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El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)

"Islam, revolution and racism"

by Federica Mereu

 

III

 

“The natural religion of the blacks”: the Islam

The apparition of the Islam was again something for America: in the complex and variegated black and white religious tradition of the United States not you n'era traces. In 1913 it was Noble Drew Wings, founder of the social-religious movement of the Moorses (Moor), to use for the first time in America an Islamic ideology [cfr. Lanternari, 1967: 244/257].


If the Islam, that the religion of his/her/their Fathers was not, entered all of a sudden scene making numerous proselytes in the community Afro-American it was because its fundamental prinćpis responded to their more urgent appeals in that particular historical moment. Better of the others, the street of the Islam was suited for the situation of the Afro-Americans, it is this the sense in which their conversion must be intended.


Religion exclusive and antagonistic, Islam spiritually made the independent blacks from the whites; anti-burgeois and revolutionary, its purpose was of the religious structure to make better, social, economic and politics of the United States of America; the Islam, one of the most diffused religions in the continent African and in the countries of the South of the world, it spiritually reunified the Afro-Americans with their brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America in name of a commune demand of liberation from the same imperialistic oppression; the Islam, for its vocation universalistica, was the religion of the brotherhood among oppressed and internazionalizzava their struggle; Islam encouraged its believers to the struggle rather than to the subjugation:


“In our book, the Koran there is not any teaching to pacifically suffer. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. You are pacific, kind, you obey to the laws, you respect whoever, but if someone gets out of hand against you, send him/it to the cemetery... eye for eye, tooth for tooth, head for head, life for life...” [Giammanco 1994: 133].


Mohammed
it was the example to imitate: he had chosen to affirm him with human means, resorting to the violence if necessary, while Jesus Cristo, that had chosen to die as man, to sacrifice and to suffer, was the example to abandon. With the Islam in the heart they would have fought one Jihad, a War Saint against the American society for the ransom of the black people. In the due confusion to the loss of identity, Islam was not only a shelter but a cry of battle.

 

 

Part - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - Bibliography - Notes

 

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