From The Conversation:
>> Scholars estimate that as many as 30% of the African slaves brought to the U.S., from West and Central African countries like Gambia and Cameroon, were Muslim. Among the difficulties they faced, were also those related to their faith.
As a scholar of Muslim communities in the West, I know African slaves were forced to abandon their Islamic faith and practices by their owners, both to separate them from their culture and religious roots and also to “civilize” them to Christianity.
Historian Sylviane Diouf explains how despite such efforts, many slaves retained aspects of their customs and traditions, and found new, creative ways to express them. Slave devotionals sung in the fields, for example, kept the tunes and memory of a bygone life alive well after the trauma of dislocation.
Diouf argues that blues music, one of the quintessential forms of American culture, can trace its origins to Muslim influences from the slave era. She also demonstrates how the famous blues song, “Levee Call Holler,” has a style and melody that comes from the Muslim call to prayer, the “adhan.” <<
I'll just never understand people who deliberately choose to remain ignorant of their own history when it's readily available to them. Boggles the mind.![]()
Stuff like this is so fascinating to me. Thanks.
Amen to that. I love to find out the roots of how things got the way they are. It fleshes out a deep understanding and is the antithesis of the vacuum of Ignorance that fuels the Bigot Brigade. Stuffing their tiny little heads into the sand is the only way they can come up with this malarkey about (insert target group here) that clearly makes no sense on its face. Knowledge is Bigotry's kryptonite.
you suffer from a confusion between HISTORICAL FACT and CURRENT EVENTS vs "bigotry" In the 1960s your malady became so SERIOUSLY accepted that some black sociologists claimed that any suggestion that black persons have a high propensity for the development of HYPERTENSION based on inherited physiology was called BIGOTRY. They insisted that the only reason for an increased prevalence of Hypertension in black populations was OBVIOUSLY BASED ON RACISM .
Uh, I think you suffer from not only HYPERACTIVE SHIFT KEY but also STRAWMAN.
is that the best you can do------I WAS VERY IMPRESSED by assertions
from black leaders that increased levels of HYPERTENSION in
black males is the result of the misery of facing racism.. Would
you like to comment on that assertion which WAS actually made by
black leaders. A more current issue of RACISM in the USA-----
makes note of increased mortality in pregnancy amongst black
ladies which is OBVIOUSLY the result of "anti-black" stuff. There
is far less alcoholism in arab muslims then in the general BLACK
population-------any comment on the issue of ISLAMOPHOBIA being
the underlying reason? Poles seem to have a higher prevalence of
alcoholism than do Italians------must be POLOPHOBIA