with the oldest community members of Rahat, this is not a centuries old tale. It is possible that some of the Afro-Bedouins were bought by traders little over three generations ago.
Hence, the repercussions are still raw. The word ‘slave’ is used freely as a derogatory term in the community for Afro-Bedouins. A man named Rashad Abid, who once fled Rahat after being refused permission to marry his Arab Bedouin girlfriend, told us his surname ‘Abid’ derives from the Arabic root “’abd” (عبد), meaning slave or servant. This is far more than an abstract historical narrative. For Rashad, it meant exile from his own community.
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