I think you're mixing up many things here and not doing the careful delineations that Pius and I are doing when we talk about Islamist terror. First, Hamitic Exegesis, if you truly know the history of its evolution, is the product of MUSLIM, Jewish, and Christian/European constructs. All of these peoples used it to victimize and oppress Africans, so it is inaccurate and ahistorical to describe it as some a Christian or European construct. There are some excellent articles on the subject--at least two in the Journal of African History that clearly highlight the multiple sources of the hypothesis. A very good article that you may have read is William McKee Evans' "From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: the Strange Odyssey of the "Sons of Ham."" The literature on the subject deals with how the hypothesis traveled and mutated in the hands of Jews, Arabs, Persians, and Europeans, authorizing racism, oppressions, anti-black pogroms and enslavement, and ultimately informing segregationist policies in the New World and colonial ones in Africa. I know the source of your misunderstanding. It comes from the vast literature in African American and African Studies that tends to only focus on the utility of the hypothesis in contexts of European oppression of Africans and Africa-descended peoples. This tends to perpetuate the notion, especially for people who haven't acquainted with the genealogy of the myth, that the hypothesis was invented by Europeans and Christians. It is not.
You're absolutely right about the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa and its role in providing some of the ideological foundation for Cape slavery, Apartheid and their associated terrors. The key difference that you ignore, however, is that the Church was thrown into turmoil precisely because many Afrikaner Christians who belonged to it and even benefited from its ideological/theological justification of Apartheid revolted against its racist prescriptions and interpretations, a revolt which led to intense reform in the church as the extreme group that wanted to maintain the racist exegesis broke off and became irrelevant and is now almost extinct. In other words, even though this racist church was in one region of Africa, Christians themselves--blacks and whites-- moved against it and forced it into irrelevance through isolation. The reaction of Christians--intellectuals and clerics alike--contrast sharply with the defensive and evasive attitudes of many Muslim intellectuals when confronted with the reality if Islamic terror. But like I said, this is not solely an attitudinal problem or sympathy for terroristic "fight back"; some of it comes from a sense of feeling that their religion and its reputation are under threat and that an unequivocal acknowledgement of Islam's terrorism problem may intensify that reputational problem.
Again, this idea that if a Christian priest prays for departing troops going to war on behalf of their country, it amounts to religious warfare or a Christian equivalent of Islamist Jihad is so patently ridiculous that I am not even sure that it merits any logical refutation. These are troops, and ALL nations engage in spiritual exercises or prayers in or before warfare. How does that equate with Muslim groups who authorize and justify the killing of innocent co-religionists, Jews, and Christians in the name of expanding the Islamic realm or doing Allah's will or paving their path to paradise? I don't understand the logic but I encounter it sometimes because it is a way to avoid having to isolate and properly name Islamist terrorism as a fairly distinct genre of evil.
--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
-- On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Lavonda Staples <lrstaples@gmail.com> wrote:
Pius, as a matter of fact, yes, they did lynch Black men in the name of Jesus. Before the 20th, 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, the Hamitic Exegesis was formed. This theory was the pre-cursor the the racial superiority tenets of the Afrikans church in South Africa. Incidentally, the Apartheid church is the ONLY church which formally espoused racial superiority as one of their core tenets. American Christianity utilized the Hamitic Exegesis as a reason why, a way of explaining the following: (1) Blacks use as a higher form of beasts of burden and (2) how God had ordained White men as masters of Black men and finally (3) that this was brought about by the actions of Ham (a son of Noah - see Genesis).
Pius, to go deeper into your posting. The terrorists don't self-advertise? What media outlets do they own? Christians don't say they're Christians when they're killing? Did you miss the parts of World War II when the planes carrying the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were blessed by a priest?
In Christian love and Muslim brotherhood, I remain your humble servant,
La VondaOn Wed, May 4, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Pius Adesanmi <piusadesanmi@yahoo.com> wrote:
La Vonda:
The answer is quite simple and self evident. It is no one's fault that Christian terrorists do not always self-advertise as Christians at the exact moment of sword's contact with the neck. Do you have any evidence that those Christian terrorists in the antebellum south screamed "in Jesus name!" "in Jesus name!" as they lynched their black victims? I thought they screamed their superior race and not their religion?
Today, do you hear screams of "in Jesus name" when two or three racist dunderheads gather in the tea party or the birther movement to denigrate Obama? Do you hear: Obama, you're a monkey or a macaca in the mighty name of Jesus? America's contemporary racist terrorists won't even own up to their racism let alone scream that they do those things in the name of Jesus Christ and their religion. The best you'll get is the loaded we are defending "our values".
Well, go to northern Nigeria. Shouts of "Allahu akbar" is often the last thing the infidel hears from the Almajiri mob before the sword kisses the neck in broad daylight.
Some of us lived in Nigeria's core north. Some of us have our entire extended families there even as we write - perpetually marked as the non-believer, permanent potential targets of the sword of Allahu Akbar-screaming mobs. You will understand why this is reality beyond the poco-pomo diction of Gayatri Spivak for us.
Blame the terrorists for the association of Islam with terrorism in the global subconscious. They are the ones who damage their religion and identity. That is where the problem you are talking about starts. Don't blame the victims. The victims aren't responsible for the imagery of the Talibanic-bearded, Allahu-Akbar-screaming, sword-swinging mob. Lavonda, when you get the time, do google Gideon Akaluka, Grace Ushang, and Christiana Oluwasesin and read up on them. Trust me, you won't return here talking theory and Spivak if you read up on those names.
Blame Moslem intellectuals like Bangura and too many of his counterparts from northern Nigeria who articulate meretricious discourses and praxes of attenuation - comforted by the American nonsense that is political correctness - rather than face the problem head-on. One is no longer in the mood to comfort attenuators like Bangura by feeding them Spivakian abstractions intravenously to make them feel-good.
I find it also annoying that the bad rap they believe Islam is getting is even more important to these attenuators than the lives of victims.
Pius
--- On Thu, 5/5/11, Lavonda Staples <lrstaples@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Lavonda Staples <lrstaples@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Conflation Of The Concepts Arab And Muslim
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Date: Thursday, 5 May, 2011, 3:12In the abstract, the work of Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak" is also helpful in theorizing this topic. I'm constantly amazed at how we have formed opinions of people we don't see, hear, or even truly know. We don't say, "the Christian terrorists who lynched Black men in post World War II south." We don't say, "the Christian doctors who practiced involuntary sterilization on women such as Fannie Lou Hamer in 1950's Mississippi." We don't do that at all. But we ALWAYS identify the word 'terrorist' with the West's neo-contemporary Untouchables - Muslims. While they remain, in definitive terms only, as an exemplar of Spivak's subaltern; a multitudinous unspoken minority indeed.
La Vonda R. StaplesOn Wed, May 4, 2011 at 8:59 PM, Abdul Bangura <theai@earthlink.net> wrote:
--The following essays are quite informative in understanding the conflation of the concepts Islam and Muslim:Ahmed Sokarno Abdel-Hafiz. 2000. "The Representation of Islam, Arabs and Muslims...." International Journal of Communication 12, 2:103-117."Is the Life of the Muslim Arab and/or Muslim?"Nadine Nober. 2008. "'Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!' Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11." The Scholar and Feminist Online 6, 3."Arab at ASU: Building Bridges."M. Lo and Aman Nadhiri. 2010. "Contextualizing 'Muridiyyah' within the American Muslim Community." African Journal of Political Science and International Relations 4, 6:231-40.G. C. David. "Studying the xotic Other in the Classroom: The Portrayal of Arab..."
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