Is this true? Was there ever a time where nikkas weren't losing?

[BlackFruitPunch]

Jerusalem was captured by the Arabs in 638 CE. Alexandria in Egypt fell to them in 643 CE. In 698 CE, they captured Carthage thus ensuring their political influence in all of northern Africa around the Mediterranean. Arabs did not move into the region until much later but tried to control it at the time with language and the Islamic religion. The Arabs began to invade Africa in large numbers from 749 CE when they settled in Alexandria, Egypt. They were mistakenly seen as African cousins and were welcomed as saviours from the oppressive rule of the Byzantium (Graeco-Roman domination.) The Arabs did not directly force their religion on the African Egyptians at first, that followed later, but unlike Christianity, Islam could not be translated into local languages.

With the Africans, looking for something to replace their banned traditional religion, and imposed Graeco-Roman Christianity, literacy in Arabic soon spread, and assisted by inter-marriages and Christian apostasy, (the reverse was punishable by death in Islam) to gain relief from taxation, Islam quickly became the religion of the land.

Although the Qur'an does not distinguish between races, there is a strong legacy of racism against Africans from early Islam because the language, traditions and customs of the Arabs supports the down grading of the African race. Dr. Azumah in his book: The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa provides several examples of Islam’s hatred of Blacks. There is the example in the hadith in which an Ethiopian woman laments her racial inferiority to Muhammad, who consoles her by saying, "In Paradise, the whiteness of the Ethiopian will be seen over the stretch of a thousand years."

Another hadith quotes Muhammad thus: "Do not bring black into your pedigree." In fact, the Arabic word for slave, “Abd,” became equated with Africans and Blacks with the advent of Islam. Osama Bin Laden, in a discussion with the Sudanese-American novelist, Kola Boof, in Morocco in 1996 said, “when next you meet an Arab, you should ask what is the Arabic word for slave, you’ll discover that the words are the same “abeed.” Which is why, when an Arab looks at a black African, what he sees is a slave.”

Muhammad owned and sold Black slaves. In fact, he ordered and built the pulpit of his mosque with African slave labour. The Qur'an encourages sex with female slaves in several places. Classical Islamic law allows a light-skinned Muslim man to marry a Black woman, but a Black Muslim man is restricted from marrying a light-skinned woman. As the literature of the time put it, "only a whore prefers blacks; the good woman will welcome death rather than being touched by a black man.”

So interwoven is slavery with Islam that Islams’ holiest city, Mecca (site of the Haj pilgrimage), was a slave trading capital. Quoting Azumah again, up until the 20th century, Mecca served as the gateway to the Muslim world for slaves brought out of Africa. "It became a custom for pilgrims to take slaves for sale in Mecca or buy one or two slaves while on Haj as souvenirs to be kept, sold or given as gifts."

Muslim Arab and Persian literature depicts Blacks as "stupid, untruthful, vicious, sexually unbridled, ugly and distorted, excessively merry and easily affected by music and drink.” Nasir al-Din Tusi, a famous Muslim scholar said of Blacks: "The ape is more capable of being trained than the Negro.” Ibn Khaldun, an early Muslim thinker, writes that Blacks are "only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings."

Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), Arab’s most famous and influential philosopher/scientist in Islam, described Blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men are abeed (slave) stock.” He equated Black people with “rats plaguing the earth.” Ibn Khaldum, an Arab historian stated that “Blacks are characterized by levity and excitability and great emotionalism,” adding that “they are every where described as stupid.”

al-Dimashqi, an Arab pseudo scientist wrote, “the Equator is inhabited by communities of blacks who may be numbered among the savage beasts. Their complexion and hair are burnt and they are physically and morally abnormal. Their brains almost boil from the sun’s heat…..” Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani painted this no less horrid picture of black people, “…..the zanj (the blacks) are overdone until they are burned, so that the child comes out between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions…..”

Arabs’ attitude to blacks derives from Genesis’ racist fiction of the three sons of Noah – Ham, Japheth and Shem. Arabs claim that “the accursed Ham was the progenitor of the black race; that Japheth begat the full-faced, small eyes Europeans, and that Shem fathered the handsome of face with beautiful hair Arabs,” of course.

After the Arabs had conquered Egypt and shortly after Muhammad’s death, they began demanding Nubian slaves from the south. This continued for 600 years. Dominated African kingdoms were forced to send on a regular basis, tributes of slaves to the Arab ruler in Cairo. From as early as the 6th century CE, they had developed slavery supply networks out of Africa, from the Sahara to the Red Sea and from Ethiopia, Somalia and East Africa, to feed demands for slaves all over the Islamic world and the Indian Ocean region. The African male slaves were castrated and used as domestic servants or to work the Sahara salt deposits or on farms all over the Islamic world.

The African female servants were continuously raped before being sold to households to be used as sex labour. Of springs from the illicit encounters were largely destroyed as unworthy to live. Between 650 CE and 1905 CE, over 20, 000,000 African slaves had been delivered through the Tans-Sahara route alone to the Islamic world. Dr. John Alembellah Azumah in his book: The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa estimates that over 80 million more died en-route. A text from Dr. Azumah books, provides this quote from a Zanzibar observer about the travails of African slaves en-route to slave markets around the Arabic world.

“As they filed past, we noticed many chained together by the neck... The women, who were as numerous as the men, carried babies on their backs in addition to a tusk of ivory or other burden on their heads... It is difficult to adequately describe the filthy state of their bodies; in many instances not only scarred by [the whip], but feet and shoulders were a mass of open sores... half-starved ill-treated creatures who, weary and friendless, must have longed for death.”

A Muslim herdsman, in Dr. Azumah’s book described the fate of those who became too ill or too weak to continue the journey as follows: “We speared them at once! For, if we did not, others would pretend they are ill in order to avoid carrying their loads. No! We never leave them alive on the road; they all know this custom.”

When asked who carries the ivory when a mother gets too tired to carry both her baby and the ivory, the herdsman replied, "She does! We cannot leave valuable ivory on the road. We spear the child and make her burden lighter.”

 

[BlackFruitPunch]

Between 9th and 10th centuries, several millions of Zanjs (Black) slaves were imported from Zanzibar to Lower Iraq where they constituted more than half the total population and worked to clear saline lands for irrigation and to cultivate sugar. The African slaves were transported through Mombasa, Zanzibar and the Sudan. More millions of African slaves were involved in the Islamic experience on the East African route than in the West African/Sahara route. At first, they were used largely for military purposes then as domestic servants, concubines or eunuchs, in affluent Muslim households. In Northern Africa, many became galley slaves, and in the Persian Gulf, pearl divers, port labourers, sailors, or date farmhands. Some notable Africans from the Arab slavery experience included the Nubian eunuch, Abu I-Misk Kufur, who became regent of Egypt in the 10th century, and Sidi Badr, who briefly seized the throne of Bengal in the 1490s. There was also the 17th century great African Muslim general, Mails Ambar, who led the resistance of the Deccans against the Mughals. A distinctive African community has survived culturally in a place called Jiruft in Iran.

With the death of Askia Muhammad, the Emperor of Songhai, in 1528 CE, Songhai Empire started falling apart. This was the opportunity Ahmad al-Mansur, the Emperor of Morocco had been waiting for to conquer Western Sudan after his Spanish humiliation. He took his time to plan his invasion and when he felt ready in 1591 CE, he sent an army of some four thousand musketeers under the leadership of a Spanish mercenary officer called Judar Pasha. The army crossed the Sahara and was on the border of Songhai before serious attention was given to it. Songhai’s ruler, Askia Ishak II, called up a superior number of army but relying on traditional weapons. The two armies met on April 12, 1591, at a small town called Tondibi, about fifty miles from the capital city of Gao. Inspite of the brave stand of the Songhai army, the Moroccan soldiers overwhelmed them and moved into the country to wreck havoc.

Prof. Clarke informs us that: “The Moroccan invasion of Songhai and eventually, other nations of the Western Sudan was made all the more tragic because in most cases it was Muslim against Muslim. The invaders from North Africa and their European mercenary troops did not spare any one, not man, woman or child. They pitilessly slew the now demoralized citizens who cried out to them; we are Muslims, we are your brothers in religion. The war brought no honour to either side and in the years that followed, an appreciation of African intellectual and material contribution to Spain and the other nations of the Mediterranean sphere was lost from the respectful commentary of human history.”

The mid 18th century saw the growth of Islamic Tariqa, an aggressive form of religious worship intolerant of traditional or other religions, culture or customs. Tariqa had two divisions, Tijaniyya and Qudiriyya, and were usually led locally by charismatic, learned and well-travelled clerics, determined to purify and cleanse fellow Muslims and conquer non-believers through the jihad (holy war.)

Usman Dan Fodio of Sokoto (Northern Nigeria) and Umar Ibn Said Tall of Tukolor (Western Sudan) were two of such leaders who started out as reformers and ended as rulers of large tracks of land and people. Many African Muslim leaders have used the rhetoric of jihad to capture power for themselves. When the Yoruba leaders in western Nigeria were fighting each other for supremacy in the 1820s because of the breakdown of Oyo kingdom, jihad leaders invited from Northern Nigeria to intervene, grabbed the leadership of northern Yoruba land instead. Their advance southwards, “to dip the Koran into the sea,” as they called it, was only stopped after a hard fight at the edge of the forest into southern Yoruba land.

Samori Toure used jihad to take over control of a large portion of the Upper Niger region in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad, having conquered eastern Sudan, declared himself the Madhi only to be succeeded after his death by another Muslim leader, Khalifa Abdallahi. Rabih, after taking over leadership of Central Sudan (i.e., south-west of Darfur) in 1893, advanced westwards to take control of Bornu in Nigeria from another Muslim leader who had himself dethroned the ancient Saifawa Dynasty founded in the 8th century CE. By the end of the 19th century CE, nearly all of Sudan from the Nile to the Atlantic was under Muslim leaders.

The chaos and devastation that followed the invasions finally set up Africa for the intense Islamic and European slave trade that followed. As the Muslim conquest and religion spread throughout North Africa and across the Sahara into West Africa, so did Arab hunger to enslave the Africans increase.

 

[Hagendas]

 

[BlackFruitPunch]

This trade in African slaves, begun by the Arabs, went on uninterrupted from the 6th century CE, to the 19th century CE, softening Africa militarily, culturally, economically, socially and politically, for the joint European and Arab onslaught on African people and economy, from the 15th century CE.

Arabs were the principal raiders and middle men for the Atlantic slave trade that decimated populations in West African. In the late 18th century CE, with most of the slave trade along the West African coast dominated by Christians, the bulk of the Arab slave trade shifted to Zanzibar, conquered then by Omani Arabs. Omani Sultan-Seyyid Said, an Arab, as the new ruler of Zanzibar, expanded the business in slavery and the trade in Ivory considerably in 1840, by re-opening and developing old established routes into the interior, to the Great Lakes and the Congo. While retaining some slaves to staff their expanding clove plantations in Zanzibar and neighbouring Pemba, they as usual, exported the great majority of their African slaves. Omani Arabs, as the Sultan’s invaders were known, raided villages, killing and maiming thousands of people in the interior of the African continent, to capture and sell some 20,000 of them yearly at their notorious Zanzibar slave market. From there, slaves were sold and cargoed all over the Mediterranean, Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Asia. Those destined for Sindh in Pakistan, for instance, first arrived in the Omani port of Muscat from where they were shipped to Karachi. Some reached Sindh through owner-to-owner transactions, originating from points along the Makran coast of the present day Pakistani and Irani Baloshistans.

The African slaves involved, were mainly Swahili from areas now known as Kenya and mainland Tanzania. The Muslim African captives faired no better than their West African kith and kin enslaved by the West in the ‘New World.’ Arabs did not only start and sell African slaves from the 6th to the 19th century in the Islamic world; they were the principal raiders, merchants and middle men for the Atlantic slave trade. In fact, even now, hundreds of years later, millions of African settler slaves are still being discriminated against and treated as the scum of the earth (untouchables) in Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, and all the Muslim states of Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Northern Africa.


Expansion of Western influence all over Africa, especially after the European partition in 1884 CE, tended to restrict Islam to purely missionary activities. During the period of sharing influence with the West over the direction of African destiny, Islam did not suffer the disadvantage of Christianity’s link with the conqueror regimes and so was able to consolidate and expand. By the 19th century, for example, 65%- 90% of the Swahili Moslem population of Zanzibar was enslaved, close to 90% on the Kenyan coast and in Madagascar was enslaved and in Ghana, 30% of the African Muslims were enslaved. Since the dawn of flag independence in Africa from the 1960s, it has been business as usual with regular threats of Jihad. Several African youths are being recruited into guerrilla activities after training in Libya, or deceived with promises of better wages, and smuggled out of Africa to the Arab world, particularly to Lebanon and Afghanistan, to work as domestic servants, behind iron walls of seclusion, deprivation, abject misery, and poverty.

 

[Nymbus]

damn that hurt my feelings

 

[MJ Freedom]

Black people shouldn't be looking for identity in any of these fairy tale religious books anyway.

 

[jjj123]

Black people shouldn't be looking for identity in any of these fairy tale religious books anyway.

Prove these "tails" wrong please do, ill wait for you...

When eve didnt listen everything on earth including us "lost" as the death cycle was created and life was no longer infinite

 

[KravenMorehead™]

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