Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
What interested you in the Nation of Islam?
I find it personally inexplicable that the adhesion to Islam within the Black Muslim movement is apparently indifferent to the survival of black slavery within Islam.
Louis Farrakhan doesn't acknowledge what goes on in Sudan and Mauritania?
Does he want them to bring him the slaves as proof? I think it's based on a crude self-defense mechanism not unrelated to those who feel it necessary to defend the conduct of the Israeli government regardless of what it does. The attitude is: "These are yours, you belong to them, they are part of your past and part of your history, and therefore how can you associate yourself with outsiders who attack them?"
But this isn't about the survival of Islam -- that's not in question. You're talking about two rogue states, which are condemned by Islamic countries, governments, preachers, writers. You become so much more credible if you show that you are altogether sensitive to suffering, that you are hostile to injustice across the board. If you become so selective that you can ignore outrages of this kind, well, how can you blame other people for ignoring outrages to you and your community?
Farrakhan is a very paradoxical thinker because he's very, very intelligent, yet he makes statements that are so obviously stupid. It is incomprehensible that he doesn't know that they are stupid. He knows how to manipulate the media. He does it on the basis of short-term gain, without realizing that it is long-term loss. You don't build anything lasting on that basis.
Do Black Muslims hold to the classic tenets of Islam?
They break from the Koran immediately -- if we're talking functionally about their crude and open anti-Semitism. That is in complete conflict with the special relationship that Islam established, while the Prophet was alive, with Judaism and Christianity. There has been no long historical conflict between Jew and Muslim, though there has been a conflict since the crusades between Christian and Muslim.
There are exceptions, but overall Islam proved most hospitable, and certainly a great deal more so than Christianity, to the Jews. When the Jewish population was expelled in 1492 from Spain, Islam took in those Jews who couldn't find havens in Christian countries. This isn't to say there haven't been tensions from time to time, but overall there is no comparison between the way Islam has behaved to Jews and the way Christianity has behaved to Jews.
On what basis does the Black Muslim movement usually attack Jews?
What I find most outrageous is that the leadership of the Black Muslim movement has judged it necessary and defensible to attack Jews on the basis -- for which there is no historical foundation whatsoever -- that they masterminded the slave trade, by which I think they mean specifically the Atlantic trade. And that is -- not to put to fine a point on it or to be excessively elegant -- unmistakable crap. Anyone who knows anything about the Atlantic trade knows that this is nonsense.
So why do you think they keep on about this?
I think that they are resentful -- and I understand the resentment but not the form it has taken -- that a great deal of fuss, an enormous amount of moral attention, is now paid to the Holocaust. And in my view, rightly so. The slave trade was the only comparable historical experience to the Holocaust -- comparable but not identical. No one seems to pay remotely the same attention to or have the same sense of guilt about the slave trade as about the combination of racism in the Holocaust.
Now, that is a point that ought to be made. But you do not aggrandize one by belittling the other. On the contrary, you end up denying the importance of one by denying the importance of the other. Certainly you add nothing to your case by basing it on assertions that are so easy to confront and contradict.
Do you think the Nation of Islam came out of pure despair with America or from a loss of faith in Christianity?
They were explicably attracted by a sense or knowledge that there was no such history of specifically anti-black racism in Islam, as so conspicuously had existed for blacks in the West and, in particular, in the United States. Those who wished to believe in God or practiced some form of religion and were, as Louis Farrakhan was, disenchanted with Christianity were easily captivated by a religious alternative not all that far apart but distinctly different from Christianity.
Do you think the Nation of Islam has helped American blacks?
I have traveled widely in the United States and have visited communities in Michigan and Illinois. Secular black academics testify that in Black Muslim schools the emphasis placed on the history and dignity of blacks in Africa has had a marked effect on the reading ability of black children, who no longer feel disparaged and demoralized.
There is a great deal of truth in a man like Farrakhan's indictment of some of the black middle class who flee the ghettos, for understandable reasons, but in the process think that they can turn their backs on those who are unable to buy new homes in these middle-class suburbs. There is a smugness there, and then there is the phenomenon of the black conservative, such as Clarence Thomas.
It is outrageous that American democracy doesn't function for the objectives that it is almost perpetually enunciating. If you start looking at statistics on the disproportionate numbers of blacks executed, of young blacks in prison -- all these undeniable abuses of the system make people very angry. The problem occurs when this anger becomes irrational. Because it is such an obvious series of abuses, the anger doesn't need to be irrational. In fact, the only way it can be effectual is to be rational.
