RE: USA Africa Dialogue Series - islam: extremism and a response to it

No one is discounting what anyone including Muslims are saying or have to say. You seem to have missed my point which is that Islam as early as in the days of her prophet was spread by war and not civil persuasion. Force has always been an instrument of conversion. It was in West Africa- the Fulani and other Jihads. It is still in Middle and near East countries of Asia. Jihads are being threatened in Western Europe.

Yes, the Israelites fought wars  but the wars as I understand them to have been, were territorial and not religious conversion wars. Jesus and his followers spread what they called the good news but neither forced its acceptance on anyone nor fight anyone to accept their message. Jesus is reported to have famously said that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Islam seems to be so different.

Of course as movements grow, differences may develop among members and non-members. Fights may happen if differences are not peacefully resolved. That is not to say that the movement has a violent beginning and therefore that violence is in its D.N.A. as seems to be the case with Islam. In Islam's case,  the fights have been and still are about the faith, who are the prophets true heirs, and therefore who are the true believers. The Sunni/Shia divide happened a few years after the prophet's death. Many centuries after, it is still not resolved and much of the violence in Iraq and Syria today have to do with the divide. Time assuages anger and bitterness and therefore soothes the heart. It does not seem to be able to do so with Islam. What is it about Islam that makes Islam so different?

The effort of many Muslims to bring Islam into the modern era is commendable. It is a tough job though. Many similar efforts in the past have not resulted in success that endured. Judaism , Christianity, Buddhism and other great religions have undergone some reformation and are matching forward for the most part. Islam though young compared with the other great religions is yet to be reformed and seems sometimes to be matching backwards.

Some of Turkey's gains under Ataturk for example, are been eroded as we breathe, by what has been described as an Islamic party in power in Turkey. Recall the mess President Morsi- a U.S. trained engineer, made of political power, as a democratically elected president of Egypt all because he is an Islamist politician. Must all Egyptians be his kind of Muslim? Did he set Egypt back? I am unreservedly on the side of faithful Muslims who try to lead and drive change, and remind us that religion and violence should not be bed fellows. They give the world hope that Islam stands for a lot more than needless difference and avoidable strife.

It is convenient to blame the U.S. for the turmoil in the Middle East. I take this position because the U.S. has also been responsible for turmoil in Central and South America, and even Africa and Asia. The troubles that followed in the places were not religious and did not become religious.

Is it not the case that Muslims kill more Muslims allegedly for Islam, that any enemies of Islam could kill today? How does that make sense even to the killers I dare to ask?

 

oa     

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2014 6:54 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - islam: extremism and a response to it

 

hi oa
well, to start w one point of disagreement, i don't see islam as beginning with a warrior leader etc. and maybe others on the list will disagree with this, but the militancy that you see as intrinsic in islam strikes me as characteristic of all organized religion to the extent that it is affiliated with major states, all the way from buddhism (the religion we in the states imagine as the least worldly) with its terrible violence in sri lanka and burma etc, to the crusades and conquests of christianity and islam; and of course in biblical accounts of the israelites.
anyway, to stop myself from going on, i'll simply recount a moment all of us in the african lit assn remember in alexandria when edward said couldn't address us (he was in his late stage of cancer), and his replacement, a "westernized" egyptian professor announced that in their struggle with militant islam it would be impossible for them to continue their public opposition to the muslim brotherhood in light of the u.s. bombing of iraq--which had just begun as we were there.
he said bush's actions would have the effect of silencing them since to protest the muslim brotherhood would be interpreted as support for bush.
when you ask islamic states to be more open in their condemnation of isis or other violent muslim movements, i think it is important to bring into the account the politics of the u.s. in sustaining the great autocracies in the middle east, like saudis, whose own one-state, one-view positions have a lot to do with sustaining such militant groups as isis--a sunni militant group out to conquer shia states.
the larger politics of the region, power politics of power states, including israel's alliance with the u.s., is not separable from the violence of the movements that are now functioning there. that's been true forever.

anyway, you can see from that blog the need many muslims feel to dissociate themselves from the retrograde politics of the states as well as the militants. which really represents the heart and soul of islam? well, i think you shouldn't discount what muslims themselves have to say about this.
ken

On 11/3/14, 7:26 PM, Anunoby, Ogugua wrote:

Thank you Ken.

The blog below is well reasoned but how recognitive is it of the basic articles of Islamic faith that many  Muslims all over the world believe in and claim to profess? The blog is very eloquent on personal freedom, choice, and reason but how well are the values upheld in Islamic societies? Islam was not supposed to have a clerical class but it seems to do so today. The exercise of choice and reason is oftentimes condemned as apostasy and blasphemy and severely punished under purported Islamic law.  

Muslims who truly believe that the damage and disservice done to Islam by extremist Muslims are unacceptable and unIslamic should do better than criticizing groups like ISIS, the Taliban, and Boko Haram among others. They should criticize politicians and States that use Islam to achieve political goals and objectives that make them potentates and help to ensure their control and oppression of their people, and  exporting of terrorism.

Islam's burden it seems to me, is that unlike other great religions, it was propagated in the first instance by violent conquest and not proselytization. Its prophet was a warrior if I remember correctly. It is not completely surprising therefore that violence seems to be engrained in its dogma, laws, methods and practice. Does this help to explain why Islamic extremists are in many cases violent? Everyone must make up their own mind.

 

oa

 

 

   

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of kenneth harrow
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2014 3:32 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - islam: extremism and a response to it

 

in the discussions concerning islam on our list, often its aberrant side often is seen--maybe because boko haram and isis are so extreme and visible. here is a response from a muslim scholar which merits reading on this topic: (this came from the blog Informed Comment by juan cole.)

The Critical spirit of Islam against the mass insanity of ISIS

Posted: 02 Nov 2014 09:38 PM PST

By Neslihan Çevik

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), having declared itself a caliphate, is now making a call to all Muslims (especially engineers and doctors) to emigrate to their new home, "Sham," the land of Ibrahim, with the caution that ones who remain outside will be drowned in apostasy and heresy.

However, as much the militants proclaim to be the only bearers of true Islam, the actions and pronouncements of these fanatics strike most Muslims as a malevolent distortion of the religion. In fact, recently in an open letter to the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a large number of Muslim scholars condemned the ISIS approach to Islam to be absolutely illegitimate and perverse based on Islamic legal theory and Quranic exegesis.

It's not only Muslims who see ISIS as a travesty of Islam. Pointing to its financial operations, its advertising and recruitment techniques, its violence and, most strikingly, its totalizing ideology, a growing number of Western scholars and pundits explain the movement as a modern phenomenon – the darker face of modernity, to be sure – rather than a return to the origins of Islam. A disgrace to "true fundamentalism," as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek described it, ISIS is symptomatic of the very modernity it rejects in the name of Islam.

Yet the most powerful critique of the movement's religious illegitimacy comes, as it rightly should, from Islam itself. I don't mean the clichéd but not unhelpful assertion that Islam is a religion of peace. I mean the core principles of religious practice established through the most widely accepted Islamic traditions. Prominent among these is "iman," the freedom of the believer in choosing to submit, a freedom informed by the open, critical spirit that flourishes in the most confident traditions of Muslim theology.

Linguistically, "iman" means being sure of something as well as being in a state of security, free from fear. In Islamic usage, it refers to the certainty of one's submission to God. Only such certainty will allow one to bind one's heart to God, and such binding is the essence of religious conviction.

As something that is felt in the heart, "iman" must be voluntary. So one must strive for permissible deedsand refrain from the forbidden out of her heartfelt submission to God, not out of fear of punishment by, or even hope for reward from, an authority of this world. To do so is to fall prey to "shirk," the unpardonable sin of polytheism, because it bestows upon that merely mortal authority the obedience that is due only to God.

There is more however. Once faith is defined as voluntary, it also becomes a conscious choice with the believer understanding what she believes. For that, she needs to deliberate, infer, and evaluate – "tahqiq" – what she believes rather than blindly following tradition, inherited knowledge and instructions of a given authority. Reason and intellect, as such, are active in "iman," or faith.

This ideal of an autonomous, conscious self with potent agency challenges authoritarian and controlling tendencies of the state, community and even at the most local level, the patriarchal family particularly when these institutions try to assert authority over the believer in ultimate spiritual matters. More broadly, this system of belief should bring a critical spirit to Muslim theology, encouraging a pluralist commentary on the divine that critically engages with the world and history and should prevent Islam from being reduced to stagnant dogmas or ideology.

With this understanding, ISIS and, more broadly, radical political Islam, fall far outside the belief systems and practices of historical Islam. Islamism reduces faith to conformity to prescribed conduct, completely ignoring its spiritual and internal dimensions. It gives supreme moral authority to lesser authorities and turns the believer into a passive receiver of what is imposed. This approach leads to a society and polity in which religion becomes something merely behavioral, imitative and, worse, something one does because the state compels them to do so. Take compulsory veiling, for example, when the state and the religious police are no longer there to enforce, the one who covers in Saudi Arabia or Iran wears a bikini while vacationing at Miami Beach. Religion then turns into an ideology deprived of its common belief or popular opinion and critical spirit.

What would happen if the core elements of faith were to be worked back into Muslim practice and interpretation in the context of modernity? We find traces of that in certain corners of contemporary Turkish life. An increasingly influential assortment of believers in positions of institutional, political, cultural and explicitly religious authority – people whom I label Muslimists – understand faith as a religious conviction and as a conscious choice. More than an abstract theological position, this approach has dramatically transformed traditional Muslim perceptions of a religious community and political authority.

Muslimists have challenged authoritarian religious communal codes and formations, e.g., "jama'ats," tight religious orders, and redefined religious community as a fellowship that acknowledges individual moral autonomy and self-expression. We see this at work in various areas of life. There are now, for example, character-education schools that emphasize inner ethics and character formation over mere religious training and Islamic human rights associations that embrace both Western and Islamic notions of rights.

The growing Islamic fashion also speaks to the greater acceptance of individual autonomy through appeal to "iman" and "tahqiq." While a decade or so ago the colors and styles of veils were prescribed by "jama'ats," women now use veils to express their moral agency and personal taste and aspirations within a context of religious submission. Faith defined as something voluntary and conscious has also changed the scope of religious learning, shifting religious authority from the traditional religious elite to religious intellectuals. These people's authority is based on intellectual effort and study, which are not only of religious matters but of the larger world as well. Most importantly, the nature of the relationship between believers and the intellectual is not that of submission but of critically engagement – the believer has an intellectual space to think through what the author presents.

The emphasis on "iman" and "tahqiq" has informed a new political ethos, too. For Muslimists, the state's duty is to establish freedom of choice by making sure that the state doesn't co-opt religion or that religion doesn't co-opt the state. Veiling, for instance, should be neither compelled nor banned. No doubt, religion will still continue to limit the liberalization of political and cultural attitudes and behaviors. Nevertheless, Islam has also become a source of freedom by validating choice within the context of religious submission. Whether this space will continue to grow is of course historically contingent as regional dynamics and the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) attitudes will have an impact on the future direction of Islam in Turkey.

The Muslimist approach to faith is not uniquely Turkish and it is not secularization. It is shaped by the grammar of Islam – it is line with, and indeed renews, existing Islamic traditions. In the 8th century Arabian Peninsula early "kalam" (Islamic theology) schools, most notably Mu'tazilites schools, saw reason to be critical to man's relationship to God and an unhesitant "iman." They rejected uncritical imitation seeing it as something that undermines rational intellect and leads to a weak doubting "iman." They also pressed that reason, as a cause inducing a strong "iman," required individual autonomy and free choice. The Ash'ariyya school similarly saw no conflict between reason and revelation. "Kalam" discipline, however, eventually declined in the 15th century and anti-theology streams, most notably, the Hanbali School, prevailed and completely rejected skeptical philosophy and intellectual aspects of faith putting Islam's own dialectical dynamism to sleep. This school of thought and its prominent scholars, especially ibn-Taymiyyah, would subsequently, in the hands of modern radical Islamist currents including puritanical Wahhabism of ISIS, become a legitimizing ground for an increasingly ideologized and authoritarian Islam.

Despite the attempts of 19th century Muslim reformers who called for reconciliation of reason and revelation and the retrieval of Islam's critical spirit, Islamist currents managed to take over the global voice and face of Islam. In the modern era too, Islamism continued its successful rise. To make Islam work both as an ideology and as a totalizing political system, the principles of religious practice had to be radically simplified, narrowed, and in some ways profoundly perverted. This trend has been enforced in part by post-colonial authoritarian governments in the Muslim world, both secular and Islamist, which continued to violate individual moral agency and co-opt religion to ideology. Saudi Arabia especially amounted to "re-bedounization" of the faith – with petro dollars in hand it boosted Wahabism, which militant Islamists could easily adapt. Within this context, the Arab Spring unsurprisingly failed to cut off Islamism. Yet despite this failure, throughout Muslim nations from Turkey to Indonesia and Egypt and among Muslim immigrants in the West – especially the youth in the U.S. – attempts to bring back Islam's historical critical dynamism continue to grow.

There is one final component of which we need to take note: the concept of madness – "junun." The mad person has no moral responsibility in Islam because she lacks the intellectual capacity to make a choice between good and evil. This means that with capacity comes responsibility as well as autonomy – the freedom of choice. Armed with reason and "iman," we are to reject that which is "haram," or forbidden.Self-mastery is a moral imperative and we will be judged accordingly. Radical Islamism, by completely canceling our ability to choose, ignores our capacity and treats everyone as, in effect, insane or mentally incompetent. More seriously, it prevents us from responding to the moral imperative of self-mastery. What this model leads to is rather obvious: mass insanity, an insurmountable distance between revelation and reason and the death of Islam's critical wisdom.

Neslihan Çevik, Ph.D., is Associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, and Board member, Post-Colonial Studies Research Center, Üsküdar University

Mirrored with the author's permission from The Daily Sabah

 

On 11/1/14, 10:50 PM, Moses Ebe Ochonu wrote:

Maurice,

 

You have spoken well about your departed friend and mentor. Yours is a balanced commentary on that great learned man of Africa. You're absolutely right that Mazrui was consumed with defending Arabs and Islam and minimizing or rationalizing the damage that both entities catalyzed in Africa. This obsession took something away from his scholarship, in my opinion. It was blatant for any fair minded person to see. Some of his scholarship thus became predictable and tendentious. In my book Africa in Fragments, the chapter titled "Arab Racism against Black Africans" challenges Mazrui's argument about "benign" Arab slavery, especially his contention that because Islam prescribes a reward for those who free their slaves African slaves in the Middle East and North Africa were frequently freed and, unlike slaves in the New World, rarely spent their lifetimes in slavery. I point out, following scholars like Yassin Addoun and Chouki El-Hamel, that this religiously incentivized freeing of slaves in fact led to the enslavement of more Africans since freed slaves (mostly infirm and old ones) were freed to reap the divine reward and then replaced by new slaves imported from Africa. You've also introduced a factor that I was previously not very familiar with--the peculiar reproductive violence of Arab slavery. Although I take his argument to task in said chapter, his brilliant exploration of why semitic peoples (Arabs and Jews) and not Africans are given to suicide martyrdom is the lynchpin of another chapter titled "Boko Haram, African Islam, and Foreign Extremism." The man was controversial and and his scholarship has blind spots, but he was an incredibly original and deep thinker--an original theorist on many issues.

 

Now that the great one has departed, I hope that scholars can begin to freely broach and discuss the crimes of Arab enslavement of Africans, Africa's Islamist terrorist and extremism problem, and the widespread but rarely discussed problem of Arab racism against black Africans.

 

Thanks for a very rich tribute.

 

On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 6:08 AM, Maurice Amutabi <amutabi@gmail.com> wrote:

Prof. Ali A. Mazrui and I

 

By Maurice N. Amutabi

 

I had a good, cordial, intellectual relationship with Prof. Ali A Mazrui whom I greatly admired. When he died, I was in shock and watched as his peers mourned him. Among the Abaluhya, young people mourn older people after burial, during "amachienga" (last ambers of funeral fire), after the real fire of mourning is gone. This is Abaluhya culture's way of saving young people from trauma and big shocks. Many people asked me why I had not written about my great friend and mentor. I cited my Luhya culture, because we are very cultural. Prof. Mazrui was like a father to me, only three years older than my biological father. He attended many of my presentations and said I was a provocative presenter. I have over a dozen personal letters written to me by Prof. Ali Mazrui is his own handwriting and which I now cherish more than before.

 

I regarded Prof. Mazrui as a mentor and did learn a lot from the Great Professor. Ali Mazrui liked me, and I greatly admired him too. I regarded myself like his protégé, always learning from the grand master. He was encouraging and pleasant as a person. He wrote me each time I took on William Ochieng' or other academic heavyweights in the national media. When Ochieng' replied to me through the Daily Nation in an article that was headlined "Amutabi talks tough, but show us his books," Mazrui wrote to me telling me not to worry, he told me to be strong because I had arrived as a great scholar in Kenya and Africa and should now just write without fear. He told me that Ochieng never attacks an idea he does not fear and taking on me meant that he regarded me as a threat and the next big thing, for he was not comfortable to be succeeded. He told that that Ochieng was not happy with the debates in the media which all focussed on my article, especially the emergence of the pro-Amutabi and anti-Amutabi groups which were elevating me to a national figure. Mazrui shared with me the need for mentoring younger scholars and being fair and civil even as one engaged in public discourse and debates. He told me to be prepared to be disappointed sometimes when some scholars hit me below the belt or use vulgar language or get personal. He made me remember how my daughter cried in school after Ochieng' had attacked me in public.

 

Mazrui had an easy smile and an active listener, who would not belittle anyone. He made you feel that your ideas were as important. He made you realize that he was listening to you. I met him more than ten times, and made sure that I took a picture with him each time we met. I am compiling my picture-bum with the great scholar. We were friends, but not close friends. I would say that I am closer to Prof. Alamin Mazrui, his nephew than I was to his fallen uncle, Prof. Ali A Mazrui. I liked Ali Mazrui's intellectual flare but did not agree with him on some of the issues he postulated. He was kind and polite. I liked his capacity to coin new words and phrases and always told him about it whenever I had opportunity to do so.

 

I first met Ali Mazrui in 1986 in rather unusual circumstances. I was a struggling undergraduate student at the University of Nairobi when his planned public lecture was cancelled at the eleventh hour, during those dark KANU days. Despite the ban, Mazrui came to the University of Nairobi bookshop to 'buy' some books, and word immediately went round that the Great Scholar was on campus. There was a stampede from the library anda handful of us caught up with him at the parking lot between Gandhi Wing and the Geography building. I recall Prof. Kibiwott Kurgat, then SONU Vice Chairman appealing to the Vice Chancellor Prof. Philip Mbithi to allow the Great scholar to address us at Taifa Hall, an appeal that was flatly declined. Prof. Mbithi told us that we were asking him to choose between his job and us having to listen to Mazrui. He chose his job.

 

We persuaded Mazrui to give us an impromptu address in the car park. For almost ten minutes, we listened to one of the greatest intellectuals that Kenya has ever produced. He told us not to worry about dictatorship because it has a lifespan and is not immortal. Speaking in parables and political metaphors, he told how dictators such as Josef Stalin could not live forever. We asked him to return to Kenya and become our Vice Chancellor and he agreed, saying "....there is no problem, I would love to come back home, just ask President Moi to appoint me and I will gladly come." The problem was passing this information to the appointing authority, but we did fantasize about life with Prof. Mazrui as our Vice Chancellor, perhaps having address from the VC every Friday in Taifa Hall which was a better idea than watching re-runs of films such as the Rise and Fall of Idi Amin or Cry Freedom.

 

Many years later in 1994, I met Ali Mazrui at the University of Florida, Gainesville, US where he was giving a public lecture on "The Wind of Change Africa" at the invitation of the Center of African Studies. It was a full house. The hall was full to the brim, the type I saw when the late poet Maya Angelou and Cornell West had visited. I felt proud to be a Kenyan. That Fall, another Kenyan, wildlife expert David Western had come to the University of Florida as well and spoke about eco-tourism and wildlife management in Africa but did not even get half of what Mazrui got for an audience. We sang 'Jambo Bwana' for Ali Mazrui but substituted Kenya with Africa. The Great Mwalimu just smiled as we milled round him, struggling to have a handshake with him. He was ours, all the way from Kenya, but Nigerians and other Africans insisted that he was also theirs, African. When he took to the podium, Prof. Mazrui was in his elements. He was impressive and spokes so eloquently. He tore into all African dictators but surprised us by saying that some of them were going to survive the tide of the wind of change blowing across the world due to lack of enough force, pull and push factors, to push them aside. He predicted that some would still be elected under democratic dispensation because of ethnicity. He was right and was vindicated on the account of rulers such as Paul Biya, Yowerri Museveni and Daniel Moi serving two 'democratic' terms, among others.

 

Prof. Mazrui was generous. In 1994 at the University of Florida he gave me two copies of his new books for free. I still keep the books with his signature, signed with my parker pen. During his presentation, Mazrui spent time trying to explain why Africa needed democracy more than foreign aid. He said democracy would allow for more equitable distribution of resources, which were enough but were unfortunately concentrated in few hands such as those of Mobutu Sese Seko and Muamar Gaddaffi. Mazrui responded to questions with amazing precision and persuasion. He predicted that Nelson Mandela was going to become the first black President of South Africa due to the number of black voters unless they were killed by some malevolent forces such as nuclear bomb or massive pandemic like the plague.

 

In 2001, Prof. Mazrui paid for an air ticket for me to fly from Chicago in Illinois to New York, Binghamton to attend a conference which he was organizing. He asked Dr. Patrick Dikirr, then his personal assistant to take care of us. It was four days of great enjoyment, listening to the grand doyen move one idea after another. At the time, I was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I was doing tour of duty as a Fullbright Scholar. I took massive notes from this Fountain of Knowledge.  I have been looking at the notes I took and wonder if Kenya will ever have such a great mind. He talked about wide range of issues such as why Africa may have the first female president before US. He said intermarriage between races and ethnic groups beautiful, bright and resilient people (perhaps anticipated the rise of Barrack Obama). He talked about why Ethiopia should colonize Eastern Africa, Nigeria should colonize West Africa and independent South Africa should colonize Southern Africa to bring about stability. He explained how US presence in the Western hemisphere had stabilized Latin America.

 

In 2002, Prof. Ali Mazrui and I met again at a conference organized by the Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) in Savannah, Georgia, where we drove for almost 15 hours from Illinois to Georgia with Prof. Moses Oketch (of University of London). The conference was organized by Prof. Harold Isaacs. We shared the same hotel with Prof. Moses Oketch and Prof. Shadrack Nasong'o (of Rhodes College, Memphis) and discussed Mazrui's keynote address late into the night. At the conference, Prof. Abdul Bangura loudly confessed to Prof. Ali A Mazrui that "Mwalimu Mazrui, we have admired you, plagiarised you and continue to hold you with great esteem as the greatest scholar from the African soil residing in America today." There was a long line of scholars from all over the world, seeking to greet Prof. Ali Mazrui. We posed for pictures with the Great Mazrui. Mazrui was a true globe trotter. He had just arrived in Savannah, Georgia from Latin America via Miami International Airport and after Savannah; he was headed to France, Europe where he was going to speak at a UNESCO meeting. We heard that ATWS paid him US$10,000 for the three hours he was in Savannah.

 

Mazrui loved sharing knowledge. Many scholars in Mazrui's league such as Cornell West and Wole Soyinka took over US$50,000 per speaking engagement but Mazrui sometimes took US$10,000. I recall when I was working in the African Studies Programme at Central Washington University; we paid Prof. Wangari Maathai US$50,000 to come to our campus at Ellensburg and speak about environment. I received her from the airport at Seattle and while driving to Ellensburg through the Cascade Mountains, I remember her extolling the virtues of Prof. Ali Mazrui, and how his 'talking fee' was unbelievably low for the great ideas that he produced. Of course some scholars have been wondering not so loudly if the talking engagements may have slightly contributed to the burning out of the Great Professor Mazrui. Although it remains in the realm of speculation, it is obvious that Mazrui's intellectual engagements may have had a contribution to his fast mortality.

 

In 2003, at Erie State University in Ohio, Mazrui asked me and Dr Godwin Murunga (currently of the University of Nairobi) to ride with him in an official limousine from the conference venue, to his hotel room in downtown Erie. He entertained us in his hotel room for over one hour on juicy intellectual stories and paid for our dinner. As we made our presentations, we did not know that the good Professor had recorded all that we had said and spared us the embarrassment and humiliation in public. He told Dr. Godwin Murunga that he needed to map the collapse of the Somali to broader factors and create a comparative matrix of similar states elsewhere in Africa and find out why even creation of smaller states from the Greater Somalia was not accepted by the Somali and the rest of the world. He seemed to move Dr. Murunga away from Islam as a factor in the problems of the Somali state. He went back to the colonial history where Somalia was divided into three colonial spheres for the British, Italians and French and how this legacy remained after independence.

 

For my presentation, Prof. Mazrui asked me to complicate cattle rustling in Northern Kenya into a more intellectual argument, and look at external and internal factors and examine the role of politicians more critically than Islam. He said that Muslims also lost cattle in northern Kenya and were also killed. He said that before Islam arrived in Northern Kenya, there were cattle raiding activities most of which were cultural and had nothing to do with Islam. He encouraged me to look for pull and push factors such as poverty than radical Islam. He said Muslim countries did not manufacture AK47 or M16 used to kill people in northern Kenya, and it was therefore wrong to blame Muslims for the violence in northern Kenya. This was one among many conferences where Mazrui cleverly deflected any discussion of Islam in negative form.

 

I looked back at many of Mazrui's writings and saw the same trajectory. I noticed that Mazrui was an apologist for Islamic and Muslim excesses in Africa and abroad. I looked at his famous Film series, Africa: A Triple Heritage and realized how he worked so hard to privilege Muslims and attributed great African success stories to Islamic presence in Africa. I started having mixed feelings about Ali Mazrui and wondered if he was sincere and honest in his academic pronouncements. I even started to believe some people who had told me over twenty years ago in Florida that Mazrui was a CIA agent. I was surprised when he said that Arabs did not exert more violence on Africans compared to White European slave traders. I found strange that the Great professor was covering the fact that many African men who ended in the Arab and Muslim were castrated or killed; while African women had their fallopian tubes surgically removed so as not to create black people in the Muslim world. This was different from white Europeans who allowed African slaves to procreate and have families in captivity.

 

So as not to be misunderstood, let me state that slaves were treated badly by both Europeans and Arabs, by Christians and Muslims and no amount of justification will ever erase the grotesque and dark memories that this evil practice exerted on people Africa and their descendants  to this day. But there are now 400 million blacks in the New World, from Brazil where there are 100 million, to the US where there are 50 million to Jamaica, Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador, Panana, Peru, Chile, Argentina, there are many black people in these places yet they received the same number of slaves as Arab countries. At least India preserved black slaves and even intermarried with them, but in the Muslim counties balck people were systematically eliminated and in ways that we see African house-helps treated in many Muslim countries. This is a topic that Ali Mazrui avoided in many of his writings and lectures, something he preferred to sweep under the carpet of the past.

 

When I first shared these historical facts and some facets of cover up in Mazrui's writings while I was teaching in America, a friend of mine told me that rising against Mazrui's ideas in America was like committing academic suicide. This was because in the American academy Mazrui's voice was very strong. I clearly believed my friend because Mazrui was one of the voices that led to the granting of my work permit in the US for a Fulbright scholar like me who should have returned to Kenya after completing my doctoral studies. I shelved these ideas and focussed on writing about innocent issues. I received very kind advice to desist from presenting Islam in any manner different from the way Mazrui presented it, pointing to less than 1 percent as bad Muslims who engage in violence and not all Muslims. A prominent Kenyan scholar discouraged me from publishing my manuscript on How Islam Undeveloped Africa, arguing that it would annoy Prof. Mazrui and end our friendship and also attract the wrong crowds to me.

 

Prof. Atieno-Odhiambo once told me, "If Mazrui endorses you, the whole world will appreciate and receive you, but if he condemns you, you will be on the side of Wole Soyinka and have few academic friends in academia" Mazrui had just praised my paper for being bold and deeply intellectual which I had presented at Association of African Studies Conference in Houston, Texas in 2001 and in which I was calling for rotational presidency along ethnic groups in African countries in order to avoid marginalization and civil wars, and domination by majority ethnic groups.

 

Prof. Mazrui was very vocal on reparations for slavery and slave trade from the West but not from the East. He was a member of the eminent Africans appointed by the African Union to pursue reparation or compensation for Africans for the trauma of slave and slave trade. He was an apologist of Islamic excesses and did not appreciate the resilience and forgiving hearts of Africans. Unlike Arabs who experienced oppression from 1948 when the state of Israel was created, Africans have suffered over three thousand centuries of oppression and invasion by other cultures and have never engaged in suicide bombing, Africans have never created a Black Al Qaeda to kill Arabs and Europeans despite many years of oppression and enslavement.

 

Prof. Ali Mazrui has left a lot of academic legacies in the world. His famous TV series on Africa: A Triple Heritage will be remembered for the many good things it did in preserving Africa's past. His many books on topical issues will continue to remind us about his great mind. I first learnt the idea of interdisciplinary research and writing from Prof. Ali Mazrui. It was only recently when I was looking at newspaper cutting from the 1980s when I realized that I had more newspaper cutting of Mazrui's articles more than any other scholar alive or dead, and interestingly followed by those of Prof. William Ochieng' whom I also admired  a lot. Mazrui wrote about anything and was perhaps the great public intellectual that Africa has ever produced. He was certainly a man who was ahead of his peers in many ways. Mazrui loved debates and was at his sharpest wit during questions and answer sessions, when he would widen his eyes and lengthen his neck looking at the audience as if to hold them in his spell, like a hypnotist. He often left audiences asking for more, because of his articulateness and eloquence.

 

Many scholars in Kenya often looked for a day when Prof. Ali Mazrui would debate William Ochieng. Now that they are both dead, perhaps their academic sons and daughters will debate one day. I look forward to one day debating an academic son of Ochieng, looking at the influence of triple heritage on former Ruothdoms in Usenge or Uyoma and how Ochieng and Mazrui would have responded to such. We shall forever be indebted to Ali Mazrui for illuminating our intellectual minds and pointing to new horizons of knowledge, many of which ideas have inspired hundreds of doctoral and masters dissertations world over. I regard myself as one of the followers of Mazrui who was regarded as historian, political scientist, literary scholar and political analyst, among other references. Asante Mzee, Mwalimu, Professor Ali A Mazrui for giving it all and rest in peace.

 

Prof. Amutabi is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and Student Affairs), Kisii University. Amutabi@yahoo.com  

 

--

Prof. Maurice N. Amutabi, PhD
Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic Affairs)
Kisii University,
P. O. Box 408 (40200),
Kisii, Kenya
E-mail: Amutabi@yahoo.com or dpaa@kisiiuniversity.ac.ke
Tel: Tel: 254-058-30826
Cellphone(Mobile)254-(0)700-744545

 

Prof. Maurice Amutabi is the author of 'The NGO Factor in Africa'(described as a 'leading publication' on NGOs in Africa)
1. The NGO Factor in Africa
http://www.amazon.com/NGO-Factor-Africa-Arrested-Development/dp/0415979951
2. Regime Change and Succession Politics in Africa
http://www.amazon.com/Regime-Change-Succession-Politics-Africa/dp/0415534089
3. Lifelong Learning in Africa
http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Lifelong-Learning-Africa-Technological/dp/0773447571
4. Studies in Economic History of Kenya
http://www.amazon.com/Studies-Economic-History-Kenya-Entrepreneurship/dp/0773439072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265479492&sr=8-1
5. Perspectives in African Environment and Technology
http://www.amazon.com/Perspectives-African-Environment-Toyin-Falola/dp/15922188496
6. Prof. Maurice Amutabi's Blog
http://kenyasocialscienceforum.wordpress.com/author/kenyasocialscienceforum/

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kenneth w. harrow 

faculty excellence advocate

professor of english

michigan state university

department of english

619 red cedar road

room C-614 wells hall

east lansing, mi 48824

ph. 517 803 8839

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kenneth w. harrow 

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michigan state university

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east lansing, mi 48824

ph. 517 803 8839

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