Part Two:\u00a0Licutan\u2019s Affirmation of Bilal & the idols of Anti-Blackness. (pt 2)<\/a><\/p>\n Hijrah and Marronage<\/strong><\/p>\n For Jamaican Maroons\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A letter from a white magistrate visiting a sugar plantation in Jamaica, reads, \u201c<\/a>One of them showed me a Koran written, from memory by himself but written, he assured me, before he became a Christian.<\/a> I had my doubts on this point<\/a><\/em>.<\/a>\u201d \u00a0Even under the bondage of slavery, enslaved Africans reproduced the text of the Qur\u2019an. However, in order to survive in a world hostile to their faith, many Muslims would openly profess Christianity while believing in Islam in their hearts.<\/p>\n The Qur\u2019an, which many African Muslim slaves had memorized, is replete with verses urging Muslims to flee from persecution, pointing to the spacious nature of God\u2019s earth. One such ayat in An-Nisa 4:97 reads, \u201c\u2026.Was, then, God\u2019s earth not spacious enough for you to forsake the domain of evil?\u201d<\/a> Hijrah, or \u2018flight from persecution,\u2019 is an Islamic practice that began when the Prophet Muhammad\u2019s (PBUH) early followers forsake the domain of evil in \u00a0Mecca and established their own Muslim polity, beginning in Ethiopia and then Medina. Prophetic precedences would guide the ways in which African Muslims would\u00a0fight slavery.<\/p>\n Describing the impact that such ayats\u00a0in the Qur\u2019an had on slaves, historian Dr. Afroz Sulanta writes that \u201chijra from the plantations led many of them to form their own community, known as Maroon communitie<\/a>s.\u201d<\/p>\n One such \u00a0Jammacian Muhammad Kaba would even wrote a book titled \u201cThe Book of Prayer\u201d<\/a> instructing the community of believers in Jamaica\u00a0\u00a0on the importance of maintaining their daily prayers.<\/p>\n Another\u00a0Arabic document found circulating among Jamaican Muslims,\u201dexhorted all followers of Mohamet tobe true and faithful, if they wished to go to heaven.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Hijrah empowered African Muslims to escape the brutalities of the slave system and to resist the efforts of white plantation owners to eradicate their faith. The maroon communities enabled African Muslims and Africans of other indigenous faiths to forge their own societies free from the hegemony of white plantation owners.\u00a0Despite the horrifying situation that Africans Muslims experienced, they still sought to remain faithful to the Prophet Muhammad and exhibited high levels of faith in their freedom struggles.<\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Muslims among<\/strong>\u00a0Haitian Rebels<\/strong><\/p>\n An ayat in the Qu\u2019ran in\u00a0 16:110\u00a0 that would have been deeply relevant to\u00a0 Muslim Maroons \u00a0states,\u201d\u201cfor those who became fugitives after they had been persecuted, and then fought and were steadfast \u2013 lo! thy Lord afterward is (for them) indeed Forgiving, Mercifu<\/a>l..\u201d<\/p>\n In Haiti, fugitive slaves formulated independent communities in the mountainous regions of Haiti and subsequently began organizing attacks against white plantation owners, which prompted French military intervention.<\/p>\n Maroon leader Francois Makandal is described in the Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion as\u00a0 \u201can erudite Muslim who wrote Arabic very well<\/a>.\u201d Living in the mountains, Makandal \u00a0organized slaves to carry out a \u00a0series of attacks on French Crops before he was captured and \u00a0burned at the stack.<\/p>\n A \u00a0French colonel recounted that, \u201cDuring the wars I was obliged to do against the blacks, we often found written papers in the bags or macoutes of the few Negroes we killed\u2026Nobody understood those writings. It was Arabic<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The Islamic centers of learning in West Africa which taught Arabic allowed slaves to communicate in a language indecipherable to whites in order to carry out acts of sabotage and resistance.<\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0The Persecution of African Muslims\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n An even \u00a0deeper historical antagonism that impacted enslaved Muslim in the Americas is furthered highlighted by Sigmund Koelle, a Germany missionary in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0<\/span>century. In his polemic against Islam,\u00a0 Koelle writes,\u201d\u201cMohammedanised Africa became the stepping-stone for invading Christian\u00a0<\/span>Europe<\/em>\u00a0<\/i><\/span>from the west.\u201d <\/a>In\u00a0\u00a0is from \u2018Mohammedanised Africa,\u2019 that a 700 year old Muslim state would exist in Europe, one that would only \u00a0fall with the Reconquista in 1492.<\/p>\n As such, the African Muslim has a relationship with Spain\u00a0which predates modernity.\u00a0Even prior to the slave trade,\u00a0 \u201cMohammadanised Africa\u2019 came to represent a villainous force in the mind of many Europeans\u00a0who \u00a0began to spread their Islamophobia into the Americas. \u00a0\u00a0The Spanish \u00a0passed laws seeking\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>to minimize the\u00a0importation of African Muslims\u00a0into the Americas.\u00a0T<\/em>he \u00a0Wolof, an African Muslim ethnic group, was ordered to be deported out of Chile. \u00a0The Spanish were concerned about attempts of Africans to spread Islam to Indians, but also, according to African historian Jeffrey A. Fortin. \u201cblack Muslim resistance to slavery.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n In the end though, did this resistance fail? In\u00a0the next article, \u00a0we will examine how despite the complete eradication of Islam among Black descendants of slaves in the \u2018new world,\u2019 it was still able to remerge and impact the black freedom struggle in the post-slavery era.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Part One:\u00a0Islamophobia and Anti-Blackness: The Historical Connection pt. 1 Part Two:\u00a0Licutan\u2019s Affirmation of Bilal & the idols of Anti-Blackness. (pt 2) Hijrah and Marronage For Black Muslims who had been captured and kidnapped to the western hemisphere, they would be separated \u00a0from\u00a0the classical tasfir texts of Ibn Kathir, the hadith collections of Imam Bukhari, and, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2731,"featured_media":337,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[87,11,85,90,9,89,86,91,73,88],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-philosophy","tag-african-muslims","tag-anti-blackness","tag-hijrah","tag-history","tag-islam","tag-laws","tag-maroons","tag-muslism","tag-slavery","tag-spain"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"africanmuslim\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/673\/2016\/05\/africanmuslim-300x210.jpg\")
Black Muslims who had been captured and kidnapped to the western hemisphere, they would be separated \u00a0from\u00a0the classical tasfir texts of Ibn Kathir, the hadith collections of Imam Bukhari, and, most significantly, the textual transcriptions of the Qur\u2019an. \u00a0Yet, the Islamic scholarly tradition is heavily predicated upon an oral tradition that places a heavy emphasis on memorization, and West Africa was no exception to this. \u00a0Black Muslims who endured the Middle Passage would still have the mental fortitude to reproduce Islamic texts \u00a0even under the most horrifying of social conditions to the dismay and shock of white slave owners.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/c\/c3\/Quran_cover.jpg\/800px-Quran_cover.jpg\")