Afrocentricity and Islam II

It is unfortunate that some people, in response to the previous post on the subject have attempted to claim basically that I have low reading comprehension. They would have you believe that when I directly quoted Diop's work, that I had mistook his position on Islam in Africa for someone elses. They unfortunately do not apparently understand the various meanings of the word "foreign" as applied to this discussion. The word foreign has two meanings applicable to this discussion:

1) Coming or introduced from the outside.

And

2) Strange and Unfamiliar.

These definitions are from the Oxford American Dictionary.

In this discussion of Islam and Africa we are using the word foreign in the above ways. The historical record shows that Islam is foreign to Africa as found in definition 1. That is, it came from Arabia. Our quotation from Walter Rodney shows that Islam was, historically "strange and unfamiliar" as foreign is also defined. That Islam is not now "strange and unfamiliar" to Africa or Africans does not mean that it is not "coming or introduced from the outside." Anyone failing to understand this is simply lacking in comprehension of history and language. I don't mean to insult, but it is true. You simply cannot state that because Africa is now familiar with Islam or Christianity, that they are not foreign in the first sense. This is the critical mistake that some Muslims make as they claim that Islam was known and a part of Africa for over 1,000 years that therefore it is not foreign to Africa. No it is not foreign in the second sense but it still is foreign in the first. Similarly 1,000 years from now Christianity will be familiar and known to Africans and it will still be foreign to Africa in the second sense.

However; let me return to Diop. Since some people think I lack reading comprehension, let me expand my quotes from the book "Pre-colonial Black Africa" which was the source cited from the author of Islam and the African people. Let me first return to the centralized statement:

African Religions, more or less forgotten, were in the process of atrophying and being emptied of their spiritual content, their former deep metaphysics, The jumble of empty forms they had left behind could not compete with Islam on the moral or rational level.

Let's assume here for a minute that I was wrong to say that Diop was reflecting the ideas of Dan Fodio. No problem. Let's analyse the statement itself. This statement is in reference to Islam in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries. Let's move back in the text and note that Diop places the beginnings of Islam in Western Africa in the 11th century. Thus the time between the statement and the introduction of Islam into West Africa represents 500 years. What was going on with the traditional African religions that Diop is supposedly discussing bad mouthing? Moving forward to pg. 171 of the same chapter we find the following:

Islam, in contrast to (present day) Christianity, takes no account of the traditional past...the equivalents of the Western pagan past must be hushed up, renounced, permanently forgotten...Reasons such as these explain why today the Blacks of Khartoum have a sense of shame at acknowledging their relationship to the ancient past of Meroe...All this is of no interest because it is tainted with a pagan tradition no good Muslim would think of recalling. How could they, in all decency, hark back to these people who knew nothing of the Koran, and who did not pray as we now do. to a time before religious wisdom?

One might term as "Sherifism" the irresistible impulse on the part of most Muslim chiefs of Black Africa to link themselves, by whatever acrobatics, to the family tree of Mahomet...This tendency spread throughout Africa after the introduction of Islam in the eighth century. All the royal families, without distinction, after Islamization invented sherifian origins for themselves, often retroactively adjusting local history...Such legends have proliferated in Black Africa since Islam came in and have contributed to altering the authentic history of the continent.

Consciousness of the continuity of the people's historical past has been progressively weakened by religious influences. Even within our own families, we know that our parents prefer to forget systematically and keep their children unaware of a certain "pagan" past, which it has become indiscreet to mention.



Lastly Diop writes on Page 173 of said title:

However that may be, Mohammedan Black Africa in the Middle Ages was no less original than Christian Europe at the close of antiquity. Both continents were invaded in the same way by alien monotheistic religions which ended up being at the foundation of the entire sociopolitical organization, ruling philosophy of thought, and carrying forward intellectual and moral values during this whole period.

So let us now, without reservation, be clear: Diop recognized that Islam was foreign to Africa, as in coming or introduced from the outside. Anyone who claims that Diop does not say so, is a liar and/or has not read his work in it's entirety. Furthermore, let us also be clear that Diop clearly outlined how Islam came into Africa (both peaceful and non-peaceful) and in no way was of the opinion that the "Great" African religions (Ifa, Asante, Vodun, Kongo) were in any way, shape or form less than Islam. Anyone making that claim is either ignorant or willfully lying.

Let me also touch upon a subject I decided against discussing in the previous post. The author of Islam and the African People, attempted to slander the Yoruba and their religion with his out of context quote of Diop. Let me now direct the reader to Diops words specifically about the Yoruba:

Alongside Islamized Sudan, in the region of Benin, another, strictly traditional center of civilization shone with incomparable brilliance: one can say, without exaggeration, that the "realistic" art of Ife and the Benin, with it's harmonious proportions, its balance, its serenity that makes one think of certain Greek works of the sixth century, represents African sculptural "classicism.' The Yoruba had been civilized just as well as the Islamized Africans: entire studies should be devoted to that civilization.

So it should be abundantly clear to those with eyes to read and the intellectual honesty that the charges leveled at Afrocentricity and of Pan-Africanist as being anti-Islam was a matter of unfounded bias, is complete crap. There may be people out in the black world who are ignorant and speak on subjects they have no knowledge of, but that is not Afrocentricity. That is not scholarship and that is definitely NOT Garvey's Ghost.

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