Showing posts sorted by date for query dhoruba. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query dhoruba. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

dhoruba bin wahad / keith ellison



A lively exchange on the nature of effective political change between Rep. Keith Ellison and Dhoruba Bin Wahad. This was actually part of a longer talk by Bin Wahad which took place Feb. 28 of last year, but Ellison happened to be in the audience when Bin Wahad started to criticize the Congressional Black Caucus.
From: Kasama

Thursday, December 04, 2008

old interview with dhoruba bin wahad

I've been watching some old episodes of the Boondocks recently (especially the ones which show the BET staff is continually plotting against the black race). It made me think back to what BET used to be like and what kind of hard-hitting, thoughtful positive shows they used to have like Teen Summit or Our Voices with Bev Smith or Tavis Smiley's show.


Bev Smith on Our Voices interviewing Dhoruba bin Wahad.

We've mentioned Dhoruba bin Wahad (Muslim, former Black Panther and political prisoner, now political activist) before on Planet Grenada. This is making me want to see what else is out there.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

dhoruba bin wahad: four points

In an earlier post, I already excerpted from Dhoruba Bin Wahad's "Fatwa on Pan-Arab racism" but I also wanted to highlight and invite comments on Dhoruba Bin Wahad's call for specific actions from the Black/Muslim communities:

Africans are of diverse faiths, varying degrees of spirituality. But for all Muslims there are requirements of faith that exhort them to resist tumult and oppression. To enjoin the good and forbid the wrong is a social and political obligation. Muslims are urged to defend the weak against the tyrant, and oppressors – not participate in rape and oppression. And for fulfilling these obligations we will be attacked, murdered, imprisoned, hunted, and martyred. Muslims have a command from Allah, the Most High, to lead in the struggle for righteousness – not wallow in the wake of unrighteous calamity.

* I am asking for Imam’s and Muslim activists of African ancestry to deliver Fatwas on the issues mention herein. To mobilize the Muslim community to act in opposition to Pan-Arab racism towards Black people.

* I am urging Imam’s in the Diaspora of African ancestry to organize a Majlis to guide the conduct of Pan-African Affairs on behalf of the Ummah, and to deliver a Fatwa on Darfur and Pan-Arab racism in general.

* I am urging activists of African ancestry, both Muslim and non-Muslim to support a campaign to pressure the AU to act forthrightly with the Darfur genocide and to resist U.S. backed (UN) initiatives to deploy UN troops in Somalia in support of an unpopular transitional government.

* I am Asking Muslims in the African Diaspora to establish foundation and convene a forum on the African continent to lay out a strategic vision of the role of Islam in Pan-African unification of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

a fatwa on pan-arab racism

A Fatwa on Pan-Arab Racism
by Muslim and former Black Panther, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad

In the Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful

As-Salaamu-alaikum,

Peace and Greetings to All.

I bear witness that there is no Illah but Allah, I bear witness that Muahammad ibn Abdullah is the Prophet of Allah.

We Muslims of African ancestry face difficult decisions. We stare the grim consequences of our multifaceted heritage in the face of; consequences of the long nightmare of enslavement by Europeans; preceded by an epoch of mercantile slavery and war at the hands of Arabs. Embedded in the fiber of our folk memory are dim recollections, like historical cultural DNA, of the successive waves of conquests - ancient and not so ancient that swept through North Africa - Hittites of antiquity, the Romans, Greeks, Arabs, and ultimately Northern Germanic clans of Western European origin, each left their legacy and impact upon Africa and our ancestors, and hence upon us.

We are today the sum total of what we were yesterday. That sum represents both failure and success, triumph and defeat, the sacred and the profane. Sometimes it seems as though we “can't win of losing.” Ask yourself, what became of our Moorish glory and hegemony over a third of Europe? Of what significance today are the trade routes and commerce of Songhay, or Dahomey, and the Niger Delta states to the political and moral bankruptcy of today's African nation-states? What have we truly learned? In what relevancy lie the appreciation of “Maroon” culture by declaring it a “national heritage” while depreciating the revolutionary impulse for freedom the burned in the hearts of Africans who became Maroons? Enslaved by a system of dehumanizing trade and commerce against their will, they revolted, organized resistance, and built a self-containing culture to keep their independence. Of what relevance are they today? Yes even our victories are subject to the vicissitudes of Time...“By the token of time [humans] are at lost”. Indeed we often are, but it is our consciousness, our intellect, our God given quality of “insight” or the human gift of abstract thought, that qualify us as Earth's vice-regent and therefore capable of learning from the past, overcoming the present, and plan our own salvation. As Muslims we are never done telling ourselves that we were molded in the best of images, We, Muslims are Guardians, not destroyers of life. Part of Creation – not above it. Nonetheless, we, like all living things are created beings. And as such we were created in different communities, of different colors, not as a basis for hatred, animosity, or war, but to appreciate the infinite variety of human possibility – to love each possibility in its own right.

But the age in which we now find ourselves will forever be shaped and judged by our actions and responses to the legacy history has imposed upon us all. There are events unfolding within western civilization and cultures of the East that are of the utmost importance to our physical survival, and the reemergence of a genuinely liberating Islam and progressive Ummah. These events have not only a history, they also are major struggles in which our freedom and salvation are at stake. These events represent for the benefactors of racism, exploitation, injustice, avarice, and elitism serious challenges as well. And we need be mindful of the monopoly on violence the benefactors of injustice, racism, and exploitation have, and their proven disposition to use legal and extralegal violence to hold on to power and privileges.

click here to read entire "fatwa"
click here for more from/about Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Saturday, December 17, 2005

imprisoned intellectuals

In the course of trying to repair a link in my Dhoruba bin Wahad entry I found an online draft of the book Imprisoned Intellectuals: US Political Prisoners and Social Justice edited by Joy James.

This larger work not only includes a section on Dhoruba bin Wahad but also Jalil Muntaqim, Safiya Bukhari, and many other activists coming from a wide range of perspectives (Muslim, Latino, Native American, former Black Panthers etc.)

Friday, December 16, 2005

black cats who became muslim

Some time ago, a Sunni African-American Muslim blogger had asserted that African-American Sunnis weren't doing as much in Black communities as Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. And to be honest, the fact that he said so kind of annoyed me.... not just because I thought he was wrong, but because of the nagging suspicion that he might be right. So I felt compelled to try to disprove him by trying to point to Black Sunni activists and doing entries on them at Planet Grenada.

In the process, what I found is that there are alot of Sunni individuals and organizations quietly doing alot of positive work in the Black community. But because they don't seek out controversy, they don't get the same kind of media attention which Farrakhan or the Nation do.

In particular, I found a group of African-American Muslims who were all former Black Panthers and it made me really curious to see how many African-American Muslims came to Islam along that particular trajectory. It would be good if someone could do more research on the phenomena. Perhaps some Panthers are left unsatisfied by Marxist materialism and so they feel a need for more spirituality and become Muslim. That would be my guess, but to be honest I really don't know.

I've been mulling this subject over for a while, but it came up again for me recently because I've reading about, and working on a blog entry for, Malik Rahim who has been in the news lately. He is a (you guessed it) former Black Panther but is still very much involved in community activism. He lives in New Orleans and is running as the Green Party candidate for mayor. I'm tentatively assuming that he's probably Muslim but I'm trying to find out more information about him online.

remember imam jamil al-amin
nuh washington
dhoruba bin wahad
interview with safiya bukhari
jalil abdul muntaqim
mustafa ibn talib

prison islam
another piece on prison islam

young lords
a really nice black panther page

(i may need to fix some links)

Sunday, May 15, 2005

dhoruba bin wahad

Dhoruba Bin Wahad (like Jamil al-Iman in this respect) is a former Black Panther who became Muslim. He spent 19 years in prison, but his conviction was ultimately overturned in 1990, when he became the first imprisoned Black Panther leader to overturn his conviction based on evidence obtained from COINTELPRO itself.

At present, Dhoruba Bin Wahad lives in Accra, Ghana where he continues organizing and writing especially on Pan-Africanism and the prison system.

I found a number of interesting links related to his life and activities.

An open letter to Al Sharpton from June 2004

interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Bill Weinberg in 1995

Dhoruba himself wrote Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture: Black Survival in a United States in Transition from the book "Still Black, Still Strong --Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries" (about Assata, Dhoruba and Mumia)

He also wrote The Siege of Fallujah, Iraq: Another Page in the West’s Long Running War with Islam

Summaries of the cases of several imprisoned political activists (along with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, there is some information on Leonard Peltier, Geronimo Pratt, Mumia Abu Jamal and Marshall Eddie Conway). At this time, Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Geronimo Pratt are the only ones who have been released.

There is a VERY bizzare and VERY eclectic book available free online called The Ibogaine Story: Report on the STATEN ISLAND PROJECT Ibogaine is an experimental drug which is extracted from a plant used in certain Central African initiation ceremonies. Dhoruba Bin Wahad gets his own chapter of the book as a part of a discussion on the anti-drug activities of the Black Panther Party (and he also appears elsewhere). But seriously, the book goes all over the place, from literature, to politics to biblical criticism, to discussions of gnosticism and science-fiction to the history of agriculture to neurology to pharmocology to quantum physics.