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Tuesday, October 2, 2012
National Writers Union, NYC Chapter News
From the Archives: Dr. M on Islam Needs a Martin Luther
Islam Needs a Martin Luther
By Dr. M
By Dr. M
Revised 10/2/12
The Islamic world needs a Martin Luther, someone to usher in an Age of Reform that will radically alter some of the fundamental values of Islam that are retrograde, archaic, primitive and must be discarded into the dustbin of Muslim history so that Islam can regain its position as a culture of enlightenment rather than darkness.
At an Islamic Art Conference I attended this past weekend in Oakland, California, along with Muslims from around the world, there was discussion of how Islam has suppressed artists, calling Muslim art haram (religiously proscribed), shirk (associating partners with God) and other negative terms that essentially condemn Islamic art as evil.
At an Islamic Art Conference I attended this past weekend in Oakland, California, along with Muslims from around the world, there was discussion of how Islam has suppressed artists, calling Muslim art haram (religiously proscribed), shirk (associating partners with God) and other negative terms that essentially condemn Islamic art as evil.
When I addressed the audience, I noted that I am the “father of Islamic literature in America” by default because other Muslim writers were told to give up the art of writing by Elijah Muhammad, i.e., creative writing, but I (being hard to lead in the right direction but easy to led in the wrong direction) ignored the ban and thus my work continued throughout the years, although many of my Black Arts Movement comrades such as Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Toure and Amiri Baraka wrote Islamic inspired poetry and plays. But aside from poet Sam Hamad, my work stood alone until the Rap era. Not only writers, but painters, musicians, dancers, singers and others were suppressed in the Nation of Islam. Even minister Farrakhan, a musician and singer, was made to give up his art. Of course there were many Muslim musicians influenced by Sunni, Sufi and Ahmedism who produced Islamic inspired art, e.g., Ahmed Jamal, John Coltrane, Dakota Stanton, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders, et al.But we know artists give visions and prophecy, thus when they are suppressed, the people walk in darkness as we see at the present moment with rampant emotionalism, fundamentalism, honor killings, suppression of the human rights of women, partner violence and sectarian mass murder. Even the so called revolutionary Arab Spring has been infiltrated by reactionary elements that would take Muslims back to the Stone Age or Ya'um Jahiliah, the so called days of ignorance before the advent of Prophet Muhammad pbuh.
In my remarks at the conference, I challenged the Muslim artists to be revolutionary and yes, disobedient — to hell with those who desire to suppress Muslim art, they are the backward ones, they are the evil ones and must be opposed by, yes, any means necessary.
So much that goes for Islam is ancient and primitive, really, not worthy of discussion in the modern world among people of intelligence. Elijah Muhammad used to say the wisdom of this world is exhausted, and this includes Islam. It must be revolutionized or thrown into the dustbin of ancient thought.
The Islamic revolution must, will and shall be led by Muslim artists with vision for a day when Islamic culture will be the vanguard of world culture, projecting the most positive and scientific aspects of the new millennium.
Islamic culture must come from behind the veil, or if anything, put the veil on men and let the women march forth as harbingers of the new world order. Contrary to what men think, women have been found to be the most advanced sector of society, intellectually and spiritually, so we would do well to listen to them for answers to the right path.
Clearly, Muslim men are not on sirat al-mustaqim (“the straight path”). Over a billion people of Islamic faith are currently steeped in poverty, ignorance and disease, wallowing in political oppression of the most backward, Stalinist variety. And when the politicians are not oppressing, the mullahs and Imams do the same work, even to the point of following the Christians in the sexual exploitation of boys and girls in the madrases and elsewhere.
Let a Muslim Martin Luther step to the front of the line and represent the way of truth, freedom, justice and equality. Muslim collaborators with imperialism, colonialism, and all manner of retrograde religiosity and political oppression must be condemned. Islamic scholars whose theology is based on primitive laws, edicts, fatwas must be ostracized because their actions only add to the utter confusion and ignorance pervading the Muslim world. The brutal regime in Syria must be smashed along with the Stone Age Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain's suppression of its majority Shia Muslims.
Surely, the destruction the Tsunami brought to South Asia is a sign of Allah’s displeasure with the Muslim people, along with Christians, Hindus and others. If we continue down the path of primitive worship of myths and rituals, surely Allah has even greater destruction planned for those without eyes, ears, the deaf, dumb and blind. After Allah has blessed us with light, how can we yet walk in darkness? How can we possess “supreme wisdom” yet have nothing, behave as spiritual slaves to any storefront imam with a rote memory of Al-Quran?
Let a Martin Luther Muslim arise to destroy idols of ignorance and suppression of creativity. Yes, let everything praise Allah, from the flute to the lute, from the dancer to the poet. Let the Sufis whirl, let the Islamic rappers give us the Adhan to revolutionary Islam, beyond ignorant ritual and rote memory of Qur'an, blind and debased interpretation of Hadith and Sharia.
See Dr. M's Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007.
Let a Muslim Martin Luther step to the front of the line and represent the way of truth, freedom, justice and equality. Muslim collaborators with imperialism, colonialism, and all manner of retrograde religiosity and political oppression must be condemned. Islamic scholars whose theology is based on primitive laws, edicts, fatwas must be ostracized because their actions only add to the utter confusion and ignorance pervading the Muslim world. The brutal regime in Syria must be smashed along with the Stone Age Islam emanating from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain's suppression of its majority Shia Muslims.
Surely, the destruction the Tsunami brought to South Asia is a sign of Allah’s displeasure with the Muslim people, along with Christians, Hindus and others. If we continue down the path of primitive worship of myths and rituals, surely Allah has even greater destruction planned for those without eyes, ears, the deaf, dumb and blind. After Allah has blessed us with light, how can we yet walk in darkness? How can we possess “supreme wisdom” yet have nothing, behave as spiritual slaves to any storefront imam with a rote memory of Al-Quran?
Let a Martin Luther Muslim arise to destroy idols of ignorance and suppression of creativity. Yes, let everything praise Allah, from the flute to the lute, from the dancer to the poet. Let the Sufis whirl, let the Islamic rappers give us the Adhan to revolutionary Islam, beyond ignorant ritual and rote memory of Qur'an, blind and debased interpretation of Hadith and Sharia.
See Dr. M's Beyond Religion, toward Spirituality, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007.
From the Archives: Dr. M Reviews the Great Debaters
The Brotha on the far Right played Melvin B. Tolson
Marvin X Reviews The Great Debaters
This is a coming of age film of the North American African Nation. It is about a people regaining their consciousness after decades of obscurity. This film puts them back properly in the time and space of history, for they present themselves as a civilized people, the children and the adults, thus making it a movie on the goodness of life and the power of consciousness to reveal the very best of a people, thus regaining their self respect before the world community. It shows the intelligence and leadership of American African youth-- of adult leadership and intelligence as well, including the radical activist tradition in North American African History.
Every North American African, every Pan African, can be proud that Oprah Winfrey and Denzil Washington produced this. Perhaps we have reached that moment in time when our people have no choice but to be their true selves, their best selves.
For the first time in a long time, we see the intellectual genius of a people during the turbulent 1930s. This should be a lesson to all North American Africans that we have a dignified liberation tradition to uphold, thus we cannot sink into the morass of today, but in the manner of this film, take a great leap forward into dignity, respect, and intelligent behavior.
As a people, we must be proud of the young performers in this drama. They have exhibited the very best in us as human beings, as African people. The children teach us and themselves in this movie. They teach us the worst in human consciousness with their remarks on a lynching.
They repeatedly show us the power of using the black mind for intellectual dexterity rather than barbarity and expressions of animal consciousness.
This film is in the genre of Akila and the Bee, except that it goes deeper socially, intellectually, historically and spiritually. While it reveals the utter racism and white supremacy of this nation, it also depicts the resistance and transcendence to this unique American evil, especially in the present era.
The music is excellent, the visuals as well, including the acting and dance, giving us a sense of the ritual life of our people during the 1930s. The young character Henry who became a debater after a riotous life is exemplary and a clear example to other wayward youth struggling to survive in the hoods of America . You can come up if you get up! Yes, it takes energy: the same energy it takes to stay down it takes to get up!
Denzil Washington must be given kudos for his role as Melvin Tolson, the great poet of our people. Denzil proves his acting ability in presenting Tolson as the intellectual/activist, a tradition often represented by the artists/activists of the 1960s. But in the character of poet Tolson, we see the roots of the Black Arts Movement artist/activism that would emerge in the 60s with Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure,Larry Neal, Marvin X, Haki Madhubuti, Ed Bullins, June Jordan and others. But this tradition had its origins in the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s, and the poets, writers, and artists of the 30s, 40s and 50s, from Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Sterling Brown, Gwen Brooks, Ralph Ellison and others.
Forest Whitaker as the senior James Farmer maintained a certain dignity early on that his character revealed later in The Deacons, his character kept its self respect when confronted by white racists after he accidentally ran over their hog. This scene is a survival lesson for young black men. I tell young black men on the street and in the schools and colleges that they must pass the tone test when confronted by police: depending on their tone of voice, they can be killed, arrested or released.
But imagine, so-called Negroes having an intellectual debate, even a team of debaters with a coach who apprises them on the Willie Lynch syndrome, who tells them straight out white supremacy has made them insane, thus confirming the sister who says it is not white supremacy but white lunacy, thus we are victims of an insanity far beyond the economic implications. I love James Baldwin's quote's, "It's a wonder we haven't all gone stark raving mad" dealing with white supremacy for four hundred years. The Debaters is a hopeful sign that we can and shall overcome, that we can and shall regain our collective sanity.
Sign up for the next session of the Pan African Mental Health Peer Group. In Houston check with Khepera Books and the Secret Word Cafe. Dr. M can be reached at 510-200-4164.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Richard Aoki: Lessons for the Movement
Richard Aoki and Lessons for the Movement
The recent releases of information about Richard Aoki have generated quite a stir. For those who haven’t been following and aren’t familiar, Aoki was a well-known Japanese-American radical starting in the 1960s and ’70s who played a key role in the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area and who died in 2009. Unexpectedly, on August 20th the journalist Seth Rosenfeld with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) announced, in conjunction with a book that he was about to publish on the FBI’s historical attacks on student radicals, that FBI documents identify Richard Aoki as an FBI informant.
Richard Aoki
The allegations raised a furor on the Left. At the center of the debate was the question of whether the evidence presented by Rosenfeld could be trusted or whether it was misinterpreted and/or manufactured. This debate was fired by the fragmentary nature of the evidence released at that point. Based on that initial evidence, it was broadly felt in the movement that Rosenfeld hadn’t proved his claims.
Subsequently, on September 7, Rosenfeld and CIR released a flood of over 200 pages of further documents from the FBI informant file in question that appear to solidify the most basic claim that Aoki was an FBI informant. There remain unanswered questions and contradictions from these files, illustrating the kind of sloppiness typical of FBI work in general.
To sum up the history, Aoki become an informant by at least 1961 after he had gotten in trouble with the law at a young age. He informed first on the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, and then most importantly on the Black Panther Party. However, there is evidence that as Aoki involved himself more deeply in the movement and became radicalized, the FBI found his reliability as an informant to be increasingly questionable. Ultimately by the early 1970s his role apparently ceased. Various people have speculated that in the latter years of this relationship Aoki may have started acting as a double agent, providing information to the movement about the FBI at the same time he was providing information to the FBI. Aoki became an educator at UC Berkeley and Merritt College and continued for decades raising the political consciousness of subsequent generations of Asian American youth.
The most important value for the movement in discussing Richard Aoki’s history is to draw out political lessons for the future. In that vein, here are some points.
Avoiding both credulity and denialism
These are the two basic dangers in confronting an allegation of snitching. First, it should hopefully go without saying that we should never take information from the FBI or similar enemy sources at face value. It should be scrutinized closely and carefully, preferably by people with relevant knowledge, expertise, and politics. There’s a long history of snitch-jacketing being used as a weapon against the movement. This refers to when an innocent activist is framed as a snitch or agent either by a political rival to undermine them or by an agent in order to sow dissension and divert attention away from himself or herself as an actual agent. It has been a very powerful and destructive tactic at various points, and we need to be sharply on guard against it.
However, in this case the main error that seems to have manifested itself is denialism. Quite a few people, including some who knew Aoki personally, have come out taking the position that the allegation couldn’t possibly be true and that it’s defamation of Aoki’s character even to suggest it. Others have acknowledged the possibility that some of the evidence may be accurate but have felt political pressure to express a one-sided skepticism of the claims.
These positions appear to be driven by a tendency to put Aoki on a pedestal. This is a real danger. We shouldn’t use the defense of the honor of a heroic figure as a measure of our political commitment and ideological purity. One’s ideological stand does not provide answers to questions like these; examination of facts is the only thing that can. The danger here is that if we become one-sidedly skeptical of all such evidence, that creates an opening leaving us more vulnerable to snitches in the future.
What we need to do is keep our brains turned on, and maintain a commitment to rational, dispassionate assessment of evidence. Nobody should be a priori above suspicion, and nobody should be subjected to suspicion without real evidence above and beyond the claim of another individual. It’s also important to remember that even with serious investigation we’re not necessarily going to get a definitive, certain answer, especially in a case like Aoki’s where the events happened decades ago and various people involved are dead. Handling such situations will take thoughtfulness.
A snitch is not the same thing as an agent provocateur
There have been further assertions made by Rosenfeld about Aoki’s role that are important to untangle. Rosenfeld claimed at first that Aoki was not merely informing but was acting as a provocateur, meaning someone actively working to sabotage an organization. Rosenfeld stated in particular that Aoki’s well-established role in providing guns to the Panthers was a purposeful attempt to discredit them. This claim is unsupported by the evidence and by basic logic. Armed self-defense was an intrinsic part of the BPP’s politics and not something that they were tricked into. This claim appears to be driven by Rosenfeld’s white liberal ideology in wanting to depict the practice of armed self-defense in the movement as a departure from a pure nonviolent ideal, as well as by his economic interest in generating buzz and controversy to help him sell his book. These two factors definitely shaped Rosenfeld’s overall distorted interpretation of Aoki’s role. Fortunately, after being challenged by others Rosenfeld appears subsequently to have backed off from some of these claims.
Being a snitch is certainly serious enough, but just because someone is informing doesn’t mean that they’re purposely working to sabotage the movement. Snitches who start out as genuine activists are often enlisted by the state by way of vulnerabilities arising from preexisting threats of criminal prosecution held over their head or from economic distress. If someone is discovered and confirmed to be an active snitch, they should be forced out of the movement and their role publicized so that they can’t do the same to others elsewhere.
An agent provocateur is more serious yet. This might be an actual FBI agent or a civilian in the employ of the state. One recovered COINTELPRO memo from the FBI’s war on the Black Liberation Movement sums up the goal: “Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them…” If someone is discovered actively trying to disrupt and destroy the movement in active concert with the state, they should be dealt with more harshly than a mere informer, such that future agents might have second thoughts about engaging in disruption.
People make mistakes, but they can also learn and grow
There’s a generalized tendency toward one-sidedness in our thinking that we really need to break out of: Aoki’s either a people’s hero OR he’s a snitch. One of the most important things to emphasize about the Aoki case is that not only did he eventually break off his contact with the FBI, but he also contributed enormously to the movement, as the existing histories about him have covered in depth. Aoki himself, when asked in an interview if he had been an informer, captured a vital point: “People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.”
When people make mistakes but are able to show through their practice that they have genuinely corrected them and have gone on to make substantial contributions, our general approach should be to set those previous mistakes aside. Let’s not fall into the bourgeoisie’s error of punishment for the sake of punishment. The fundamental principle we should follow is the advancement of the interests of the people. Everything else is in service of that goal. Regardless of whether someone has made mistakes in the past, if they are now contributing positively toward that goal and present the prospect of continuing to do so in the future, they should be welcome in the movement.
Even more than that, such people should even be held up as paragons. We’re trying to transform a sick society into a healthy one; individuals who have made their own transformation into true servants of the people are living examples that such transformation is possible. Such people are of great value to the movement. So we should reject any assessment of Richard Aoki that seeks now, as a result of the new evidence, to cast him and his legacy aside while also rejecting those assessments which dismiss evidence to the contrary without a thorough examination.
Limiting the damage agents can do
We can’t completely prevent snitches and agents from entering the movement. One of our tasks is thus to figure out how to organize ourselves to minimize the impact that such people can have.
Most fundamentally, we should use social practice as the most basic criterion for assessing people, not just whether someone can talk a good line. This is what we should be doing under any circumstances. Where agents do infiltrate our organizations, holding everyone to a high standard of practice will force them to do significant good work that benefits the movement in order to maintain their cover.
Here are some signs we should watch for:
• Systematically divisive behavior, setting one person against another, talking behind people’s backs about them to other people (note that encouraging principled debate about substantive political questions is a wholly different matter)
• Lack of a reputable background, having appeared seemingly from nowhere.
• Vague and dodging responses to questions about one’s background, attacking the questioner, or giving background stories that don’t hold up to subsequent investigation.
• Pushing to quickly take up positions of authority in the organization without having spent a fair amount of time earning one’s stripes. [This is a failure of the organizational model as well…]
• Pushing for illegal activity that seems to depart from where the majority of the group is at and what’s appropriate to the current level of the struggle; offering resources to engage in that activity, particularly resources of mysterious origin.
• Fingering other people as agents without clear evidence.
• Lack of interest in helping other people develop their leadership, political understanding, and general skills.
As discussed previously, a balance needs to be found between appropriately scrutinizing suspicious behavior and not falling into paranoia or falling victim to snitch jacketing. We also need to be careful not treat as agents those who engage in destructive behavior simply due to incorrect ideas, bad judgment, or psychological/emotional difficulties. Such people should be criticized, struggled with in a constructive way, and helped so that they can improve their practice.
The bottom-line lesson to take away from the Aoki controversy is that snitches and agents are a real thing that we need to deal with in a practical, principled, and serious way. They are not just something that took place in decades gone by, as the experiences with the snitch Brandon Darby in the demonstrations against the 2008 Republican Convention, undercover FBI agent Karen Sullivan in the Twin Cities Antiwar Committee, and others in the recent period have shown. Because Richard Aoki grew as a person and eventually broke off his relationship with the FBI, we should continue to hold him up as a model of oppressed-nationality revolutionary unity. We can learn not only from his early mistake in informing but even more from the great contributions he went on to make to the revolutionary cause.
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