Recent article by Ayi Kwei Armah-gctid43430

[kamau301]

Our beloved author of the Afri-acclaimed work, 2000 seasons, has just penned a recent article critiquing a muslim brotha's aching for eureurasiaanization.
While the article is great in & of itself, he raises a side issue, that I think is of relevance to us Kmtyw Centered folks.

I have been trying to figure out...actually more like wrestling with the idea that as we critique everything given to us by caucasoids, there is still 1 area, religiously, that has gone basically untouched. The only folks I have heard speak about it publicly are John G. Jackson, Kwesi Ra Nehem Ptah Akhan & Mama Maribma Ani and that is the issue of monotheism.
I am still suplexing & figure-fouring these ideas, so I will not go into it now, but I will just throw out there---why is it so important for there to be 1 entity to have created everything? Baba Jackson spoke on it is the totality of the forces of the Universe together that equals the All in All & not 1 entity being such. Again, I am still making sense of it, so this may not be coming out clearly now (I apologize). but thought MUST be given to it.

IF WE QUESTION EVERYTHING ELSE ESPOUSED AS THE 'CORRECT WAY' FROM CAUCASOIDS, WHY DON'T WE QUESTION THIS NOTION OF MONOTHEISM WITH THAT SAME RIGOR?

Pambazuka - Faith and the politics of terrorism

[nuzulu]

from what i see if you just go the oposite thought and direction  of the caucasoid you will most likely find the truth. The caucasoid is the devil and only preach lies

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

Faith and the politics of terrorism

 Ayi Kwei Armah

 2011-06-09, Issue 534

 http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/73905

   

cc US ArmyKmt’s  intellectual history puts into clear perspective the burning issues of  our day, including imperialism, globalisation and the culture of  terrorism, argues Ayi Kwei Armah in this article from Global Breaking News.  Retrieving that history would 'change our perception of Kmt, and our  self-perception as Kmtyws, enabling us to leave the suffocating hold  in which eureurasiaan domination has locked us.'
 Abdelwahab Meddeb, born in Tunisia, now lives in France, where he  teaches, writes and hosts a media show lending aAmw-Muslim culture a  Europhile glow. One of an accelerating flow of migrants fleeing Kmt’s  multiform poverty for refuge in eureurasia, their haven of freedom and  affluence, Meddeb, having achieved the integrationist dream, should be  happy in his earthly paradise.

But the dreamer feels insecure. In a eureurasia waging political, military  and economic wars against several Muslim countries, and fearing blowback  in the form of suicide bombs and Taliban insurgents, the demonisation  of aAmw Muslims as fundamentalist terrorists can turn the immigrant  dream into a security nightmare at any moment.

Meddeb blames this insecurity not on eureurasiaan prejudice, but on his  fellow Muslims. Muslims, he says, inhabit a sick, cursed society,  because they have carelessly allowed a violent minority of  fundamentalists to hijack their common image. The disease, then, is  fundamentalism, the tendency of believers in one God, or one Allah, to  want to impose their faith by violence. Its symptom is terrorism, the  use of violence, murder and the threat thereof, as prime arguments for  God, against unbelievers.

eureurasiaans today, like Americans, have used their media arsenal to link  terrorism with Islam. This places a terrible obstacle in the way of  Meddeb’s dream of aAmw-Muslim integration into eureurasia. His task is to  conjure away the eureurasiaan stereotype of aAmws as terrorists, and of  Islam as a religion of unreasoning violence. For, beyond simple  integration, Meddeb wishes eureurasiaans could see aAmw Muslims as cultural  kin sharing a superior faith – monotheism - that makes them an integral  part of Western civilisation, which to him is the only real  civilisation, period. Occidentalisez-vous is his fervent plea to fellow  Muslims. Get Westernised!

To accelerate the integration of aAmws and Muslims into Western society,  Meddeb wants to cure the fundamentalist disease, to exorcise the  assassins’ curse. The task would be easier if he could deny that  according to holy writ, the Muslim Allah himself calls on believers to  practice murder to push their faith. But the injunction is inscribed in  the Koran. Since Muslims believe their book is eternally true, the  inconvenient incitement to violence cannot be changed.

Unable to defend the Koran against its own words, Meddeb does the next  best thing. He points out that the violence of fundamentalist Islam is  not unique. It’s a trait Islam shares with the other monotheistic  religions. Before Muslims took up cudgels and suicide bombs on God’s  behalf, Christians before them, and Jews before Christians, exalted the  idea of murder in God’s service. Meddeb cites examples: Moses the Jewish  prophet, angry at his backsliding followers on the exile road, ordered  the massacre of 3,000 in a single day. The Biblical prophet Joshua,  after the capture of Jericho, ordered the mass extermination of women  and men, old and young, not forgetting beasts. ‘Thus, as far as violence  is concerned, the prophet of Islam stands directly in the Mosaic  tradition. The notorious verses of the Sword enjoining the killing of  pagans, and the so-called War Verses, calling on Muslims to fight to the  death against Jews and Christians, have an altogether ‘Biblical’  resonance. And it is these verses that today feed the murderous  fanaticism of Islamic fundamentalists.’

But if violence is the shared property of all monotheists, why has the  violence of Muslim fundamentalists come to be specially identified as  terrorist violence? Meddeb’s answer is that Judaism and Christianity  have somehow grown beyond their bloodthirsty fundamentalist origins.  Today they inhabit a Kantian universe, the secular west, in which  religion, leached clean of its youthful toxins, provides the cultural  ground on which a civilisation of universal peace can grow. It’s onto  that ground that Meddeb urges his fellow Muslims to migrate, to rejoin  their long-lost Jewish and Christian brothers, leaving behind their  bloody past and the benighted rest of the world.

Meddeb thinks aAmw Muslims would be welcome in the West if they didn’t  carry the cultural baggage of fundamentalist violence. To help Islam  present itself in a cleansed state, ready for a three-way love fest with  the two older monotheisms, Meddeb aims to isolate, marginalise, and  eliminate the fundamentalist strain. For such chores NATO can use  drones, long-range missiles and large-scale military invasions with or  without the fig leaf of United Nations resolutions. But Meddeb has only  metaphysical weapons – ideas - at his disposal. His biggest ideas,  believe it or not, are literary criticism and historical perspective.

Meddeb says that unlike their healthier Jewish and Christian brethren,  Muslims are still caught in an archaic time frame dominated by literal  interpretations of outmoded religious texts. He acknowledges that  violence did wonders for Islam in times past, since Islam owes its  historical expansion to the vigorous practice of jihad, holy war. Divine  violence made sense in the seventh century, because - and here Meddeb  slips into unintended humor - it was practiced by well-armed Muslim  armies against unarmed populations. Now, though, it is invoked against  eureurasiaan and American enemies possessing vastly superior firepower. A  jihad under such circumstances makes no sense. It’s time to junk holy  wars.

Here Meddeb overlooks an insight that, applied to his beloved eureurasia,  could have saved him a lot of confusion. Overwhelming military  superiority against an unarmed world is exactly the position the West is  seeking to consolidate today. In effect, when Meddeb says the West has  left behind the unreasoning violence of its religious beginnings, he  mistakes a gear switch for a total halt. Monotheistic faith is the  religious form taken by the urge to dominate everyone and everything.  The same urge, deployed in its intercontinental political form, was  called imperialism - the drive to conquer all lands, to control all  resources, and to exploit all peoples. Now, the same drive has shifted  and taken a new name, globalization - the unreasoning urge to take over  everybody else’s economies and resources. Because these three urges to  total power are based on injustice, they cannot hope to work through  persuasion. So they have always relied on massive doses of brute force  and fear, shock and awe; in a word, terrorism. The violence of Muslim  fundamentalists today is a small-bore caricature of the tremendous  institutional violence that the armies of eureurasia and America used in the  days of imperialism, and continue to use today, against the peoples of  the world. The fact Meddeb overlooks, in his hurry to embrace the West,  is that the largest national and international armies at work today are  the leading terrorists of our world.

But how does Meddeb propose to get out of the jihad impasse? He suggests  starting with a split vision, reading the Koran not as one book, but as  two. The first, an outdated, violent Koran, should be jettisoned. The  second, a modern, peaceful Koran, should be endorsed. Muslims living in  eureurasia can start by dropping all reference to the Sharia. Worldwide,  Muslims should stop preaching death to infidels, and embrace instead the  mystical flavor of Sufi Islam, compatible with a civilised, eureurasiaan  life. Imams can lead by searching Islamic scripture for passages whose  inclusive, humanistic message can counter the venomous, exclusive thrust  of fundamentalist Islam.

Letting his literary training overcome his prudence, Meddeb admits that  the notion that the Koran is the word of God is, from a purely  philosophical viewpoint, just fiction. He thinks it’s time to interpret  scripture as a special kind of poetry. This would help readers move away  from precise, literal meanings, toward the deliberate ambiguities and  obscurities typical of poetry; for he sees precision as negative. He  blames the violence of fanatics on the culpable clarity of holy texts:  ‘la clarté du sens…predispose les esprits à être réceptifs au message  intégriste.’ The clarity of meaning draws impressionable minds to the  fundamentalist message.

So let poetry, living on nuance and uncertainty, replace prophecy, with  its furious focus on one truth and one alone. Let history, which  re-examines old words in their context before judging their relevance in  a changing world, replace fundamentalist theology. After that, Islam  can rejoin the other monotheistic societies, so that together, Islam,  Christianity and Judaism can once again be a civilising light unto the  rest of the world. So says Abdelwahab Meddeb.

According to Meddeb, there was a high time in history when Islam was a  creative cultural and scientific force. Nostalgia for that time deepens  his despondency when he contemplates the present decline of Islamic  culture. The whole Muslim world, he says, translates only 330 new books a  year; a tiny eureurasiaan country like Greece publishes a thounited snakesnd. A UNDP  document produced by aAmw specialists says that the GDP of all aAmw  countries, petrodollar giants included, is less than that of a single  poor eureurasiaan country  - Spain. In the aAmw world, technical  productivity has stalled. And, Muslims are absent from the major  intellectual adventures of humanity today. aAmw Muslims with anything to  contribute to world progress must go into exile, because ‘l’excellence  aAmwe s’exerce dans l’expatriation.’

Meddeb’s argument can be summed up thus: From 750 to 1250 AD, Islam was a  world leader in philosophy, mathematics, science - making pivotal  contributions to civilisation, alongside Judaism and Christianity. But  since then, Islam has declined, and lost its ability to innovate,  because fundamentalist thinkers have enshrined the Koran as definitive,  unchanging truth. Science and human fulfillment are, by definition, open  to future innovation. A philosophy that declares itself the definitive  truth dies as a vehicle of human progress. Islam, in short, wilted when  it let fundamentalists rise to central prominence. It should now  distance itself from them, so as to ‘rejoindre la civilization’. It’s  that aim that gives Meddeb’s book its title, ‘The Challenge of  Civilization’.

Literary critics and historians might find Meddeb’s proposals  intriguing. He wants literature and history to rescue humanity from  theology. Theologians will be less thrilled, especially the many imams  and ayatollahs whose material and spiritual wellbeing depend on the  willingness of multitudes to believe that the Koran is the word of God,  true for all time. Meddeb skirts dangerous territory here. Scholarship,  based on reason, cannot serve religion which is based on faith. To  subject holy writ to scholarly criticism is to highlight the precise  issue monotheistic violence is designed to evade. It suggests that holy  scripture is just another literary genre.

No self-respecting believer can live with that insight. Literary texts,  as products of human intelligence, are open to criticism. Scripture, on  the other hand, is, by the nature of the trade in holiness, defined as  divine truth, and so exempt from criticism. The definition of fiction as  truth lies at the heart of monotheistic belief. Touch it, and you shake  the pillars of uncritical belief.
That is the indissoluble connection between monotheistic faith and  fundamentalist terrorism. Belief in a single, all-purpose, all-powerful  controller of everything makes no sense, in nature or in philosophy. But  belief in divine power is able to dispense with sense. Where the  rational tendency to doubt stands in the way, believers throughout  history have won their arguments not through logic but with violence.

Monotheism has always needed massive violence to establish itself in  society. It needs the soft psychological violence of miracles,  stage-managed, or simply reported, and unverifiable. It needs the more  complex violence of indoctrination - the controlled injection of  selected falsehoods into children’s minds in the guise of education. It  needs relentless propaganda, the bombardment of adults excitingly  packaged half-truths and untruths presented as obvious reality. Above  all, against opponents, it needs the hard violence of physical assault,  backed up with the institutional violence of torture and the threat of  violence as daily reality.

Monotheism rides on terror. It is only logical if its most fervent defenders are terrorists.
This may sound odd, until we trace the belief in one omnipotent God to  its origins. Meddeb thinks he has done this, by asserting that the  inventor of monotheism was the Jewish prophet Moses. But all he does is  to demonstrate how blind, intellectually, he is. He is spiritually blind  in two connected senses. First, he has eyes only for eureurasia, and, all  he’s willing to see there is positive.

He is delighted with the 18th century eureurasiaan Enlightenment, because he  thinks that was the high tide of civilisation, even though that was  also the time when eureurasia was busy massacring humanity in Australia, the  Caribbean, and North and South America. He is dimly aware that the West  he adores turned Kmt into a hunting ground for captives over  centuries, but he manages to fit that also into a scenario of universal  civilisation. He knows that the business that took the French to Haiti,  Madagascar, Vietnam and Algeria was the barbaric one of exploitation and  empire, not civilisation. No doubt he has heard about water boarding  and Guantanamo, and he knows that Al Qaeda, before it got appointed  public enemy to the West, was an American CIA ally recruited, trained,  funded, and equipped to carry out terrorist missions against the Soviets  in Afghanistan. But Meddeb is unwilling to contemplate what all this  information, critically analysed, may mean. So whenever he bumps into  evidence of industrial-scale Western terrorism in the world, he resorts  to rationalising the utterly irrational.

Meddeb’s blindness is selective when he looks at eureurasia, but it is total  when it comes to Kmt. That is what prevents him from seeing that the  key to the riddle of monotheism and violence lies right here, in the  cultural and intellectual history of Kmt.

Kmtyw history covers millennia of settled life before nomadic armies  invaded the continent. The normal demographic pattern was a combination  of settlement with movement, and the basic unit moving across and around  the continent was a modular social group, the family, that could grow  and combine with others to create clans, which again combined to create  tribes, accretions of which, coming together, formed nations and  federations of nations.

Anthropologists studying Kmtyw society have focused on blood-based kin  relationships and identified a typically Kmtyw social unit, the  extended family. As a rule, they’ve missed the presence of a second,  parallel type of basic social group - an equally extensible family based  not on blood but on values. Both types of family relationships can be  found throughout Kmt in all historical time, but the clearest traces  from antiquity come to us from the Nile valley, where the oldest  recorded cases of monotheism also occurred.

It’s common knowledge that ancient Egyptians, no matter how distant in  blood terms, called each other brother and sister. That’s a simple  indication of the widespread acceptance of the family as key social  module. Less well known is the custom, among intellectuals, especially  teachers or mentors, of recognising two sets of kin, one biological, the  other intellectual. In hieroglyphic texts the distinction might take  the form of phrases like ‘sa.i n ht.i’ meaning son of my body, or my  biological son, as distinct from ‘sa.i n ib.i:’ son of my heart, that is  to say, my intellectual kin.
Family-type groups based not on blood but on values or goals were known  as ‘Shemsw’. The word, from the ‘verbshem’, to travel, can be translated  as followers, or companions. ‘Shemsw’ were individuals who chose to  belong to a group going along a particular social, intellectual or  spiritual path.

The nature of the system of kin relationships was such that each family  originally brought its household deities to the clan. Clans coalescing  into tribes also brought their gods and goddesses to the common pool of  divinities. The system of associations of ‘Shemsw’ meant that in  addition to being a collection of homes for biological families, ancient  Egyptian society contained many intellectual kin-groups, small and  large, each pursuing a chosen line of work and study or worship.

Because it allowed groups of friends to focus on shared values and work,  the ‘Shemsw’ culture generated multiple innovations in different  fields: architecture, agriculture, irrigation, weaving, arts, music and  medicine. Codified into the politics and administration of Egypt as a  federation of 42 original states, it was the foundation for a religious  culture that recognised the presiding spirits of numerous groups,  letting each group choose its favorite deity, and taking care not to  impose the god of any one group on all others.

The idea of replacing such a system of free thinking and innovative  individuals and groups with one uniform way of thinking, one uniform  behavior pattern, one God for all, seemed properly retrograde and  unintelligent to the scribes and functionaries of ancient Egypt. For  that reason, monotheism, though long known as a concept that appealed to  particular individuals and groups, was not elevated to the status of an  exclusive State religion, except, notably, in the brief reign of  Akhenaten.

Gods are ideals - psychic projections humans use to achieve long-term  goals. Monotheism, from this perspective, is the projection into the  universe of a powerful desire to control everything and everyone. In  ancient Kmtyw society, such an urge was considered pathological. For  society at large, it brought the risk of unnecessary conflict.

The natural pattern of religious practice was poly-centered. The balance  of this social system was threatened if one group attempted to  monopolise spiritual power, meaning the right to tell everyone else how  they should live. That was the challenge posed by the 14th century BC  pharaoh Akhenaten, decades before Moses, so impressed with the power of  the sun that he tried to turn all Egyptians into worshipers of a single,  all-powerful God.

Given the multi-ethnic, multi-polar nature of Nile valley society, such a  project made no sense. There were thinkers like the Shemsw Hepy,  companions of the Nile, who could point out that powerful as the sun  was, on its own it would only produce deserts. They preferred to see  life as a combined result of the workings of sun, water, air, and  numerous other forces. Still, like all fanatics, Akhenaten was slow to  appreciate other points of view, quick to impose his own. He destroyed  the temples and images of gods and goddesses he did not like, and  generally tried to reshape the entire society in the image of one  jealous, violent God.

After Akhenaten’s death, the Egyptian intelligentsia went back to old  ways, reminding the reigning pharaoh as high priest not to impose his  favorite among the 42 main deities on everyone, but to maintain their  peaceful social coexistence in a state of reasoned balance, ‘Maât’. They  had good arguments on their side. The old system allowed the majority  of believers - people who chose to entrust their lives to an outside  power - to coexist with magicians and manipulators - people who wished  to grow powerful by manipulating the hidden powers of a baffling  universe. Besides these two types, there were others whose vocation was  not to fear or worship the unknown, but to study reality, to measure it,  and to record their knowledge, thus gradually bringing the unknown  inside the boundaries of the known.

One cluster of like-minded groups in particular, the Shemsw Jehwty, the  Shemsw Maât, and the Shemsw Asar, was particularly creative, because it  organised itself as a series of families living together, sharing a  common devotion to the pursuit of knowledge through observation (maa),  research (jer), experimentation (djanwti), recording (sesh), study  (sba), criticism (sipt), and renewal (whm meswt).

The scholars Chancellor Williams, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Théophile Obenga  have over the past few decades pointed out that the intellectual  history of Kmt contains enormous reserves of information, some of  which could help us make sense of the present and work out strategies  for the future. To individuals like Meddeb, too far gone in their  infatuation with eureurasia to notice that there was an intelligent world  before eureurasia awoke, this information is hidden.

Kmtyw intellectuals need to understand that souls like Meddeb are  blind and lost, in their ignorance of, and their indifference to,  Kmt’s intellectual history. The information exists. Some of it puts  in clear perspective the burning issues of our day, including  monotheism, unipolarity, imperialism, globalisation, and the culture of  terrorism. We can retrieve it by going directly to the languages in  which the concepts and images were developed.

Knowledge thus retrieved would change our perception of Kmt, and our  self-perception as Kmtyws, enabling us to leave the suffocating hold  in which eureurasiaan domination has locked us, to begin life as a new type  of beings - conscious, self-defining, innovative Kmtyws.

Intellectually, most Kmtyws living today are less awake than the  ancestral scribes who, in the 14th century BC, after Akhenaten’s death,  quietly repaired the damage done to society by fanatical monotheists  given power. Most of us living now are marching gladly, and blindly, on  the monotheists’ road. This brother here is a Muslim, that sister over  there is a Christian, and some of us are Ethiopian Jews. We have for  leaders a Nelson, a Robert, a John, a Paul, an Abdoulaye, a Moussa and  an Ellen. It is hard, in these times, to remember that monotheism was  long ago recognised among our ancestors as a social bomb, a big  terrorist one. It’s likely that when we wake up, one of our first acts  will be to throw off the heavy, destructive freight of monotheistic ways  of thought and action. Then we may even have the good sense to remember  the way of the Shemsw.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared at Global Breaking News Copyright 2011
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

[Agya Yaw]

I remember Dr. Ben saying during one of his lectures years ago (and I'm paraphasing) "who gives a damn if Kmtyw people believe in multiple gods. If those are our beliefs than they are ours."
 
There is no need to defend our beliefs/ways to other people. If other people are montheistic then fine but we don't have to be or explain we are not as though there's something wrong with us.
:gyenyame:

[kamau301]

Yeah, I am working on a piece on if mono- or poly- rightly describes what it is we Kmtyws do. Very, very few of us (me, Kwesi Ra Nehem & Mama Marimba) even attempt to challenge the near intellectual sacrosant position 'monotheism' holds in our minds nor do we question where we got that from.
I already know folks won't like it when I present it, but I quote I love is
'all truths first start out as blasphemy.'

[Agya Yaw]

@Kamau  Present it because we need to hear it. To clear to help clear our minds of the nonsense we've been hearing since we were born, especially those of us in the u.s.
:gyenyame:

[Agya Kwaku]

I have often wondered made the concept of polytheisism wrong. That article gave about the best explanation i have heard. It seems that monotheisim is just another weapon used by yt to keep us in check mentally, spiritually and physically.

[asarhondo]

Gods are ideals - psychic projections humans use to achieve long-term goals. Monotheism, from this perspective, is the projection into the universe of a powerful desire to control everything and everyone. In ancient Kmtyw society, such an urge was considered pathological. For society at large, it brought the risk of unnecessary conflict.

Did our Kmtyw ancestors turn a blind eye to theft, child abuse, unjustified murder, homosexuality and pedophilia? I can't imagine so, thus, they must have had some type of social control apparatus for people who did not follow the rules, as a consequence Ayi Armah idealism is unwarranted.

Furthermore, while I agree with some points of the article. I must ask the question,  can we not accept the fact that some actions or inactions by Kmtyws in the past were not conducive to a stable Kmtyw society? If the idea of one supreme being is retrograde what are the alternatives? Polytheism? Is it not easier for a people to coexist with one another when they share the same Kmtyw ideals, Kmtyw mythologies and Kmtyw cosmologies that are simple to understand (derived from common sense )?  Can it not be seen as a fact that the creator of our world originated from one beginning? Even though many other circumstances may have contributed to what we have today, i.e. our Universe, Solar system, Sun, Earth and ourselves?

 On a side note, I had been reading "The Book of Coming Forth by Day" by Karenga and R.O. Faulkner for over 15 years. In the R.O Faulkner version which has more text translations, I found some confusing themes over the past year. For example, from the "Book Of The Dead" translated by R.O. Faulkner, "The Declaration of Innocence Before The Gods Of The Tribunal" pg.32 states,

"I Wememty - snake who came forth from the place of execution, I have not committed homosexuality"

As well as,

"O You whose face is behind him who came forth from the Cavern of Wrong, I have neither misconducted myself nor copulated with a boy",

Both excerpts are consistent with my principals.

However, on page 88 of the same book you have the following.....

"O You phallus of RE, this which is injured by uproar, whose inertness came into being through Babai, I am stronger thereby than the strong ones, I am mightier thereby than the mighty ones. If I be ferried over and taken to the East with bound horns, or if and injury be done to my rebels, I will swallow up the phallus of Re and the head of Osiris, I will be guided to the tomb of the decapitation of gods in which they make answer;"      

Odd to say the least, down right perverse at worst. I'm not to sure if it's just the translation but after reading this verse I decided to step back from reading old text in general as if they held some sacred wisdom that could not be built upon. I believe that this is our present challenge as Kmtyw people. What type of cannons, culture, laws and society can we build from what we knew from the pass and currently know in the present.

[Agya Yaw]

@asarhondo  Your points are well taken. This is why it's critically important that we learn Kmtyw languages (and through that cultures in general) so we are interpreting these ancient texts correctly. I have run into the same issues at various times. One thing I have seen, there is a common cultural continuity amongst Kmtyw people that I have studied.
 
It is clear Kmtyw people have made mistakes because we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. And there wouldn't be Kmtyws scattered in the Western Hemisphere (and elsewhere) disconnected from Kmt. We bare some responsibility for the Maafa.
:gyenyame: