Personally I have always questioned why slaves adopted the religion of those who enslaved/owned them. That goes for Christianity and Islam.
Can we actually hold current people responsible for the actions of their ancestors? Your connection is tenuous at best with no real proof available.
Correct me if I am wrong but slavery existed before either Christianity and Islam existed. The Jews were slaves in the polytheistic land of Egypt centuries before the birth of Jesus or Muhammed.
Barack Hussein Obama has nothing in common with Americans that are decendants of slaves. He's not "black".
Maybe in this case "African-American" would be a better term? What I am about to say could be termed subjective but I believe it to be true. The "black experience" is different for every single person. There is no one way to be black.
Slaves in this country were not only from Africa. The natives in the new world were also enslaved to some degree in the Americas. I don't believe the Arabs were part of that.
Beyond that, blacks in this country have to deal with being directly genetically related to those that were slave owners. Take for example, Thomas Jefferson who has been documented as having had children with a slave he owned. There were others who not so gentle nor held in such high regard as him.
Can you point me toward your source on the slave trade? I would like to do some more research.
As I basically mentioned, I am looking at Obama somewhat through the prism put forth by the Democrats and the media. They have brought up issues of race.
Since Obama's father was a moslem there is not way I'd ever vote for him. Prejudiced? Politically incorrect? Probably yes but I have the right to be that way.
Actually, the "proof" that Jefferson had children by one of his slaves is oral tradition among some of the descendants of Sally Hemings. (Her son Madison Hemings was claiming to be a son of TJ in 1870--on the US census that year the census taker wrote "This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson" on the line with his name.)
There was a lot of hype in 1998 about a DNA study that showed that descendants of one of Sally's sons had a distinctive Jefferson Y-chromosome marker, but that could have been inherited from Jefferson's brother or a number of other relatives who lived reasonably close to Monticello. The reason for saying that Thomas Jefferson rather than another Jefferson was the father is the oral tradition.