Why Islam is my choice — Page 118
118 accepted Isl ā m. It has always intrigued me to ask a person who accepts Isl ā m, who converts to Isl ā m, what happens to his identity, before and after accepting Isl ā m? I have always known you as Br. Ra ḥ mat Jam ā l, what was your name prior to this, what did your friends think about you, what did your parents—how did they deal with this transformation, this identity change, and how did you deal with this? R: Well, the simplest way to put it is, I think one has to realize that Afro-Americans, by and large, have an identity problem. People were taken from Africa and brought here as slaves. Whatever they were called, or whatever their names were, whatever their family names were, that was all abolished. They took on the names of the people who owned them. And I think that Mr. Alex Huxly, in his book Roots, he wrote, I’m Alex Huxly, and talking to him… That when he was in search of his family, he got taken to a certain plantation; all of a sudden his research seemed to have stopped. At that, he said, Well I came from the head, why is there no record of these people on this particular plantation? And to his surprise, he discovered that his family members were listed among the cows, were listed [with] the chickens and the goats and the pigs and all the other things that the people owned. So those people took the names of their owners. So, when people ask me what my name was prior to my becoming a Muslim, to think about it, I don’t really know, because the name that I was given by the people who owned my ancestors—that wasn’t my name. And whatever my name was, it was that of my African ancestors. Because here, they demolished those names completely because they didn’t want any unity among people who they had in slavery because unity made problems. So, therefore, they denied you of your name, and also, they split the families up. Every time they had the opportunity, they would split the family because they did not want that unity because unity meant problems.