(ThyBlackMan.com) All over the United States, people are recoiling recently at vicious acts that are being committed with increasing frequency against Muslims.
Girls and women wearing headscarves have been beaten on the streets. Mosques have been firebombed and desecrated. An entire school was shuttered over an art assignment asking students to draw Islamic calligraphy. A teacher was suspended for wearing a scarf and for quoting a recent statement by Pope Francis concerning the “oneness” of the God of Abraham, who is revered as a prophet by Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike.
Such Islamophobic acts are not new. In fact, Muslims have been set upon in this country for 85 years and counting.
In the 1930s, shortly after Mr. Elijah Muhammad emerged in Detroit as the leader of the newly formed Nation of Islam, he and his followers were persecuted by authorities for withdrawing their children from the miserable, separate and unequal public schools 
and enrolling them in his University of Islam, where they were taught prayer, respect, cleanliness, mathematics and science.
How dare this Black man take children from the public schools and teach them independently? Today, of course, home schools and independent schools are so very chic among Whites and Blacks as well in this country.
In 1942, although he was 45 years old and well past the draft-eligible age, Mr. Muhammad was arrested and imprisoned for five years because he preached against the participation of Black men in the military forces of this nation that denied them even the tiniest shred of equality. In prison, Mr. Muhammad and his followers were starved because they refused to eat pork or vegetables prepared with pork. Today, after Supreme Court rulings in their favor, prisoners are permitted to choose diets that conform to their religious practices.
In the 1950s, Mr. Muhammad and his followers — Minister Malcolm X in particular — were persecuted and labeled “hate teachers” by the very same segregationists who denied millions and millions of Black people equal education, equal public accommodations, equal protection under the law. The “Black Muslims” were labeled in a documentary, “The hate that hate produced.”
By the 1960s, the NOI had gained international prominence, and rather than be celebrated for the amazing work of reforming criminals, drug addicts, alcoholics and other “bad actors,” Black Muslims were disowned by the so-called “orthodox” Islamic community (the community of immigrants who are themselves now viewed as suspects in American society, as not being “true Muslims” because of the doctrine Mr. Muhammad popularized of Caucasians being “blue-eyed devils.”
Then in the late 1970s, Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, shocked the world declaring the United States “the Great Satan.” Case closed. Conversation ended.
In the 1980s, Mr. Muhammad’s National Spokesman Minister Louis Farrakhan emerged into the political arena as a supporter of the presidential candidacy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and it was “game on” once more.
Farrakhan — who does not teach hatred of Jewish people or of White people — was famously misquoted as saying Judaism is a “gutter religion.” That mischaracterization stuck, and even today he is almost always referred to as an anti-Semite and a bigot in the corporate-owned “mainstream” media.]
Written by Askia Muhammad
Official website; http://twitter.com/askiaphotojourn
