MANSFIELD: A Comparative Look at Religions

 

After Malcolm X made his first obligatory pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca he came back to the United States a changed man. Previously to his religious journey he had been very vocal in calling all whites “devils.”

Considering the fact that his father — who was an early follower of the brilliant, dark-skinned Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who first espoused the notion of black being “beautiful” to African-Americans in the 1920s — had been lynched by a white mob, it’s not surprising that upon his “awakening” in a prison cell to the diabolical racist trap blacks were ensnared in, that he perceived whites in the harshest of terms.

In Mecca he, according to his autobiography, saw, for the first time … “blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans embracing as brothers.” The experience changed him. “The true Islam” — as opposed to the Americanized version he had been taught — “showed me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make a blanket indictment against blacks.”

If nothing else, Malcolm X was a man with an open mind amenable to changing when new information is introduced, in spite of the fact that the white media continued to portray him as a racist until his dying day — and beyond. He still is viewed as such by the majority of whites, as well as many blacks.

But what he learned in Mecca can be instructive to Americans, and Europeans as well.

While Christianity is still the largest religion in the world in terms of adherents, Islam, for the last 40 years or so, has been the fastest growing — by far.

Allow me to state at this point I have no dog in this race since I’m an avowed agnostic, but one still devoutly hoping to see proof of any kind of afterlife. And the closer I get to my dotage the less concrete that proof has to be. I’m just about willing to settle for any kind of sign from above at this point.

But alas, I digress.

My point is, the more Islamists there are in the world, the greater the number of them that can be radicalized and turned into terrorists — proving that Muslims can pervert religion with just as much alacrity as the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan adherents on the far Christian right can pervert theirs.

But Christians need to ask themselves, “Why is Islam winning the recruitment race?” Why are more young people from all over the globe turning towards the Muslim religion?

I submit that the reason is, the same phenomenon Malcolm X witnessed in Mecca over 50 years ago: A complete lack of racism and color prejudice. While there may be a few cases that are outliers, for the most part Islam truly is colorblind.

Certainly there are Christians who are just as colorblind, it’s just that they are far fewer and further between. As Dr. King once said, “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America.” It was true then, and it’s just as true now.

So my point is this: The best (and perhaps only) way for Western first-world nations to slow the march of Islam all over the world — since there are far more persons of color than there are whites on the planet — is to make Christianity as free of racism as the religion of those who pray to Allah.

But just as I’m not holding my breath waiting for that sign of an afterlife, I’m not placing any bets on Christianity reforming its racist ways any time soon, given that American evangelicals are now devoutly following a leader who doesn’t even give the pretense of being anything but a non-church-attending bigot.

Say what you want about Muslims, at least they’re not hypocrites.

From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

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