Do Muslims and Black Christians Worship the Same God? The Prayer of the Oppressed is Answered!
1. A Prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out their complaint before the LORD. Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry come to you!
2. Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress! Incline your ear to me; answer me speedily in the day when I call! (Psalms 17 1–2)
Some errantly believe God remains silent to the prayers of the afflicted. American religious history from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has convinced many of this. The fate of my Native and Black American ancestors is a compelling historical and theological argument levied in support as they were absolutely under the control of white Christians. Makes you wonder what the Biblical hermeneutic and political theology employed by the enslavers was and what sustained my Christian ancestors? Did they share the same understanding of God’s immanence and transcendence? If so, how? If not, what was the difference?
Do Muslims and black Christians worship the same God? Dr. Larycia Hawkins believes so,
as she recently bravely stated: “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” she wrote in a Facebook post on December 10. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” Obviously, some white Christians of Wheaton College believe differently, but why?
Perhaps they take a humanist view of history and agree with the sentiments of the former president and slaveholder Thomas Jefferson who lamented about the enslaved in America that, “Heaven remained silent.” This silence infers heavenly approval or non-interference of the divine in human history and this shaped white Christian political theology of mission.
In the Qur’anic (read Islamic) hermeneutic the silence of heaven is understood quite differently. Silence is virtuous in both the heavens and on earth. Silence is God’s prerogative and He transcends all evil. Affliction for believers acts as an inspiration to resist despair through knowing God’s immanent mercy. Affliction is also an adorning of the soul with two great divine attributes: gratitude and a bestowal of a beautiful patience. I argue that my black ancestors under the oppression of white Christianity adopted and were sustained with a Qur’anic understanding as their black theology and Biblical hermeneutic. Dr. Hawkins at Wheaton is looking to assert this which is why her political theology appears distinctly unique from Wheaton’s privileged white Christian theology.
St. Augustine speaks about why some are tone deaf to God’s communication. He offers a suggestion of how enslaved black people could and would be rejoicing in the Lord in such apparent silences from heaven under the brutality of white enslavers:
“If only all might be hushed, sense impressions, the soul itself, all imagery, all symbols, all things transient, then we might hear the very voice of the eternal, and if that experience were prolonged, we would indeed enter into the joy of our Lord.”
In the early American colonies, from 1651 to 1674, from New England to Virginia, mainline Christians set up over a dozen “praying towns” of communities of converted Indians. They forced these Natives to live separated from their clans because this is where allegedly God was not silent in these “praying towns.” George Steven Wilder explains in Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities that these “praying towns” were “relocations to attack beliefs and break up traditions that acted as barriers to Christianization or offended English sensibilities.” Harvard and William and Mary College — to name a few — hosted, housed and indoctrinated these Natives in what was called Indian Colleges on their campuses. At the founding of this country, theology really mattered as a humanizing element for white Christians. Christianity was to civilize them and to teach them God’s language so He would listen to their prayers and finally acknowledge and speak to them. Ann Taves writes of Jon Butler’s, Enlarging the Bonds of Christ: Slavery, Evangelicalism, and Christianization of the White South, 1690–1790:
Jon Butler has shown, eighteenth-century Anglican missionaries anxious to offer salvation to slaves participated in the creation of a racially based worldview by assuring slaveowners that, contrary to popular belief, Christians could enslave other Christians and that baptism liberated the soul but not the body.
Epistemologically, Ann Taves continues to explain this point about how important it was to assuage white sensibilities and beliefs in this period of a peculiar American religious history. She asserts that civilizing societies employed Biblical hermeneutics and theologies to support their racist ideologies and control:
As long as persons were enslaved because they were heathens, they could be freed through conversion. Once their enslavement was rationalized on the basis of race — on the basis of a “divinely ordained” hierarchy of biological distinguishable human groupings — then salvation and enslavement could coexist.
In the testimonial of the enslaved you can hear the type of salvation that coexisted in their hearts and minds. Quite a different theology sustained my ancestors. Oral histories record that the enslaved had a liberation theology of both the soul and body.
St. Augustine mentioned that when ‘all might be hushed’ and there were no symbols or images to distract, you can detect the voice of God. Since the enslaved were stripped of those worldly things, they could hear God’s voice.
Hence, they developed quite a different Biblical hermeneutic of salvation among themselves. Many narratives of the enslaved speak of worship habits of prolonged experiences and tell of exceeding fits of the joy of the Lord. Rachel Reed, formerly enslaved during this time, shared a great insight about how silence and prayer was active in the daily lives of the enslaved before and after the American Civil War. She describes her sense that prior to 1861 in her community colored folks ‘naturally’ had more religion and they creatively and secretly kept their belief and prayers for emancipation intimately quiet. In her oral history in the Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember An Oral History, Reed says:
I was a ‘ligious chile, in dem days, and I’m ‘ligious now, too, but colored folks jes’ naturally had more ‘ligion back dere, before de War. I kin remember when my ma used to put us chillun outside de cabin in de quarters, and den she would shut de doors, and shut de windows tight, and sit a tub of water in de middle of de floor, and kneel down, and pray dat de yoke of bondage be removed from de niggers neck. All de niggers done dat. Dey did. Ma allus said de sound of dey voices went down into de tub of water and de white folks couldn’t hear dem prayin’.
“Heaven was silent” outside the cabin so white folks could not hear or detect the angelic activity of conveyance and showering of blessings of belief, hope, fortitude, patience, gratitude and divine pleasure. The heavens shouted and the earth quaked and it could only be heard and felt on the knees in the middle of the floor near a tub of water in the slave quarters. Albert J. Raboteau explains the enslaved during this time looked to two scriptures to interpret black historical events in the nineteenth century, “the book of Exodus and Psalms 68: 31.” The above narration is about a preoccupation on and inspiration from Exodus, but as slavery ended in the North earlier in the century, the enslaved were spiritually supported by Psalms 68:31: “Ethiopia shall again stretch forth her hands unto God.”
Carla L. Peterson wrote about this support in an excellent article “Doers of the Word” with a different opinion about this Biblical hermeneutic of heaven’s silence during this time, particularly emphasizing action and public resistance as opposed to a passive personal relationship with God awaiting an exodus. In this article she documents a different dynamic of communication with God through the doing of good works that were most urgent for blacks in this time. She recalls the open and public laments of Maria Stewart as early as 1831 she writes:
Yet at the same time her writings exude a strong revolutionary note as she repeatedly invoked the Old Testament rhetoric of prophecy to chastise America for its oppression of blacks, envisaging its destruction at the hands of God and predicating the resurrection of the African race as recorded in Psalms 68:31 “Ethiopa shall again stretch forth her hands unto God.”
Carla L. Peterson shows a legacy of powerful women leaders and voices like Maria Stewart, Prince, Watkins Harper, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells.
These were black women who embodied God’s Word in response to the heaven as “Doers of the Word.”
As Peterson writes, they “joined female benevolent associations” and “encouraged a politic of domestic economy.” Dr. Larycia Hawkins would understand this as black Christian Professor of Political Science. These women:
…for example, devoted themselves to moral reform activities, creating “asylums” to shelter destitute young women, organizing mutual aid societies to succor the needy, or participating in the free produce and temperance movements.
Ida B. Wells sought to be embodied with God’s Word as she wrote in 1895 some two decades after the Civil War in The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, literally ‘stretching out her hands’ as the psalms encouraged with a global appeal for sympathy and help against the lawlessness and horrific terror of the Jim Crow lynchings, believing heaven was still listening, and if white American Christians were ignoring the voice of God then it would not deter us from stretching forth our hands towards the heavens to God for assistance on His spacious earth. Wells wrote:
If America would not hear the cry of men, women and children whose dying groans ascended to heaven praying for relief, not only for them but for others who might soon be treated as they, then certainly no fair-minded person can charge disloyalty to those who make an appeal to the civilization of the world for such sympathy and help as it is possible to extend. If stating the facts of these lynchings, as they appeared from time to time in the white newspapers of America — the news gathered by white correspondents, compiled by white press bureaus and disseminated among white people — shows any vindictiveness, then the mind which so charges is not amenable to argument.
Ida B. Wells voice was indeed powerfully prophetic when she spoke about the “dying groans ascended to heaven praying for relief, not only for those lynched” in her day but for others who might soon face this horror. When this was written at the turn of the century according to Joel Martin, “Anglo-Saxon” colonialism reached its apogee in North America.” Joel Martin explains how this was a global turning point in history. He writes in Indians, Contact and Colonialism after Wounded Knee and the slaughter of the Lakota Ghost Dancers by U.S. troops, America looked outward.
The US government’s political theology seemed to allow as atonement for the sin of civil war the carte blanche lynching of black lives as if they did not matter.
Lynchings peaked to around 700 a year during this time. Joel concludes, “By 1890, many white Americans had become imperialistic, race-obsessed, and perhaps xenophobic.”
Black theologians as early as 1808 have written and preserved sermons of their wrestling with this theodicy paradox. How can they sustain their humanity participating and promoting the same white Christianity of the enslavers and now silent moral majority who sit by and watch the slaughter of their people? Absalom Jones, pastor of St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, William Miller, African Methodist minister, and two generations later, George Washington Williams all spoke in accord to this. Carefully they agreed, “Perhaps his design was” to permit evil so a good could emerge out from it. Raboteau writes about how they clarified what their cautious political theology was going to be as black Christians because of these predominant beliefs of the time:
As Jones and other black ministers well knew, the evangelization and civilization of blacks was the rationale used by Europeans, from the mid fifteenth century on, to justify enslaving Africans. In other words, this explanation came dangerously close to absolving whites of their guilt for slavery. The Black clergy refused absolution by distinguishing God’s will from his permission. God wills good; he permits evil, and from it draws good.
In conclusion, Albert J. Raboteau has a chapter in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology called “Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands” which clearly articulates how in the nineteenth century the understanding of black destiny shifted from a “particularistic to a universal role.” To truly appreciate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today on his birthday, you have to understand this American religious history, Biblical hermeneutic and political theology. You should know how and why it is similar to our Qur’anic understanding. I purposely choose to cite sources from the rich black history of African American women on whose shoulders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood.
In solidarity with Dr. Larycia Hawkins who I believe represents our ancestors well in our day and time, I assert that the shining star Political Science professor at Wheaton ( which ironically was originally an Abolitionist-built school founded in the nineteenth century) espouses and models the legacy of her black Christian sisters today. Threats to terminate her seem really to be based in a lack of acceptance of her understanding of her faith as a “Doer of the Word.” Thus, she describes her political theology as an “embodied solidarity with her sisters in hijab.” Raboteau concludes and summarizes our black political theology brilliantly:
Reflecting upon their experience of suffering as a people, black Americans in the nineteenth century fashioned a theology of history whose conclusions, clumsily summarized, were these: Those who oppress and enslave others, those who make war, those who spread “civilization” by conquest, those who degrade other races, those who corrupt Christianity by making it a clan religion, are destined to destroy one another. Their age will shortly end. A new age will soon begin. In this new age, it will be the destiny of those who were enslaved but did not enslave, those who were hated but did not hate, to realize the gospel on earth.
As a Muslim, Dr. Hawkins, I stand with you and pray for you in your spiritual struggle to uphold the Truth and to stand for justice. I say have no fear and be not aggrieved for it is written in our Book about the afflicted:
62. The Muslims, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians, any who believe in God and the last day and do good have their reward with their Lord. There is nothing for them to fear; they will not sorrow.
(Qur’an, The Cow 2:62)
In The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. he writes on the power of prayer for and of the afflicted in the movement for justice. So let us all pray for the people of this spiritual movement fighting this spiritual warfare as believers and doers of good.
We need a great deal of encouragement in this movement. Of course one thing that we are depending on, from not only other communities but from our own community is prayer. We ask people everywhere to pray that God will guide us, pray that justice will be done and that righteousness will stand. And I think through these prayers we will be strengthened; it will make us feel the unity of the nation and the presence of Almighty God. For as we said all along, this is a spiritual movement.
This means: Wheaton College, we pray for you too.
For more stories from Ummah Wide click our Logo below
Sign up for our Weekly Email Newsletter Here
Follow Ummah Wide: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Linkedin
