The head of the committee which oversees the hajj pilgrimage has sparked outrage by blaming pilgrims of 'African nationalities' for the stampede which killed more than 700 people.

In what was the worst disaster in a quarter-century to strike the annual event, 769 people died two days ago when the stampede broke out in Mina, about three miles from Mecca, during the symbolic stoning of the devil ritual.

The inflammatory comments come as authorities were heavily criticised for a perceived lapse in safety measures at what is one of the world's largest pilgrimages.

The comment provoked a storm of condemnation, with critics describing it as 'more obscene than racism' while others said authorities should focus on determining what went wrong, rather than blaming ethnic groups.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh has told Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef: 'You are not responsible for what happened', the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

He added: 'As for the things that humans cannot control, you are not blamed for them. Fate and destiny are inevitable.'

Mohammed chairs the Saudi hajj committee and has ordered an investigation into Thursday's stampede during a symbolic stoning of the devil ritual by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at Jamarat Bridge in Mina, just outside the holy city of Mecca.

King Salman, whose official title is 'Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques' in Mecca and Medina, also ordered 'a revision' of how the hajj is organised.

.....Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari urged King Salman 'to ensure a comprehensive and thorough exercise that will identify any flaws in hajj organisation'.

Buhari said his country had lost a prominent journalist, a professor 'and others' in the tragedy.

Largely incident-free for nine years after safety improvements, this year's hajj was afflicted by double tragedy.

Days before it started, a construction crane collapsed at the Grand Mosque, Islam's holiest site, killing 109 people including many foreigners.



Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3250036/Fury-Saudi-s-hajj-chief-blames-African-pilgrims-stampede-killed-700-country-s-cleric-says-human-control.html

I don't know why Nigerians endanger themselves by going for these events. Good to have a President that can speak up though.

True talk

The awful truth is that Arabs ravaged Africa for almost a thousand years before Europeans ever began to export black slaves.  In fact, it was the foundation of slave procurement and trading established by the Muslims (usually through Jihad) that enabled the European practice.

Far more Africans were swallowed up in the fourteen hundred years of Islamic slave trading than in the three centuries of European practice.  An estimated 17 to 20 million Africans were exported from their native land to the Muslim world, but this isn't the whole story.  With a transport survival rate of less than 1 in 3, Dr. John Alembellah Azumah estimates that perhaps 50 to 80 million more died in route.

Here is a quote from an observer in Zanzibar that sheds light on the harsh conditions of Islamic slavery:

"As they filed past, we noticed many chained together by the neck... The women, who were as numerous as the men, carried babies on their backs in addition to a tusk of ivory or other burden on their heads... It is difficult to adequately describe the filthy state of their bodies; in many instances not only scarred by [the whip], but feet and shoulders were a mass of open sores... half-starved ill-treated creatures who, weary and friendless must have longed for death."

The text (quoted from Dr. Azumah's The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa) goes on to describe the fate of those who became too ill or too weak to continue the journey - as related by a Muslim "herdsman":

"Spear them at once!  For, if we did not, others would pretend they are ill in order to avoid carrying their loads.  No!  We never leave them alive on the road; they all know this custom." 

When asked who carries the ivory when a mother gets too tired to carry both her baby and the ivory, the herdsman replied, "She does!  We cannot leave valuable ivory on the road.  We spear the child and make her burden lighter."

After Muhammad's companions overthrew the Christians in Egypt shortly after his death, they began demanding slaves from the Nubians to the south.  For over 600 years, the black African kingdom was forced to send a tribute of slaves to Cairo on a regular basis.

Although the Qur'an does not distinguish between races, there is a strong legacy of racism against people of African descent in early Islam.

According to the Quran itself, blackness is a product of being too close to where the sun sets and rises (Muhammad thought that the earth flat and the Africans lived along the edge).  Islamic scholar Ibn Qutaybah described black people as "ugly and misshapen because they live in a hot country where the heat overcooks them in the womb and curls their hair."

Again quoting from The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa, Dr. Azumah provides several examples of Islam's early attitude toward blackness:

The hadith in which an Ethiopian woman laments her racial inferiority to Muhammad, who consoles her by saying, "In Paradise, the whiteness of the Ethiopian will be seen over the stretch of a thousand years."
 

The Muslim Arab and Persian literature which depicts blacks as "stupid, untruthful, vicious, sexually unbridled, ugly and distorted, excessively merry and easily affected by music and drink."
 

Nasir al-Din Tusi, the famous Muslim scholar said of blacks: "The ape is more capable of being trained than the Negro."
 

Ibn Khaldun, an early Muslim thinker, writes that blacks are  "only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings."  He also insisted that "the only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage."  (In truth, over 500,000 Africans in Basra overthrew their Arab-Islamic masters in the largest slave uprising in history in what is known as the Zanj Rebellion).  
 

Classical Islamic law allows a light-skinned Muslim man to marry a black woman, but a black Muslim man is restricted from marrying a light-skinned woman.  As the literature of the time put it, "only a LovePeddler prefers blacks; the good woman will welcome death rather than being touched by a black man."
 

Another hadith quotes Muhammad: "Do not bring black into your pedigree."

The famous Muslim historian, al-Mas'udi describes the African slaves as, "Kinky hair, thin eyebrows, broad noses, thick lips, sharp teeth, malodorous skin, dark pupils, clefty hands and feet, elongated joysticks and excessive merriment."  He goes on to add that the "the dark complexion person (al-aswad) is overwhelmed by merriment due to the imperfection (fasad) of his brain; therefore, his intellect is weak."  (Akbar Muhammad, Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, vol. I, p 68)

In fact, the original Arabic word for slave, "Abd," evolved into the the colloquial word for a black person after the establishment of Islam. 

Muhammad owned and sold black slaves.  In fact, the pulpit of his mosque, from which he preached Islam, was built by slave labor on his order. 

Even Christianity’s harshest critics could hardly picture Jesus as a slave trader.  Whereas the New Testament merely acknowledges slavery, the teachings of Islam offer explicit guidance in the details of the practice, thus endowing it with divine sanction.

The Qur'an encourages sex with slaves in several places, which explains the 2-1 ratio of female to male slaves taken from Africa by Muhammad's descendants.  The Muslims were more interested in the sexual servitude of black women than the Europeans, who exported Africans for labor.

As one might have guessed, the life of slaves in Muslim countries was quick and painful.  There is a reason why one doesn't find too many native blacks in Saudi Arabia or Iraq today.  Enslaved men could not bear children because they were often castrated, and the unfortunate Africans as a group did not ultimately survive the brutal treatment.

Here's a description of what Turkish Muslims did to their male "Negro" children in the relatively civilized late-1800's:

Castrators of Negroes buy them and then sell them, after having mutilated them, on the Turkish market, that is if the victim does not succumb to the operation or to its consequences [90% do not survive the castration].  As to the methods used, they have remained as primitive as in the past. The child is spread out on the floor or a table, the sexual parts are tied at their base by a rope, and on these parts they operate with one vigorous movement of a razor, the wound is then dressed with some small shot [i.e., lead rifle shot?], with some astringent substances, boiling oil, or some warm honey. Once the bleeding stops, they fix a kind of lead nail two inches long, slightly curved and with a thickened end, in the urethra, until it is completely healed... Castrators sometimes use an even more barbaric method. Immediately after the removal of organs, they introduce into the urethra rather than a nail, a piece of reed protruding two inches, so that urinary functions are performed without interruption. Then a plaster is applied on the wound, and the patient is buried up to his neck in the warm and dry sand, while the assistants trample the ground around him. This maneuver reduces the mobility of the wounded one completely... after a week he is unearthed.  (As quoted from Andrew Bostom)

By contrast, the 400,000 slaves brought to America over the course of 200 years managed to leave the most prosperous group of African people on the planet.  You can tell a lot about a people’s quality of life by the things they choose to complain about.  While the life expectancy in some African countries is less than 19, what with disease, abject poverty, starvation and kleptocratic dictators, African-Americans are actually demanding financial compensation (reparations) for not having to live in those conditions.

So ingrained is slavery in Islam that the religion's holiest city, Mecca (site of the Haj pilgrimage), was a slave trading capital.  Up until the 20th century, Mecca served as the gateway to the Muslim world for slaves brought out of Africa.  Azumah notes:

"It became a custom for pilgrims to take slaves for sale in Mecca or buy one or two slaves while on Haj as souvenirs to be kept, sold or given as gifts."

The last slaves were openly traded in Islam's holiest city in 1960!

Arab enslavement of black Africans continues to this day in the Muslim world, particularly in the Sudan, Niger, and Mauritania.  

Slavery would most certainly exist today in the same form that it did for more than a thousand years in the Arab world were it not for the Western Christian-based nations “imposing their values on Muslim lands” by putting an end to it.  The horrific situation that we described of slaves in Zanzibar was forcibly suppressed by the Europeans.

There is not, and never has been, an abolition movement within Islam.

Unlike the West, the Muslim world has yet to offer an apology for slavery.  The institution is ingrained in the Qur'an.  To admit that it is a mistake would be to admit the fallibility of the Qur'an and bring its divine origin into question.  Even today, Muslims act as if Islamic slavery was a favor done to the millions of unfortunate men, women and children who were forcibly uprooted from their native lands and sent to lives of sexual and menial servitude deep in the Islamic world.

Slavery was not entirely race-based in Islamic history (although it eventually became illegal to enslave an Arab).  Hungary was pillaged of 3 million people over a 150 year period, and Muslim slave traders raided European coasts for well over 1000 years, killing, raping and taking slaves.

But, perhaps the most conspicuous example of overt racism in Islam is the genocide in present-day Sudan by the Arab-Islamic government and the refusal of Muslim organizations around the world to condemn it.  Over two million black Africans have died from Arab aggression in the Christian south.  And 200,000 more were killed by Arab militias over the last four years in Darfur.  The Arabs are known for rampaging through villages and hacking black Africans to death in the name of Jihad while screaming things like, "Kill the slaves!"

Although the Darfurians are mostly Muslim as well, there is little to no attention placed on their plight by international Muslim organizations.  Despite being repeatedly challenged on the issue,  the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), for example, has never bothered to condemn the Islamic Republic of Sudan for the Arab massacre of Africans.

Compare this to the outrage, sympathy and money that is poured out on the Palestinian people... who are Arab.  Yet, the number of Palestinian civilians killed in their relentless conflict with Israel over the last 40 years is less than the average number of Africans killed by Islam each month.

Even in the earliest days, racism against blacks was a fringe part of Islam.  At one time there was a law that mandated the death penalty for anyone suggesting that Muhammad was black.  Perhaps it is for this reason that quite a few hadith mention the "whiteness of the prophet" - explicitly referring to his skin color.

Africa and African-Americans owe absolutely nothing to Islam, because it has done nothing good for them.  It inspires slavery, but not abolition.  It may not be the “White man’s religion,” but that certainly doesn’t make it the Black man’s.