Convert Straddles Worlds of Islam and Hip-Hop

[Jetavan]

He was a “15-year-old white kid with Dad a diagnosed schizophrenic, rapist and racial separatist and Mom fresh off her second divorce,” Michael Muhammad Knight writes in his 2006 memoir, “Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America.” At home in Rochester, he “listened to a lot of Public Enemy and read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and by 16 had a huge portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini” on his bedroom wall.

At 17, Mr. Knight, having converted to Islam, was “running around Pakistan with Afghan and Somalian refugees” and studying “at the largest mosque in the world: Faisal Masjid in Islamabad, which happens to look like a spaceship.”

That was precisely half a lifetime ago. Mr. Knight is now 34, a doctoral student in Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina. He returned to the United States the same year he left, and by age 20 he had traded his fundamentalist Islam for a more liberal, irreverent version. A prolific writer, he often satirizes his fellow Muslims, pricking the traditionalists. He is a court jester to the Islamic world, a provocateur in a kufi.
....
Until now, he has been recognized as a learned (if mischievous) practitioner of Sunni Islam, the world’s largest Muslim tradition. But Mr. Knight has found a new way to surprise his fellow believers. In his seventh book, “Why I Am a Five Percenter” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, published this month), Mr. Knight professes an affinity with the Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as the Five Percenters, a mysterious, misunderstood offshoot of the Nation of Islam.
....
Mr. Knight does not live as a Five Percenter. Some would say he barely lives as a Muslim. In his two years at Harvard, where in May he finished a master’s degree, he “went to a mosque maybe twice,” he told me this week. But that seeming tension only points to a principal argument of “Why I Am a Five Percenter,” that religious identity is not necessarily about belief, or even about culture.

[jewish voice]

Sorry I don't get your point on what your trying to make here

[sainthieu]

He sounds like a moron---or am I insulting morons? If so, please accept my apologies.

[biro]

Are the Five Percenters the ones who believe white people were created in a lab?  Oh goodness.

[Jetavan]

Are the Five Percenters the ones who believe white people were created in a lab?   Oh goodness.

The Nation of Islam is the one that teaches that "whites" were the result of selective breeding -- carried out by the mad-scientist named Yakub -- of certain members of the original black race, over hundreds of years. Basically, Yakub only allowed the lighter-skinned blacks to interbreed, eventually producing the "white" race (and, along the way, also producing the brown, red, and yellow races). The Five Percenters might include some or many who also believe in that, but I'm not sure. The Five Percenters don't seem to emphasize it, if some do believe it.

But it's also good to understand that the Nation of Islam taught this idea, as a response to the American society of the 1920s and '30s, which often depicted Africans as sub-human. The Yakub story is a reaction to American racism, and it simply does to whites what many whites had done, and were doing, to blacks. I refer you to the racist interpretations (communicated especially by antebellum Southern Baptists) of the Noah/Canaan/Ham story, in which black inferiority is justified by claiming that blacks are descendants of a cursed Ham/Canaan. (A good book on this is Noah's Curse.) And then you also have another basis of black inferiority coming out of the "mark of Cain" narrative in Genesis, a narrative that seems to have been utilized often in 19th- and early 20th-century Mormonism.

[biro]

True, and sobering. Thanks.

[Jetavan]

Sorry I don't get your point on what your trying to make here

I'm still trying to figure that out myself. 

[Iconodule]

Are the Five Percenters the ones who believe white people were created in a lab?   Oh goodness.

The Nation of Islam is the one that teaches that "whites" were the result of selective breeding -- carried out by the mad-scientist named Yakub -- of certain members of the original black race, over hundreds of years. Basically, Yakub only allowed the lighter-skinned blacks to interbreed, eventually producing the "white" race (and, along the way, also producing the brown, red, and yellow races). The Five Percenters might include some or many who also believe in that, but I'm not sure. The Five Percenters don't seem to emphasize it, if some do believe it.

But it's also good to understand that the Nation of Islam taught this idea, as a response to the American society of the 1920s and '30s, which often depicted Africans as sub-human. The Yakub story is a reaction to American racism, and it simply does to whites what many whites had done, and were doing, to blacks. I refer you to the racist interpretations (communicated especially by antebellum Southern Baptists) of the Noah/Canaan/Ham story, in which black inferiority is justified by claiming that blacks are descendants of a cursed Ham/Canaan. (A good book on this is Noah's Curse.) And then you also have another basis of black inferiority coming out of the "mark of Cain" narrative in Genesis, a narrative that seems to have been utilized often in 19th- and early 20th-century Mormonism.

First of all, I get your point. A lot of complaints about "reverse racism" ignore the historical/ social context of white supremacy. Where racism can be a tool of a oppression for some people, it can be a (misguided) tool of resistance for others. In both cases it's wrong and stupid but they can't really be equated.

But this guy really does sound like a jackass.

[primuspilus]

The Nation of Islam is the one that teaches that "whites" were the result of selective breeding -- carried out by the mad-scientist named Yakub -- of certain members of the original black race, over hundreds of years. Basically, Yakub only allowed the lighter-skinned blacks to interbreed, eventually producing the "white" race (and, along the way, also producing the brown, red, and yellow races). The Five Percenters might include some or many who also believe in that, but I'm not sure. The Five Percenters don't seem to emphasize it, if some do believe it

Ah yes, the "Nation of Islam" the mentally-handicapped cousin in the Islamic family. While they're spouting their gutter faith, I wonder if they can show me a picture of the mothership that they're always spouting about.

PP

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