True Black history has been obfuscated and replaced with nefarious Eurocentric myths. Africa is portrayed as a place without history: primitive, inferior and impoverished. The noble descendants of Africa are by extension portrayed as incompetent and inconsequential actors in world history. To counter these Eurocentric tall-tells that masquerade as objective history, Carter G. Woodson first proposed Black History Week, which later expanded to a month. Muslims, who have been duty-bound to submit to Quranic revelations of getting to “know each other,” cannot truly fulfill this duty unless we counter this epistemic racism that inhibits accurate knowledge about Africa and its descendants. To do this, we must look at our own tradition to learn about the contributions that Africans made to Islam from the beginning of our faith’s history to the present. It was an African woman, Umm Ayman, who first told Aminah , “You shall give birth to a blessed child who will bring goodness,” whe...
