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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
The Jihad of 1831–1832: The Misunderstood Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica

http://layncal.blogspot.com/2006/07/misunderstood-baptist-rebellion-in.html

Also, one of Cedric J. Robinson's masterpiece books, mentions, that there were many other rebellions in the new world; in the Caribbean, Brazil, lead by slaves from Africa--already in the first generations from Atlantic Slave trade.

From historic referances, we know that the queen of Spain, Isabella (? can't remember if Ferdinand, her husband, was also involved ) sent soldiers to suppress rebellions. Obviously, they had problems and faced strong resistance.
 

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Posted by Hotep2u (Member # 9820) on :
 
Greetings:

Muslim STAMPING, MUSLIM STAMPING, has to STOP

I guess we can say Bob Marley was a Muslim though he practiced Islam in secret.

America is a Muslim Country because Americans practice Islam in secret.

Eurabia will be the new name for Eurasia because Europeans practice Islam in secret.

CHINARABIA will be the name for China because all Chinese practice Islam in secret.

IndiaArabia because all Hindus practice Islam in secret.

ONE WORLD ARAB ORDER, ONE WORLD ARAB ORDER.

Arabs rule the world though the world just doesn't know it yet

Islam is NOT a true Religion because MUSLIMS tell TOO MANY LIES or un-truths.

Muslims have proven themselves to be the biggest LIARS.

Synopsis of the Jamaican Maroons!


Introduction

quote:

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The introduction of black slaves in the western world were the beginning of a new culture, more economic wealth and prosperity for whites and for blacks a life of poverty, enslavement and oppression. Thus, what would be the state of the economy in the Americas if Black people were not forcefully brought to this Continent from Africa?
The life and times of the Jamaican Maroons is a story of an indomitable foe, a people whose survival depends on their wit and tenacity, form a part of this terrible saga in the history of blacks in the New World and where we are today.

The struggle of the Maroons of Jamaica against the British colonial authorities, their subsequent collaboration with and betrayal by them. A story that took a circular voyage from West Africa to Jamaica, then to Canada and in the end returned to Africa. The Maroons of Jamaica originally came from West Africa. Some of them were IBO, a tribe from eastern Nigeria. On the 18th May, 1700 the slaver "Herietta Marie" sank off the coast of Florida on its way back to England. The ship voyage took it from England to Nigeria where the crew acquired slaves and then travel to Jamaica where over 200 slaves were sold in the market place.

Before 1655 the Spaniards occupied Jamaica. The island having been "discovered" by Columbus in 1494. At the time of discovery the inhabitants were the Arawak Indians who were enslaved by the Spaniards. But, by the time the British took possession of the island, spanish ill treatment; European deaseas; and the the introduction of cattle which destablized native agriculture cause all the Arawak Indians to be totally wiped out. So, the most reliable source of slave labour, even before the the Indian population was decimated was from Africa inline with the inexorable pattern of the enslavement process of the New World.

The Spanish and Portuguese explorers that occupied the island brought with them a cultural heritage of slavery as practiced in Iberia and the model of the institutional complex of the slave - run sugar plantation of Madeira. Columbus lived in Maderia for nearly 10 years. Also, in Columbus time the infamous Spanish Inquisition, authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478 was entrenched in the Old World. Pope Sixtus tried to establish harmony between the inquisitors and the ordinaries, but was unable to maintain control of the desires of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isablella. Sixtus agreed to recognize the independence of the Spanish Inquisition. This institution survived to the beginning of the 19th century, and was permanently suppressed by a decree on July 15, 1834. Columbus and his men came to the New World to plunder and seek riches for the return voyage to Spain.

However, those Spaniards left in Jamaica by Columbus were subsistence farmers, they farmed domestic produce and was more interested in finding Gold and other precious metal. Consequently, by the time of the English conquests "not one hundredth part of the plantable land was in cultivation." The Spanish explorers frequent forays into the hills for Gold and their hunting habits contributed to their slaves becoming skilled hunters and backwoodsmen. The slaves were used more for hunting wild cattle and hogs than farming and so became masters of woodcraft. They learned the trails through the woods and mountains, an invaluable skill to them later on as guerrilla fighters. "It was these black slaves of the Spaniards who took to the hills at the time of the British conquest that were to form the nucleus of the first Maroon society in Jamaica under the British."

Mavis Campbell argued whether these Spanish blacks who ran into the hills could be properly called runaway slaves. She said that since the definition of slaves as property, then the Spanish blacks were by conquest now British property and, as such, runaway slaves. This species of property in perpetuity was also heritable by itself and through its progency. Thus, decendants to be born in the hills would also be slaves, legally subject to be reconsigned to slavery in the event of capture, whatever their perception of themselves or their notion of their freedom might be, so long as a slave society existed on the island. See Amistad Trials! for the idea of property.

We should also consider the fact that, Admiral Venables the Naval Commander of the British Navy set forth Article Eleven of the Terms of Capitulation upon capturing the island, said in paraphase, "All slaves and negroes were to appear on the Savanna near the town on the 26th when Venables would inform them of the favours and acts of grace concerning their freedom to be granted them."

It is said that none of them responded to this offer. "The majority took to the hills separating themselves from their late masters." The attitudes of the slaves is that white masters were the same regardless of nationality. Nevertheless, the word "Maroon" is a generic term to designate fugitive slaves from plantations in the New World. Popular opinions accept that the word is derives from the Spanish Cimarron which referred to domestic cattle that had escaped to a wild existence. Others like the Iberians had their own designation for runaway slaves, but since 1655, Maroon is a designation use to refer to runaway slaves under the British. So, we could look at the Spanish Maroons as separate and they does not form a continuum of Maroon society in Jamaica as developed from the turn of the seventeenth century to the first three decades of the eighteenth. The Spanish Maroons are called Maroons by virtue of an historical event (British conquest) and not from the usual runaway situation.

Another issue is that the Spanish Maroons were Creoles mostly from the northern part of West Africa and Angola, while their eighteenth century counterparts were mainly Akan speaking blacks. What is important is that their were hostilities between these two groups. The Spanish Creoles did not take kindly to the newly arrived African runaways who came to join them in the hills. One reason is that British slave traders concentrate mostly on the Gold Cost of Africa seeking slaves for the New World. The Akan blacks were from Ghana and, a cause for the open hostility and lack of unity between the two groups. In spite of this, the Spanish Creoles were an inspiration to plantation slaves, they showed resistance to slavery. They created a precedent of defiance of the slave master's authority and their presence in the woods gave cause to slaves running away from the plantations. Their skills as hunters help to show runaway slaves how to adapt to their surrounding, and later on in guerrilla warfare against the authorities.

Therefore, the history of Maroon societies in the New World is the history of guerrilla warfare. A question to keep in mind is why these former bitter opponent of the colonial authorities should have turned to collaborate with them? And, in so doing what effect this had on the plantocracy in Jamaica?

Within a year of the British conquest of Jamaica, "the rebellious slaves" in the hills, had made themselves so formidable that, like the Spanish officials of Panama, the British soon conceived that they were a greater danger that were the Spaniards. The Maroons' boldness, their prowess in guerrilla warfare, their knowledge of the terrain of the country were all too noted with apprehension. "Concerning the state of the enemy on shore here the Spanairds is not considerable, but of the Blacks there are many, who are like to prove as thorns and pricks in our sides, living in the mountains and woods, a kind of life both natural, and I believe, acceptable to them...." Certainly this were not true of Africans, but a life born of necessity.

Indeed, the early Maroons were "thorns and pricks" in the side of the British, they plunder and burn plantations, captured slaves and killed British soldiers who ventured out too far into the woods. The Maroons victories against the British were so numerous that in April, 1656, the British Governor D'Oyley reported "it hath pleased God to give us some success against the negroes. A plantation of theirs beeinge (sic) found out, wee (sic) fell on them, slew some, and spoiled one of their chief quarters." In another skirmish the British soldiers killed "seven or eight " negroes" but the Maroons retaliated by ambushing and killing forty soldiers. In a letter to John Thurloe, Major Sedgwicke said, "In two daies (sic) more than forty of our soldiers, were cut off by the negroes as they were carelessly going about their quarters."

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1. Many Afrikans sold into bondage were sold by Arabicized Afrikans or Arabs, though Muslims wouldn't want Afrikans to know this dirty little secret.

2.The specific Maroons in Jamaica were mainly related to IBO people of Nigeria whom were probably considered pagans by Arabs or Arabicized Afrikans which would make them prime targets for forced labor by Muslims though Muslims would NOT want that secret to be known either.

Maroons were Muslims fighting Jihad riiiiggghhhhtt



Hotep
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Do you see any Arabs here?

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2004/04/05/international/20040406_RWAN_AUDIOSS.html
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 


Yarrow Mamout (c.1736-1823), a Muslim who was born in Guinea but brought to Georgetown to serve in slavedom.


So Hotep2u, why did he remained a Muslim when he was freed from his Arab Massa? Afterall what he went through?
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Since Muslim slavery was characteristically associated with unlimited potential for social mobility and much less racialism, it is not surprising to find whole dynasties in Muslim history founded by slaves (e.g. the Egyptian Mamelukes) or the emergence to prominence of Africans as soldiers, poetys, philosophers, writers and statesmen. As early as the 8th Century,

Ibrahim, the son of a Black concubine of the caliph Al-Mahdi (775-785) came very close to being caliph in 817-819 when a faction in Baghdad supported his candidature against the nominated successor of the caliph Al-Ma'mun. In spite of being 'excessively black and shiny' he was preferred by some 'Abasid loyalists to 'Alid candidate of Persian descent (Source: Hunwick, op.cit., p. 28)

Al-Mustansir, another such son, Hunwick reports, reigned in Egypt between 1036 and 1094. In the 17th Century, Mulay Isma'il, sharing the same condition ruled in Morocco. Even Black eunuchs such as Kafur who ruled Egypt for 22 years could achive enormous power.

That Christendom failed to be impressed by Islamic law and customs on this matter is hardly surprising since the tradition of European slavery were already quite ancient and quite elaborately rationalized by the time of the appearance of Islam in the 7th Century. Moreover, it was highly improbable that the Christian establishment of the medievel era would countenance the adaptation of customs from what they considered the ultimate Christian heresy- Islam, many believed, was based on sexual licence and forced conversion, and finally, Western xenophobia- so critical to the character of European identity and so fundamental to Christian slave systems expressed a revulsion toward Muslim ideals. "A fund of xenophobia was latent in the homogeneous culture of Europe", is how Norman Daniel has put it.

Source: Black Marxism:The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
by Cedric J. Robinson

I know your hatred and ignorance blinde you to see the truth, but do us a favour next time you come with statement, Arab Brainwash , try to provide sources, otherwise, STAY OUT OF MY THREAD!
 

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Posted by yazid904 (Member # 7708) on :
 
arwa,

The American view of Islam and its socio-cultural
heterogenous background is and will remain at odds with outsiders. The Mamluk and Yeniseri corps was the backbone of Turkish military so training these 'foreigners' in the ways and acceptance of Islam was a positive experience. It was never one sided like the Anglo-Saxon view!
The heterogeneity of Islam where Arab, Turk, Berber, Persian, Azeri, Wolof, Taureg, Hausa, etc, identities merge and collide is what allowed Islam to go far and wide.

Hotep's absolutist view is an unspoken one although he says it! That kind of fearlessness is rare today and in a democratic place, it is his right. It is the deceivers who play both sides that are not to be trusted!
One of the main tribal group of Jamaica were the Ibo! In the late 19th century, the instigators of rebellions were usually Hausa, Yoruba (the leaders) but the rank and file were non Hausa/Yoruba.

babash trini
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 
In my past reading experience the Outliers of the
southern USA, the Maroons of the Caribbean, and
the Palenques and Quilombos of South America,
were not in the least Muslim societies.

Excepting the Outliers the other resistance states
founded by self-emancipated slaves prominently
featured characteristics of traditional African
ethnies.

For instance Brazilian Quilombos displayed Angolan
cultures, their spirituality would reflect Condomble.
Jamaican Maroons had strong Koromantee cultural
elements, their spirituality was Obeah not Islam.

The dominant spirituality outside the USA was that
related to a Vodoun type strongly resembling the
traditional Yoruba model in practice and pantheon.

In Luso-Hispanic territories African spirituality
was hidden within and/or meshed with Catholicism.
In a place like Jamaica the Protestant Christianity
of the Africans loosely incorporated a very few
traditional elements best noted in "Pentacostal"
expression where roots, shout, and getting the
spirit were as close as they could get to the old
rites like spirit possession, etc.
 

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Posted by yazid904 (Member # 7708) on :
 
al-Takruri,

The Angolans represented a threat to the Portuguese social order and the qilombos survived (~100 years)because they refused to be part of the milieu of the day. Take a look at the fascinating art of capoeira in Brazil and its sociological imprint on society!
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 
Robinson's conclusion is perhaps a little too
gratuitous and pollyana-ish about colour roles.

quote:

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Ahmad b. Tulun (d. 884), the first independent ruler of Muslim Egypt, relied very heavily on
black slaves, probably Nubians, for his armed forces; at his death he is said to have left,
among other possessions, twenty-four thousand white mamluks and forty-five thousand
blacks. These were organized in separate corps, and accommodated in separate quarters
at the military cantonments. When Khumarawayh, the son and successor of Ahmad ibn Tulun
rode in procession, he was followed, according to a chronicler,

"by a thousand black guards wearing black cloaks and black turbans, so that a watcher could fancy
them to be a black sea spreading over the face of the earth, because of the blackness of their
color and of their garments. With the glitter of their shields, of the chasing on their swords,
and of the helmets under their turbans, they made a really splendid sight."

The black troops were the most faithful supporters of the dynasty, and shared its fate.
When the Tulunids were overthrown at the beginning of 905, the restoration of caliphal
authority was followed by a massacre of the black infantry and the burning of their
quarters:

"Then the cavalry turned against the cantonments of the Tulunid blacks, seized as many of them
as they could, and took them to Muhammad ibn Sulayman [the new governor sent by the caliph].
He was on horseback, amid his escort. He gave orders to slaughter them, and they were
slaughtered in his presence like sheep."

A similar fate befell the black infantry in Baghdad in 930, when they were attacked and
massacred by the white cavalry, with the help of other troops and of the populace, and
their quarters burned. Thereafter, black soldiers virtually disappear from the armies of the
eastern caliphate.

. . . .

Black soldiers served the various rulers of medieval Egypt, and under the Fatimid caliphs
of Cairo black regiments, known as 'Abid al-Shira', "the slaves by purchase," formed an
important part of the military establishment. They were particularly prominent in the mid-
eleventh century, during the reign of al-Mustansir, when for a while the real ruler of Egypt
was the caliph's mother, a Sudanese slave woman of remarkable strength of character. There
were frequent clashes between black regiments and those of other races and occasional
friction with the civil population.

With the fall of the Fatimids, the black troops again paid the price of their loyalty. Among
the most faithful supporters of the Fatimid Caliphate, they were also among the last to
resist its overthrow by Saladin, ostensibly the caliph's vizier but in fact the new master of
Egypt. By the time of the last Fatimid caliph, al-'Adid, the blacks had achieved a position of
power. The black eunuchs wielded great influence in the palace; the black troops formed a major
element in the Fatimid army. It was natural that they should resist the vizier's encroachments.
In 1169 Saladin learned of a plot by the caliph's chief black eunuch to remove him, allegedly
in collusion with the Crusaders in Palestine. Saladin acted swiftly; the offender was seized
and decapitated and replaced in his office by a white eunuch. The other black eunuchs of the
caliph's palace were also dismissed. The black troops in Cairo were infuriated by this summary
execution of one whom they regarded as their spokesman and defender. Moved, according to a
chronicler, by "racial solidarity" (jinsiyya), they prepared for battle. In two hot August days, an
estimated fifty thousand blacks fought against Saladin's army in the area between the two palaces,
of the caliph and the vizier.

Two reasons are given for their defeat. One was their betrayal by the Fatimid Caliph al-'Adid,
whose cause they believed they were defending against the usurping vizier:

"Al-'Adid had gone up to his belvedere tower, to watch the battle between the palaces. It is said
that he ordered the men in the palace to shoot arrows and throw stones at [Saladin's] troops,
and they did so. Others say that this was not done by his choice. Shams al-Dawla [Saladin's
brother] sent naphtha-throwers to burn down al-'Adid's belvedere. One of them was about to do
this when the door of the belvedere tower opened and out came a caliphal aide, who said: "The
Commander of the Faithful greets Shams al-Dawla, and says: 'Beware of the [black] slave dogs!
Drive them out of the country!'" The blacks were sustained by the belief that al-'Adid was
pleased with what they did. When they heard this, their strength was sapped, their courage
waned, and they fled."

The other reason, it is said, was an attack on their homes. During the battle between the
palaces, Saladin sent a detachment to the black quarters, with instructions "to burn them
down on their possessions and their children." Learning of this, the blacks tried to break
off the battle and return to their families but were caught in the streets and destroyed. This
encounter is variously known in Arabic annals as "the Battle of the Blacks" and "the Battle of
the Slaves.'' Though the conflict was not primarily racial, it acquired a racial aspect, which is
reflected in some of the verses composed in honor of Saladin's victory. Maqrizi, in a comment
on this episode, complains of the power and arrogance of the blacks:

"If they had a grievance against a vizier, they killed him; and they caused much damage by
stretching out their hands against the property and families of the people. When their outrages
were many and their misdeeds increased, God destroyed them for their sins."

Sporadic resistance by groups of black soldiers continued, but was finally crushed after a few
years. While the white units of the Fatimid army were incorporated by Saladin in his own
forces, the blacks were not. The black regiments were disbanded, and black fighting men
did not reappear in the armies of Egypt for centuries. Under the mamluk sultans, blacks were
employed in the army in a menial role, as servants of the knights. There was a clear distinction
between these servants, who were black and slaves, and the knights' orderlies and grooms, who
were white and free.

Though black slaves no longer served as soldiers in Egypt, they still fought occasionally -- as
rebels or rioters. In 1260, during the transition from the Ayyubid to the mamluk
sultanate, black stableboys and some others seized horses and weapons, and staged a minor
insurrection in Cairo. They proclaimed their allegiance to the Fatimids and followed a
religious leader who "incited them to rise against the people of the state; he granted them
fiefs and wrote them deeds of assignment."

The end was swift: "When they rebelled during the night, the troops rode in, surrounded them,
and shackled them; by morning they were crucified outside the Zuwayla gate."

. . . .

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, black slaves were admitted to units using firearms --
a socially despised weapon in the mamluk knightly society. When a sultan tried to show some
favor to his black arquebusiers, he provoked violent antagonism from the mamluk knights,
which he was not able to resist. In 1498 "a great disturbance occurred in Cairo." The sultan
(according to the chronicler) had outraged the mamluks by conferring two boons on a black
slave called Farajallah, chief of the firearms personnel in the citadel -- first, giving him a white
Circassian slave girl from the palace as wife, and second, granting him a short-sleeved tunic,
a characteristic garment of the mamluks:

"On beholding this spectacle [says the chronicler] the Royal mamluks expressed their
disapproval to the sultan, and they put on their. . . armour. . . and armed themselves with
their full equipment. A battle broke out between them and the black slaves, who numbered about
five hundred. The black slaves ran away and gathered again in the towers of the citadel and
fired at the Royal mamluks. The Royal mamluks marched on them, killing Farajallah and about
fifty of the black slaves; the rest fled; two Royal mamluks were killed. Then the emirs and
the sultan's maternal uncle, the Great Dawadar, met the sultan and told him: "We disapprove of
these acts of yours [and if you persist in them, it would be better for you to ride by night in
the narrow by-streets and go away together with those black slaves to far-off places!" The
sultan answered: "I shall desist from this, and these black slaves will be sold to the Turkmans."

In the Islamic West black slave troops were more frequent, and sometimes even included cavalry
-- something virtually unknown in the East. The first emir of Cordova, 'Abd al-Rahman I, is said
to have kept a large personal guard of black troops; and black military slaves were used,
especially to maintain order, by his successors. Black units, probably recruited by purchase via
Zawila in Fezzan (now southern Libya), figure in the armies of the rulers of Tunisia between the
ninth and eleventh centuries. Black troops became important from the seventeenth century,
after the Moroccan military expansion into the Western Sudan. The Moroccan Sultan Mawlay
Ismaili (1672-1727) had an army of black slaves, said to number 250,000. The nucleus of this
army was provided by the conscription or compulsory purchase of all male blacks in Morocco; it
was supplemented by levies on the slaves and serfs of the Saharan tribes and slave raids into
southern Mauritania. These soldiers were mated with black slave girls, to produce the next
generation of male soldiers and female servants. The youngsters began training at ten and were
mated at fifteen. After the sultan's death in 1727, a period of anarchic internal struggles
followed, which some contemporaries describe as a conflict between blacks and whites.

. . . .

In 1757 a new sultan, Sidi Muhammad Ill, came to the throne. He decided to disband the black
troops and rely instead on Arabs. With a promise of royal favor, he induced the blacks to come to
Larache with their families and worldly possessions. There he had them surrounded by
Arab tribesmen, to whom he gave their possessions as booty and the black soldiers,
their wives, and their children as slaves. "I make you a gift," he said, "of these 'abid, of
their children, their horses, their weapons, and all they possess. Share them among you.''

. . . .


Bernard Lewis
Race and Slavery in the Middle East
Oxford Univ Press, 1994

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quote:

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Originally posted by Arwa:
Since Muslim slavery was characteristically associated with unlimited potential for social mobility and much less racialism, it is not surprising to find whole dynasties in Muslim history founded by slaves (e.g. the Egyptian Mamelukes) or the emergence to prominence of Africans as soldiers, poetys, philosophers, writers and statesmen.

Source: Black Marxism:The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
by Cedric J. Robinson

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quote:

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Catastrophic predictions of violence and civil strife have long been used by the far Right as an argument against immigration by nonwhite migrants from ‘alien’ cultures but these responses to the events in France from more ‘liberal’ commentators are another indication of the extent to which Eurabian concepts have passed into more mainstream political discourse. The spectre of an Islamic Europe has also been given more highbrow respectability by Bernard Lewis, the White House’s favoured Middle Eastern specialist, who told the German newspaper Die Welt in 2004 that ‘Europe will be Islamic by the end of the 21st century’. That same year, the outgoing EU Competitions Commissioner Fritz Bolkestein quoted Lewis in a speech to the University of Leiden in September, in support of his arguments against the rapid enlargement of Europe. Bolkestein warned that the integration of Turkey into the European Union risked transforming the Union into an ‘Austro-Hungarian empire on a grand scale’ in which Europeans would become a minority in an Islamicised Europe.

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quote:

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Introduction


It was the romantic island of wood and water, Jamaica in the
Caribbean, which wassighted by the Morisco pilot who steered the
lead boat of Columbus from Spain to the West Indies in 1494.

The current invisibility of the Muslim ummah (community)
in Jamaica is overshadowed by the historic role played by the
al-Andalus Muslim mariners in the discovery voyages of
Columbus and the illustrious military feats of the historical Muslim
Maroons who had brought the world’s ‘mightiest’ Red Coats
to sue for peace.
The splendorous past of the Muslim ummah serves as a source of
spiritual inspirationto maintain its Islamic identity in the multicultural
and religiously diverse society of Jamaica. The country’s coat of arms,
‘Out of Many, One People’, embraces the ummah under the broad
spectrum of its historical diversity. Nonetheless, Christianity
is acknowledged as the most important part of the national
heritage within which various religious faiths exist. Although the
Muslim community remains constitutionally unrec-ognized,
the guarantee for freedom of religion and the democratic nature
of the parliamentary form of government have allowed the continuity
and growth in the number of adherents to Islam in Jamaica.
The acceptance of Muslim membership in the Jamaica Interfaith
Organization, which is patronized by the Governor General,
has provided the Muslims with a sense of recognition and a
wholesome basis for living together despite some popular prejudices.

Currently, numbering about 4000, the Muslims in Jamaica form 0.15% of the estimated total population of 2,590,400 persons. Jamaica has an annual population growth rate of 0.7% and the total fertility rate of 2.8 children per woman. The Muslims are predominantly of African descent. Approximately 50% of the Muslim population of Jamaica resides in the Kingston Metropolitan Region, where some 43.3% of Jamaica’s population lives. Kingston is the capital and the biggest seaport of the island. It is also the financial and commercial centre of the country. The other important cities of Muslim concentration are Spanish Town in Saint Catherine Parish, the island’s second oldest capital, and Montego Bay in Saint James, popularly known as the ‘Tourist City’ on the northern coast of the island. The parishes of St. Elizabeth, St. Mary and Westmoreland also have a good concentration of this tiny Muslim community. A few others are scattered throughout the country. Although invisible as a community, their presence in society is easily recognized by their mode of dressing and behavioural patterns. The Muslim community emphasizes the Islamic principles of equality and brotherhood and conforms with values such as those of honesty, collective sharing of knowledge and observance of religious festivities, respect for elders, close family relations, maintenance of legitimacy and mutual assistance. The Islamic greeting as-salaamu-alaikum and the essential Qur’anic prescripts have influenced the vernacular of the ummah, which is English, and the Arabic terms have become an integral part of their vocabulary.


The Advent of Islam in Jamaica


Islam made its first appearance in the home of the Tainos, Jamaica, with the undaunted Andalusian mariners who played the dominant role in navigating Columbus’ discovery voyage through the rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean Sea in 1494. These Moorish sailors, schooled in Atlantic navigation to discover and dominate the sea routes, received Royal Pardon from the Spanish Crown and continued to be an integral part of the discovery and conquest entourage long after Columbus. Indeed the Muslims, as discoverers and conquerors, arrived for settlement in Jamaica since the coming of Columbus.

Subsequent to the importation of the Moorish slaves to Jamaica in 1503, the practice of Islam became more dominant as the number of Muslims increased with rapidity. Jihad (struggle) against the indignity of slavery took the form of hijra, the flight from servitude, in order to establish a community based on Islam. From among these Moorish or free Negro communities, referred to as Spanish Maroon communities, came leaders such as Don Christoval Arnaldo de Ysassi, who was appointed the governor of Jamaica by the Spanish King in 1655, and Don Francisco de Leyba, the Spanish lieutenant general of Jamaica. Ysassi is a corruption of the Arabic word ysassa, meaning ruler, while Leyba in Arabic denotes lioness or intelligent. With the Spanish Maroons came the aqueducts, water wheels, windmills, and the introduction of sugar- cane in Jamaica and the West Indies.

The Maroon societies of the Moors subsequent to the British occupation of Jamaica in 1655 became a source of refuge for the rebellious slaves from the plantations. Many of them came from Muslim nations of western and sub-Saharan regions of Africa. The 80-year jihad initiated by Spanish Maroon leaders such as Yuan de Bola and Yuan de Serras, in response to repeated attacks by the British ‘Red Coats’ on the Muslim community, ultimately compelled the authorities to conclude a peace treaty in 1739 with the Maroons recognizing their territories as separate entities beyond the jurisdic- tion of the British colonial government. The island-wide alliance of the Maroon communities of the Leeward and the Windward was united under the indisputable leadership of Cudjoe. Cudjoe’s power of endurance and his conspicuous worship of Allah are illustrated by his act of prostration on the occasion of the peace offer. This behaviour, of utmost humility, in appreciation of the reward of victory from Allah speaks of the inherent Arabic meaning of Cudjoe or Kwadjoe, ‘humbleness’. Cudjoe’s sister, Grandy Nanny or Sarah, is regarded by the Maroons to be the most illustrious woman, who never lost a battle with the British. Sarah’s deep devotion and dependence on Allah to establish human dignity were apparently answered by favours or karamat, which were misunderstood and regarded as obeah (witchcraft or sorcery).

The piety of the historical Maroon leaders is illustrated by their Arabic derived names, such as Ghani, Quao and Cuffee, which refer to the attributes of Allah. The deep profession of the faith also found expression through varied Islamic practices. Governance of the Maroons was based on consensual authority or shura. The pious beginning of the treaty—‘In the Name of God, Amen’, which in Qur’anic term is Bismillah—was never the precedent in Christendom Europe. The adoption of the Islamic greeting, as-salaamu-alaikum, which still continues to be the official Council greeting at Moore Town, and the presence of Qur’anic Arabic terms in present day Maroon vocabulary such as deen and dunya indicate the pervasiveness of Islam among the historical Maroons. Nonetheless, Islam has been in oblivion for long in the Maroon societies, despite their freedom from the British colonial government. The death of the historical Maroons, the absence of Islamic teachings, and the complacency of
the succeeding generations to preserve the faith of their forefathers in the face of
consistent and persistent efforts of the state machinery and the Anglican church to penetrate into the Maroon communities are the attributable causes for the Maroons in Jamaica to have become oblivious to Islam.


The mu’minun from Africa


Parallel to the Maroon ummah, thousands of mu’minun of African descent belonging to the Islamic nations of Mandinka, Fula, Susu, Ashanti and Hausa worked as slaves on the plantations in Jamaica. Approximately 57% of the enslaved African arrivants came from Muslim areas. The presence of Islam among the slaves is revealed through autobiographical pieces written in Arabic by the Muslim slaves and accounts left by His Majesty’s officials, plantation historians and British travellers. These slaves were gener- ally literate in Arabic and many of them could write with great beauty and exactness the Arabic alphabet and passages from the Holy Qur’an. They also displayed a gentleness of disposition and demeanour, which is believed to have been ‘the result of early education and discipline’.

Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, a Mandinka slave assigned to Magistrate Robert Madden, reveals himself through two autobiographical pieces written in Arabic, as the son of a learned family in Islamic Jurisprudence from the city of Timbuktu. He acquired advance Qur’anic learning initially in the city of Jenne and subsequently in Bouna, ‘a place of great celebrity for its learning and schools, in the countries of the Mo- hammedan Mandingoes’. So strong was Abu Bakr’s Islamic teaching that even after thirty years of bondage in Jamaica he still knew the Qur’an ‘almost by heart’. Like hundreds of other African Muslim slaves, Abu Bakr had different masters and had been baptized as Edward Donellan but remained faithful to Islam. He is perhaps one of the very few who returned to Africa upon his manumission in 1834.

The accounts left by Bryan Edwards, a planter historian, and Magistrate Robert Madden are clear testimonies that Islam was the religion of hundreds of African slaves who were brought to Jamaica from the Muslim nations of Africa. Bryan Edwards, writing on the national customs and manners of Muslim slaves, states as follows:

An old and faithful Mandinka servant, who stands at my elbow while I write this, relates that the natives practice circumcision, and that he himself has undergone that operation; and he has not forgotten the morning and evening prayer which his father taught him. In proof of this assertion, he chants in an audible and shrill tone, a sentence that I conceive to be part of the Al-Koran, ‘La Illa ill illa’! (i.e. La Ilaha Illallah, there is no god but Allah) which he says they sing aloud at first appearance of the new moon. He relates, moreover, that in his own country Friday was constantly made a strict fasting. It
wasalmost a sin, he observes, on that day to swallow his spittle; such is his
expression.


The narrative left by Magistrate Robert Madden further reveals the faithfulness of the Muslim slaves to Islam and their exertion in the Way of Allah, despite forceful baptism. He records the presence of a considerable number of Muslims in Jamaica in a letter written to J. F. Savory, Esq., Jamaica, on 30 March 1835:

I had a visit one Sunday morning very lately, from three Mandingo negroes, natives of Africa. They could all read and write Arabic; and one of them showed me a Koran written, from memory by himself—but written, he assured me, before he became a Christian. I had my doubts on this point. One of them, Benjamin Cockrane, a free negro was in the habit of coming to me on Sundays … His history is that of hundreds of others in Jamaica … [emphasis added by author] Cockrane says his father was a chief in the Mandingo country … I (Madden) have not the time to give you an account of his religious opinions; but though very singular, they were expressed with infinitely more energy and eloquence than his sentiments on other subjects. He professed to be an occasional follower of one of the sectarian ministers here, and so did each of his two friends. I had my doubts thereupon. I expressed them to my wife … and told her to prepare for a demonstration of Mohometanism. I took up a book, as if by accident, and commenced repeat- ing the well-known Mussalman Salaam to Prophet Allah (sic.) Illah Mo- hammed Rasul Allah! In an instant, I had a Mussalman trio, long and loud: my Neophytes were chanting their names with irrepressible fervour, and Mr. Benjamin Cockrane I thought, would have inflicted the whole of ‘the perspic- uous book’ of Islam on me, if I had not taken advantage of the opportunity for giving him and his companions reproof for pretending to be that which they were not.


Despite the systematic and brutal suppression of the West African Islamic heritage by the plantocracy, the metropolitan powers and the various established Christian churches, the community of the mu’minun nonetheless responded to the call for an island-wide jihad made through a wathiqah, a pastoral letter, in 1832. Slave leaders like Mohammad Kaba, Sam Sharpe and George Lewis were all crypto-Muslims working as local leaders, marabouts or imams. These marabouts were apparently the so-called ‘deacons’ in the less established or nonconformist churches such as the Baptist, Moravians and Wesleyen, 17 of which were destroyed following the outbreak of the rebellion in 1832 by the Colonial Church Union run by the Anglican Reverend George Bridges. Although ruthlessly suppressed, the Jihad of 1832, commonly known as the Baptist Rebellion, hastened the Emancipation Act of 1833.

The complete metamorphosis experienced by the once proud African Muslim slaves through the shock in the process of enslavement, the subsequent physical torture and the cultural and spiritual genocide led to the dormancy of Islam until it re-emerged with the arrival of the Muslims from Moghul India in the 1850s. Vestiges of Islamic practices, however, still persist in the cultural heritage of the African Jamaicans. It is customary to take off one’s shoes upon entering the house, indicating the importance attached to cleanliness of the abode, which was considered as the masjid for the performance of prayer by the Muslim forefathers. The observance of wudhu and night prayer, isha’a, by the pioneer Muslims from Africa are illustrated by the traditional practice of washing hands, rinsing mouth, washing face and feet, and offering prayer before going to bed. Women, mostly in the countryside, also continue to wear the head covering.

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quote:

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he said, "of these 'abid, of
their children, their horses, their weapons, and all they possess. Share them among you.''

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ROFL

Ya wright!

He calls himself an Islam expert, but he doesn't know the basic principles of the religion.

No muslim should call other person, my slave (abid), which is a grave sin to say.

God is The Creator, and we're all His slaves.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Since it was you who brought the subject; Slavery, who do you think gave the permission to use this implement:


 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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Robinson's conclusion is perhaps a little too
gratuitous and pollyana-ish about colour roles.

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quote:

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Originally posted by ausar:
Kind of reminds me of the claim that Cherokee Indians were Muslims and that Tallahasse means ''house of Allah'' in one article I read.

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quote:

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You on the otherhand are presenting yourself
as myopically Islamicist to the extent of
intentionally distorting African history just
to boost your particular choice in religions.

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I didn't know that Jamaica was an African country, no?

Look you troll.

Yes, I'm a Muslim and an African. Does it make me an Arab because the Qur'an is in the Arabic language?

As a scientist I know too well what it means to provide the right sources. Where is your proof "intentionally distorting African history "?

It was you who started quoting Bernard Lewis which entitles you as a Muslim basher and an islamophobic!
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 


Revelations from a Muslim?
published: Sunday | February 2, 2003

Reverend Clinton Chisholm, Contributor

DID YOU know that Daddy Sam Sharpe and the slaves who led the 1831 Christmas rebellion were Muslims? Are you aware that the 'jerk-pork' loving ancient Maroons were also Muslims?

If you answered no to any of the above questions then let Dr. Sultana Afroz, a Muslim, of the department of history at the University of the West Indies, Mona, upgrade your education.

Afroz's novel theses emerge from her paper, 'The Jihad of 1831-1832: The Misunderstood Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica', in the hard to find Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2001, 227-243.

I don't know what the historians would say after reading this paper but I find the paper an excellent example of how not to reason.

The very first sentence of the essay informs, without any appeal to demographic documentation, that "Contemporaneous to the autonomous Muslim Maroon ummah, hundreds of thousands of Mu'minun (the Believers of the Islamic faith) of African descent worked as slaves on the plantations in Jamaica." (227)

While providing proof of the faith of the Muslim slaves, Afroz wisely employs two promising sub-sections, 'Evidences of their Faith: From Others' (228-229) and 'Evidences of their Faith: From Themselves' (229-230).

In the first sub-section, three witnesses are used, Mrs. A. Carmichael, who resided "in the British West Indies", Bryan Edwards "a plantation historian" and Magistrate Robert Madden. Their collective views argue for hundreds of Islamic slaves in Jamaica.

The second sub-section opens with the very promising "[t]he autobiographical notes, correspondence and letters written by slaves further bear testimony [that their Church-links] had not altered their belief in Islam." Despite this, the only testimony comes from Madden's assigned Mandinka slave, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq.

We also learn that these Muslims used Christianity as a protective front for their undercover work in preparing to wage Jihad, or holy war on the plantations of Jamaica. "Jihad became the religious and political ideology of these crypto-Muslims, who became members of the various denominational non-conformist churches-" (227).

The founder of Baptist witness in Jamaica, George Liele, was a Muslim, according to Afroz. Liele "... a Baptist preacher who came from Southern United States, frequently faced charges of sedition. It is likely that because of his thorough knowledge of the Holy Qur'an and the Bible, he was able to convince the authorities that his teachings were in line with the gospel." (235).

Indeed, the American black Baptist missionaries, in general, are seen as Muslims. How is this established? By a simple and specious argument, as Afroz quotes one Slyviane A. Diouf then concludes. Watch the words, Diouf is in single quotes, the rest is Afroz's.

"(Diouf) writing on the Muslim slaves in the Americas asserts: 'If counted as a whole, on a religious basis rather than on an ethnic one the Muslims were probably more numerous in the Americas than any other group among the arriving Africans'. Hence, Islam dominated the religious beliefs of these black missionaries." (233-234).

Afroz's logic rules out the possibility that the American Baptist missionaries could have come from a group other than the 'probably more numerous' Muslims. And why would Muslims from America, or anywhere, come here and function as Christian preachers as opposed to Muslims given the Islamic obsession with promoting the faith and Islam's teaching that Christians and Jews are infidels?

What is the evidence that Sam Sharpe and other slave leaders were in fact Muslims? For the learned UWI lecturer the matter is quite simple.

"Slave leaders, like Mohammad Kaba, Sam Sharpe and George Lewis to name a few, were apparently all literate and well respected by their fellow slave brethren. Evidently, their literacy had its origin in Africa and those who were literate were usually Muslims." (234). A similar point is made on page 233, employing the same calibre of logic.

The learned historian seems unaware of the fact that literacy is related to a language. The African slaves may have been literate in some language(s), other than English, spoken in their homelands, but that would not necessarily acquit them for anything in Jamaica that would be dependent on knowledge of English. If the literacy she is talking about is literacy in English then one has to factor in the schools for slaves, set up by white British missionaries, which made many of the slaves literate in English.

A central plank of Dr. Afroz's thesis is that "- there was the call for jihad through a wathiqah (pastoral letter) believed to have originated from Africa" (227), in 1789, circulated in Jamaica "- and reached the hands of Muhammad Kaba, a Muslim slave -" (232).

The only hint at the content of the pastoral letter, shared by Afroz, drawing on the works of Philip Curtin and Robert Madden, is the innocuous statement that the letter 'exhorted all of the followers of prophet Muhammad (SAW) to be true and faithful if they wished to enter Paradise' (232).

For Afroz, seemingly, the pastoral letter constituted a necessary and sufficient cause of the 1831-1832 rebellion because she mentions no other possible explanatory antecedent to the rebellion, like news of the English Emancipation campaign which was launched in 1831 and the prior discussions in Britain on reform from 1823 onwards.

Is Dr. Sultana Afroz engaging in Muslim myth-making or historical revisionism?
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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Islam is no different than anything else.

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"An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action."

Name one religion that teach that whites have no superiority over blacks?

You troll !!

Next time, when you speak about Islam , provide references in the Qur'an and the Ahadith, because only these two are sources of Islam

Now who is "unable to intelligently digest" ?
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
ROFL,

No articles from Brill (your favoutite publisher )or other respected publish house?

Is this what your "intelligence " is capable by quoting from non-research article, and not to mention Muslim bashar like you.

Do you call MetaPress and Academic Search Elite myth publishers?

I don't know how they could allow such a controversial subject to publish in their respectable journals.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Troll !!


"Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The African Muslim Uprising in Bahia, 1835,"
Joao Jose Reis; Arthur Brakel

Review author[s]: Thomas E. Skidmore

Review author[s]: Thomas E. Skidmore Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 2. (Apr., 1995), pp. 389-390.


Religion and Slave Rebellion in Bahia
THOMAS E. SKIDMORE
History Department, Brown University, Providence, R. I. 02912, U.S.A. 28 vii 94
_________________________________________________
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. By Joåo José Reis. Tnanslated by
Arthur Brakel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 . 281 pp.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil is a major contribution to our knowledge of slavery, race relations, and the history of Africans in the Amenicas. The author, a leading Brazilian historian from the region about which he writes, is a pioneer in writing Brazilian social history. Translated and expanded from the Brazilian edition, the book focuses on “the most effective urban slave rebellion even to occur on the American continent.” The rebels numbered in the hundreds, and some 500 were given punishments ranging from death to deportation. The uprising alarmed authorities throughout Brazil and led to draconian new legislation governing slaves.

The revolt has long fascinated historians because of its Muslim component. Its leaders were all African-born slaves or freedmen, and the target of their anger was the rest of the society of Bahia—whites and all others born in Brazii, especially the mulattos who dominated the police force. The rebels were primanily Yorubas who had been converted to Islam, and it was their religion that had given them the sense of identity and dignity that facilitated the planning and execution of the conspiracy. Jewelry and documents found on the rebels confirmed that it was a truly Muslim-led movement which also swept up some discontented non-Muslim Africans. Reis argues vigorously that the revolt was not a “jihad” as some have claimed. Rather, he sees religion here as a means of bonding foreign-born slaves to resist the encircing society. The revolt did, however, serve to alert slaveholders to the need to verify the ethnic origins of any newly acquired slaves.

The picture presented here confirms the general view that slave rebellion was easier in urban settings, where slaves moved with greater ease than in the countryside. Furthermore, the Muslims were aided by their ability to use Arabic. Most interesting, the rebels not only did not seek to enlist Brazilian-born slaves but saw the latter as part of the enemy.

Rejs’s work also confirms that by the early 19th century the Brazilian elite was fixed on the idea of a “whiter” Brazil. This policy was evident in the justifications for repression and punishment after the revolt. Such an objective was ironic in view of the fact that Bahia was about 70% nonwhite at this time. The authorities came up with quaint language to describe the objects of their wrath. The rebellious Africans were termed “dangerous guests” and finally “treacherous guests.” It was surely a reflection of Brazilian elite culture to refer to slaves as “guests,” much in the tradition of Brazilian cordialidade.

Reis has produced a superb analysis of these important events that will be of interest to ethnohistorians and anyone interested in the development of modern race relations in the Americas.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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“the most effective urban slave rebellion eve[r] to occur on the American continent.”

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You can find the article in J-stor. I used "Accessibility Option - TIFF Format "

So you know now, it's not from Frontpage or Storm site
 

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Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by ausar:

Kind of reminds me of the claim that Cherokee Indians were Muslims and that Tallahasse means ''house of Allah'' in one article I read.

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ROTFL
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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(A Council of the Indies to the King in 1685 states, “The introduction of Mohammedan slaves into America is forbidden on account of the danger which lies in their intercourse with the Indians.”)

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The danger to teach dignity, equality and a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action?


 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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as Afroz quotes one Slyviane A. Diouf

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quote:

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NOTES
1. Slyviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, New York: New
York University Press, 1998, p. 48.
2. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the West Indies (1819), Vol. 2, New York:
AMS Press, 1966, p. 72.
3. Diouf, Servants of Allah, op. cit., p. 6.
4. Mrs A. Carmichael, The Domestic Manners and the Social Condition of the White, Coloured and Negro
Population of the West Indies, Vol. 2, London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1833, pp. 251–252.
5. Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 71–72.
6. Robert R. Madden, A Twelve Months Residence in the West Indies During the Transition from Slavery
to Apprenticeship, Vol. 1, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1835, pp. 99–101.
7. Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans From the Era of the Slave
Trade, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968, p. 106.
8. Ibid., p. 153.
9. Ibid., p. 162, and Madden, A Twelve Months Residence, op. cit., Vol. 2, pp. 128–130.
10. Madden, A Twelve Months Residence, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 129.
11. Ibid.
12. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982, p. 247.
13. Ibid.
14. Reverend George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica, Vol. 2, West Port, CT: Negro University
Press, pp. 425–426 (originally published London: John Murray, 1828).
15. Abigail B. Bakan, Ideology and Class Con� ict in Jamaica: The Politics of Rebellion, Montreal:
McGill–Queens University Press, 1990, p. 66.
16. The Holy Qur’an, Surah Muhammad.
17. ‘Surah Muhammad’, Commentary 221, Verses 20–38, The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an, text,
translation and commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.
18. Curtin, Africa Remembered, op. cit., p. 164, and Madden, A Twelve Months Residence, op. cit., Vol.
2, pp. 135–136.
19. J. H. Buckner, The Moravians in Jamaica, London: Longman Brown, 1854, p. 52.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 63.
22. Richard Hart, ‘Slaves Who Abolished Slavery’, in Blacks in Bondage, Vol. 1, Kingston: Institute of
Social and Economic Research, 1980, p. 117.
23. Madden, A Twelve Months Residence, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 141.
24. Craton, Testing the Chains, op. cit., pp. 315–316, based on CO 137/185.
25. Reverend J. T. Dillon, 1824–1924 Centennial Review of the First Baptist Church, Montego Bay,
Jamaica, Kingston: Gleaner, 1923, p. 9.
26. Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, Mona, Jamaica:
University of the West Indies Press, 1998, p. 136.
27. Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, Bilal Ibn Rabah, A Leading Companion of the Prophet Muhammad,
Washington, DC: American Trust, 1977, p. 58.
28. Sultana Afroz, ‘Islam and Slavery through the Ages: Slave Sultans and Slave Mujahids’, Journal of
Islamic Law & Culture, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2000, p. 97.
29. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, op. cit., p. 135.
30. The Holy Qur’an, Surat Al-KaŽ run.
31. Bakan, Ideology and Class Con� ict in Jamaica, op. cit., p. 52.
32. Diouf, Servants of Allah, op. cit., p. 48.
33. Ibid., p. 53.
34. Ibid.
35. Craton, Testing the Chains, op. cit., p. 301.
36. Madden, A Twelve Months Residence, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 140.
37. The Holy Qur’an, 2:101.
38. Buckner, The Moravians, op. cit., p. 51.
39. Madden, A Twelve Months Residence, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 133.
40. Buckner, The Moravians, op. cit., p. 53.
41. Slave Insurrection, 6 January 1832, CO 137/181.
42. Al-Hadis, Mishkat-ul-Masabih, Vol. 2, commentary and translation by Alhaj Maulana Fazlul
Karim, New York: Islamic Book Service, 1994, p. 459.
43. The Holy Qur’an, 3:195 and 4:25.
44. Abdul Wahid Hamid, Islam the Natural Way, London: Muslim Education and Literary Services,
1989, p. 131.
45. Reverend Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, London: Hamilton, Adams, 1853, p. 118.
46. Reverend Dillon, The Centennial Review, op. cit., p. 7; and Trial of Samuel Sharpe, 19 April 1832,
CO 137, 304–313 reveals slaves testifying the oath administered by Sharpe.
47. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle for People’s Liberation, Kingston:
API for the National Heritage Week Committee, 1977, p. 27.
48. Bakan, Ideology and Class Con� ict in Jamaica, op. cit., p. 56.
49. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, op. cit., p. 143.
50. Rev. Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, op. cit., p. 115.
51. Ibid., p. 115.
52. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, op. cit., pp. 56, 63.
53. Brathwaite, Nanny, Sam Sharpe and the Struggle, op. cit., p. 23.
54. Michael Craton, ‘Emancipation from Below? The Role of the British West Indian Slaves in the
Emancipation Movement, 1816–34’, in ed. Jay Hayward, Out of Slavery: Abolition and After,
London: Frank Cass, 1985, p. 120.
55. Letter writtten by Sharpe addressed to the Managing Committee of the Jamaican Auxiliary Church
Missionary Society, 22 March 1830, Church Missionary Society, West Indies Mission Records,
1819–1861, C/WO, 3–12.
56. Governor Belmore to Goderich, 14 December 1831, CO 137/179.
57. Sultana Afroz, ‘From Moors to Marronage: The Islamic Heritage of the Maroons in Jamaica’,
Journal Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1999, pp. 161–179.
58. Joao Jose Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 156.
59. Rev. Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, op. cit., p. 120.
60. The Holy Qur’an, 3:105.
61. Rev. Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery, op. cit., p. 117.
62. Rev. Dillon, The Centennial Review, op. cit., p. 8; and Narrative of Certain Events Connected with the
Late Disturbances in Jamaica and the Charges Preferred Against the Baptist Missionaries in that Island,
London: Mission Society, 1832, p. 2.
63. Rev. Dillon, Centennial Review, op. cit., p. 8.
64. Narrative of Certain Events, op. cit., p. 2.
65. Ibid.
66. Michael Craton, ‘Emancipation from below?’ in ed. Hayward, Out of Slavery, op. cit., p. 120.
67. Narrative of Certain Events, op. cit., p. 2.
68. Bakan, Ideology and Class Con� ict in Jamaica, op. cit., p. 64.
69. Diouf, Servants of Allah, op. cit., p. 160.
70. Quoted by Craton, ‘Emancipation from below?’, op. cit., p. 110.
71. Slave Disturbances, CO 137/181, King’s House Jamaica, 6 January 1832.
72. The Holy Qur’an, 2:191.
73. The Holy Qur’an, 3:170.
74. Bakan, Ideology and Class Con� ict in Jamaica, op. cit., p. 65.
75. Rev. Bleby, The Death Struggles of Slavery, p. 116; and for Mu-minun, see Asghar Ali Engineer,
Rethinking Issues in Islam, London: Sangam Books, 1998, p. 8.

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Who is Cedric J. Robinson? Was he not the guy who introduced Cheikh Anta Diop to wider audience thanks to when he was chief editor in Race & Class?

quote:

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Cedric J. Robinson

History, philosophy, rhetoric are claimed to be the very foundations of western scholarship: from them we construct our knowledge of the world, our understanding of that knowledge and our power of conveying that understanding; they are the root of all social conceptualisation. Yet what if history, philosophy, rhetoric have themselves been stunted at birth, diminished in their capacities, crammed into spaces too small to contain them? What would that mean for the ways in which we conceive and bring about the transformation of our societies? What would it mean for our understanding of how to effect social justice? It is a question that scarcely even occurs within the academy, let alone the busy workaday world of getting and spending and laying waste our powers. It is a question forbidden by the habits of thought, the presumptions, the assumptions that render us quiescent to power. But it is the question at the heart of Cedric Robinson’s life-work. It is the question that makes that work sometimes difficult – for how do you step outside the unthought thought patterns of a life-time, of generations – it is the question that makes his work so exciting – for what liberation to see the world in a new light – it is a question of increasing urgency in an increasingly unequal, increasingly ideologically driven world.

Only, perhaps, have mystics asked such questions; but there, the return is always, except fleetingly, to the divine. Here, it is to the divine and human agency, both at once, each inhering in the other. It is a truism that history is always written by its victors, but what has not been previously understood is how notions of political order, of the arrangement of the very fabric of society, of authority and obedience, of the movement of time and progress have themselves been written to a particular script, created out of a particular and not necessarily inevitable pattern of socioeconomic development. ‘I have sought to expose’, stated Robinson in Terms of Order, ‘from the vantage point inherited from a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual streams, those contradictions within Western civilization which have been conserved at the cost of analytical coherence.’ Confronted with a chaotic, fragmented reality, the impulse of most analysts and commentators is, as Robinson shows, to impose a framework, by excluding what does not fit, in a process of self- or system-serving orderliness. Robinson, as this issue of Race & Class attempts to demonstrate, proceeds by incorporation, by recuperation of what is deemed outside the framework, whether political, sociological or philosophical, bringing the insights of each to bear on the other; celebrating the mystic and the rebel; the medieval peasant and the maroon in their attempts at turning the world upside down.

‘Thinking in order to do’ was one of Race & Class’s founding precepts, articulated in its first editorial. But thinking in order to do requires, as well, new ways of seeing not only what is to be done but also of what has been done. This is the hallmark of Robinson’s scholarship, whether in his conceptualisation, analysis and historical documentation of the Black radical tradition, as in Black Marxism; in his revelation of the wholeness of Black resistance in America (Black Movements in America); and in his restoration of a far older, wider and more varied socialism than is dreamt of in Marxist philosophy (An Anthropology of Marxism), for there is, indeed, more in heaven and earth. The lineage of black resistance in all its multifarious forms, the restoration of what was hitherto rendered invisible, is what gives his scholarship its dynamic thrust. It is Robinson who has made the understanding and tracing of that lineage crucial to all serious radical scholarship on the Black diaspora; it is Robinson who has given it a habitation and a name. It is Robinson who has inspired and influenced a community of scholars to take on that enterprise.

It has taken an unconscionably long time for the magnitude of his contribution to Black studies, to political philosophy, to history, to the study of culture, to begin to be recognised. This issue of Race & Class is one attempt to redress that – and, published in the UK’s Black History Month, to throw light on the true weight and significance of what is implied by Black History. Modest to a fault, Cedric Robinson could never, in Whitman’s words, celebrate himself and sing himself. But he could, with Whitman, say,

‘What I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you’.

A. Sivanandan and Hazel Waters, Race & Class Vol. 47(2)

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Black Marxism is divided into three parts: the history of European capitalism and radicalism, the origins of black radicalism, and black radicalism's relationship to Marxism. The first section examines European socio-economic history, and its chief purpose is to analyze how "racial capitalism" developed. Now a familiar theoretical position, Robinson argues that the rise of industrial capitalism was built on a culture of racial construction. Emergent labor classes and ethnic minorities could be assembled through national identity formations--pitted against one another--to serve the dominant ideology. The Irish peasants' relocation to England during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, for example, occasioned the opportunity for "an ideological and physical drifting apart of the two 'races'": English and Irish (41). Thus "race" as a strategic mechanism for social control led to the immanence of "racialism" in Western civilization. Racialism ordered "the very values and traditions of consciousness through which the peoples of [End Page 368] these ages came to understand their worlds and their experiences" (66). Radicalism then rose in Europe as a revolt against capitalism but also as a resistance to nationalism, racialism, and racial capitalism.

Black Marxism's inquiry into the constructedness of both the "Negro" and whiteness in the next section, "The Roots of Black Radicalism," is also now familiar territory. Despite its early appearance in the trajectory of "race construction" theory, Robinson's study of slave ideology's arrogation of cultural identity cannot be classified merely as prologue, as this comment illustrates:


The "Negro," that is the color black, was both a negation of African and a unity of opposition to white. The construct of Negro, unlike the terms "African," "Moor," or "Ethiope" suggested no situatedness in time, that is history, or space, that is ethno- or politico-geography. The Negro had no civilization, no cultures, no religions, no history, no place, and finally no humanity that might command consideration. (81)


Having established the context for the development of race construction under industrial capitalism, slavery, and imperialism, Black Marxism then provides a concise history of black resistance in the Caribbean, Brazil, North America, and Africa (140-66), thus preparing the way for the final section on black radicalism's relationship to Marxist theory.

Part three recovers the history of a diaspora of the black intelligentsia, examining principally how such figures as Du Bois, James, and Wright responded to Marxism. Black Marxism argues not only for an awareness of the centrality of Marxist consciousness in black radical thought, but contends as well for a recognition of the centralization of black resistance and liberation struggle in the historical development of radical internationalist labor politics. In other words, while Marxism helped shape black radicalism, black resistance contributed significantly to the formation of twentieth-century Marxism. Robinson insists, moreover, that the formations of organizations like the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) and even the United Negro Improvement Association "would have enormous consequence for the American Communist Party's efforts at organizing Blacks"(213). The ABB began as a black revolutionary nationalist organization; then, as Caribbean members like Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and W.A. Domingo grew to be Marxist in consciousness, the Brotherhood soon "came to be influenced by the socialism of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and state Bolshevism" (217). [End Page 369] Robinson also historicizes the rise of Caribbean Leftism, anticipating Winston James's Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America. 6 Black Marxism depicts how the Trinidad Workingmen's Association's agitation against imperialist-capitalist oppression would influence C.L.R. James's move toward Marxism (241-86).

Finally, Robinson recovers Richard Wright's Marxist orientation, characterizing Wright's complex disposition toward American communist orthodoxy in a way that sounds very much like one of the central messages of Black Marxism. That is, although Wright saw that the "Negro" was an invention of oppressive ideology, Robinson argues, Wright also understood that the enforcement of an institutionalized poverty and an alienation from bourgeois culture positioned blacks perfectly for engaging in radical proletarian struggle (305). At the end of Black Marxism, Robinson's champions are Du Bois, James, and though it may surprise those who have not encountered this book, Wright, a figure who, like Ralph Ellison, has for decades served as a source for many received assumptions about the "failure" of black Marxism.


Before concluding, a note is warranted on the attention Robinson's work deserves. Robin D.G. Kelley's newly added foreword to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism ponders why the book has not been conferred more critical attention, and indeed it is puzzling that Black Marxism has not been as influential as it deserves to be. Echoing Cornel West's review essay a few years after its publication, Kelley notes that few reviews of Black Marxism ever appeared; although West expresses somewhat mixed opinions of Robinson's work, he notes how the book unfortunately "fell through the cracks" (xviii). 10 Moreover, the foreword chastens Paul Gilroy and Winston James for slighting Black Marxism: Gilroy for his brusque criticism of Robinson's thesis in The Black Atlantic; 11 James for omitting any mention of Robinson's scholarship in Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia. Kelley suggests that a "conspiracy of silence" cloaks the history of the text's public notice (xv). There is very likely something to this argument, as West himself suggests. The fact that both Gilroy and James have spent much of their time working in the U.K. does not absolve their inattention. Nonetheless, another, albeit probably ancillary reason in the regrettable lack of attention accorded this work is the reality that Black Marxism has been a bit challenging to locate. Published by Zed Press in the U.K. in 1983, availability has been limited in the U.S. (and, one suspects, limited even in Britain). The academic community should be grateful to the University of North Carolina Press for making this vital text finally so widely accessible.

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intentionally distorting African history just to boost your particular choice in religions.

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Oh yea, try to sell the idea Nile valley civilization or Diop, when you're the only Black person in university. You Troll!

I'm a "traitor" when I'm defending my religion but not Diop and my African heritage!
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 


Jamaica's Muslim past: disconcerting theories



File photo
Colonel Wright, right, of the Accompong Maroons leads other Maroons in paying tribute to Kojo of Accompong, St. Elizabeth, as they celebrated Kojo's Day in 1982.

Maureen Warner-Lewis, Contributor

Some weeks ago, Gordon Mullings issued a challenge to historians to comment publicly on the claims put forward by Dr. Sultana Afroz, a member of the Department of History at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, regarding the high number of Muslim slaves who came to Jamaica and the Muslim foundations of the island's Maroon communities. Although not a historian by training, I have researched both African and Caribbean history enough to put forward my views with some degree of confidence.

There is no doubt that there were Muslims among the enslaved brought to the Caribbean. My oral interviews in the 1960s with Trinidadian descendants of such persons, bore testimony to this, findings which were published in the African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletins 5 and 6 (1972, 1973), later republished in my Guinea's Other Suns' (1991). These foreparents had come from the Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and Mandingo ethnic groups of West Africa. Of these groups, the Mandingo of the Senegambia region were most associated with Islam. The religious ideas of these Muslims as well as the writing skills in Arabic which several of them possessed had in fact caught the attention of European planters, among them Jamaican-based Bryan Edwards (1819).

In fact, their numeracy and writing skills allowed them to secure jobs as storekeepers and tally clerks on estates. But many of the Africans who had come into contact with Islam before migrating were not literate in Arabic, and it is the literacy of those who belonged to families of established Muslim priests and scholars which most readily attracted the attention of European commentators.

ATTENDED MUSLIM SCHOOLS

Having attended Muslim schools, they were able to recite short or long sections of the Koran, as well as write Arabic words and letters. Indeed, Jonas Mohammed Bath of Port of Spain, Trinidad, wrote several petitions in English and Arabic during the 1830s on behalf of other Muslims who wished to be repatriated to their native lands.

In a 1974 article, Carl Campbell set out the life story of Mohammedu Sisei of the Gambia, who had arrived in Trinidad as a demobilised West India Regiment soldier in 1816 and who, through the agency of the Royal Geographical Society of England did return to the Gambia.

In an almost similar vein, Magistrate R. R. Madden of Jamaica alerted anti-slavery and Africa colonisation interests in London to the Arabic autobiography (1830s) of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, otherwise called Edward Donlan in Jamaica.

Moravian and Baptist missionaries collected other autobiographies; and European and American missionaries commented on the arguments they conducted with Muslims regarding the relative positions of Jesus, Abraham and other sacred figures shared by the Christian and Islamic orders of divinity. There is therefore, in the travelogues and histories of the 18th 19th centuries, mention of Muslim Africans, but the comment is consistently made that the presence of such persons was small.

Of course, Europeans did not understand much about the lives of the slaves. So other evidence must be adduced to bring to light fuller understandings of the Caribbean past. An important strand of evidence lies in the data on sources and destinations of the Caribbean's enslaved populations.

Orlando Patterson's ethnic ratios of slave imports into Jamaica given in The Sociology of Slavery (1967) have been consistent with the findings of later analysts such as Curtin, Higman, Eltis and others. Between 1655 and 1700 after the British seized the island, the main slave sources were the Gold Coast and the Senegambian Windward Coast comprised of today's Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast.

In the first half of the 18th century (1700-1750), the Windward Coast and Angola at the south-eastern extreme of the slaving zone parted with 27 per cent, and 33 per cent came from the Slave Coast (today's Togo and the Republic of Benin, previously called Dahomey), while the neighbouring Gold Coast yielded 25 per cent. By the second half of the 18th century, there was a noticeable shift toward the Niger and Cross deltas of today's Nigeria and Cameroon, but between 1790 and 1807 when the traffic was outlawed there was a rapid increase in slaves exported by the British from the Congo and Angola.

By contrast, Afroz in her 1995 article on "The Unsung Slaves: Islam in Plantation Jamaica" identifies Jamaican slaves as being Mandinka, Fula, Susu, Ashanti and Hausa, without indicating their relative strengths vis-a-vis other significant ethnicities such as Igbo-Ibibio from the Niger and Cross River deltas, Ewe-Fon from Togo and Dahomey, and people from Congo and Angola. Four of her five named categories came from cultures which had been either minimally, partially, or heavily converted to Islam between the 8th to the 19th centuries.

In a similar non-rigorous manner, by her 1999 article "From Moors to Marronage: the Islamic Heritage of the Maroons", Afroz moves from indicating that Muslims (called Moors) in Spain were among the earliest Spanish settlers in the Americas to speaking of Jamaica's Maroon settlements as being 'Muslim'.

Thereafter, her article continues to make extravagant claims for Muslim influence among them: the fact that windward and leeward Maroon links are couched in "brother" and "sister" terms; that Maroon communities are governed by councils; that Nanny's other name, reputedly Sarah, is Muslim; that since Salaam aleikum (peace be with you) has been used by the Moore Town Maroons, and since this term is confined to greetings among Muslims rather than by Muslims to non-Muslims, then this serves as proof that Muslim culture dominated Moore Town and that Islam was its "unifying force".

Regarding the salutation, studies on residual and dying languages show that grammatical forms in their original languages become abridged when languages are used by isolated minority groups who are under pressure to acquire the dominant languages of an exile environment; and the infrequency of usage also leads to a non-observance of the social conventions which govern the use of particular phrases or words, such as the appropriate differentiation between pronouns which are emphatic versus non-emphatic, familiar versus respectful.

Since speakers of a language most often speak it among themselves, Arabic speakers would most commonly use Salaam aleikum, rather than 'Assalamo-Ala-Manittaba'al Huda' which Afroz indicates is the proper greeting from a Muslim to a non-Muslim.

Furthermore, the shorter, less complicated phrase would be the one most likely to be remembered in a situation of exile, where an immigrant language is in disadvantageous competition with other languages.

As for the other claims, these are similarly untenable as proof of intense Muslim influence. African cultures in general use certain basic kinship terms, such as "father", "mother", "brother", "sister", "uncle", "aunt", "husband", "wife", to signal relationships among individuals for which European languages add "in-law", "adopted", "half-", or use words such as "cousin" or "friend"

In like fashion, all over Africa alliances between communities, villages, and ethnic groupings are rationalised in terms of descent from common ancestors, thus making the groups "brothers" and "sisters".

Another distortion is Afroz's, assertion that Akan day-names such as Kojo, Kwao and Kofi are Arabic. These names are so embedded in the Akan tradition of the Fanti (Coromanti) and Ashanti that in their ancient and cryptic drum poetry and religious verse, one of the aspects of God, Nyankopong or the Great Ananse, also bears Kwaku, the birthday-name for those born on Wednesday. And Mother Earth is named Asase Yaa, the final name being given to females born on Friday.

Given the fact that Islam did not become a serious political force in the royal court of Ashanti until the second half of the 1700s, it is surprising that names so deeply embedded in the Akan and Ga cultures to the east and west of the Volta River and extending from the savannah lands bordering the Sahel in the north and southward to the Gulf of Guinea coast could be Arabic in their source.

MUSLIM INFLUENCE

This is because Ashanti was one of several West African kingdoms where Muslim influence was confined to the royal court, rather than an aspect of mass popular culture and worldview.

Islam had penetrated sub-Saharan Africa from North Africa in the eighth century. Its first host was the ancient kingdom of Ghana in the vicinity of present-day Mali. It was introduced by Berber traders who opened up the trans-Saharan gold trade from Ghana to the Mediterranean.

Over the next 11 centuries, the international contacts stimulated by the trade in gold, slaves, salt, and kola, and the need of sub-Saharan rulers to communicate with the Arab world of traders, lawyers, and scholars led African kings to recruit Arabic speaking scribes-cum-merchants as diplomats and interpreters at their courts.

This process took place at different times at varying locations from west to east across the savannah belt of West Africa, and in some cases this collaboration led to the conversion to Islam of court elites.

By cultural osmosis, and sometimes by upsurges of Islamic religious militancy, the village-level leadership, and later commoners, eventually became converted from various forms of African animistic religion and ancestor veneration to the monotheism and international religious culture of Islam. In contrast to Ashanti and Yoruba, by the 14th century Islam had already extensively penetrated into the urban culture of the Senegambian peoples.

The contention that the final segment of Juan de Bolas' name was a Yoruba name originating from Arabic is another glib assertion. In the first place, the Yoruba did not figure in the slave trade till the late 17th century whereas de Bolas or Lubolo or Libolo lived in Jamaica in the mid-17th.

Furthermore, "Bola is easily decoded as comprising two Yoruba segments of meaning. Then the assignation of Sarah as Arabic might be more helpfully denoted as Semitic, that is, common to the languages of the Red Sea, such as Hebrew and Arabic. This applies to names like Abraham/Ibrahim, Solomon/Suleiman, Miriam/Miramu, and so on. "Sarah" having entered into English language and culture through Biblical influence, it would be preposterous to claim that every British girl who bore the name Sarah or Sally was Jewish, just as the slaves who carried such names cannot be identified as either Muslim or Jewish on that ground.

Another custom deeply embedded in African culture was prostration on the ground by the subordinate in deference to a superior. It was already the practice in Central Africa when the Portuguese arrived in the Congo at the end of the 15th century, and the northeastern segment of the vast Congo Basin only felt the effects of Islam approaching from East Africa in the 19th century.

Prostration in its full form, in which the subject lies full-length on the ground face downward in the presence of the superior in social status or age, or in truncated forms which involve touching the hands to the earth, is widely practised among several peoples of West Africa and predates Islamic intervention. Maroon Kojo's act of prostration during the signing of the Treaty with the British in 1739 cannot therefore be ascribed to Islamic influence in the light of the acts of respect and social distance which are indigenous to so many African cultures.

Another instance advanced by Afroz to assert the Islamic affiliation of Jamaican Maroons is the initial phrase of the Treaty drawn up between the British authorities and the Leeward Maroons led by Kojo (Cudjoe). The Treaty begins with the words "In the name of God, Amen," the equivalent to Arabic Bismillah "In the Name of Allah". Afroz asserts that "such an introduction to a treaty or contract was never the precedent in Christendom Europe."

On the other hand, the phrase in the Treaty occurs at the beginning of some British wills, and possibly was a reflection of the testator's religious faith. To cite two instances I know of, it occurs at the start of a will made by Sarah Hart in St. Elizabeth in 1822 and registered in 1834, and in a Scottish will registered in 1818, which begins: "Follows the Probate of the Defuncts last will and testament: In the name of God Amen. I Robert Douglass of Mains..." Indeed, it is clear that Kojo did not himself draw up the wording of the Treaty; the British would hardly have allowed him that privilege. He was a formidable military tactician, but his signing the Treaty with an x indicates that the writing styles of legal documents was outside of his specialisation and that he wrote neither in Roman nor Arabic letters.

QUESTIONABLE DEVICE

Yet another questionable device in Afroz's two articles is the application of the term jihad to label acts of war and rebellion on the part of slaves and Maroons in Jamaica, Suriname and, by association in the same sentence, Haiti. Because two Suriname Maroon leaders bear names which she identifies as Arabic, her deduction is that their military actions constituted jihad.

Such an attribution cannot be made unless proof is adduced as to the motives for their actions. Similar over-reading affects her designation of the 1831-32 Jamaican slave rebellion as inspired by motives to effect an Islamic jihad.

No such evidence emerged in the several inquiries into the prolonged event and no Muslims were specifically singled out as pivotal to the action. Were Sam Sharpe and his principal lieutenants Muslim, then it is strange that they did not use the forum of their trials, their interviews with pastors, or their execution gibbets to proclaim their Islamic faith.

All the same, there might well have been either crypto- or active Muslim believers among the hundreds of slaves who participated in the uprising. The sole piece of evidence that suggests a link in the mind of a contemporary slave was recorded by magistrate Madden regarding Muhammad Kaba of Spice Grove estate in Manchester who in Jamaica also carried the names Robert Peart and Robert Tuffit.

Given the repression by government, militia, and anti-missionary civilian elements, that followed the widespread devastation of the uprising, Kaba's wife destroyed a letter in Arabic which had been hand-delivered to Kaba in 1831 from a Muslim friend in Kingston. It was believed to have been written in Africa by a Muslim cleric and it "exhorted all the followers of Mahomet to be true and faithful, if they wished to go to Heaven."

What else it said is not recorded. But Kaba's wife thought it might be incriminating at a time when in several parishes local militia and army personnel were carrying out house-to-house searches and were posted outside churches, while slaves were being put to death on the slightest suspicion of disloyalty.

Indeed, Brother Pfeiffer, a German Moravian pastor, had been arrested in St. Elizabeth on January 7, taken on the 9th to Mandeville in Manchester and tried, and came within an inch of being executed, in addition to which Craton (1982) alludes to some events in Manchester on the night of January 11, 1832 which led to the army shooting six and executing two, so that there was reason for alarm by Kaba's wife, especially as Kaba had become a Moravian and so might have come under special scrutiny at this time.

If the letter to Kaba advanced the cause of jihad, it might have had the effect of triggering rebellion, in the way in which Muslim slaves rose against bondage in the city of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil, in January 1835.

In the Brazilian case, there was evidently a sufficiently large Muslim community of Yoruba and Hausa slaves united by a supra-ethnic religion to have made this prospect feasible, despite the fact that these two ethnicities had been engaged in a religious-political war in Africa since the end of the 1800s and this was feeding the 19th century slave trade with many war captives.

But there has not so far emerged evidence of concentrations of Yoruba or Nago in Jamaica sizeable enough to have spread their influence and shaken the system, though there are known to have been pockets of Nago in the post-slavery period in Hanover (where etu is practised), at Abeokuta in Westmoreland, in St. Mary and St. Thomas, and of course, there may have been a settlement at Naggo Head in St. Catherine. But there does appear to have been loose interconnected groupings of Muslim slaves generally referred to as "Mandingo" who debated the authenticity of Christianity even as they joined various Christian religions.

This network takes vague shape in the writings of magistrate Madden, even though he clearly did not comprehend the complexity of the religious lives of individuals such as Peart/Kaba.

Kaba's religious questionings also gained the attention of the Moravian clerics John Lang and Henry Buchner, while the recent discovery of a notebook with pastoral advice on prayer, fasting, and marriage written by Kaba in Arabic sheds more light on his spiritual conflicts and preoccupations. The contents of that notebook were discussed by Yacine Daddi Addoun and Paul Lovejoy in a paper on 'The Arabic Manuscript of Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu of Jamaica, c. 1823' at the Caribbean Culture conference at Mona in January 2002.

It is very useful that the understanding of Caribbean history should have the benefit of analysts who know the Arabic language, religion, and culture. It allows the researcher so equipped to spot information which another would miss. As for example, when Afroz (1999) informs us that the Koranic terms Din and Dunya still form "an integral part of the vocabulary of some of the living elderly Maroons in Mooretown, Portland."

Unfortunately, the writer does not divulge precisely in what context or what sentences these terms were used, or whether the words were suggested to the speakers and responses thus elicited.

This lack of proper supporting evidence undermines the validity of her discovery. In general, then, it is to be lamented that Afroz's effort to throw new light on Caribbean history and culture is discredited by constant slippage from probability to bolder and bolder assertions, by misapplication of terminology, and disconcerting manipulation of evidence.

Dr. Maureen Warner-Lewis is a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at the UWI, Mona.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

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In my past reading experience the Outliers of the
southern USA, the Maroons of the Caribbean, and
the Palenques and Quilombos of South America,
were not in the least Muslim societies.

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"Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The African Muslim Uprising in Bahia, 1835,"
Joao Jose Reis; Arthur Brakel

Review author[s]: Thomas E. Skidmore

Review author[s]: Thomas E. Skidmore Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 2. (Apr., 1995), pp. 389-390.


Religion and Slave Rebellion in Bahia
THOMAS E. SKIDMORE
History Department, Brown University, Providence, R. I. 02912, U.S.A. 28 vii 94
_________________________________________________
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. By Joåo José Reis. Tnanslated by
Arthur Brakel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 . 281 pp.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil is a major contribution to our knowledge of slavery, race relations, and the history of Africans in the Amenicas. The author, a leading Brazilian historian from the region about which he writes, is a pioneer in writing Brazilian social history. Translated and expanded from the Brazilian edition, the book focuses on “the most effective urban slave rebellion even to occur on the American continent.” The rebels numbered in the hundreds, and some 500 were given punishments ranging from death to deportation. The uprising alarmed authorities throughout Brazil and led to draconian new legislation governing slaves.

The revolt has long fascinated historians because of its Muslim component. Its leaders were all African-born slaves or freedmen, and the target of their anger was the rest of the society of Bahia—whites and all others born in Brazii, especially the mulattos who dominated the police force. The rebels were primanily Yorubas who had been converted to Islam, and it was their religion that had given them the sense of identity and dignity that facilitated the planning and execution of the conspiracy. Jewelry and documents found on the rebels confirmed that it was a truly Muslim-led movement which also swept up some discontented non-Muslim Africans. Reis argues vigorously that the revolt was not a “jihad” as some have claimed. Rather, he sees religion here as a means of bonding foreign-born slaves to resist the encircing society. The revolt did, however, serve to alert slaveholders to the need to verify the ethnic origins of any newly acquired slaves.

The picture presented here confirms the general view that slave rebellion was easier in urban settings, where slaves moved with greater ease than in the countryside. Furthermore, the Muslims were aided by their ability to use Arabic. Most interesting, the rebels not only did not seek to enlist Brazilian-born slaves but saw the latter as part of the enemy.

Rejs’s work also confirms that by the early 19th century the Brazilian elite was fixed on the idea of a “whiter” Brazil. This policy was evident in the justifications for repression and punishment after the revolt. Such an objective was ironic in view of the fact that Bahia was about 70% nonwhite at this time. The authorities came up with quaint language to describe the objects of their wrath. The rebellious Africans were termed “dangerous guests” and finally “treacherous guests.” It was surely a reflection of Brazilian elite culture to refer to slaves as “guests,” much in the tradition of Brazilian cordialidade.

Reis has produced a superb analysis of these important events that will be of interest to ethnohistorians and anyone interested in the development of modern race relations in the Americas.

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Some people are happy to serve their Massa.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
ROFL,

The same article that claimed one quote from Diouf?

No Brill?
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 
It's fun watching you burst a ventricle
because you obvious only selectively
read what I wrote and so draw silly
conclusions and present fabrications
that never came from anything I ever
wrote.

Keep it up you're hillarious!

If you bothered to actually read what
I wrote you'd see where I acknowledged
African Muslim presence in the Americas
and rebellions they were responsible
for and the best I know of for info
on African Muslim presense and
accomplishments in the Americas.

As it is you're responses are just filled
with blind mad dog hatred because one
poster attacks Islam and African Muslims.
Being a newbie (under the name Arwa) you
missed out on everything I wrote last
season in defense of African's right
to profess Islam and snippets from
hadith on black and red.

As a bad example of any spirituality
you blindly lash out like a dog struck
by a stone and begin a name calling
tirade to antagonistically pit one
African against another. And why?
Because I don't agree with Afroz
on the spiritual identity of the
Jamaicans involved in the Christmas
Rebellion and gave the opinion of
a Jamaican from the island's premier
newspaper.

Don't you know people have the right
to disagree whether you like it or
not and their reasoning for doing
so is just as valid, or more so,
than the reasoning behind what
was originally stated.

If anybody's serving a massa, just
remember the pointing hand of
accusation only presents one finger
out while the other three point
in to you and the thumb pleads
for the Creator to truly judge.

So far I've decided not to indulge
your attempts to draw me into a
sophmoric bout of insult swapping
so go ahead and call me every
name in the book, but there is
One who watches and judges.

It's fun watching you burst a ventricle
because you obvious only selectively
read what I wrote and so draw silly
conclusions and present fabrications.

Keep it up you're hillarious!
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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The accounts of Reverend Bridges reveal his anguish over the strong conviction of the Islamic faith of many of the slaves in Jamaica who had been baptized by him. The mere sprinkling of water had no effect on the SuŽfis who had become purged of self and its desires. Bridges writes:

… amongst the Negroes of Jamaica, who are natives of the northern coasts of Africa, many of its institutions (Islamic) may still be traced by the eye of a careful observer; and whatever maybe the in�fluence of Christianity upon their sable offspring, it is to be feared that they themselves will never change their conduct or their faith …The tribes of Foulis, Madingo, Ghiolofs, and Bambarra … practice the rite of circumcision, and observe the Jente Karafana or Ramadan, with much greater respect and awe than they feel when they allow themselves to be sprinkled with
the waters of baptism. Allah, the Mahometan appelation of the Deity, is still used in the different dialects of these tribes… The Friday is their Sabbath, and though they rank the mother of Jesus as one of the four perfect women of the prophet’s faith, they look upon her Son … as an inferior prophet, famous only for his miracles. They maintain a Marbut, or a priest, in every village; believe implicitly in the doctrine of predestination …

---

Source: Reverend George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica, Vol. 2, West Port, CT: Negro University
Press, pp. 425–426 (originally published London: John Murray, 1828).

quote:

---

Furthermore, the presence of hundreds of Muslim slaves in Jamaica even during the apprenticeship period leading to emancipation, as confiŽrmed and authenticated by Special Magistrate Robert Madden, gives credence to the argument that the insurrection in 1831–1832 was a jihad' against the indignity of slavery. Evidence further suggests that the rebellion had been essentially rural and was led by mature slaves belonging to the slave elite group such as drivers, slave headmen, carpenters, masons, coopers and blacksmiths.

---

Source: Craton, Testing the Chains, op. cit., pp. 315–316, based on CO 137/185.

quote:

---

Intelligence, education, specialized skills, discipline and good disposition, which were the characteristics of the Muslim slaves, must have earned them these elite positions. The exoneration of the white Baptist Missionaries from all criminal charges of inciting their slave members to rebel for the purpose of effecting a change in their state and condition in open court by a jury is also indicative of the misnomer attached to this rebellion as a Baptist War. This is further strengthened by the testimonials of the rebel leaders as to the innocence of the white missionaries.

---

Source: Reverend J. T. Dillon, 1824–1924 Centennial Review of the First Baptist Church, Montego Bay,
Jamaica, Kingston: Gleaner, 1923, p. 9.

quote:

---

Neither did the white brethren come to the assistance of their black brethren during the trial or even before, when blacks were butchered for no other offences than that of coming to chapels like the Baptists, Moravians and Wesleyan Methodists.

---

Source: Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, Mona, Jamaica:
University of the West Indies Press, 1998, p. 136.

quote:

---

Apparently, an uncompromising religious difference existed between the black and white brethren. Guided by the Holy Qur’an, the religious belief of the mujahids (Ž fighters) stood in sharp contrast to Christianity, the faith of the white missionaries and the oppressive slave masters. The Torah enjoins slavery, and Christianity is silent about it. Hence, neither Christianity nor the white Christian brethren had anything to offer to the slaves. However, Islam, according to the words of the Ž first muezzin in Islam, Bilal Ibn Rabah, ‘has left no chance except that it urged the emancipation of slaves, as a mandatory obligation or as a recommended action’

---

Source: Muhammad Abdul-Rauf, Bilal Ibn Rabah, A Leading Companion of the Prophet Muhammad,
Washington, DC: American Trust, 1977, p. 58.

quote:

---

To the Muslim slaves who
had been sprinkled with baptismal water, Christianity, the religion of the spiritually
fossilized bukra massa, represented oppression. Despite � ogging and severe punishments,
even privileged slaves enjoying yearly pensions remained deŽ ant and refused to
leave their religion.

---

Source: Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, op. cit., p. 135.


 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Yesterday:

quote:

---

In my past reading experience the Outliers of the
southern USA, the Maroons of the Caribbean, and
the Palenques and Quilombos of South America,
were not in the least Muslim societies.

---

quote:

---

If you bothered to actually read what
I wrote you'd see where I acknowledged
African Muslim presence in the Americas
and rebellions they were responsible
for and the best I know of for info
on African Muslim presense and
accomplishments in the Americas.

---

 

---

Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Obviously, there is a limit one can quote from Frontpage
 

---

Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Using Bernard Lewise, is that what you call to acknowledge?
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 
Why do I bother answering the breying of an ass?
I'm sure every reader without an axe to grind or
not in search of enemies noticed the below when I
first posted it.

Again, I strongly urge you to study Diouf's work.

quote:

---

Originally posted by alTakruri on 02 August, 2006 06:44 PM:

. . . all diligent
students of Africana already know, that Muslims
were captured and shipped to the Americas where
some retained high levels of Islamic education
and practice.

An excellent study on Muslim Africans in the USA is

Sylviane A. Diouf (clickable link)
Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas
New York: University Press, 1998

I strongly suggest you get a copy and study it so
as to educate yourself to historically documented
African Muslim accomplishments in the Americas. In
it you will learn in which rebellions African Muslims
actually played key roles.

Unfortunately, for those harboring prejudicial
hatred of Islam and the Africans who confess it
there is no immediate remedy. Such folk may one
day realize their bias is no different nor any
more noble than the bias, prejudice, and hatred
that many have for black people and Africans
regardless of religion.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by alTakruri:

In my past reading experience the Outliers of the
southern USA, the Maroons of the Caribbean, and
the Palenques and Quilombos of South America,
were not in the least Muslim societies.

Excepting the Outliers the other resistance states
founded by self-emancipated slaves prominently
featured characteristics of traditional African
ethnies.

For instance Brazilian Quilombos displayed Angolan
cultures, their spirituality would reflect Condomble.
Jamaican Maroons had strong Koromantee cultural
elements, their spirituality was Obeah not Islam.

The dominant spirituality outside the USA was that
related to a Vodoun type strongly resembling the
traditional Yoruba model in practice and pantheon.

In Luso-Hispanic territories African spirituality
was hidden within and/or meshed with Catholicism.
In a place like Jamaica the Protestant Christianity
of the Africans loosely incorporated a very few
traditional elements best noted in "Pentacostal"
expression where roots, shout, and getting the
spirit were as close as they could get to the old
rites like spirit possession, etc.

---

quote:

---

"What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

---

quote:

---

The Jihad of 1831–1832: The Misunderstood Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica

http://layncal.blogspot.com/2006/07/misunderstood-baptist-rebellion-in.html

Also, one of Cedric J. Robinson's masterpiece books, mentions, that there were many other rebellions in the new world; in the Caribbean, Brazil, lead by slaves from Africa--already in the first generations from Atlantic Slave trade.

---

quote:

---

Maroons were Muslims fighting Jihad riiiiggghhhhtt

---

quote:

---

Ibrahim, the son of a Black concubine of the caliph Al-Mahdi (775-785) came very close to being caliph in 817-819 when a faction in Baghdad supported his candidature against the nominated successor of the caliph Al-Ma'mun. In spite of being 'excessively black and shiny' he was preferred by some 'Abasid loyalists to 'Alid candidate of Persian descent (Source: Hunwick, op.cit., p. 28)

---

quote:

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Clyde Winters that is sloppy research to claim Muslim Maroons, we know quite well how Arabs use Islam to Brainwash Afrikans. Clyde Winters were these people Muslim Maroons or Afrikans trapped on foreign soil fighting against their oppressors? which is a NORMAL human behavior against oppression. MUSLIM STAMPING HAS GOT TO STOP EVEN BY YOU CLYDE WINTERS.

Did Nat Turner fight a Jihad also?
Did Harriet Tubman fight a Jihad also?
Why not say that the Jews are fighting a "Jihad" against the Lebanese Arabs.
I see Republicans fighting a Jihad against Democrats here in America.
Feminist fight a Jihad against Men all the time.
MUSLIM STAMPING HAS TO STOP.

---

quote:

---

Although comparable behaviour patterns on the West African coast are rarel}. obvious
from the archaeological record, ethnohistorical research among the Maroons (Francis
1991) indicates that family relationships based on the principle of'shipmates' or 'sipi', as
obtained today among Suriname Maroons (Mintz and Price 1992), continued to be maintained.
Ethnic identities are also based on very vague references to African source-areas
which their traditions recall. Some of the Maroons in eastern Jamaica call themselves
'Kromanti', while others refer to themselves" as' Dokosi' or 'Tindandu' or Asante. Others in
the west end of the island say they are Yoruba, while others claim Arawak ancestry. How can
one identify (he differences? The mosaic picture is largely the result of the roots. Such cultural
mosaics can be identified at such places as Efutu, not to mention that some memories of
African points or departure may have been transformed or completely abandoned.

---

quote:

---

The roots
Africans in the Caribbean
The early inhabitants in the Caribbean may be regarded as a mixture of prehistoric groups
existing in the islands before the Spaniards, Africans who may have arrived in the New
World both before and with the Spaniards, and possibly people of other origins (Morales
1952). The development and growth of societies and social organizations of West Africa are
relevant to the Caribbean after AD 1500. However, one cannot posit cultural uniformity for
the whole of West Africa (Miers and Kopytoff 1977;Curtin 1986; Curtin tl at. 1978; Postma
1990; Honeychurch 1979; Mintz and Price 1985». The study of the traditional systems of
West Africa, as Posnansky (1984) has pointed out, is particularly important for the Caribbean
not just because of the link with the slave trade but also because West African cultural
systems present several authentic characteristics of general development before and after
colonial contacts. Those features formed the basis of observed continuities and adaptations
in the Caribbean (Hall-Alleyne 1982; Kopytoff 1973; Price 1976; Bilby 1984, 1987;
Singleton 1985). Although transformations have been observed in several aspects of the
cultural systems, there still remain elements that indicate the trend, as well as the force, of
various events that have occurred subsequently (Asante 1992; Dalby 1985; Debrunner
1961; Davies 1967; Fage 1958, 1978).

The journey to the New WorLd

Archaeological excavation of the ancient site of Efutu, 15 km inland from the central coast
of Ghana, provides evidence that enables us to speculate about the possible cultural
background or at least the last memories of groups of people and individuals taken as slaves
to the Caribbean. Historical references (Claridge 1915; Bowdich 1821; Dalby 1971, 1977;
Postma 1990; Curtin 1978) as well as oral traditions and ethnographic data provide further
means of identifying individual characteristics of such cultural groups as 'Koromantin',
'Luango', 'Ardra' and 'Calabaris', and help to establish the areas from which various
people were brought to the New World. The wealth and importance of the Kingdom of
Efutu (Fig. I) represented by the archaeological finds, and their relationship with the
ancient village of Koromantse, as it is known by its modern inhabitants, should at least
provide the starting point for reconstructing the travellers' last memory. of their homeland.

The Portuguese and the Dutch were the first Europeans to set up bases from which they
operated local trading activities (Decorse 1987, 1991). Kromantse, a small settlement of the
Fante-speaking people of the then Gold Coast, became the first location from which the
English subsequently commenced their operations. It was from Kromantse that the
English began to ship out slaves in 1631. Consequently, all slaves coming from that point: of embarkation were referred to as 'Kromantine' slaves. The town of Kromantse was, and is
still, a small fishing village on the coast very close to Cape Coast and Elmina, the latter
being the largest of all the slave trading locations on the Gold Coast.

The Kingdom of Efutu
controlled the entire area around Cape Coast and Elmina, and Efutu kings initiated trading
activities with the Europeans (Claridge 1915). Since many of the slaves shipped out passed
through Kromantse, which was in the area controlled by Efutu, life in that kingdom was
clearly the last that slaves experienced before being forced into the journey across the
Atlantic.
The archaeological and historical evidence from Efutu is thus an essential first
step towards identification of connections between the two sides of the Atlantic.
Historians and archaeologists arc now agreed that the slaves often referred to as
'Kromantee people' did not all come from Kromantse. Therefore, although the memof). of
the last experience of life before leaving the West African coast would often have been those
of Kromantse, other cultural backgrounds were also represented.
It is important to take
this into account in attempting a reconstruction of West African cultural traditions in the
Caribbean. Much interpretation of the history of the diaspora depends on knowing the
cultural patterns and the areas whence the slaves were bought. Unfortunately, owing to
limited knowledlege about thc variety of cultural traditions in Africa, the tendency has been
to limit descriptions and interpretations to only a very few ethnic groups such as Asante,
Yoruba or lbo.

Last memories of Africa:

Efutu Kingdom

Historical sources supplement the archaeological record and help to support speculation
about the last memories of Africa that the enslaved would have carried With them. The
earliest reference to Efutu (Fetu) comes from the Portuguese explorer and historian
Pacheco Pereira (Kimble 1937). Perreira, who helped to found Elmina Castle in 1482,
knew many pans of the Gold Coast well, and served as Governor of the colony from 1520 to
1522. He mentioned in his report that about 20 leagues from Cabo Corso (Cape Coast) 'Felta
point is the last place on this coast where we know there is gold and it is much finer than
that which merchants take to be bartered at Mina'. A Dutch map of 1629 shows Efutu
Kingdom with its major village at Cape Coast.
from 1661 to 1668, according to a colonial account, the Kingdom of Efutu ('fetu') was
under the rule of 'Ohin' (the Akan word for king), with the help of court elders. The chief
rode in a hammock accompanied by musicians, stool bearers, shield carriers, and heralds
as well as about a dozen musketeers (Mueller 1973).
Traditions of Efutu even claim that
Cape Coast, the first administrative hcadquaners of the British colonial government, was
founded by Egya Oguaa from Efutu (Fynn 1975, 1976). In the Ulmer Museum, Gennany,
is a sword supposedly owned by one Abraham Hevantzel of Augsburg who was in the Gold
Coast and stayed at Efutu. The sword was presumably obtained from the ruler of the
Kingdom as a gift in the early seventeenth century. Apparently by this time several
kingdoms had sprung up in the central point of the Gold Coast, largely because of the
trade contacts that were then developing along the coast. Efutu, being on the main trade
route of the coastal interior and also a strategic and military point on the route from the
interior to the coast, had become particularly important.
Early European records, including those mentioned above, indicate that Efutu was an
imponant settlement before the coming of the Europeans and one which developed a well
organized political system.

Its wealth was probably a result of the gold trade: gold dust,
locally called sita futuru, gave the settlement its name. According to Nana Kow Adama of
Efutu (aged about eighty-five in 1974), his grandfather used to collect gold from the ground
in the Efutu neighbourhood during the rainy season.
A description of the Kingdom by Mueller (1973) explains the wealth of Efutu in the
following terms:
The capital of Fetu lay some twelve miles inland from Cape Coast. It had a large and busy
market-place which, was also used for singing and dancing. The town itself consisted of a
maze of narrow, deep and often muddy alley ways. It is about three limes the size of the
Village of Ugwa which surrounded Cape Coast Castle. The houses of Cape Coast were often
better than those of Fetu city because many Acanny traden lived there.

David Birmingham (1966:30-1) has identified three seventeenth-century kingdoms in
the coastal regions or the Gold Coast as Aguafa, Fetu and Asebu. These kingdoms consisted
of:
A complex of Fante chiefdoms containing the forts of Kormantin and Anomabu. The three
central kingdoms contained the oldest and most important European trading forts. Elmina
lay on the boundary between Agufo and Fetu, Komenda in Aguafo, Cape Coast Castle and
Fredricksborg in Fetu, and Mouri, the oldest Dutch fort in Asebu.

These references clearly demonstrate the connection between the Kingdom of Efutu and
Kromantse, and also indicate that the connection dates to the period before the earliest
European presence on the coast.
The general picture of Efutu deduced from the discussion of the excavation and the oral
evidence is that by the early seventeenth century Efutu had become a typical coastal
kingdom with a well organized political system, having developed from a humble small
settlement from at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century. It came into early contact
with Europeans and obtained such items as kaolin smoking pipes, beads and drinks in
exchange for gold dust. By the end of the seventeenth century Efutu had absorbed some
features of western culture through the trade. The people of Efutu began to bury their dead
in coffins constructed with nails and handles imported from Europe. The richness of the
coastal trade lured them towards the coast. Famine around the 1860s probably led to the
death of many people at a time and possibly the mass burial. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Efutu became a main camp on the Kumasi-Cape Coast military
route and was used at different times for Fante, European and Asante forces. Perhaps
Efutu's role as a military base resulted in the loss of its wealth. With the formation of the
Fante Confederacy, Efutu became one of the leading members, and seems briefly to have
revived its lost position.
Evidence of the burial of the dead with beads, bracelets and gold ornaments confirms the
peaceful situation of the time. But it would seem that with further growth of the Fante
Confederacy, Efutu gradually became less important. By the middle of the eighteenth
century Efutu, like states in the interior of Ghana such as Begho (Posnansky 1973), Buipe,
Gonja, Kitare (Braimah 1970), Bonomanso (Effah-Gyamfi 1985) and others, had declined
as Asante power vigorously expanded to control the gold trade. Also, the kingdoms of the
middle Niger turned to the coast and captured a large percentage of the western trade.
Mass migrations towards the coast, and domination by Asante power, reduced Efutu and
its neighbours to small states. For the enslaved who left the West African coast, however,
the booming wealth and vigorous trade of the Kingdom of Efutu, as well as its cultural
practices, would have been the last memories which were shared, passed down or secretly
cherished. To what extent are these memories identifiable in the Caribbean?
One cannot adequately comprehend the African cultural heritage in the Caribbean
without first appreciating the dynamism of its life-sustaining elements, which have helped
the cultural heritage to survive beyond the geographical boundaries of the African continent.
Recent research :1nd writing (Price 1976; Sertima 1992; Agorsah 1992a) indicate
that these roots are more complex than had hitherto been thought. More than any other in
the New World, Caribbean culture provided some of the most successful freedom fighters
ever known in historical times, placing resistance in a context within which they tested the

---

quote:

---

Another observation from the archaeological record is that Maroons were not exclusively
African. Material from the earliest phase at Nanny Town is dearly Amerindian indicating
that the earliest Maroons would have been non-African or a mixture of the very earliest
Africans and local Amerindians. Spanish records mention a 1631 expedition sent to flush
out 'runaways' from the Blue Mountains (Morales 19~) and appear to confirm that there
were already Maroons living and thriving in the Blue Mountains of eastern Jamaica.
Identification of West African cultural elements in the Caribbean also depends on the
identification of the panicular regions from which slaves were imported to different places
and at different times. For example, there were preferences of or slaves from particular areas.
Postma (1990) mentions, for example, that the Dutch obtained their slaves generally
referred to as 'Calabaris' from the Bight of Biafra (the region extending from the Niger
delta to Cameroon); the 'Luango' or 'Angola' slaves from the Congo region and the 'Slave
coast', and the 'Cormantin' slaves from the Gold Coast. The Dutch are reported to have
disliked 'Calabari' slaves because they were 'prone to run away or die more readily than
other African slaves'. On the other hand the English were reputed to have preferred
'Cormantins' (although' ArJra' slaves, as those from the Slave coast were called, also
referred to as 'Papas' in Surinam were often rated above the 'Corman tin' and the 'Luango'
especially in the eighteenth century). Such preferences and related issues need to be
examined in order to identify the African roots of Maroons and other groups in the
Americas as well.

---

quote:

---

Clyde Winters please don't tell me I hate Islam because I don't, I used to practice Islam many years ago, until I got hip to the game and learned how ARABS use Afrikans with Islamic brainwashing techniques.
I suggest Clyde Winters that you try to speak with someone from the Sudan that has been victimized by Arab brainwashing and ask them how they feel about Islam because they can tell you the REAL TRUTH about Islam.

---

quote:

---

I would only expect the Devil to STEAL and DECEIVE not Muslims.
Now the Maroons were victims of the AFRIKAN HOLOCAUST so when Muslims try to spin their suffering in order to promote Islam then such behavior is LOW DOWN and DISGRACEFUL especially for a Muslim.

---

Again, you should read the literature about slaves in the Americas. You will find that Muslims slaves were not afraid to acknowledge their faith in Islam.

They are mainly recognized as Believers by the writings they left us, their declaration of faith and example as righteous men and women. They did not separate themselves from fellow Africans, because they believed in One religion while their fellow slaves believed in another, they worshipped their God in their own way while maintaining Unity.

The Black slave Muslims were true Muslims. They were not cowards like Muslims from the Middle East who make themselves into bombs. In every jihad in Brazil, the Muslims made known their objections to their treatment at the hands of their masters before they went to war.Once they were treated justly, they were law abiding slaves--they only fought against injustice.

Living in the land of plenty, I can only imagine how the Muslims were able to keep the faith while enslaved in the Americas, especially in the Spanish lands were slaves were usually worked until they died. Many of us today would probably believe that we were abandoned by God. Yet through all of this hardship the Muslim slaves were sustained in their faith in God, by reciting the Quran and writing phrases from Quran to reinforce their faith.

I feel sorry for you that you let rejection by a group of arrogant people make you lose your religion. But I celebrate the fact that you still maintain faith in God.


Stop attacking the Islamic faith--point out the errors of people who practice the Muslim religion--but stop attacking people who believe in Islam. Shame on you.


.
 

---

Posted by Israel (Member # 11221) on :
 
Clyde,

I wouldn't say that Nat Turner was a Christian, but from what I remember from his autobiography, he definitely was into the New Testament. One of the "divine" commands that he received to fight the oppressors was based on New Testament writings.........Do you have proof that Turner was into Hebrewism?

Also, I read the book, "Servants of Allah: African Muslims enslaved in the Americas". It is an interesting book. Very interesting. It shines light on a dimension of history that is often neglected. It made me wonder if my great-great-great-great whoever was a Muslim...... . Salaam
 

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Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
 
Israel

quote:

---

I wouldn't say that Nat Turner was a Christian, but from what I remember from his autobiography, he definitely was into the New Testament. One of the "divine" commands that he received to fight the oppressors was based on New Testament writings.........Do you have proof that Turner was into Hebrewism?

---

quote:

---

The Black slave Muslims were true Muslims. They were not cowards like Muslims from the Middle East who make themselves into bombs. In every jihad in Brazil, the Muslims made known their objections to their treatment at the hands of their masters before they went to war.Once they were treated justly, they were law abiding slaves--they only fought against injustice.

---

quote:

---

Living in the land of plenty, I can only imagine how the Muslims were able to keep the faith while enslaved in the Americas, especially in the Spanish lands were slaves were usually worked until they died. Many of us today would probably believe that we were abandoned by God. Yet through all of this hardship the Muslim slaves were sustained in their faith in God, by reciting the Quran and writing phrases from Quran to reinforce their faith

---

quote:

---

Stop attacking the Islamic faith--point out the errors of people who practice the Muslim religion--but stop attacking people who believe in Islam. Shame on you

---

quote:

---

I feel sorry for you that you let rejection by a group of arrogant people make you lose your religion. But I celebrate the fact that you still maintain faith in God

---

I feel sorry for you also because you have become so BRAINWASH that you are talking about "LAW ABIDING Slaves", I wonder what law did the oppressed have to follow? maybe the law of you have a right to work until death, you have a right to fifty lashes or to be abused beyond your wildest dreams, were those the laws that forced laborers/Slaves had Clyde Winters?
For the record I did NOT lose my "Religion" I actually gained back my Religion is called using COMMON SENSE to see LIES and CON games and not getting mixed up with LIARS and con-Artist. My holy book is called the daily NEWS paper, I read the current events section every day to help me keep the liars away, next I research to help me find the TRUTH because that's what I need to make me a better person, just some good cup of TRUTH.


WE WILL NEVER FORGET, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.

LOOK AT WHAT ARABS DID TO AFRIKANS, LOOK WHAT ISLAM JUSTIFIED AGAINST AFRIKANS.

quote:

---

The Arab Slave Trade is the longest yet least discussed of the two major trades. It begins in the 7th century AD as Arabs and other Asians poured into Northern and Eastern Africa under the banner of Islam, either converting or subjugating the African societies they came upon. In the beginning there was some level of mutual respect between the Blacks and the more Caucasian-Semitic Arabs. Mihdja, a Black man, is said to be the first Muslim killed in battle while another, Bilal, is regarded as a "third of the faith." Dhu'l-Nun al-Misri, born in Upper Egypt near Sudan, is regarded as the founder of Sufism. Today Sufism's greatest stronghold is in Southern Egypt and Sudan. Islamic prosperity was based upon Black as well as Arabic genius.


The children of a stinking Nubian black---God put no light in their complexion!
Arab Poet, late 600AD,


But as Islamic prosperity grew, so did an air of hostility towards many Blacks, Muslims or otherwise. Some Arabs complained about having to work next to Blacks in high positions. After the Prophet's death, even the descendants of Bilal received negative treatment. Arabic writings became laced with anti-Black sentiment. This reaction of Blacks at the time to this can be seen in the writings of a contemporary 9th Century Black scholar in residence at Baghdad by the name of Abu 'Uthman' Amr Ibn Bahr Al-Jahiz. Al-Jahiz, to confront a growing tide of anti-black sentiment in the Muslim world, published a highly controversial work at the time titled, Kitab Fakhr As-Sudan 'Ala Al-Bidan, "The Book of Glory of the Blacks over the Whites." Al-Jahiz in his work contended that even the Prophet Mohammad's father may have been of African lineage.

These new attitudes towards Blacks by Arabs marked the beginning of African enslavement. Though not based solely on race, the Arab Slave Trade did focus heavily upon Africans whom Arabs now saw as inferior to themselves. At first these Arabs raided African villages themselves seeking humans for sale. This not being always successful, they soon enlisted the aid of fellow African Muslims or recently converted Blacks. Wrapping themselves within Islam, these converts rationalized the slavery of their non Muslim brethren as the selling of "unbelievers." At other times the Arabs would demand tribute in the form of human bodies from Africans weary of the fight against Arabic-Islamic incursions.

The Arabs took advantage of regional wars in Africa to buy captives from the victor. They also used the old divide-and-conquer technique. They worked one group against the other and took or killed the best and strongest.
S.E. Anderson, The Black Holocaust for Beginners

Slave Raids and Markets
The Arab slavers raided at nightfall, during the dinner time. Africans who resisted or tried to run were shot and killed. Most adult men were killed as the Arabs favored women and children for sale. The captives then endured a long and torturous march through the African countryside as the slavers searched and gathered more captives. Young men, women, and children were bound by hand and by neck throughout this journey, enduring beatings and rapes along the way. Those who fell sick or dead were left behind. Others remained bound to living captives.

After surviving the torturous ride aboard the Arab slave ships, Africans were taken to the slave markets. Here Muslim men would inspect their intended purchases. Women and young girls were degradingly probed by these men in public or private stalls to test their sexual worth. Those that did not survive their time in these markets were left out to rot. It is said that that hyenas, very numerous in the region, "gorged themselves on human flesh..." Pictured here is a slave market in East Africa.


Concubines and Eunuchs
Pictured here is an African trader (possibly an Egyptian)with two Sudanese slave girls for sale. The African is a Muslim while the girls are not. The Eastern Slave Trade dealt primarily with African women: a ratio of two women for each man. These women and young girls were used by Arabs and other Asians as concubines. Filling the harems of wealthy Arabs, they often bore them a host of children. This sexual abuse of African women would continue for nearly 1200 years.


The Eastern Slave Trade also dealt in the sale of castrated male slaves: Aghas or eunuchs. Used as guards and tutors, these slaves were central to familial peace, protection and order in many wealthy Muslim households. Eunuchs were created by completely amputating the scrotum and penis of 8-to-12-year-old African boys. Hundreds of thousands of young boys may have been subjected to this genital mutilation. Many bled to death during the gory procedure. The survival rate of this process ranged from 1 in 10 to 1 in 30.

Holocaust: The Numbers
Due to the enormous length of the Arab Slave Trade, from 700 to 1911AD, it is impossible to be certain of the numbers of Africans sold in this system. Estimates place the numbers somewhere around 14 million: at least 9.6 million African women and 4.4 African men.


It has been estimated that in all, at least 14 to 20 MILLION African men, women and children died throughout this trade. (Photos and Information courtesy of The Black Holocaust for Beginners by SE Anderson, A Pictorial History of the Slave Trade, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa by Beachy, Slavery in the Arab World by Gordon Murray and Africa in History by Basil Davidson)

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You are either a ARAB PUPPET or a UNCLE TOM, which is it? What the hell do you mean with that comment about LAW abiding SLAVE. You must be smoking CRACK because that is some straight up B.S you just wrote.
BRAINWASH ARAB WANNABE,

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I read it myself some years ago. Yes, there were African Muslims in the New World during slave times: they said so themselves oftentime. If Turner was Hebrew, why didn't he state SPECIFICALLY that he was Hebrew? Salaam

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What I am saying is that it is not correct to group him under the umbrella of "Hebrew" when it is quite clear that he was influenced by Christianity on some level. Salaam

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The point is that Nat Turner wasn't a Hebrew, period. If we start a bookclub on this website, and everybody reads Nat Turner's autobiography, nobody would imply that Turner was a Hebrew. Again, Dr. Winters, with all due respect, can you specifically PROVE that Nat Turner was a Hebrew? You said that he is, well, please show proof of your assertion.

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I am neither. You must be talking about your dead beat daddy,who failed to teach you manners before he left your whore maami walking the streets of your hometown, selling her HIV ass, to put food on the table for your ignorant butt. But I do know one thing, you are a dumb ass.

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Yes there were law abiding slaves dummy.If slaves did not believe in a Creator, RIGHT DOING and being JUST, they would of murdered their masters. We know from history this never took place, eventhough many of them had the right to do so because of mistreatment at the hands of same.

They did not have time to hate, because they were trying to survive.

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You don't know anything about slavery. If you had studied this area and read the slave narratives you would not have the hate in you for anyone--they knew that hate destroys. This does not mean that they willingly remained docile slaves--it only means that they did what it took to survive --and did not go out of their way to allow Europeans to dominate their conciousness.

You continue to spread half truths. If you knew the history of Black American slaves, or any slaves for that matter, you would know that according to DuBois, it was 100 million, not 10 million slaves killed during the Atlantic slave trade. But you didn't know this because you believe all knowledge has been provided you by the WWW and Europeans. Your research philosophy is that if Europeans said it, it must be true.
"Cause Massa says it".

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Scholarship is based on testing hypotheses or questions.

I will try to explain further. Social science research is about explanations, this results from the fact that the objective of social science is to explain social life. The method of this research is the development of the research question, choosing a design for the study, and deciding on how you will acquire and analyze the data to explain a social phenomena.

The four social science methods are: surveys, ethnogrphy, the study of records and history. To write anthropology and history we directly analyze the data using one's synthesis and reflection of the data under study.

The research question in historical research relates to what really happened at a particular point in time, or at a particular place. This means that the historical method involves reading documents, especially primary documents relating to the time and place you are studying.

Since you are relying on documents and other evidence including anthropological and archaeological knowledge and even gentics today, the historical narration is depended on the quality and abundance of evidence used in writing about a historical event, place and etc. There is no "truth" in writing history, the story we tell is only an approximation of an actual event because we are interpreting this event or place based on the reports of others, may they be the primary records (usually from an eyewitness) relating to an event or the archaeologist's interpretation of the artifacts s/he discovered during excavation.

The historical research method after all is said and done is depended on the historian's interpretation and analysis of the data he is reading. As a result, the historical narrative can not be considered the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because new documents or artifacts may be uncovered that contradict the so-called established "fact".

If "facts" can be manipulated by "new" data, which in turn makes a former truth, false, there is no way we can conduct research based on "facts" because in any type of research the "facts" can change over time, as we acquire new sources of information.


If "facts" change with the discovery of new data, "truth" is transitory, and therefore worthless as a heuristic in the social sciences. This is why social science researchers use the terms confirm and disconfirm, instead of "fact" and "truth" relating to this or that phenomena or event under study.


You ask why history is based on race. It is based on race because history tells stories about people. As a result we have histories of Germany, that discuss Germans, while a history of Japan will discuss Japanese. You can not write a history of any country and its people without writing about race.

If you read a history of WWII historians will discuss the role of different races in the War: Japanese, Germans and Americans. There would be no history without a discussion of race.

The ability of data to determine what is "true" or a "fact" overtime,makes it impossible use truth and facts to determine what happened or didn't happen in the past . A research question therefore can either be confirmed, or rejected based on the evidence, it can not be a "truth" or "fact", due to the temporal nature of data/information.

For the above reasons we must reject a heuristic based on seeking truth and fact. Race will always be involved in writing history because, race is a reality of social life.

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If you were once a Muslim you were a dumb Muslim. This is clear from the fact that you probably never even bothered to read the Quran, you probably waited for somewhat to read and interpret it for you. That is why you constantly talk about Arab brainwashing. Hotep2U you were the only one brainwashed.

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Yes I admit I was once a dumb Muslim, then I started doing research into Islam and gained intelligence and walked away from the LIES that is paraded as truth in Islam, so I know that would also make you a dumb Muslim also because your still stuck in the LIES, now claiming their is a difference between Islam the Religion and Islam the "Faith" proving once again that your BRAINWASHED

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In you little mind you wanted your Arab masters to pat you on the head like a puppy and let you into their clique. Lead you around as the "Main Negro" Muslim (Sorry this job is already taken by Sulayman Nyang formerly of Howard).

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If you had bothered to read the history of Islam in Africa, you would know that the African Muslims were Malikites and rarely followed the ideas of the Arabs. You would also know that Arabs did not sale my ancestors to the European it was Black Africans.

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It is clear that you reject first person reports of historical events. Instead you have an idea about something, and therefore it must be true because you thought of it--and therefore know this or that to be true. This is not research my good man-- it is delusion.

If you fail to verify citations--believe what you will--but I guarantee you no one will take you serious. You have never read a primary document in your life. Your dependence on sources only from the WWW will never provide you with the facts relating to Black History. This information is mainly in archives and the stacks of the great libraries around the world. Your failure to do original research will keep you ignorant, and your feelings of rejection due to your experience with Arabs, will keep you in darkness.

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It is clear from your comments you don't hate Arabs, you hate your Black self because they did not accept you into the fold as the "Boss Negro Muslim". You sad self hater.

I feel sorry for you. Your mind will never expand if you close it to knowledge not baptized by your idol: any European. Shame on you. The Arab didn't brainwash you, you brainwashed yourself dummy.

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Malcolm X, Elijah Muhhamad, Marcus Garvey, and Anta Diop were all admirers of Islam. Are you saying they were brainwashed. I don't think so!!!These were men fought for justice for their people and above all TRUTH.

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You will never stand up like a man until you get off you hands and knees and stop thinking about the fact you didn't fit in with your former Arab masters. Maybe, just maybe they did not accept you because they looked into your eyes and saw a coward--a BOY trying to be a man.

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Now Dr. Winters, I know that you are a Muslim(or at least that is what I heard that you are), so I can understand if you don't want to give credit to Nat Turner being a Christian or something: that I can totally understand. But to suggest that Turner is a Hebrew is definitely far-fetched. Naw, I don't have the book handy, but I know what I read. THe New Testament LANGUAGE is within the text, AT LEAST IN THE INSTANCE THAT I MENTIONED ABOVE! Is it possible for you at admit that you might be mistaken in this instance?

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Yes. When I say he practiced Hebrewism, I mean that he worshipped the god of Israel , who delievered the Hebrews from slavery and not Jesus Christ. If you read Nat Turner's autobiographical statement he wrote in jail he makes it clear that he considered himself a prophet and was led to his rebellion by "the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days". Turner wrote "...and I was greatly astonished, and for two years prayed continually, whenever my duty permit; and then again I had the same revelation, which fully confirmed me in the impression that I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty" (Herbert Aptheker, A documentary history of the negro in the United States, volume 1(1969), p.121). He saw himself as a servant of God, not Christ.

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Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
 
The Great East African Arab Slave Trader Tippu Tib



Hotep2U you many of your statements indicate your lack of awareness of Afrocentric history and Islam.

Hotep2U

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I hope you understand that the post is discussing topics dealing with Rebellions that were quite Violent so if hate wasn't involved in those rebellions I fail to imagine what was.

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Actually I was lied to, because some so called Muslims told me that Muhammad was black and Islam was the religion that all Afrikans practiced before coming to America, this is sad I know but I did research and learned the non-transitory "TRUTH", you know the truth that doesn't change, and this made me upset so I walked away from LIARS and the con games they play. Arabs made me upset because I learned that Arabs PAID LIARS to lie to my people in order to brainwash us, which really makes me angry when I think about it.

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Arabs








They were not lying Muhammad was Black. In this forum people would probably saying he was Black--but not African.

You post from Canada. I can not comment on the origin of former slaves that were settled in Canada. But I can speak of slave origins in the United States.

Most slaves that were sold in the United States before the American Revolution came from the Guinea Coast. If you read Black Cargoes, you will discover that the slaves recorded in the slave list were predominately Muslim. (The trade in slaves from Africa was "officially" ended after the Revolutionary War.)

Slaves from other parts of Africa had been sold to the Spanish and French. These slaves became Americans once the United States absorbed former Spanish and French colonial areas into the United States i.e., the Lousiana Purchase.

Given the location from which most United States African slaves originated, one can claim that the mass of American slaves were Muslims.

I don't know what research you did that contradicted the historical evidence for slaves in America.

Hotep2U

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Malcom X and Elijah Muhammad read MESSAGE to the Blackman did you?
Malcom X and Elijah Muhammad studied Yacub and grafting of the Devil did you?
Malcom X and Elijah Muhammad studied Farad Muhammad did you?
Nation of Islam members are NOT considered as "TRUE MUSLIMS" so why are using two influential former leaders of the NATION of ISLAM to score political points for Islam?
Did you forget that Nation of Islam are not considered as "TRUE MUSLIMS"? Nation of Islam don't count towards Islamic accomplishements, because you can't have it both ways, such as when they do good they are Muslims though their doctrine is Not "REAL ISLAM". ARAB mind games are just crazy.

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Cheikh Anta Diop was a Afrocentric scholar so Muslim Stamping won't work

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Muhammad was Black.

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Hey Mr. Winters,

The picture of the women in a black tob in the postcard? Where does she come from? What country is she from? What was your purpose for posting her picture?

http://www.basthabda.co.uk/arab%20woman01.jpg

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Mr Winters, there is a big difference between saying that Nat Turner WAS a Hebrew and saying that you BELIEVE that Nat Turner was(or MAY HAVE BEEN) a Hebrew. Big difference.

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Christianity was a religion forced on slaves in the US. Nat Turner was not a Christian, he believed in Hebrewism. Only a few freed Blacks believed in Christianity the mass of slaves before 1830 beieved in the God of Israel who they felt would liberate them from slavery like he did the Jews.

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Regardless of what colour Mohammed is, Islam says to rely on a man's devotion?? character! acts! behaviour and that being the true merit of a man, let us stop the colour 'ting.
The colour thang only plays in Anglo-Saxon domains but that shows us how we have bceome assimilated that we do not recognize ourselves.

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Mr. Winters, that women in the picture is not even Arabic. By the water jug she is carrying is most likely a fallaha from Middle Egypt. The rural Fallahin are not Arabs and still pratice alot of folk culture of the ancient Egyptians.


Indeed, ''black'' Arabs exist on the Arabian peninsula but I would not use a fallaha as a primary example.

You agree that the Fallaha women is ''black''?

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Originally posted by yazid904:

The colour thang only plays in Anglo-Saxon domains but that shows us how we have bceome assimilated that we do not recognize ourselves.

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Originally posted by Djehuti:
^^I agree, but what are we to make of the incident in the Bible where Moses's sister was cursed with leprosy for insulting his black Midianite wife?

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Hotep2U you many of your statements indicate your lack of awareness of Afrocentric history and Islam.

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Hate has nothing to do with war. Are you saying that WWI and WWII which were violent conflicts were based on hate? If this is what you believe you area dead wrong. For example WWII was fought because the Germans wanted to take over Europe, and the Japanese wanted to maintain their access to Oil.

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If the Maroons hated Europeans they would have continually fought Europeans. History shows that they only fought Europeans when they were attacked. Hate eats away at a person.

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They were not lying Muhammad was Black. In this forum people would probably saying he was Black--but not African.

You post from Canada. I can not comment on the origin of former slaves that were settled in Canada. But I can speak of slave origins in the United States.

Most slaves that were sold in the United States before the American Revolution came from the Guinea Coast. If you read Black Cargoes, you will discover that the slaves recorded in the slave list were predominately Muslim. (The trade in slaves from Africa was "officially" ended after the Revolutionary War.)

Slaves from other parts of Africa had been sold to the Spanish and French. These slaves became Americans once the United States absorbed former Spanish and French colonial areas into the United States i.e., the Lousiana Purchase.

Given the location from which most United States African slaves originated, one can claim that the mass of American slaves were Muslims.

I don't know what research you did that contradicted the historical evidence for slaves in America.

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located at the southeastern part of Kabah, a sign of divine grace. It is a heavy oval stone, of black reddish color. Its diameter is 30 cm, surrounded with a silver frame. The circler is required to kiss the black stone if possible. It is told that Messenger (peace of Allah be upon him) said, "the stone and the station of Abraham are two bequeathed from paradise, but Allah obliterated their light, otherwise they would have lit between east and west". He also said, " when the black stone was lowered from paradise, it was whiter than milk, but the sins of humans made it black ".

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Remember folks the stone is said to be black because of human SIN.


Afghanistan




All these images don't show anyone looking remotely black or Afrikan so Muhammad belongs to Arabs, so keep the LIES Clyde Winters because saying Muhammad is black could bring you harm.

In fact, other narrations even command that any person claiming that Muhammad was black be put to death!


Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, the companion of Sahnun, said, "Anyone who says that the Prophet was black SHOULD BE KILLED." (Muhammad Messenger of Allah (Ash-Shifa of Qadi 'Iyad), Qadi 'Iyad Musa al-Yahsubi, translated by Aisha Abdarrahman Bewley [Madinah Press, Anyone who says that the Prophet was black SHOULD BE KILLED." Inverness, Scotland, U.K. 1991; third reprint, paperback], p. 375; capital emphasis ours)

Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, Sahnun's companion, said that whoever says that the Prophet was black IS KILLED. The Prophet was not black. (Ibid., p. 387; capital emphasis ours)

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This shows how brainwashed you are. To be a Muslim according to the Quran, you simply repeat the phrase: "There is one god Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet". Given this requirement and the fact that Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad believed in this statement they were Muslims. But since your Arab Masters told you they were not "real" Muslims you claim they were not Muslims.

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The British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that he has read the whole Qur'an three times. In his statements, he often mentioned his admiration for the Qur'an's moral teaching. On March 29, 2000, the BBC reported on Blair's admiration for the Qur'an in a feature entitled "Blair: Qur'an Inspired Me." He was reported to have said that Islam was a good and peaceful religion, that he owned two copies of the Qur'an, and that he was quite inspired by it:

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What's in a name? - The Problem with the "Nation of Islam"
A court ruling overturning a fifteen year British ban on its leader, Louis Farrakhan, has propelled the so-called Nation of Islam into the headlines. Michael Young examines the Islamic credentials of these self-styled "Muslims".
August 1, 2001


"Nation of Islam" members in their trademark bow ties and suits

The Fundamentals of Islamic Belief
One could be forgiven for assuming that any group with the word Islam in its title would be Muslim. But when it comes to the group calling itself the "Nation of Islam", one must be very wary indeed. To be Muslim means to hold certain fundamental theological beliefs. The Muslim profession of faith is:

"I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Mohammed is a prophet of God."

To elaborate on these statements, to be a Muslim means to believe that God is One, unique. He has no partners, no associates, no Son, nor did He ever become incarnate. As chapter 112 of the Quran makes clear:

"He is God, the only One,
God the Everlasting.
He did not beget and is not begotten,
And none is His equal."

In Islam the ascribing of partners to God, referred to as shirk, is the greatest of all sins. The Quran states explicitly in chapter 4, verse 36:

"Serve Allah, and join not any partners with Him."

Secondly, Muslims believe Mohammed to have been the "Seal" or last of the prophets. To recognize anyone after Mohammed claiming to be a prophet, negates one's Islam. As is stated in the Quran:

"O people! Mohammed has no sons among ye men, but verily, he is the Messenger of Allah and the last in the line of Prophets. And Allah is aware of everything." (33:40)

This is reinforced by various sayings of Prophet Mohammed :

"The tribe of Israel was guided by prophets. When a prophet passed away, another succeeded him. But no prophet will come after me; only caliphs will succeed me." (Bukhari)

"In My Ummah, there shall be born Thirty Grand Liars (Dajjals), each of whom will claim to be a prophet, But I am the Last Prophet; there is No Prophet after Me." (Abu Dawood, at-Tirmidhi)

The Errant Theology of the "Nation of Islam"
The "Nation of Islam" does not adhere to these core tenets of Islamic theology. They believe that God appeared on earth in the person of their founder, a "great man from the East", Master W. Fard Muhammad, a preacher who first came to public attention in the USA on July 4, 1930 then mysteriously "departed the scene" on February 26, 1934. As the NOI website unambiguously declares:

"WE BELIEVE that Allah (God) appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad, July, 1930; the long-awaited "Messiah" of the Christians and the "Mahdi" of the Muslims."

In 1934 following the unexplained departure of the "Master", the organization he founded came to be headed by one Elijah Poole, who became known as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Until very recently, the "Nation of Islam" accorded the status of prophet to Elijah Muhammad.

Therefore it is clear that despite their name and calling themselves Muslims, "Nation of Islam" beliefs about God and prophethood are glaringly incompatible with Islam.

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It is clear from your statements that because you were brainwashed by your Arab Masters, you believe that you can only be a Muslim if you are certified by the Arabs and their lackeys. Sad boy--no body can certify what religion you believe in on this planet. God sees your heart.

I pray that one day you can erase the brainwashing you experienced at the hands of Arabs and their lackeys. Until then try to stop the hate. Find the love of mankind in your heart before you are LOST in the darkness of Hate.

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Clyde Winters based on the evidence I have shown, it proves that you are really Brainwashed because you don't even read the Quran though you want to speak on what is written in the Quran, it is you who conjured up on your own exactly what Islam is and what it requires.

The Quran exist for a reason Clyde Winters did you know that?
Clyde Winters are you planning to re-invent Islam?
Why not rewrite the Quran to fit you view of Islam?
I pray for you that you may stop telling lies to yourself because you are beginning to accept your own lies as truth

Hotep
 

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Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
 
Hotep2U

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Muhammad was NOT Black or Afrikan so stop telling LIES. I take it that you HATE telling the truth don't you?
Here are images of Muhammad from 1400's- 1600's
Persian image of Muhammad dedicating the black stone.

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Originally posted by alTakruri:

Though failing to outright declare Muhammed a red
Arab, there is a statement in Muslim law (don't
know if it's truly part of "universal" sharia) that
if someone says Muhammed was black they should
suffer the death penalty.

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quote:
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Originally posted by alTakruri:

Though failing to outright declare Muhammed a red
Arab, there is a statement in Muslim law (don't
know if it's truly part of "universal" sharia) that
if someone says Muhammed was black they should
suffer the death penalty.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello Al-Takruri

Maybe your quote could be right, and I want to ask you if you have a reference (a Qur'an verse or a Hadith number) on what you said, thanks.

Arwa

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Originally posted by Arwa:

quote:

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Originally posted by alTakruri:

Though failing to outright declare Muhammed a red
Arab, there is a statement in Muslim law (don't
know if it's truly part of "universal" sharia) that
if someone says Muhammed was black they should
suffer the death penalty.

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Hello Al-Takruri

Maybe your quote could be right, and I want to ask you if you have a reference (a Qur'an verse or a Hadith number) on what you said, thanks.

Arwa

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Dr. Sherman Jackson, an African-American Islamic scholar.

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From the onset of exploration, Europeans had associated the appearance of the Americas within their geographical imaginaries with the fantasy of displacing the Muslim world. The year of Columbus’s journey coincided with the reconquista that aimed to expel the Muslim Moors from Spain. Columbus’s belief that he had landed in Asia, rather than locating the intervening continents of the Americas, is registered by the designation of Native Americans as Indians. The Chief Admiral of the Ocean Sea’s first speech to the Spanish King and Queen upon his return from his first voyage began with a 323 word sentence that surprisingly focused on Islam rather than on America. Islam had long been viewed by Europeans as a divine scandal whose claims of a post-Christian dispensation provoked millennial desires to subdue and supplant its despotic usurpation. Columbus spoke of the banners of Spain being placed on the towers of the Alhambra and of the Moorish King kissing their royal hands as he departed the gates of Granada into exile. Columbus’s royal benefactors had sent him westward that same month with letters of instruction and an Arabic interpreter to effect further victories over “the sect of Mahoma and to all idolatries and heresies” (89–90). By circumventing the Islamic world and bringing the Christian gospel directly to the potentates of Asia, Columbus’s detour aimed to enlist new converts to serve as eastern allies in the mission of ousting Islam from its hegemonic hold over the Holy Land since the times of the Crusades.

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Muslim Moors comprised some of the earliest settlers in the Americas and, augmented by the enslaved Africans transported from Muslim West Africa, formed a significant part of the population of the early Americas. (Almost 20% of the present citizens of Suriname are Muslims, the highest percentage in the hemisphere.) Nevertheless, Islam has remained for the most part an exiled or excluded outsider to the different Christian cultures that controlled the colonization of the Americas. Whether relegated beyond the pale of the Atlantic and Pacific frontiers of the hemisphere or buried within the hybrid abyss of the creolized Americas, the oppositional alterity of Islam has nevertheless provided an outside challenge that writers have deployed in different ways to perform diverse and contrasting forms of ideological commentary.

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4. Muslims, Maroons, and Transcultural Rebellion

Jim’s masquerade as a Blue Arab on a raft in the midst of the Mississippi and the Son of Ben Ali’s fugitive freedom in the swamps of Georgia both posit temporary spaces of marronage that create imaginative alternatives for African freedom in the late nineteenth century. Latin America has a rich history of Muslim rebels Muslim rebels resisting their treatment in the Americas, the most important being the 1835 revolts in Bahia, Brazil, and the most recent the 1990 Jamaat al Muslimeen attempt at a coup d’état in Trinidad and Tobago. Such a rebellious presence also found expression in antebellum literature written by North American writers. Harriet Beecher Stowe (as well as the lesser known David Hunter Strother) drew upon the liminal freedoms of the swamp well before Harris did to evoke a militant Muslim liberty committed to resisting the confining rigidities and injustices of enslavement. By contrast, Herman Melville constructed a transpacific horizon of islamicized difference in his fictional treatment of the Senegalese mutineer Babo off the west coast of Chile and his evocation of the malign machinations of his Asian characters. In these instances, the global horizons of Islamic difference provided transcultural resources for representing the rebellion against race-based systems of American slavery.

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Please visit my blog and comment
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Update
Now with sources and pictures

http://gess.wordpress.com/out-of-this-world-islamic-irruptions-in-the-literary-americas/
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 
Excommunication in al Islam??? Please teach us about
that concept. Don't forget to include citation of
references, please. When a Muslim becomes a kafir
via takfir isn't it essentially a death sentence?

I need clarification on this from a knowledgeable
practicing Muslim who understands Arabic and sharia.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by alTakruri:
Excommunication in al Islam??? Please teach us about
that concept. Don't forget to include citation of
references, please. When a Muslim becomes a kafir
via takfir isn't it essentially a death sentence?

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Originally posted by Israel:
Whats happening ya'll. Well, I heard of that statement that "if anyone believes that Mohammad is Black, he should be excommunicated.....". I read it in an article written by Dr. Sherman Jackson, an African-American Islamic scholar. What that statment shows is the racism within the Islamic world. At the same time, that doesn't negate the fact that Muhammad's father was Black..........according to Al-Jahiz, Muhammad's father was Black as night. So Muhammad was light-skinned, but his father was Black. Salaam.

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At the time of the Fajr prayer the Prophet asked Bilal, "Tell me of the best deed you did after embracing Islam, for I heard your footsteps in front of me in Paradise." Bilal replied, "I did not do anything worth mentioning except that whenever I performed ablution during the day or night, I prayed after that ablution as much as was written for me."

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I am not surprised that Bilal is said to have done NOTHING WORTH MENTIONING.
Arabs are VERY RACIST so why would a Afrikan want to do anything with a ARABIC BRAINWASHING literature is beyond comprehension.
ARWA NO ONE is falling for you BRAINWASH rhetoric Afrikans came to America not Muslims.
Can someone tell me if the so called "Muslims" who came to America were Sunni or Shiite?

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That was the reason for my being here for even if an ethiopian had been nominated as my ruler, I would have obeyed him .

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Let me help you translate, A Ethiopian would be the LAST person on earth to rule a Arab, though if such a unforgivable misfortune should happen the individual should obey the Ethiopian UNTIL a Arab can brainwash the Ethiopian into repenting from such a transgression because we all know that only RAISIN heads were meant to be Abeeds according to SECRET fundamentalist laws

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Islam is a religion, whose sacred Scriptures contain explicit denigrating remarks about Black people.

Mohammed referred to Blacks as "raisin heads". (Sahih Al Bukhary vol. 1, no. 662 and vol. 9, no. 256).

In another Hadith, Mohammed is quoted as saying that Blacks are, "pug-nosed slaves". (Sahih Moslem vol. 9 pages 46 and 47).

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Brainwashed Arab wannabe sellouts please STAY OUT of AFRIKAN HISTORY

Hotep
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Ok, this is the last time I'll write to you:

Why didn't you mention the quote; "Listen to and obey your ruler, even if..."

Read the following posts by Brother Charles Murphy

http://tinyurl.com/llno2
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 
Amazing, you know how to quote Sahih Moslem and Sahih Bukhari, but where are your sources about The Prophet claimed:
"if someone says Muhammed was black they should
suffer the death penalty."?
 

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Posted by Hotep2u (Member # 9820) on :
 
Greetings:

quote:

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Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, the companion of Sahnun, said, "Anyone who says that the Prophet was black SHOULD BE KILLED." (Muhammad Messenger of Allah (Ash-Shifa o Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, the companion of Sahnun f Qadi 'Iyad), Qadi 'Iyad Musa al-Yahsubi, translated by Aisha Abdarrahman Bewley [Madinah Press, Anyone who says that the Prophet was black SHOULD BE KILLED." Inverness, Scotland, U.K. 1991; third reprint, paperback], p. 375; capital emphasis ours)

Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, Sahnun's companion, said that whoever says that the Prophet was black IS KILLED. The Prophet was not black. (Ibid., p. 387; capital emphasis ours)

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Brainwashing seems to be serious business amongst your camp.

Arwa
I didn't mention the comment( If you should be ruled by a Ethiopian) because it is hypothetical point which occurs when you use the word "IF" emphasis on "IF".

No righteous book sent from a Omnipotent Creator would condone the oppression rape and murder of other human beings, such as we find in the book for Arabs.

Lies and Muslim stamping only shows who you really are, which is nothing more than a LIAR and a THIEF.


Djehuti for the record I don't hate Islam, I hate lying, stealing, murder, rapes and the Brainwashing that goes on in the name of spreading Islam.

Hotep
 

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Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
 
^^Hotep, I too hate any evil done in the name of any religion, but you seem to have a personal vendetta against Muslims in particular. I haven't heard you chastise Christians as much as Muslims, even though European-Christianity and not Christianity has been just as harmful to many Africans.
 

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Posted by Hotep2u (Member # 9820) on :
 
Greetings:

Djehuti start a topic about problems in Christianity and Afrikans.

Djehuti are you aware that it was Christian run organizations who went into the Sudan in order to purchase the freedom of those people who were in bondage to Arabs within the Sudan?

Christians have been helping Afrikans TODAY Djehuti are you aware of that?


TODAY is another story because Arabs are still committing similar atrocities and even more TODAY versus 1300+ years ago, towards Afrikan people.

Don't you think that's a problem Djehuti?

quote:

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Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia extends over most of the Arabian peninsula [map] and is bounded by the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea (W); by the Persian Gulf, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (E); by Yemen and Oman (S); and by Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait (N). Riyadh is its capital and largest city. Saudi Arabia possesses 25% of the world's proven petroleum reserves, ranks as the largest exporter of petroleum, and plays a leading role in OPEC. Roughly five and a half million foreign workers play an important role in the Saudi economy, for example, in the oil and service sectors. Priorities for government spending in the short term include additional funds for education and for the water and sewage systems. Economic reforms proceed cautiously because of deep-rooted political and social conservatism.

Saudi Arabia is a destination country for workers from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, an indeterminate number of whom are subjected to conditions that constitute involuntary servitude. There were reports that victims are subjected to physical and sexual abuse, non-payment of wages, confinement, and withholding of passports as a restriction on their movement. Domestic workers are particularly vulnerable because some are confined to the house in which they work, unable to seek help. Saudi Arabia is also a destination country for Nigerian, Yemeni, Pakistani, Afghan, Somali, Malian, and Sudanese children trafficked for forced begging and involuntary servitude as street vendors. There were also reports that some Nigerian women were trafficked into Saudi Arabia for commercial sexual exploitation. - U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2006

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I had a conversation with someone from Somalia before about forced labor/Slavery and the guy told me that it was OK to put someone in forced labor/Slavery it was the MOST suprising experience I had in my life.
I took it for granted that everyone accepted that forced labor was EVIL, I now know that I was wrong in my assumption.

Djehuti I have spoken with victims of forced labor from the Sudan and I will tell you that the information that you obtain from those conversations are mind boggling, stories of Afrikan women comitting suicide are common, infanticide because of children being the product of rape are common, this goes on TODAY in the name of spreading Islam.


Hotep
 

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Posted by MULLAH'S_REVENGE (Member # 11724) on :
 
Walaalyaal iskadaafa doofaarkan

ha lahadliin wuxuu u naga raba wa attention

wa dhillo weyn
 

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Posted by alTakruri (Member # 10195) on :
 
The reason Muslims, who at that time were only in
the Arabian peninsula, were adjoined to pledge
fealty to even a raisin (nappy) headed Ethiopian
is that just a generation earlier the Negus and
Abyssinia were conquering rulers over the Arabs.

Their rule had only been shaken off the very year
that Muhammad was born. Thus the people of Arabia
chauvinistic pride would smart and incline them to
reject and rebell under an Abyssinian ruler. Thus
the command that they shold and must obey rightful
Muslim rulership no matter if it was held by one of
the old enemies of Arabia.
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MULLAH'S_REVENGE:
Walaalyaal iskadaafa doofaarkan

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Done
 

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Posted by Arwa (Member # 11172) on :
 

quote:

---

The reason Muslims, who at that time were only in
the Arabian peninsula, were adjoined to pledge
fealty to even a raisin (nappy) headed Ethiopian
is that just a generation earlier the Negus and
Abyssinia were conquering rulers over the Arabs.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Hotep2u:

I am not surprised that Bilal is said to have done NOTHING WORTH MENTIONING.
Arabs are VERY RACIST so why would a Afrikan want to do anything with a ARABIC BRAINWASHING literature is beyond comprehension.
ARWA NO ONE is falling for you BRAINWASH rhetoric Afrikans came to America not Muslims.
Can someone tell me if the so called "Muslims" who came to America were Sunni or Shiite?

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quote:

---

Their rule had only been shaken off the very year
that Muhammad was born. Thus the people of Arabia
chauvinistic pride would smart and incline them to
reject and rebell under an Abyssinian ruler. Thus
the command that they shold and must obey rightful
Muslim rulership no matter if it was held by one of
the old enemies of Arabia.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Arwa:

quote:

---

The reason Muslims, who at that time were only in
the Arabian peninsula, were adjoined to pledge
fealty to even a raisin (nappy) headed Ethiopian
is that just a generation earlier the Negus and
Abyssinia were conquering rulers over the Arabs.

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I don't think that the raisin quote has something to do with King Negus, Abyssinia or Black people.
http://tinyurl.com/llno2

I they looked down to black people, the companions of the Prophet(swt) wouldn't immigrated to Ethiopia.

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quote:

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Does the quote in question, in its original Arabic
give a nationality or a colour? If a nationality, is
it Habesh or Zanj?

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quote:

---

Originally posted by Arwa:

quote:

---

Does the quote in question, in its original Arabic
give a nationality or a colour? If a nationality, is
it Habesh or Zanj?

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I don't have the arabic text with me.I want to ask you if you can provide it here on this forum. Thanks.

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quote:

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POPE Benedict has hit out at Islam and its concept of holy war during a visit to his Bavarian homeland.

The thinly veiled attack on extremist Islam's justification for terrorism came during a theological lecture to staff and students at the University of Regensburg, where the former Joseph Ratzinger taught theology in the 1970s.

Using the words, "jihad" and "holy war", the Pope quoted criticisms of the prophet Mohammed by a 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II, during a debate with a learned Persian.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached," Benedict quoted the emperor as saying.

"The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable," the Pope said.

"Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," he added.

But in reiterating his concerns about a modern world "deaf" to God, he warned that other religious cultures saw the West's exclusion of God "as an attack on their most profound convictions".

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures," he said.

Though the section of the lecture dealing with Islam was relatively short, its inclusion made his address at Regensburg the most political of the German pope's six-day visit.

Presiding later over an ecumenical prayer meeting with Orthodox Christian and Protestant leaders, the Pope led prayers for the success of discussions with other churches aimed at uniting Christians.

At an earlier giant open-air mass attended by some 250,000 pilgrims, the Pope urged them to stand up for their beliefs in the face of the "hatred and fanaticism" tarnishing religion.

"Today, when we have learned to recognise the pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God's image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe," the Pope said.

"Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life."

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