The Pretension of Muslims Who Claim to Fight Against Racism

Ethiopian Christians About to be Beheaded by ISIS Militants (Photo: AP)

Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of the late Malcom X, stated on the pro-Islamic al-Jazeera news in a segment A message to Black Lives Matter protesters: Organise:

“There are so many people who have been killed…. We know about George Floyd, but there are countless others…. Now you have an opportunity to understand and witness what African Americans have been talking about for such a long time…. The systemic racism, the absolute criminal behavior….to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ for God’s sake.”

There is no doubt that black Americans have been marginalized and treated horribly by the Jim Crow laws of the southern U.S. States, which led people like Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., to peacefully fight for justice for the ‘Negro’ people in America. Yet as the peaceful Muslim Shabazz claims to be, she fails to disclose that her father belonged to a black separatist group, the Nation of Islam that called for black racial separation, as well as ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.’ She also willingly refuses to admit, just like Black Lives Matter (BLM), how her own Islamic religion created the very injustice she claims to be fighting against—she and BLM also do not touch the historical tragedy of how blacks owned black slave in America.

As I explain in my book, Islam: Religion of Peace?: The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up, the Prophet Muhammad, during the course of installing a tripartite paradigm of Islamic slavery via his military campaigns and raids against the inhabitants of Arabia, enslaved many of the Semitic peoples of the region. The prerequisite for being enslaved in Islam, whether it was for domestic labor or sexual exploitation, was not based on race, as it was with the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the New World and West Africa, but on being a non-Muslim war captive. It is estimated that between 650 and 1900, a minimum of eighteen million Africans had been enslaved by Arab slave traders; over one million Europeans were equally subjugated by the Muslim world during the same period—something Shabazz and BLM never discuss in public, if at all.

From the beginning of the Islamic era, slavers had been staging raids against the coastal tribes of equatorial East Africa. When the Sultanate of Zanzibar was established in the ninth century, the raids shifted inland to present-day Kenya and Uganda. Slaves were taken from as far south as Mozambique and as far north as Sudan.

Many slaves went to the mines and plantations of the Middle East, but many more went to Muslim territories in India and Java. These slaves were used as a kind of international currency, with up to hundreds of them being given as gifts to Chinese diplomatic parties. As Muslim power expanded, Arab slavers spread to North Africa and found a very lucrative trade waiting for them in the Mediterranean. Male African slaves were favored for heavy-duty work in salt mines and on sugar plantations. Older men and women cleaned streets and scrubbed floors in wealthy households. Boys and girls alike were kept as sexual property.

There are numerous Quranic and hadith verses that justify and encourage slavery as a blessing and a profitable enterprise:

• And marry the unmarried among you and the righteous among your male slaves and female slaves. If they should be poor, Allah will enrich them from His bounty, and Allah is all-Encompassing and Knowing.—Sura 24, 64
• O Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and those your right hand possesses [slave girls] what Allah has return to you as booty.—Sura 33, 50
• Narrated Jabir: A man manumitted a slave and he had no other property than that, so the Prophet cancelled the manumission (and sold the slave for him). No’aim bin Al-Nahham bought the slave from him.—Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 42, hadith 598

In Nigeria, for example, not just females but men and boys are also captured for physical labor and sexual exploitation. Not too long ago, police raided an Islamic school in Katsina State—the northwestern home state of President Muhammadu Buhari—and freed nearly seventy men and boys. Lawal Ahmad, a 33-year-old man who was held captive, said he witnessed sexual assault, beatings and the death of other captives during his two years there.

And in North Sudan, slavery was restored in 1983 when the Islamic government began using slave raids as a weapon in its military campaign to put down the southern rebellion against the government’s imposition of Islamic law. The government armed Arab Muslim militia groups and encouraged them to raid Southern villages, steal their property, and take their women and children as slaves—tens of thousands of Christians and non-Muslims were captured and enslaved.

In fact, in the seventh century  the Nubian Kingdom of Makuria (North Sudan) signed a treaty with the Arabs who had just conquered Egypt to send 360 slaves a year in exchange for peace—these slaves would then become the backbone of Muslim armies for centuries to come—today the Gulf monarchies continue to rely on to North Sudan to provide enslaved foot-soldiers for their ruthless plans for regional domination.

Joe Biden holding one-time KKK member Sen. Robert Byrd (D. W. VA.) – 2008 – (Photo: AP)

Do black lives really matter? Definitely not if you are a devout follower of the Prophet of Islam (or belong or promote BLM). It is not just about black lives but every single life altogether. Nor do the Democrats who are putting former Vice President Joe Biden on the presidential ticket who was chummy with the late Senator Robert Byrd, a one-time member of the Ku Klux Klan.

There is more than clear cut evidence that BLM and hate groups like the Nation of Islam promote racial hatred and violence, just like white separatists, such as the Ku Klux Klan—they are birds of the same feather.

The very fact that Ilyasah Shabazz, while rightfully calling a spade for a spade as to how blacks in America been mistreated, tends to come off as a hypocrite in her drive for racial equality when her Islamic religion, like her father Malcom X, sustained the opposite.

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Mario Alexis Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence, Italy. He has a doctorate in canon law and civil law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome; he also holds a M. A. in Medieval History from Fordham University, as well as a B.A. in Government & Politics from St. John’s University.

* Sources no cited may be found in my book Islam: Religion of Peace? – The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up.