Boreal

Zeitouna

A Black History for Idiots

The example set by Allah and His Messenger in making history fit their narrative is reflected in the work of Islamic scholars who do the same with more recent events.

For more than a millennium before President Bourguida evicted Zeitouna's bearded scholars and students, in 1956, this university spread Islamic knowledge across North and West Africa as far as Nigeria and Senegal ...

"This was an archaic, medieval place. Back in 1956, we were still studying an Islamic law course on how to treat slaves and how to punish a slave who escapes from a master..."

After leaving Zeitouna and tasting secular education, [Abdallah] Amami (Tunisian writer and former diplomat) was shocked by the disparity. At the Islamic university, he had been told that Vasco da Gama was following the real explorer, Arab navigator Ibn Majid. Descartes, he had thought, copied from the Moghul Muslim emperor Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal. And Dante plagiarized from the blind Arab poet Abu Al Alaa al Maari.

"For fourteen centuries the Muslims have been falsifying their history. They never learned it as it was. The truth was always adapted to improve the image of Islam." Amami said.

Yaroslav Trofimov, Faith at War, A Journey On The Frontlines of Islam (Henry Holt, 2005) p. 49

Abdallah Amami went from believing in a falsified history put forward by religious scholars with an agenda, to trusting in a realistic factual account of times gone by. American author and convert Yahiya Emeric did the reverse. Emeric is the commissioned author of one of the most read, if not the most read book by Americans wishing to learn about Islam.

In The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam (Alpha – A Pearson Education Company), it is black Muslim sailors, centuries before Columbus, who discovered the Caribbean Islands on which the explorer from Genoa would set foot.

Upon landing in the Americas, Columbus was stunned to find that some of the people he encountered were black skinned and possessed clothing styles suspiciously akin to those of the Moors of Granada and West Africa. Other Spaniards (sic Columbus was Italian) also noticed similar peculiarities. Hernando Cortes, conqueror of the Aztecs, remarked that some of the natives had clothes that were “painted in the style of the Moorish draperies.”

But it was Columbus’ son, Ferdinand, who would later surmise what has been privately accepted by many modern scholars; Africans landed in the Caribbean long before Columbus. What is even more exciting is that they were all Muslims.

Islam did not survive, however, and it appears that the early African voyages, dated mainly to the twelfth century, were not permanent forays but accidental discoveries. The sailors, mostly from the Islamic Mandinka tribe of West Africa, merely intermingled and assimilated into local Indian cultures.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam, first printing 2002, p. 310

The conversion, by force, of the Mandinkas began in earnest hundreds of years after their alleged discovery of the New World. The Mandinkas who came to the Americas did so in slave ships long after Columbus' discovery, most the booty of Islamic holy wars of aggression.

It is a testament to the assuredness of writers on Islam and our gullibility, that even alleged mainstream Islamic scholars like Emeric feel confident enough to distort the history of the discovery of the New World, even when that distortion, easily discovered, not only highlights the lie, but also Islam's key role in the slave trade which would bring the Mandinkas to America.

Bernard Payeur