Prophet Muhammad’s War Against White Supremacy and the later Aryanization of Islam According to a Classical Arabic Source

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD (c) 2012 

The famed Egyptian scholar Taqī ‘l-Dīn Abu ‘l-‘Abbās Aḥmad b. ‘Alī al-Maqrīzī (d. 1364-1442) wrote an important work entitled Kitāb al-Nizāʿ wa ’l-takhāṣum fīmā bayn Banī Umayya wa-Banī Hāshim, “The Book of Contention and Strife between the Banū Umayya and the Banū Hāshim.” Written long after the fall of the Umayyads and the rise of the Abbasids, this work reflects the anti-Umayyad bias and polemic that was current in al-Maqrīzī’s day. Nevertheless, the work is equally critical of the Abbasids, as the author wrote long after the fall of that dynasty in 1258 CE. There is in this work a profoundly insightful and honest passage that affirms so many of the historical developments that I have been documenting, and al-Maqrīzī’s seems to share my evaluation of these developments. In the passage quoted below al-Maqrīzī discusses the influence on Islamic tradition of the Abbasid caliph al-Maʿmūn (reigned 813-833) and his successors al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 833-842), al-Mutawakkil (r. 847-861) and al-Mustaʿīn (r. 862-866).  

   

“This fellow al-Maʿmūn …left one of the worst possible reputations in the whole history of Islam. This arose from the fact that he had books on philosophy translated into Arabic, to such a pitch that heretics and deviationists used them to pervert Islam and to trick the Muslims…He removed from the pay-registers the Arabs, the Messenger of God’s people, the race through whose agency God had established the religion of Islam…In their place, he relied on the Turks. He abandoned Arab dress and clothing, put a crown on his head and wore the dress of the Persians, that race which God had sent his prophet Muhammad to slay and to combat. With al-Muʿtaṣim, and through his deliberate agency, the rule of the Arabs came to an end; henceforth, during his reign and under his political regime, the Turks, upon whom the Messenger of God vowed to make war, assumed power. After him, they (viz. the Turks) secured an ascendency in all the lands. God gave the Turks dominion over al-Muʿtaṣim’s son, Jaʿfar al-Mutawakkil, so that they eventually murdered him. They also murdered al-Muʿtaṣim’s grandson, Aḥmad al-Mustaʿīn. They treated the religion of God as a plaything and established a reign of terror throughout all the provinces of the caliphate.”

In this brief quote al-Maqrīzī alludes to a number of critical developments within Islam during the Abbasid period (750 – 1258 CE):

1. Al-Maqrīzī notes the deleterious impact on Islamic tradition of al-Maʿmūn’s program to translate Greek philosophical works into Arabic and thus making them available to Muslim thinkers. The result has been the ‘Hellenization’ of Islam, i.e. the shaping of Islamic tradition by Greek philosophical ideas and arguments. The most damaging aspect of this ‘Hellenizing’ of Islamic tradition, as I have documented, was the eventual replacing of the anthropomorphic God of Prophet Muhammad and early Islam with the Platonic and Aristotelian ‘Spook God’ of Greek Philosophy and later Islam.

2. Al-Maqrīzī alludes to the Fall of the Arabs: both al-Maʿmūn and al-Muʿtaṣim affected the final demise of the Arabs and the rise of the Turks. Here we thus have the early stages of the “De-Arabization” of Islam and its ‘Turkifaction’ and ‘Persianization’. Both of these processes constitute what I have called the ‘Aryanization’ of Islam, i.e. the later re-shaping of Islam by White (viz. Aryan) converts to Islam: the Persians, Turks, Byzantines, etc.  

3. Next al-Maqrīzī makes a startling admission: that the Prophet Muhammad – whom we now know was a Black Arab – was sent by Allah to SLAY the Persians!!! Those who have followed my work know that Sassanian Persia was one of two pillars of White Supremacy in Late Antiquity, the other being the Byzantine Empire. The Black Arabs conquered and destroyed the Persian Sassanian Empire in 650. According to al-Maqrīzī the prophet Muhammad also vowed to make war with the Turks. This is an amazing matter-of-fact confession which suggests that Prophet Muhammad was an early warrior against White Supremacy.

4. According to al-Maqrīzī these transgressions against Islam by these Abbasid caliphs earned them the chastisement of Allah, who allowed these very Turks to gain tyrannical dominion over the caliphs, whom they eventually kill. The Turks, al-Maqrīzī notes, only superficially embraced Islam and treated the religion as a plaything.

These allusions within this important Classical Arabic text cohere with the reconstruction of Islamic history as I have been documenting it, ma sha Allah.   

Islam, Black Power and the End of White Supremacy

By Wesley Muhammad, PhD (c) 2012

The height of imperial 'Black Power' in the ancient world was probably New Kingdom Kemet, which was very imperial. However, Kemet managed only to extend east into the Levant and south as far as the 4th-5th Cataract. 

On the other hand, this is the Islamic empire at its height (in extent).

Robert Goldston, Sword of the Prophet (1979):  72:

“The domain of Islam stretched from the Pyrenes to the Himalayas, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, from central Asia to Central Africa. Not only had the Arabs conquered this huge area, but they had remained to govern it…In all of recorded history their accomplishment remains unique.”

David Levering Lewis, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008): 3:

“the Arabs accomplished the greatest revolution in power, religion, culture and wealth in history”

The “Arabs” that achieved this “unique” accomplishment were black-skinned Arabs, descendents of the Africans who settled in Arabia several millennia prior. This is documented in Arabic, Latin, Chinese and Persian sources. The Islamic Empire was the work of the Black Rashidun caliphs of Medina (Abu Bak, Umar, Uthman) and the Black Umayyad caliphs in Damascus and Al-Andulus. Dana Marniche, in her important article “Fear of Blackness: Descriptions and Ethnogenesis of the original Afro-Arabian tribes of ‘Moorish’ Spain,“ affirms :

“Although the Arabians were not the first to be called Moors, it was the color of the people leaving the peninsula of Arabia that was mainly due the use of the term ‘Moor’ for black and woolly haired people in Spain, France, Italy and other parts of Europe in Islamic times. When the Chanson de Roland which speaks of the time of the Moorish battles in Gallic France speaks of ‘those hordes and hordes blacker than the blackest ink – no shred of white on them except their teeth…’ it is no mere exaggeration. Anyone familiar with the Arabic writings of the Syrian, Iraqi and Iranian historians up until the 14th century knows that this is also their description of the early ‘pure’ Arab clans of the Arabian peninsula.”

Authentic Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula 

Sir Roland and Saracens, Battle of Roncevaux. Miniature from Charles V’s, Grandes chroniques de France (ca. 1370s)

Never since the rise of White Supremacy and the sleep of God’s people has there been such a display of ‘Black Power.’  In order to achieve this global empire of Black Power, these black-skinned Arab Muslims had to demolish the existing white power structure which consisted of the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empires. 

Byzantine Empire (330 CE - 1453)

Sassanian Empire at its apogee (224–651)

The Byzantines and Sasanians ruled much of the known world, including Africa, for centuries prior to the rise of the Islamic Empire. The Black Muslims demolished the southern portion of the Byzantine Empire, freeing Africa, and totally decimated the Sasanian Empire.  Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth of Reality(1967): 119 notes:

“Except for the Islamic breakthrough, Europe has ruled Africa down to the present day.”

This Islamic “breakthrough” that temporarily freed Africa from Europe’s rule was a “Black Islamic breakthrough”. 

Where else in the annals of recorded history for the last 6000 years can one document a comparable display of Black Power? The coming of Master Fard Muhammad (TWAPID) initiated the process that will eventually eclipse this, but that process has not fully played itself out yet. We still have a long way to go, I believe.   

The guardians of White Supremacy since the rise of the Islamic Empire continue to acknowledge Black Islam as its cheif threat.  After overthrowing the Byzantines in North Africa the Muslims (Black Arab and African) headed to Europe and, after defeating the Visigoth army and killing the last Visigoth king, Roderick, in 711 they added the Iberian Peninsula to the Islamic empire. For 800 years Black (and mulatto) Muslims called Moors ruled southwest Europe. As a consequence, in the psyche of White Christian Europe the Black Muslim incarnated evil itself. As James Brunson and Runoko Rashidi note in their articel, "Moors in Antiquity":

"because of his dark complexion and Islamic faith, the Moor became in Europe a symbol of guile, evil, and hate."

The material coming out of Europe during this period leaves no room to doubt that the Black Muslim was perceived as thegreatest threat to White Christendom. This fact is probably illustrated by the 11th century coat of arms commemorating Peter III of Aragon’s victory over the Moors in 1096. During the battle four Moorish princes fell. On the coat of arms their black heads surround a Christian cross. This was updated on a gold coin after 1700 by King Charles of Hapsburg. These Black Muslim heads on this European Christian coat of arms undoubtedly symbolized victory over the perceived chief threat.

Hapsburg gold coin of Aragon coat of arms. From Sertima, GoldenAge.

Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (d. 1950) was an influential American political scientist and white supremacist. He was also an historian with a History degree from Harvard University. As an historian he was a keen student of Islamic history in particular as his book, The New World of Islam, clearly displays. Stoddard was concerned with the fall of White Supremacy and rise of the world of color. HE documented this trend and his fears of it in his work, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In it he makes an important confession:

"Concerning Islam’s steady progress in black Africa there can beno shadow of a doubt. Every candid European observer tells the same story. ‘Mohammedanism,’ says Sir Charles Elliot, ‘can still give the natives a motive for animosity against Europeans…’Twenty years ago another English observer, T.R. Threlfall, wrote: ‘…The rapid spread of militant Mohammedanism among the…tribes to the north of the equator is a serious factor in the fight for racial supremacy in Africa…’ Islam is as yet unknown south of the Zambezi, but white men universally dread thepossibility of its appearance…"  

Black Islam continues to be the cheif threat against White Supreamcy. 

Cartoon from 1964 edition of Esquire Magazine depicting the former late president of France, Charles de Gaulle , speaking to white world leaders including Moshe Dayan and others from Israel and other places, pointing to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and declaring: "Were it not for this man, we would have a glorious future." 

Newsweeks Magazine anouncing that, once again, the face of 'Islamic terror' is Black. 

“There is no good in Black people”: Racism and the Fabrication of Islamic Tradition

Br Wesley Muhammad, PhD

The Muslim world today, and its Islam, is characterized by profound misogyny/sexism and a rabid White Supremacy and anti-black racism. Neither characterized early Islam, however. It is a myth that Jahili (pre-Islamic) and early Islamic Arabia was racist and that Black people were ill-treated on account of their blackness. In fact, Arabia and the Arabs were themselves still black on the eve of Islam.[1] To the existent that there was any racism at all, it was certainly anti-white racism.  Al-Mubarrad (d. 898), the leading figure in the Basran grammatical tradition, affirmed:

“The Arabs used to take pride in their brown and black complexion (al-sumra wa al-sawad) and they had a distaste for a white and fair complexion (al-humra wa al-shaqra), and they used to say that such was the complexion of the non-Arabs.”[2]

That these indigenous Blacks of Arabia took pride in their blackness is noted also by Al-Jahiz (d. 869), who declares in his Fakhr al-sudan ‘ala l-bidan: “The Arabs pride themselves in (their) black color (al-‘arab tafkhar bi-sawad al-lawn).”[3]

As Dana Marniche points out:

“As if the world has been turned upside down, blackness in the early Arab culture as in pre-Ptolemaic Egypt and early Dravidian India (according to Marco Polo), was revered as representative of what was archetypically good, holy and powerful, while in European culture even in early times it appears to have been the exact opposite.”[4]

That Jahili and early Islamic Arabia were free of anti-black racism has been pointed out by several Western scholars. John Alembillah Azumah,  Associate Professor of World Christianity at Colombia Theological Seminary and former director for the Centre of Islamic Studies at the London School of Theology, in his The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa, affirms:

“in pre-Islamic Arabia blacks were held in high esteem and did marry Arab women … the discrimination against the (blacks) on account of the colour of their skin is a development within the Islamic period.  “In pre-Islamic Arab poetry and historical narrative blacks…were usually referred to as Habash…There is hardly any trace of antagonism or discrimination on the basis of the skin color in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. In line with this pre-Islamic and early Islamic period, the Qur’an, apart from one instance where the colours black and white are used in an idiomatic sense to depict evil and good respectively, express no prejudice in matters of race or colour…    In social life in pre-Islamic and early Arabia there were black slaves as well as white slaves, mainly captured during war, and there is no evidence that the former suffered any specific discrimination by virtue of the colour of their skin. On the contrary, the Habash, who were active in the sixth-century Arabia as allies of the Byzantines, were usually regarded as people with a higher civilization than the Arabs and respected during early Islamic times as people with a revealed religion. It was partly due to the high esteem with which the Habash were held in the early Islamic period that Muhammad advised his persecuted followers to seek asylum in Abyssinia in 615 CE.”[5]

The late St Clair Drake, who created at Roosevelt University one of the first African American Studies programs in the United States, noted also:

 “In early Islam, there were positive associations with blackness…The rabbinic and midrashic stories that interpret black skin as a curse was apparently not part of early Arab oral tradition…However…they became known after the seventh-century Arab conquests, among scholars in Mesopotamia who were developing Islamic religious thought. The scholars…some [were] Arabs, [most were] Persians.”[6]

The absence of racism in early Islam and the creation of it in later Islamic texts is affirmed also by Prof Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, who has done the most to expose the racism that eventually took root in Islam:

“the Qur’ān expresses no racial or color prejudice. What is perhaps most significant is that the Qur’ān does not even reveal any awareness of such prejudice…The evidence of the Qur’ān on the lack of racial prejudice in pre-Islamic and the earliest Islamic times is born out by such fully authenticated fragments of contemporary literature as survive. As in the Qur’ān so also in the ancient Arabian poetry, we find awareness of difference…We do not however find any clear indication that this was felt in racial terms, or went beyond the normal feeling of distinction which all human groups have about themselves in relation to others…There are verses (indeed many verses) attributed to pre-Islamic and early Islamic poets which would suggest very strongly a feeling of hatred and contempt directed against persons of African birth or origin. Most if not all of these, however, almost certainly belong to later periods and reflect later problems, attitudes, and preoccupations. Such projection backward into early Islamic or pre-Islamic times is a very common feature, and a recurring difficulty in Islamic scholarship.”[7]    

The role that non-Arab converts, particularly Iranian, played in the manipulation and fabrication of Islamic tradition has by documented in my God’s Black Prophet’s: Deconstructing the Myth and the White Muhammad of Arabia and Jesus of Jerusalem (2010). This ‘Aryanization’ of Islam introduced anti-black racism. This racism was falsely attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (who was himself black-skinned) in fabricated hadith reports. Shaykh Abdullah Faisal, in his work, 100 Fabricated Hadith, discusses the most notorious of these racist fabrications. I reproduce here Shaykh Faisals full discussion of this.

“Hadith 35      There is no good in black people; when they are hungry they steal and when their stomach is full they commit zina (fornication/adultery). However they have two noble characteristics, which are generosity to their guests and perseverance at times of hardship. Related by Tabaraani and classified fabricated by Imam Bukhari and Ibn Jawzee. This fabricated hadith…is detrimental to the Islamic brotherhood and sisterhood because they create a feeling of nationalism and racism, which are both unbelief. Ibn-ul-Qayyim al Jawzia said all ahaadith cursing black people are fabricated. Bilal (ra) the Muathin of the Prophet was black and the Prophet (saw) said: “Bilal is from my household.”
 Our father Adam (s) was black hence Allah (swt) said:
 “And indeed, We created Mankind from sounding clay of altered black smooth mud.”
 Prophet Musa (s) was also black, If the people who fabricate hadith say those were Prophets so it was expected for them to be good; we say that Luqman the wise and Bilal were black with good character and they were not prophets. How could the above-mentioned khabar be authentic when the Holy Prophet (saw) said to Bilal: I heard the sound of your shoes in Paradise just in front of me.” If Black people didn’t have any good in them how was it possible for Bilal (ra) to be promised Paradise by the Holy Prophet?
 Narrated by Jabir Ibn Abdullah (ra): “Umar used to say Abu Bakr is our chief and he manumitted our chief, meaning Bilal.” In the Arab world people do not call their sons Bilal (ra) even though he was a prominent Sahaabah; all this is due to racism on their part.”

  

Notes

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[1] See Wesley Muhammad, “Were the Pre-Islamic Arabs Racist? The Evidence of Bilal ibn Rabah,” @ http://blackarabia.blogspot.com/2011/09/bilal-b-ribah-not-first-black-muslim.html

[2] Apud Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh nahj al-balaghah, V:56. 

[3] Al-Jahiz, Fakhr al-sudan ‘ala al-bidan, I:207.

[4] Dana Marniche, “FEAR OF BLACKNESS PART II: EARLY DESCRIPTIONS OF THE CENTRAL ARABIAN TRIBESMEN WHO COMPRISED THE ‘MOORS’ OF SPAIN,” http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/fear-of-blackness-part-ii-dana-marniche/

[5] John Alembillah Azumah, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001) 139, 112.

[6] St Clair Drake, Black Folks Here and There, 2:85, 152.

[7] Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 7, 8-9.