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Lifted Out of the Commonplace Grandeur of Modern Times: Reappraising Edward Wilmot Blyden's Views of Islam and Afrocentrism in Light of His Scholarly Black Christian Orientalism

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10999949.2010.526067

1548-3843

Jacob S. Dorman,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Abstract Although the West Indian–born West African intellectual Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden praised the societies of Africa and the Orient, he was actually a lifelong Christian whose thought followed Orientalist templates, from his acquisition of “Oriental” languages, to his use of Orientalist learning to evangelize Muslims, to his advocacy of Islamic education as a means of strengthening British imperialism in West Africa. While Blyden's view of Islam was far more Orientalist and far less positive than most accounts portray, it nonetheless played an important part in the formation of Afrocentrism and in Black appreciation of Islam. Keywords: African personalityafrocentrismBeirutBlack MuslimsBlyden Bookstore (Harlem)Blyden Society for the Study of African History (Harlem) BlydenChristianityClassicsColonialismEdward Wadie (1935–2003)EgyptHugginsImperialismIslamLiberiaOrientalismPan-AfricanismSaidSierra LeoneSt. ThomasThe Rev. Dr. Edward Wilmot (1832–1912)West IndiesWillis Nathaniel (1886–1941) Notes Thomas W. Livingston, Education and Race: A Biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden (San Francisco: Glendessary Press, 1975), 52. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Ladder of St. Augustine,” as quoted in Edward W. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine (Freetown, Sierra Leone: T. J. Sawyer, 1873), 98. Ibid., 100–101. Jean Chesneaux as cited in Anouar Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes 11, no. 44 (Winter 1963): 104–112. I have used the spelling and punctuation of the original of this passage and prior Longfellow excerpt earlier, which differ slightly from Blyden's version. Baptist preacher Rev. Hilary Teage (1802–1853), author of the Liberian Declaration of Independence, was the editor of the Liberia Herald, and he composed the poem Blyden cited on December 1, 1822. Teage served as Liberian secretary of state and senator for many years and was attorney general at the time of his death. Rev. Hilary Teage, “Specimen of Liberian Poetry,” The African Repository and Colonial Journal (June 1843): 191–192; “Recent Deaths,” New York Times, August 24, 1853; Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 157. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 104–105. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 112. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 2–3. Richard Brent Turner argues that Blyden was not an Orientalist because his impressions of Islam were largely positive, but this argument fails to recognize that Orientalism is multivalent, and much of scholarly Orientalism is steeped in great respect and even reverence for its subjects. Blyden's views of Islam were also far less complimentary than their portrayal by Turner and others. See Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 50–51. For more on Orientalism and African Americans, see Ernest J. Wilson III, “Orientalism: A Black Perspective,” Journal of Palestinian Studies 10, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 59–69; Ernest Allen, Jr., “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Dark Races': Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar 24 (Winter 1994): 23–46; Idem., “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1995): 38–55; Ali A. Mazrui, “Black Orientalism? Further Reflections on ‘Wonders of the African World'” Black Scholar 30, no. 1 (2000): 15–18; Biodun Jeyifo, “On Mazrui's ‘Black Orientalism': A Cautionary Critique,” Black Scholar 30, no. 1 (2000): 19–22; Thomas E. R. Maguire, “The Islamic Simulacrum in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Into Africa,” West Africa Review 1, no. 2 (2000): 1–12; Nathaniel Deutsch, “‘The Asiatic Black Man': An African American Orientalism?” Journal of African American Studies 4, no. 3 (October 2001): 193–208; Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 99–129; Helen H. Jun, “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2006): 1047–1066; Alex Lubin, “Locating Palestine in Pre-1948 Black Internationalism,” Souls 9, no. 2 (April 2007): 95–108, republished in Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 17–32. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. F. Barker, P. Hulme, M. Iverson and D. Loxley (Methuen, 1986), 210–229, cited in Alexander Lyon MacFie, ed., Orientalism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 350. The differences between Said and Saidians are many: Said attempted to link knowledge and power using the concept of hegemony developed by Antonio Gramsci, but at its extreme, subaltern studies has dismantled the concept of hegemony altogether, arguing that any appearance of consent on the part of oppressed peoples is always simply masking resistance and dissent. For a sample of the complex and multifaceted debates over hegemony, resistance and recalcitrance, see T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 567–593; James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (January 1995): 173–193; Jean and John Comaroff, introduction to Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xv–xxii. Scott Trafton, Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 23–26; Lubin, “Locating Palestine,” Black Routes, 21–4. Edward E. Curtis has taken a similar position regarding Blyden's use of Orientalist discourse, but he interprets Blyden's views on Islam far differently. See Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 21–43. In at least one documented case, Blyden's work is known to have convinced someone convert to Islam, when Trinidadian-born Pan Africanist George Padmore's father converted to Islam after reading Blyden's Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race. Blyden's work no doubt helped to effect other conversions and repositioned Islam in Black imaginations more generally. On Padmore's father, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “The World the Diaspora Made: C. L. R. James and the Politics of History,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Grant Farred (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 106. On Blyden's role in bringing Islam into narratives of Black history, see Edward E. Curtis IV, “African American Islam Reconsidered: Black History Narratives and Muslim Identity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73, no. 3 (September 2005): 659–684. For the role of Orientalism in the formation of new Black religious movements such as Black Israelite and Black Muslim faiths, see Curtis, Islam in Black America, 4, 26–27, 36; Jacob S. Dorman, “Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis,” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 116–142. Livingston, Education and Race, 15, 20. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1967 [1887]); Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden—Pan-Negro Patriot 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Hollis R. Lynch, ed., Black Spokesman: Selected Writings of Edward Wilmot Blyden (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971); Hollis R. Lynch, Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1978). Edward W. Blyden, “Christian Missions in West Africa,” (1876), in Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 69. Blyden to the Rev. John C. Lowrie, May 9, 1876, in Hollis, Selected Letters, 202. Lynch, Pan-Negro Patriot, 249; Christopher Fyfe, “Introduction,” in Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, xiv. See also Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 47; Edward Curtis, “Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912) and the Paradox of Islam,” in Islam in Black America, Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 21–43. Curtis, Islam in Black America, 21. See Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 75, 144, 188; Hollis, ed., Selected Letters, 462, 353; Livingston, Education and Race, 53, 144. Curtis's argument that Blyden varied his views of Islam depending on his audience is appealing but not demonstrated in Curtis's text or in Blyden's writing. In fact, his private letters expressed more, not less hostility to Islam. See footnotes 56 and 57. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 91–92. Ibid., 92. Livingstone, Education and Race, 32. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Discovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [1950]), 33, 36; Said, Orientalism, 77–79; John Keay, India: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 383. Said, Orientalism, 76, 80–92; Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism, 1798–1836 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 3–4. Rev. Stephen D. Peet, “Introduction,” Oriental and Biblical Journal 1, no. 1 (January 1880): i. The linkage between biblical and Oriental pursuits can also be seen in the fact that the American School of Oriental Research was founded in 1900 as the American School of Oriental Research in Palestine. Rev. Stephen D. Peet, ed. “The Scope of Our Journal,” (unsigned editorial), ibid., 22. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 1. Said, Orientalism, 2–3, 122–123. Ibid., 123. Emphasis in the original. For some of the legions of debates about Orientalism from a variety of perspectives before and after Said's Orientalism, see Alexander Lyon Macfie, ed., Orientalism: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Homi Bhaba and W. J. T. Mitchell, eds., Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Curtis, Islam in Black America, 26–27. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 149. Ibid., 150–151. The American Mission's Arabic translation of the entire Bible, the first in circulation since a lost translation from the eleventh century, was begun by Dr. Smith's team in 1843 and completed by Dr. Van Dyck's group in 1865. Isaac H. Hall, “The Arabic Bible of Drs. Eli Smith and Cornelius V. A. Van Dyck,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 11 (1885): 276–286; Issa A. Saliba, “The Bible in Arabic: The 19th-Century Protestant Translation,” Muslim World 65, no. 4 (1975): 254–263. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 280. Ibid., 200. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 11, 13, 68, 229–232, 244, 254. Blyden, “Sierra Leone and Liberia: Their Origin, Work, and Destiny,” Lecture at Sierra Leone, April 1884, in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 231. Blyden to the Rev. John C. Lowrie, January 23, 1877, in Lynch, Selected Letters, 24. Ibid. Curtis, Islam in Black America, 22; Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 47. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 230, 335. Those glosses might be an apt description of the views of Elijah Mohammed or (pre-hajj) Malcolm X, but not those of Blyden. Some have pointed to this incident to explain his life-long enmity toward “mulattoes,” and it could also have inspired his intolerance for intemperance. Later that year he reported, “the Government [of Liberia] is now completely disorganized—ignorant and drunken mobs bear sway. They do anything, say anything and write anything and there is no remedy at law against them.” Lynch, Selected Letters, 5, 94. Edward W. Blyden, “The Mohammedans of Nigritia,” (1885) in Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 309. Blyden, “Sierra Leone and Liberia,” (1884) in ibid., 232. See, for example, Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 77–82, 118–125. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, 246. A few scholars have refuted the claim that Blyden became Muslim and that he believed Islam to be superior to Christianity, although these errors continue to circulate in the literature. See the exhaustive thousand-page biography by Edith Holden, Blyden of Liberia: An Account of the Life and Labors of Edward Wilmot Blyden, L.L.D. As Recorded in Letters and in Print (New York: Vantage Press, 1966), 602; see as well the Soviet biography of Blyden: M. Yu. Frenkel, Edward Blyden and African Nationalism, trans. E. Mozolkova, ed. E. Bessmertnaya (Moscow: Africa Institute, Academy of Sciences, USSR, 1978), 59–77. Edward W. Blyden, “Mohammedanism and the Negro Race,” originally published in Fraser's Magazine, November 1875, in Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 22. See also pages 165, 171, 172. He repeats this theme in several of his letters as well, e.g., Blyden to the Rev. Henry Venn, October 28, 1871, in Hollis, ed., Selected Letters, 99; Blyden to William Coppinger, April 16, 1888, ibid., 387–388. See, for example: Alfred Guillaume, Islam (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 192–196. Edward Wilmot Blyden, “Mohammedanism in Western Africa,” in Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 188. Blyden, “Sierra Leone and Liberia,” ibid., 232–233. Ibid. Remarkably, very few scholars have noted this persistent theme in Blyden's thought. One who does is Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 258. Paul Edwards touches on the matter in his brief essay “Edward W. Blyden: Sense and Sentimentality,” in The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation ed. Alastair Niven (Brussels: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1976), 146. Blyden, “Philip and the Eunuch,” in Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 171–172. Lynch, Pan-Negro Patriot, 124; Yusuf Nuruddin, “African-American Muslims and the Question of Identity: Between Traditional Islam, African Heritage, and the American Way,” in Muslims on the Americanization Path? ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 221. Blyden, “The Mohammedans of Nigritia,” 333. Blyden to The Rev. Henry Venn, October 28, 1871, in Hollis, ed., Selected Letters, 99. Blyden to Venn, October 11, 1871, in ibid., 94; Blyden to Venn, September 6, 1871, in ibid., 89–90. Blyden, The Jewish Question, 22. Blyden to Mary Kingsley, May 7, 1900, in Hollis, ed., Selected Letters, 462. On Mary Kingsley's views of West Africa, see Lynch, Pan-Negro Patriot, 205–207. Blyden, The Jewish Question, 12, 14. Ibid., 23. Blyden also used the phrase “of the earth, earthy” to describe the pyramids, of which he was quite proud, but which he contrasted to what he thought of as the more spiritual monuments of Jerusalem and Christianity: Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 157. He borrowed the doubled adjectival form from a West African Arabic manuscript that a traveling companion translated for him: ibid., 40. Blyden to Mary Kingsley, 462. Ibid., 463. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 104–105; Livingstone, Education and Race, 109. Blyden to Mary Kingsley, 463–464. Blyden to William Coppinger, April 16, 1888, in Hollis, ed., Selected Letters, 388. Blyden to Mary Kingsley, 464, 461. Blyden, The Jewish Question, 20. Blyden, “West Africa,” August 22, 1903, 199–200, cited in Holden, Blyden of Liberia, 772. Blyden, West Africa Before Europe (London, 1905), 61–62, cited in Frenkel, Blyden and African Nationalism, 67. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine, 125. Blyden to the Rev. John Miller, November 29, 1888, in Lynch, Selected Letters, 396–397; Livingstone, Education and Race, 84. Eugene Stock, The History of the Church Missionary Society (London, 1899), 231, cited in Livingstone, Education and Race, 213. Bond cited in ibid. Ibid., 221. Willis N. Huggins, “The Last Laugh: An Etching of the Color Line,” The New York Amsterdam News (June 10, 1925), 9. Runoko Rashidi, “Foreword,” in John G. Jackson, Runoko Rashidi, and John Henrik Clarke, eds., Introduction to African Civilizations, rev. ed. (New York: Citadel Press, 2001), vii; Nuruddin, “African American Muslims and the Question of Identity,” 253.