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El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)
"Islam, revolution and racism" by Federica Mereu V
The conception of the religion as tool of emancipation it is in contradiction with the thought of Marx that considered her/it “the people's opium”, the superstructure that reflects and it maintains a state of dominion. But the Marxist inheritance has also developed a different analysis of the religion. Ernst Bloch has affirmed that in Marx it is present also an idea of the religion as it protests against the condition of alienation of the existence, distinguishing a phase of it “heretical” and one “teocratica” that it is destroyed opening toward the new
one.
“Anthony Gramsci has furnished the first directives for a different approach, from the historical materialism, to a sociological understanding of the religion” [Beckford 1991: 152]. He thought that it was possible to cultivate a non ecclesiastical form of religiousness, deprived of the ideological contaminations of the affairs of the dominant class, that it constituted a strength of liberation to use for the formation of a conscience of revolutionary class. In this way he was detached by the mechanistic and deterministic conception of the relationship between structure and superstructure and he/she thought that you/he/she would have been possible “to practice a control on the conscience with tools cultural essential ...pre-condition to the exercise of the political power” [ibidem:
152/157].
In this sense, while the Moslem religion developed for the blacks a revolutionary function and liberatrice, contrarily that Christian had developed always a role of oppression, functional to the maintenance of the predominance of the whites on the blacks. As C. Eric Lincoln had written in his thesis of doctorate on the Nation of
Islam:
“The Christian religion is incompatible with the aspirations of the blacks Americans to the dignity and the equality. It has represented an obstacle instead that a help... you/he/she has accepted that among his believers the discrimination was practised in base to the color of the skin, although you/he/she had declared that its mission was that to establish an universal brotherhood under Jesus Cristo. The Christian love is the love of the white man for himself and for its race. For the one who Islam is not white it represents the hope of justice and equality in the world that we will have to build” [Malcolm X 1992: 281 and seg.].
One of the matters on which the Shepherd Malcolm X raged more often during his discourses were the Sacred Writings, the ideological weapon of which the white man was historically served for mentally making enslaved million of human beings of color; he wanted to estrange the blacks from the religion of the whites, that promised the Heaven in the aldilą (“the - pious-in-the-sky”), “been Glad, therefore and you jump: because here, great you/he/she is your reward in sky” [Luca 6, 23]; the religion of the pardon, of the blacks toward the whites naturally, “If you don't forgive to the men their lacks, even you your Father in the skies will forgive” [Matteo 6, 15] and of the subjugation, that had persuaded the “so-called black” to always hand the other cheek, to obey and not to rebel.
Malcolm X had read Nietzsche that, of it The antichrist. Curse of the Christianity, warned the men against the Christian religion, “briber of the good instincts”, degenerate, harmful, decadent, that insignia her “moral of the slaves” contrasted to the Islam, the religion of the pride and the boldness, an aristocratic and virile religion that doesn't deny the vital instincts of the man [cfr. Nietzsche 1990: 92-93].
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