Witnessing to Black Muslims & the Nation of Islam

Posted by afghanjohn on March 14, 2008

I came across three links today on the Answering Islam site that deal with Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam:

and

All three of these links are also on the front page of Truth For Muslims.

This entry was posted on March 14, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under APOLOGETICS, ISLAM, MUSLIM EVANGELISM. Tagged: Nation of Islam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

14 Responses to “Witnessing to Black Muslims & the Nation of Islam”

velvethammer said

March 14, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Who Was the Real Slave Master?
You might want to sit down for this.

Not…only…whites. Shocking!

History of Slavery Not So Black & White
theveiledtsunami said

March 15, 2008 at 10:37 am
Sit down for what?

I always knew that there was “slavery” in Islam, and in any other religion and culture for that matter. The question however, I believe, should be, “What was the nature fo that slavery?” Are the slaves in Islam taken during war the same as those taken by Europeans? No. Not. In Islam, slavery is permitted during times of war. (I challenge you to find a culture where captives of war were not enslaved.) When one side wins over another, those people captured can be taken as slaves. Not only that, but the law of Islam itself requires that they receive good treatment, and in many cases, be freed. There are stories about deals made between the captured and the capturer where if the captured agrees to teach people to read and write, they will be freed. The list goes on. Now compare that to slavery by Europeans. Packed in slave ships like sardines, made to lay in their own excrement for months, as many as 3/4 dying in the middle passage. Whipped, lashed, raped, mutilated, starved, abused, lynched. The Bible used to decieve them into believing that God made them black and therefore slaves.

So, I am confused velvet. What are you trying to convey with your argument? Are you suggesting that since it wasn’t only whites that somehow it was “not as bad” or even “okay”?
velvethammer said

March 15, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. I do NOT condone slavery. I merely pointed out the lesser mentioned white slavery. (Note I never learned of it in school) Of course the reply I always receive is that black slavery trumps any other slavery. Apologizing for Muslims enslaving whites is ignorant. During the 300 year time span Barbary pirates raided ships and villages was not a time of war. Conquest not war. Merchant ships and fishing villages were not opposing armies.

White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800, estimates that as many as 1.25 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved. The Barbary raiders–so called because they were partly of Berber origin–struck as far north as England and Ireland. It appears, for example, that almost every inhabitant of the Irish village of Baltimore was carried off in 1631

Christian slaves of European ancestry were hardly an uncommon phenomenon in the Barbary States. The Barbary pirates were excellent seafarers and, from the Coasts of North Africa, sailed as far north as Iceland Were the Barbary pirates at war with the Icelanders? (where they went ashore and captured 800 slaves during one incident) and as far West as Newfoundland, Canada, (Or the people of Canada?) where they pillaged more than 40 vessels at one time. By 1620, reports Baepler, there were more than 20,000 white Christian slaves in Algiers alone, and by the 1630s that number tolled more than 30,000 men and 2,000 women. The most famous of all white Christian Europeans to serve as a slave in the Barbary States was probably Miguel de Cervantes, the great Spanish author of the “Don Quixote” epic, who was taken as a slave in the late 1500s.

…the number of slaves “harvested” from Black Africa over the period of the Muslim Arab slave trade at 11 million – roughly equal to the number taken by European Christians for their colonies in the New World.

Young women were targeted because of their value as concubines or sex slaves in markets. “The most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab world was to exploit them for sexual purposes,” I’d call that rape

Slavery is a horrid part of world history.
Whites enslaved blacks, blacks captured and sold fellow Africans, Muslims enslaved Africans and whites. We could compare the estimated numbers, and argue to the cows come home but what good would that do.

Slaves were raped and beat at the hands of both the European and Muslim captors.
(Never have read the same for the blacks who sold blacks to others)

Packed in slave ships like sardines, made to lay in their own excrement for months, as many as 3/4 dying in the middle passage. Whipped, lashed, raped, mutilated, starved, abused, lynched.

How do you think the European and American whites fared in the Barbary pirate ships. I am sure it was not a pleasure cruise! And they had a long trip ahead of them. The Americans, Icelanders and Canadians especially. And those that survived the trip lived a live of hell just as any other slave.

There was as much or more of a thriving slave market in Muslim lands as there was in the Americas.

Not only that, but the law of Islam itself requires that they receive good treatment, and in many cases, be freed.

There are stories about deals made between the captured and the capturer where if the captured agrees to teach people to read and write, they will be freed.

Well la di da. There were many kind slave owners in America, but do they count? No probably not cause they were ‘white’. Heh.
velvethammer said

March 16, 2008 at 8:57 am
The first-person narratives reproduced in this book do not support the often-repeated contention that slavery was somehow a more human institution in the Islamic world than it was in the European colonies of the New World.

By and large, the Christian slaves were poorly fed and housed, existing, by one account, on a meager ration of two slices of bread and a small quantity of beans per day. Clothing – and medical care — was provided by sympathetic free Europeans living in North Africa; slave-owners provided nothing. Spanish Catholic priests even built a large hospital in Algeria to look after ill and dying Christian slaves.

The most popular punishment was the “bastinado” – hundreds of blows on the soles of the feet with a thick wooden truncheon. For more severe offenses, such as attempting to escape or ridiculing the Muslim religion or prophet, slaves were executed in particularly cruel ways: by crucifixion, burning at the stake or impalement on huge iron hooks until death. The narrators of these slave accounts witnessed many acts of brutality toward the Christian slaves, as well as toward the general North African populace ruled over by the elite: the beys, deys and bashaws of the Barbary States.
theveiledtsunami said

March 16, 2008 at 2:33 pm
velvet
Am I wrong in thinking that you sound angry? I am confused about why. What exactly is it that you take offense to? You’re Caucasian I take it, and Christian. Do you somehow feel as if this is a personal endictment against you? Is this why it offends you? The thing is, if you do not condone slavery and you know it to be a wrong and tragic crime, them why on earth would you continue to try to “trump” the African diasporatic experience. Why this fury to try to make it less important somehow? Regardless of the other incidences of slavery that may have existed, I believe that the African American experience absolutely trumps all. I’ll tell you why. Even though slavery has legally been abolished for at least 150 years, the remnants of that barabric past still exist today. White slavery, sure it existed, but what are the results of that slavery today? Are white people held back enmasse from attending Universities, or from getting jobs they are over qualified for, are they stopped from living in the neighborhoods that they wish to and can afford to live in? Are white people racially profiled? Have you ever been stopped for driving through a black neighborhood? Beaten to death for dating a black woman? Things are getting better. Absolutely. And fortunately, I am young enough to have been able to move through life pretty unaffected by a lot of the most vulgar of these wrongs, but my mother knew Jim Crow (not that long ago) and even in the 21st century I have been called a nigger, been denied employment I know that I should have been offered, am racially profiled (and religiously as well, since we are on that topic).

And quite frankly, I also feel that I have more right than anyone (like you) to make a judgement on what type of slavery is worse, that by Muslims of Africans and Whites, versus that of Whites against Africans. I am an African American, the descendent of the African holocaust, who is still living with the remnants of that crime. I am a Muslim, which many of the African slaves were before being brought here and denied the right to even speak in their own language let alone practice their own faith. You, on the other hand are someone who can only comment based on your take on things, not based on any real understanding, experience, or even honest interest or desire to “get it”. You’re on defense. Actually, you sound like one of those white people who are damned sick and tired of “those black people” making a stink and demanding rights. Because you are not African, not Muslim, and obvious not interested in understanding anything that isn’t strictly based on white Christian ideals.

But if you can’t take my word for it:
Olaudah Equiano on his own slave experience 1756:
Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one for their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who had brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain….I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wished for my former slavery in preference to my present situation, which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened by my ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life; so that with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered my eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely…
velvethammer said

March 17, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Feel free to continue to resent ‘whites’ while simultaneously embracing the misogynistic, oppressive islam. You are one enlightened woman. Go you!

Sick and tired of house work? I have a solution for you! Get your bad self on down to Saudi and acquire a slave/maid. In doing so you’ll have plenty of time on your hands to ponder why as a female you are treated like a second class citizen. In the 21st century no less.

Don’t forget to write and let me know how it all works out for you.
velvethammer said

March 17, 2008 at 7:32 pm
It’s time to take a stand against Islam and Sharia

Picture this, says Maryam Namazie: “A child is swathed in cloth from head to toe every day. Everything but her face and hands are covered for fear that a man might find her attractive. At school she learns that she is worth less than a boy. She is not allowed to dance or swim or feel the sun on her skin or the wind in her hair. This is clearly unacceptable, yet it is accepted when it is done in the name of religion.”

Namazie is the founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain (CEMB) which started life in the middle of last year. On Monday – in celebration of the centenary of International Women’s Day – she spoke at a conference on Political Islam and Women’s Rights, and launched a campaign against Sharia.
afghanjohn said

March 17, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Thanks for the link velvet. I think I’ll put the link in a new post.
velvethammer said

March 17, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Great idea afghanjohn and you are welcome.
theveiledtsunami said

March 17, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Did I sound resentful against white people? Not me. Hmm. I guess the truth does hurt. (So much so that you stoop to mockery and bitterness.) I thought it was you sounding resentful, especially considering your sarcastic and belittling comment and your continued denial of the truth. As for the excerpt used in your post, who wrote it? Another angry white Christian? Or worse, a Muslim desperate for an abrogation of her faith and secularization? The kind of Muslim all Christians like. I’ll consider the source and bow out.

Surah Kafirun (The Unbelievers)
In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
Say: O ye that reject Faith!
I worship not that which ye worship,
Nor will ye worship that which I worship.
And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship,
Nor will ye worship that which I worship.
To you be your Way, and to me mine.
velvethammer said

March 17, 2008 at 11:01 pm
I do not mind dancing with you TVT, but I’d much prefer a less clumsy partner.

So sensitive. Mockery and bitterness has nothing to do with it. Truth and awareness yes. Mockery and bitterness, no.

Or worse, a Muslim desperate for an abrogation of her faith and secularization?

Did you even read the article? It plainly states “Namazie is the founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain (CEMB)” As in ex-Muslim? If not what are you afraid of? Hmm…

To answer you, she was a human being desperate to be free of the cult of islam. Who was brave enough to break the chains that bound her.

sarcastic and belittling comment and your continued denial of the truth.

Sarcastic? Perhaps. But unless belittling is an synonym for fact then no.

Truth? What truth? Islam? Islam has not one ounce of truth in it. Muhammed invented the mind bending drug known as islam. You are brainwashed.

Feel free to continue to resent ‘whites’ while simultaneously embracing the misogynistic, oppressive islam. You are one enlightened woman. Go you!

“There are none so blind as those who will not see”.

CYA
velvethammer said

March 19, 2008 at 1:01 pm
trajan75
Islam is an expansionist Imperialistic religion started by a desert bandit. The reason Osama hates us is because the Koran commands Muslims to conquer the world. …Islam is an evil expansionist Ideology. It’s the 7th Century version of Nazism, with Arabs as the Master Race.
konservo said

March 19, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I do not mind dancing with you TVT, but I’d much prefer a less clumsy partner.

I would ask to cut-in, but I only know one dance and it’s not done on a dance floor… okay, maybe it is sometimes

As to the question of slavery, here is a little known piece of writing by Benjamin Franklin called Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade. In this work Franklin shows the injustice of the practice of slavery by reminding his readers that Christians had been kidnapped and enslaved by Muslims for centuries. African peoples practiced slavery long before any European set foot in Africa, but, even the ancient Greek city-states had slaves (they were not African though, they were fellow Greeks who had been captured after a battle).
velvethammer said

March 20, 2008 at 1:14 am
Konservo

Feel free to cut in. But good luck rhythm is not TVT’s middle name.

Great informative piece! I wish I would of know of it when I was putting together my article on slavery.