Most Americans are familiar with the story of the conversion of Malcolm X to a post-racist form of Islam. The firebrand renounced his prior racist statements, ingrained in him by the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad, after witnessing a multiracial brotherhood shown to him at his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 (after his break from the Nation). Today in a more prolonged and prosaic visit to Saudi Arabia, Ed Hussain once a proponent of radical Islam in London, tells how his time as a teacher in Saudi Arabia led him to turn against extremism. In this case, it was not brotherhood that changed his mind, it was his eyewitness of the fanaticism of Islamist Wahabbism. Hussain, himself of African descent a brown-skinned man, was also shocked by the blatant racism of the Arab Saudis.
At that moment it dawned on me that Britain, my home, had given refuge to thousands of black Africans from Somalia and Sudan: I had seen them in their droves in Whitechapel. They prayed, had their own mosques, were free and were given government housing.
Many Muslims enjoyed a better lifestyle in non-Muslim Britain than they did in Muslim Saudi Arabia. At that moment I longed to be home again.
All my talk of ummah seemed so juvenile now. It was only in the comfort of Britain that Islamists could come out with such radical utopian slogans as one government, one ever expanding country, for one Muslim nation. The racist reality of the Arab psyche would never accept black and white people as equal.
Standing in Karantina that day, I reminisced and marvelled over what I previously considered as wrong: mixed-race, mixed-religion marriages. The students to whom I described life in modern multi-ethnic Britain could not comprehend that such a world of freedom, away from “normal” Saudi racism, could exist.
Racism was an integral part of Saudi society. My students often used the word “nigger” to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in the world’s most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. I was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm, something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist.
Hussain is coming out with a new book, 'Islamist'. His will be the interesting story of a recognition of what the West has to offer Muslims from a black perspective. I think he has discovered that he had been preaching false revolution and now recognizes the error of his ways, but more importantly gives us all a first hand account of what goes on inside the madrassas of Saudi Arabia and details Wahhabism from the inside out.
This is my second accounting for the racism of Arab muslims. It's not just the Baathists but the Wahhabis too. Thanks to Olivia Smith for this heads up.
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