All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

The exhibition will be held at The Islamic Central Mosque Regent’s park, London, from August 11th-15th, 2008.

Alhamdullilah, I am very honoured to know sister Sultana, and I can’t wait to meet her finally in London, Isha’Allah. May Allah(SWT) Reward her with good in the Dunya and Akhirah, ameen.

As’salamu Aleikum Ahmed/Muslem Historian, and apologize for taking so long to approve your comment. usually my comment moderation is turned off, but lately I had couple of hate messages toward Islam and Obama, yes Obama. Sometimes I wonder if these people can read, and those who can read can easily see that I am not a supporter of Obama, but somehow some people assume that I am. Nevertheless, I am strictly against on my blog to be used as platform for hate speech ! And those who know my blog can bear witness that I am not shy of criticism of my writings or my faith. I don’t think I need to explain the difference between criticism and hate speech.

Back to you, Ahmed/Muslem Historian. I have decided to bring your comment on front page:

An informative article on a forgotten chapter of islamic history..but i have some remarks regarding inaccuracies in the text:
1)You say “the son of a learned family in Islamic Jurisprudence from the city of Timbuktu, which had the world’s first university” Timbuktu did not have the world’s first university,spain ,Tunisia and Cairo’s alazhar had universities centuries before timbuktu was ever built.Timbuktu may have been a regional center for a while but never more than that and never even one of the largest five islamic cities worldwide.
2)I notice you provided reference for all koranic verses with the exception of this one ” In accordance with the Qur’anic command: ‘Fight it, and fall not in the test of your mettle. Be bold and establish the flag of Righteousness in the highest places. Thus comes Peace, for which due sacrifice must be made…’” ………….Reason is simply is that it does not exist in koran.
3)you say that there were huge numbers of muslims among the slaves shipped to the Americas, taking into account that the recorded numbers of shipped slaves exceeded 3 millions…that means that at least over a million muslims were among them.That is not correct for many reasons..muslims were not a sizable minority in the slave exporting areas..and their jihad warrior ethic would not have allowed for such numbers to be taken captive.The shores of west africa and the center at the time were mostly pagan.
In reality the slave emancipation movement of Europe and later, Lincolnesque America, of which the African Americans were merely adoptees,came in response to the huge numbers(some say over a million) of European and American white slaves who were captured by the mujahideen of North Africa(Also called Barbary Pirates) who forced the U.S government to pay tribute for safe passage in the mediterranean.
4)Finally, it is understood that the Atlantic trade had a traumatic effect on African Americans but that is no justification to change muslim laws that allow slavery.Companions of the prophet(saw) had slaves and the generations after them did that untill Lincoln and Victoria convinced some secular muslim rulers to release their white and Black slaves and institute Anti slavery laws in the 19th century amost 13 centuries after the revelation of Koran. Slavery in muslem lands was not as cruel, documented cases show hundreds of slaves rose to become rulers of the native muslim populations and establish ruling dynasties.In a way islamic societies were meritocracies where your origin did not count in the face achievements.

The post you refer to is; “The Jihad of 1831–1832: The Misunderstood Baptist Rebellion in Jamaica” by Dr. Sultana Afroz.

Dr. Sultana Afroz has been very kind to send me this comment:

(a) Regarding the Qur’anic statement, it is not a direct verse from the Holy Quran. It is a part of the commentary from verses 20-38 from Surah Mauhammad (47). It is from Yusuf Ali’s commentary.

(b) New research shows that the majority of the enslaved Africans were of Islamic faith. Sylviane Diouf (1998, 48), writing on the Muslim slaves in the Americas, conclusively asserts, “Therefore, if countedf 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”. For Jamica from 1655 to 1807, in Curtin’s (1969, 160) work on the slave census, 423,900 were Africans from Muslim-dominated areas, representing 56.8 percent of the arrivals. The dominance of the Muslims among the enslaved Africans and that Islam forbids Muslims to enslave other Muslims challenge the thesis established by western metropolitan historians that Muslims were wholesalers in the Atlantic slave trade(c) Enslaved Africans exported through pagan held-coastal areas do not necessarily mean that they were pagans. There are new research work showing that Senegambia, Guniea, Mali, to name a few were major areas from where Africans were brought as slaves. Likewise, it would be erroneous to consider all the enslaved deported through Fante port as from Koromantyn, just as all those shipped through Calcutta as from the state of Bengal in India. Similarly, it would be\n wrong to conclude that enslaved Africans coming from non-Islamic areas were non-Muslims, since many of them were war captives who were Muslims.(c) Timbuktu was the most important center of Arabic and Islamic studies in West Africa. The scholarly elite came from a number of interrelated families representing the varied tribal and ethnic groups, which made up the populace of the city. Scholars sustained Timbuktu society regardless of the fortunes of political regimes such as the rise and fall of Mali and Songhay. Trade sustained the scholarly families, besides investments in cloth, camels, cattle and urban property, patronage of rulers and state officials and donations of their students and disciples, who worked as traders and tailors. For centuries, the scholars of Timbuktu\n maintained a rich and vital tradition of Qur’anic, hadith, and legal studies supplemented by studies in linguistics, history, mathematics, and astronomy.

(c) Enslaved Africans exported through pagan held-coastal areas do not necessarily mean that they were pagans. There are new research work showing that Senegambia, Guniea, Mali, to name a few were major areas from where Africans were brought as slaves. Likewise,

it would be erroneous to consider all the enslaved deported through Fante port as from Koromantyn, just as all those shipped through Calcutta as from the state of Bengal in India. Similarly, it would be wrong to conclude that enslaved Africans coming from non-Islamic areas were non-Muslims, since many of them were war captives who were Muslims.

(c) Timbuktu was the most important center of Arabic and Islamic studies in West Africa. The scholarly elite came from a number of interrelated families representing the varied tribal and ethnic groups, which made up the populace of the city. Scholars sustained Timbuktu society regardless of the fortunes of political regimes such as the rise and fall of Mali and Songhay. Trade sustained the scholarly families, besides investments in cloth, camels, cattle and urban property, patronage of rulers and state officials and donations of their students and disciples, who worked as traders and tailors. For centuries, the scholars of Timbuktu maintained a rich and vital tradition of Qur’anic, hadith, and legal studies supplemented by studies in linguistics, history, mathematics, and astronomy.

[..] Islam, which gave Africa its first higher education institutions that have endured to the present. Indeed, Africa claims distinction as the center of the world’s oldest Islamic universities and some of the world’s oldest surviving universities. They include Ez-Zitouna madrassa in Tunis founded in 732. Next came al-Qarawiyyin mosque university established in Fez in 859 by a young migrant female princess from Qairawan (Tunisia), Fatima Al-Fihri. The university attracted students and scholars from Andalusian Spain to West Africa. Then in 969 Al-Azhar mosque university was established in Cairo, the same year that the city was founded by the Fatimid dynasty from the Maghreb. It came to be regarded as the most prestigious center of Islamic education and scholarship and attracted the greatest intellectuals of the Muslim world, including Ibn Khaldun the renowned historian who taught there. Another major early Islamic university was Sankore mosque university in Timbuktu founded in the twelfth century where a wide range of courses were taught from theology, logic, astronomy and astrology, to grammar, rhetoric, history and geography. [Source Paul Tiyambe Zeleza ]

“Fear God concerning your slaves, Feed them with what you eat and cloth them with what you wear and do not give them work beyond their capacity. Those whom you like, keep, and those whom you dislike, sell. Do not cause pain to God’s creation. He caused you to own them, and had He so wished he would have made them own you”

Lincoln had never been an Abolitionist; he had never believed in full Negro citizenship; he had tried desperately to win the war without Negro soldiers, and he had emancipated the slaves only on account of military necessity. (p. 153)

Freedom for the slave was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting.(p. 121)

[Source from this book]

Via Gülay Kocbay

via Ruth Gledhill

PS: Click this link to read his lecture at London School of Economics. Quite interesting!

Here are a couple of extracts from the video; not! from the lecture!

‘Certainly the way in which western democracies currently operate – one need only look at the enormous time, attention and money devoted to an entire year’s worth of electioneering in the USA, not to mention the fact that, though the new President of the USA will have effective power over the whole world, it’s only Americans who get to vote – calls into sharp question the normal western assumption of recent years, that if only we could export more western-style democracy to more parts of the world all problems would be solved. I believe, on the contrary, that as the Archbishop said about law, human dignity and shared goods and priorities, so it is with democracy. Democracies, like all other rulers, need to be called to account, as Kofi Annan said in his retirement speech, both in what they actually do and in what they actually are.’

‘This stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism takes many forms. There is, for example, the well-known fresh attack on religious belief of all sorts launched in the name of empirical science by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others. I say ‘in the name of’, but actually the rhetoric used by those three goes way beyond empirical science itself and into the realm of good old-fashioned mud-slinging. Just as the media refused last week to engage with what the Archbishop actually said, so Dawkins and others refuse to engage with real theologians, not to mention real communities of faith that are making a real difference at places where the world is in deep pain, a pain which the great advances of science have if anything exacerbated (through weapons technology and the like) rather than alleviated. Just as European science in the nineteenth century was anything but politically neutral, but must be understood within the Enlightenment-based projects of imperial and technological expansion, leading inexorably to the First World War, so the present anti-religious scientific protests must be understood within the multivalent culture of late modernity.’

‘I now have a threefold proposal. (i) The confusions we have observed are indications of an increasing instability which has generated the present stand-off between secularism and fundamentalism, as the two sides in the Deist divide now perceive themselves as fighting for their lives against a suddenly awakened foe. (ii) The chilly winds of postmodernity, blowing their deconstructive gales through the entire eighteenth-century settlement, are threatening the Enlightenment systems themselves and the secularism and fundamentalism to which they often seem reduced. (iii) Out of this postmodern moment there might yet emerge, as the Archbishop has been suggesting, new paths towards a wise and civil society in which the genuine values for which the Enlightenment was striving can be preserved and enhanced while the excesses to which it has given rise can be avoided.’

‘Establishment’ is a way of recognising that we are still essentially a Christian country, both in the sense that our history and culture have been decisively shaped by the Christian faith and life and in the sense that at the last census over 70% called themselves ‘Christian’. As the Archbishop said last Monday, this means that the ‘established’ church has a special responsibility to take thought for, and speak up for, the small minorities, and to ensure that they are not squashed between an unthinking church and an uncaring secular state. Hence his perfectly proper concern for the particular sensitivities of Muslims, as indeed of Jews and others. And most Church of England leaders would insist today that if some way could be found to share our ‘Established’ status with our great sister churches, we would be delighted. But let’s not fool ourselves. To give up ‘Establishment’ now would be to collude with that secularism which postmodernity has cheerfully and rightly deconstructed. Rather, the challenge ought to be to make it work for the benefit of the whole society. To aim at that would be to work with the grain both of the Christian gospel itself and of the deep roots of our own society and traditions.’

Dear Friends,
The astonishing misrepresentation of Archbishop Rowan in virtually all newspapers over the last few days, and the scorn and anger which this has fuelled, have caused many people within the church to ask what on earth is going on. The issues are complex, but let me try to highlight the key points. Obviously it would be good for people to read the whole lecture, which is available on line at his website together with further clarification.

There will shortly be an excellent summary and discussion of the whole issue by Andrew Goddard available on the Fulcrum website.

I’m sorry that this message will probably get to you too late for inclusion in Sunday morning worship, but I hope it will help the conversations that many of you will undoubtedly have in the next few days.
First, the lecture which +Rowan gave was the start of a series organised by and for the legal profession, about the nature of law. He was not making a public statement about his belief in Jesus (people have asked me ‘why doesn’t he speak about Jesus?’ and the answer is ‘he does, a great deal of the time, but this wasn’t that sort of occasion’). He was addressing some of the most serious and far-reaching questions which face us both in Britain and throughout western culture, and was doing so with the sensitivity and intellectual rigour which the occasion, and his audience, rightly demanded. We should be grateful that we have an Archbishop capable of such work, not demand that his every word be instantly comprehensible by the casual uninformed onlooker. If I ask someone to fix my car, or my computer, I don’t expect to understand everything they say about the technicalities; rather, I’m glad someone out there knows what’s going on and can do what’s necessary.
Second, the fundamental issue he was addressing is the relation between the law of the land and the religious conscience of the citizen. For 200 years it has been assumed that these operated in separate spheres: the law regulates my public life, faith or religion operate in private. This was always a dangerous half-truth, since many of the great world faiths, including Christianity itself, actually claim that all of life is included within religious obedience. As some of us used to be taught, if Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all. In recent years various governments, including our own, have pushed the other way, to suggest that the secular state is itself master of all of life, including religious conviction. That’s why we’ve seen an airline worker sacked for wearing a cross, while in France the government has tried similarly to ban Muslim women from wearing their traditional head-covering. Because we haven’t had to address these issues before, our society has tended to slide round them by emphasizing words like ‘multiculturalism’, which often doesn’t actually mean that we celebrate our different cultures but rather that we subordinate them all to whatever the secular state wants. That is as much a problem for Catholic adoption agencies, as we saw last year, as it is for Muslims who want to follow their traditional teaching about (for instance) the prohibition of interest on loans while living within a society where the mortgage system is endemic. +Rowan was going to the roots of these problems and coming up not only with fresh analysis but fresh solutions, particularly what he calls ‘interactive pluralism’. The question of how we live together as a civil and wise society while cherishing different faiths is a deep and serious one and can’t be pushed away just because people take fright at certain misunderstandings. His point was precisely that neither the secular state nor any particular religion can ‘monopolise’.
Third, +Rowan was very clear in his lecture to rule out exactly those points which the screaming tabloids have assumed he was affirming. We all know the standard images of Sharia law – beatings, beheadings, oppression of women, etc. He distanced himself completely from all that, though you’d never know it from the media. He knows, just as well as do his critics, that Sharia is complex, that it varies from place to place, that it demands interpretation, and so on. His point was, rather, that there are some elements of Muslim law which can and should be accommodated within our legal structures. Ironically, Gordon Brown, who was quick to offer a knee-jerk rejection against the lecture, himself altered the law last year to enable devout Muslims to obtain mortgages. That’s the kind of thing +Rowan was advocating in similar spheres.
Fourth, it does now appear that +Rowan was ill-advised to go on ‘The World at One’ before his lecture was given and to say things about Sharia law which only really made the sense they did within the context of the larger, careful argument which he gave that evening. Even within the lecture there might have been ways of saying what needed to be said. Perhaps, as some Muslims themselves have found, it might be better to avoid the ‘Sharia’ word altogether, because of its extremely negative image in this country. (Think, by the way, of what the word ‘Christian’ means in a country that has been bombed to bits by the ‘Christian’ west.)
Fifth, what the whole sorry affair highlights is that our society is extremely touchy not only about Islam (and not only because of terrorism), but also about the whole, normally unspoken, set of assumptions about society, law, culture, freedom and religion by which we have operated. We live at a time of massive cultural change, and we shouldn’t be surprised that attempts to understand what’s going on and do something about it are deeply threatening. This is somewhat like what happens when a couple are having their first session with a marriage guidance counsellor after years of unspoken puzzlement, and find some of the questions threatening. But unless we can ask the difficult questions, and try to address them wisely and maturely, we will drift into worse problems by far.
Sixth, therefore, as you pray for +Rowan through all of this, pray too for wise and reasoned discourse to emerge, in which the key points he made are allowed to stand out and function as signposts in the murky world of our present public life. And please pray for all of us who will be in Synod this week, and for me as I give a lecture at the London School of Economics this coming Thursday night, on ‘God in Public’. I didn’t know how apposite it was going to be.
Warmest greetings and prayers

+Tom

Source

Taken from Photo contest at Ijtema.

By Widad Sirkhotte, : Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

This photo is public.

EDIT  

THE MUSLIM MAROONS AND THE BUCRA MASSA IN JAMAICA (Word doc. and print friendly)

By Dr. Sultana Afroz

AS-SALAAMU-ALAIKUM:

THE MUSLIM MAROONS AND THE BUCRA MASSA IN JAMAICA

©Sultana Afroz

Introduction

As eight centuries of glorious Muslim rule folded in Andalusia Spain in 1492, Islam unfolded itself in the West Indian islands with the Andalusian Muslim mariners who piloted Columbus discovery entourage through the rough waters of the Atlantic into the Caribbean. Schooled in Atlantic navigation to discover and to dominate the sea routes for centuries, the mission for the Muslim mariners was to find the eternal peace of Islam as they left al-Andalus/Muslim Spain in a state of ‘empty husks’ and a land synonym for intellectual and moral desolation in the hands of Christendom Spain. The Islamic faith made its advent into Jamaica in1494 as these Muslim mariners on their second voyage with Columbus set their feet on the peaceful West Indian island adorned with wooded mountains, waterfalls, sandy beaches and blue seas. The seed of Islam sown by the Mu’minun (the Believers of the Islamic faith) from al-Andalus gradually propagated through the enslaved African Muslims from West Africa brought to serve the plantation system in Jamaica. Their struggle or resistance (jihad) against the slave system often in the form of flight or run away (hijra) from the plantations led many of them to form their own community (ummah), known as Maroon communities, a feature then common in the New World plantation economy.[1] Isolationism and lack of Islamic learning made Islam oblivion in the Maroon societies, while the enslaved African Muslims on the plantations saw their faith being eclipsed and subdued by the slave institution, the metropolitan powers and the various Christian churches with their draconian laws.

Justification of Research

The present paper attempts to study the Islamic heritage of the Maroons in Jamaica. This is part of the greater research on Islam in Jamaica since Columbus. The history of the Maroons constitutes an important aspect of the historical study of Jamaica particularly because of the British recognition of their societies as separate entities beyond the jurisdiction of the British colonial government through the conclusion of formal ‘victory’ treaties and their continuance into the present. However, there is much misinformation, misconception and misrepresentation regarding Jamaican Maroons who were the first to inflict a military defeat upon the British in the New World. Uniqueness in Maroon communities continues to draw the attention of numerous researchers but distortions continue to abound in Maroon history. Because of the lack of adequate knowledge in Islam and the absence of any written documents by the historical Maroons, the researchers fall prey to the corrupt and inaccurate primary sources in the form of official documents, biased eyewitnesses’ accounts or stories of planter historians, which were almost all biased and written from their ethnocentricity and coloured by their economic interests. Furthermore, with the passage of time and the penetration of Western culture into Maroon societies, oral history and testimonies offered by present day Maroons have little historical value pertaining to the authentic cultural heritage of the historical Maroons. The absence of literary archaeology and the lack of proper analyses of oral history due to the general dearth of scholarship in Maroon communities have also created room for distortions in Maroon history. The Islamic heritage of the Maroons has not been studied, despite all the indications that Blacks brought directly to the West Indies from Spain were of Moorish background and that the majority of the enslaved Africans brought to Jamaica, came from Muslim dominated West Africa. Without a properly reconstructed history of the Maroons in Jamaica, the history of Jamaica remains incomplete.

The presence of Islam in the form of existing historical institutions and vernacular culture in predominantly Black Christian Maroon communities in Jamaica is an eye opener to researchers with Islamic background to unearth the story of the Muslim Maroons of al-Andalusia Spain and West African heritage. The stories of the Moorish Muslim mariners and the enslaved Moors have been overshadowed by the fabricated myths of Columbus discovery of the Americas in Jamaican and West Indian history. While ethnicity of the enslaved Africans dominated the nature and scope of previous scholarship, Islam, which was the predominant religion of these people and, which overshadowed varied traditional cultures forms the basis of this research.

New Research Methodology

Islam does not believe in symbolism. Therefore, Islamic archeological evidence in the form of artifacts should not be the primary measuring tool to ascertain the authenticity of the Islamic heritage of the Maroons in Jamaica. To a Muslim, the whole world is a house of worship. The absence of a masjid, which is a formal house of worship for the Muslims, as an archaeological evidence cannot be used as an argument to refute the Islamic heritage of the Jamaican Maroons. Even the presence of the Holy Qur’an as a literary archaeological evidence is not a necessity given the prevailing conditions of the Maroon communities in the midst of the plantation system. The memorization of the Holy Qur’an is a traditional practice for the preservation of the Holy Revelation within the hearts of Muslims. The presence of Islamic scholars—ulemas (teachers) and marabouts and imams (prayer leaders) is the essence for the practice and propagation of Islamic knowledge to the succeeding generations. Consequently, the authenticity of Islamic heritage can be established from the analytical study of the prevailing cultural practices within the Maroon societies, which fall within the framework of Islam. The universality of Islamic principles will allow a careful observer to recognize the Islamic faith even in the few and scanty evidences left in the form of cultural heritages and oral testimony. Contrary to Christianity, where different denominations follow different versions of the Bible, and the polytheists who are believers of many gods and spirits, Islam is a religion of The Holy Qur’an, the authenticity and purity of which has been maintained since its revelation in the seventh century. All actions of a Muslim must conform to the Qur’anic guidance and the practical applications of the Qur’anic principles by the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). Hence, there is no room for manipulation of evidence or creation of myth based on superstitions or imagination.[2] The use of Qur’anic terms, Islamic salutation, Islamic governance, Muslim names, and Islamic actions are indicative of the strong Islamic faith of the historical Maroons. These cultural practices are fundamental to understanding the Islamic heritage of both the windward and leeward Maroon communities in Jamaica.

The Genesis of Islam in West Indian/Jamaican History

The dominance of Islam in al-Andalusia for almost eight hundred years until the fall of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, and the significant impact of Islam in the formation of societies and states in West Africa as early as the tenth century, i.e. long before the commencement of the Atlantic slave trade make it imperative to study the history and heritage of Jamaica from an Islamic perspective.

(more…)

As’salamu Aleikum Dear Brothers and Sisters in Islam and peace to everyone.

A reminder of Day of `Arafah, which is tomorrow, Insha’Allah.

Abu Oatadah reported that the Messenger (Peace Be Upon Him) of Allah said:

“Fasting on the day of ‘Arafah is an expiation for two years, the year preceding it and the year following it.

There is no other day on which forgiveness and mercy reach the level they do on the Day of `Arafah. On `Arafah Allah frees people from Hellfire.

`A’ishah (may Allah be pleased with her) narrated that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “There is no day in which Allah frees greater number of His slaves from the Hellfire than the Day of `Arafah. Allah comes close to His slaves and boasts about them to the angels, then asks (a rhetorical question), ‘What do these slaves seek?’” (Muslim)

There is a new book by Hans Küng, Islam: Past, Present and Future. More on Hans Küng, read here.

• In the end-days the mosques will be full but the people devoid of guidance.

• The leaders will be the worst of the people.

• Mosques will be built on grander and grander scale but the teaching will be absent.

• Nothing will be left of the Qur’an except its outward form and people will no longer understand its meaning.

• The Muslims will be split into 72 sects - of which only one will be the people of salvation.