- Professor of humanities and political science at the State University of New York
- Former board member of the American Muslim Council and the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy
- Spoke out in defense of terrorist Sami Al-Arian
- Characterizes Israel as a Nazi-like state that practices ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people
See also: Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding
Association of Muslim Social
Scientists of North America
Born
February 24, 1933 to a Muslim family in Mombasa, Kenya, Ali
al Mazrui holds a B.A. degree from Manchester University, an M.A.
from Columbia
University, and a doctorate from Oxford. The author
of more than 30 books, Mazrui
is currently a professor
of humanities and political science at SUNY Binghamton, where he
serves as director
of the Institute
of Global Cultural Studies.
He
is also a senior scholar in Africana Studies at Cornell University; a
board member of
the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding; a fellow at the
Nigeria-based Institute of Governance and Social Research; and president of the Association of Muslim Social
Scientists of North America.
In the
past, Mazrui has been a
board member of both the American
Muslim Council and—along
with Jamal
Barzinji and others—the
Center
for the Study of Islam & Democracy. He
was also president of the African Studies Association of the United
States (1978-79); vice president of the International Congress of
African Studies (1979-91); and a board of
trustees member with the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies (1998).
Mazrui
hosted the 1986 PBS
series The
Africans: A Triple Heritage,
and authored a companion book with the same title. While The
Africans emphasized the horror, and the continuing cost to the continent, of the
European slave-trade of centuries past, Mazrui failed to
mention, in that context, that he himself is descended
from Mombasa's leading slave-trading family, which sold slaves into
Muslim lands.[1]
In
the book version of The
Africans,
Mazrui supported the southward expansion of Islam through the Sudan—an expansion generated by the genocidal Sudanese Islamic government—as a natural development not to be resisted by the Christian South.[2]
According to an entry in Governance
and Leadership: Debating the African Condition,
Mazrui “writes approvingly about Sudanese massacres, enslavement
and forced conversions of African southern Sudanese”; “talks
about Western-Christian slavery but not about Arab-Islamic slavery
which pre-dated and post-dated trans-Atlantic slavery for centuries”;
and “talks about racism in the West and denies racism in
Arab-Muslim societies.” Moreover, Mazrui wrote
that after Moses and Jesus, “the last of the Great Jewish prophets”
was Karl Marx.
In
2001 Mazrui stated that he had “collaborated
extensively”
with the Council on Islamic Education, now known as the Institute
on Religion and Civic Values.
Mazrui
was a featured speaker at the 2002 annual banquet of the Muslim
Public Affairs Council, where he suggested
that “some members of the Bush administration in collusion with
Israel”
were “more than ready to plunge the Middle East into turmoil in the
hope that the final outcome would be to the territorial advantage of
Israel and the strategic advantage of the United States.” “All
this,” he said, “is part of the emerging external sadism of the
United States, a readiness to hurt others abroad.”
In April
2002, Mazrui co-authored a highly controversial article titled “Is Israel a Threat to
American Democracy?” Depicting Osama bin Laden's hatred of the U.S.
as a response to America's provision of “massive economic
aid” and “sophisticated...weapons” to Israel, this piece states that “Israeli militarism, occupation of Arab lands, and
repression of Palestinians” ultimately “provok[e] suicide bombers” and give “rise to
movements like Hamas
and al
Qaeda”; that the U.S. is “both the main source of
military support for the enemy of the Arab World, Israel, and…the
main destroyer of Arab capacity to rise militarily”; that “Israeli neo-Nazism” has “reversed the
scale of genetic values favored by German Nazis”; that Israel “has
indeed become the most efficient war machine since Nazi Germany”;
that Israel pursues “a policy of ethnic cleansing” in quest of a “final solution to the Palestinian problem”; and that those who had opposed Israel's “creation in the first place” were now
being “vindicated.”[3]
In
2003 Mazrui dismissed
allegations that University of South Florida professor Sami
Al-Arian, who had recently been arrested on the basis of
voluminous FBI evidence, was indeed an agent of the terrorist
group Palestinian
Islamic Jihad. Rather, said
Mazrui, Al-Arian was merely a
“victim of prejudice and of popular ill will.”
Also
in 2003, Mazrui characterized
America’s post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures as assaults against civil
liberties and democracy: “We can empty the political prisons of
Saddam
Hussein without having a Guantanamo
Gulag of our own in Cuba under American jurisdiction.” Regarding
upscaled airport security in the U.S., Mazrui said,
“If you are a Muslim, it is an equal opportunity for harassment.”
In 2004 Mazrui delivered a lecture
at the International Center for the Propagation of Islam, whose
founder and director, Ahmed Deedat, received funding directly from
Osama
bin Laden’s family and boasted about having personally met the
al
Qaeda leader on several occasions.
In 2005 Mazrui was a
board member
of the Association of Muslim Social Services (AMSS), a sister
organization of the International
Institute of Islamic Thought.
Al Mazrui is an editorial
board member of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, a publication of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Among his fellow editorial board members are such notables as John
Esposito and John
Voll.
NOTES:
[1] Cited in David Horowitz, The Professors (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006), p. 282.
[2] Ali
A. Mazrui and Tony Kleban Levine, eds., The Africans: A Reader
(Praeger Publishers, 1986). Cited in The Professors, p. 282.)
[3] Ali
A. Mazrui, “Is Israel a Threat to American Democracy?”
SwahiliOnline.com (April 17, 2002). Cited in The Professors, p. 282.
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