Black Nationalism Provides Foundation for African-American Islamist Movement
11th October 2009
The fools. Who do they think ran the damned slave trade from medieval times up until after World War II? And still does.
The irony of this situation is that the argument that politicized Islam inherently improves the position of racial minorities is entirely untenable from both a historical and a modern perspective. Though many Islamist websites make claims like “only … through Islam has this idea [‘of racial equality and of human brotherhood’] ever been realized in action,” reality tells a different story.
According to historian Bernard Lewis in his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East, slavery was an established practice in the lands of Islam from the time of Muhammad. The Islamic states later hosted an extensive slave trade network that rivaled that of the Europeans. A look at the modern world is even more telling: in the Arab Islamic states of Mauritania and Sudan, black slavery is still so pervasive that the word “black” in the local Arabic dialect has become synonymous with “slave.”