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OT: The Misunderstood Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by alTakruri: [QB] [IMG]http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/imagesn/masthead_01.jpg[/IMG] 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? [/QB][/QUOTE]
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