The Mahdi Times May 2014 Issue | Page 46

In the first centuries conversion to Islam followed the rapid growth of the Muslim world created by the conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphs. These Indo-Aryans or near white Caucasian people (mainly Turkish, Persian, Asians and Byzantines) converted to Islam in the hundreds of thousands ( later on millions ) and adopted the Black skinned kinky haired Arab culture, eventually outnumbering the original Black skinned founders politically, militarily, intellectually, and religiously and in the process through successive generations managed to influence some aspects of what has been presented as Islam into a culture of traditional Indo-European superstition, mythology, intolerance, misogyny as well as a racist anti-black mentality. This is certainly not a generalization of all Muslims from that region or to deny the beneficial, progressive and brilliant scholarship and knowledge that the region has produced over several centuries but rather an insight into why and how racist attitudes and intolerant cultural practices have crept into the minds of many Muslims worldwide under the guise of Religion, a attitude which is contrary to the peaceful, progressive and global message appeal of The Quran. It is safe to say that some aspects of this shift in Muslim schools of thought back then has to some degree had an influence on the justification for acts of terrorism or religious extremism committed today by groups all over the Muslim world regardless of their colour or ethnicity or geographical location which has resulted in conflicts between Muslims and people of other faiths as well as amongst Muslims themselves. This process of mass conversion changed the initial demographic face of the Muslim world in general from black to mainly Indo-European....and as a consequence the Black Arab Prophet Mohamed, like the Black Hebrew Prophet Jesus was found offensive in and to the new order. Thus we find narrations like the following; ‘Anyone who says that The Prophet was Black should be killed, he was not black’ Qadi Iyad (al-Shifa) The above declaration of course raises its own set of questions, like: Why would such a fatwa even be necessary except there was in circulation the claim that the Prophet was black in the first place? On what was such a claim based? And why would describing The Prophet Mohamed as black, whatever its historical merits, be so offensive as to warrant death?