It's a black thing?

According to the Nation (of Islam), Islam is the natural religion for the original Asiatic Blackman, the maker, the owner, the cream of the planet earth, father of civilization, God of the universe. And for them, Christianity is the white slaveowner's religion.

I'm not sure that I would say all that, but it is *slightly* more true than not true.

But I really don't mean to embrace the exclusive aspects. It would be better to frame this as a rejection of the Afrocentrist (in particular Asante's) argument that Islam is an "Arab" religion and that Blacks who accept Islam have somehow gotten off-center. Blackness and Islam interweave much too tightly, too intimately, too frequently, too deeply for Asante to make his claim.

I once saw the National spokesman for the Hebrew Israelites being interviewed on tv (cable public access) by Munir Muhammad. He basically said that the Middle East should be thought of as Northeastern Africa. In alot of ways, I think that is the correct argument to make. Islam and "Afrocentricity" can be reconciled because the Muslim world overlaps with the African.

At the same time, Islam manages to be universal. As Schuon puts it, Islam is about the meeting between God as such, and man as such. And to show this it should be sufficient to point to the various groups of ethnic Muslims outside of the Middle East, in Subsaharan Africa, in China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia, in the United States, and of course in the former Soviet Unions. Just think about the situation of the Chechens, who are ethnic Muslims from the Caucus region... where the Muslims are so white that they named white people after them... lol... By no means is Islam merely bound to 7th century Arabia.