Elijah Muhammad and Islam

Herbert Berg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780814791134
• eBook ISBN: 9780814791233
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Elijah Muhammad is arguably the most significant figure in the history of Islam in the United States. Successor to W. D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam, and a mentor to Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam for over forty years.
In Elijah Muhammad and Islam, Herbert Berg focuses on Elijah Muhammad's religiosity, which is frequently brought into question as the authenticity of the Nation of Islam as "truly Islamic" remains hotly debated. To better comprehend this powerful and controversial figure, Berg contextualizes Elijah Muhammad and his religious approach within the larger Islamic tradition, exploring his use of the Qur’an, his interpretation of Islam, and his relationships with other Muslims. Above all, Berg seeks to understand—not define or label—Muhammad as a Muslim. To do otherwise, he argues, is to misunderstand and distort the man, his teachings, his movement, and his legacy.

1

American Islam before Elijah Muhammad

Many Africans who made the Middle Passage were Muslims. The story of how their religion was all but extinguished in the United States is a remarkable one. Just as intriguing is its seemingly spontaneous reappearance under the charismatic but unlearned and unassuming Elijah Muhammad. Although Elijah Muhammad and his Nation of Islam were almost entirely responsible for bringing African Americans to Islam during the twentieth century, a closer examination reveals that Islam was not unheard of even in the 1930s when he himself converted. Some African Americans were aware that many of their African ancestors had been Muslims when brought as slaves to North America. They were stripped of this religion almost immediately (as they were of their names and other elements of African culture). Nevertheless, the association of Islam with Africa remained. This association was strengthened by white American islamicism. Although the white American view of Islam was quite negative, Islam’s presumed antithesis to Christianity and its alleged opposition to slavery would have been intriguing and appealing to many African Americans.

These vestiges of, and imaginations about, Islam made the fertile ground that allowed the seeds of Islam to be sown, first by Ahmadiyya missionaries and then by Noble Drew Ali. These movements and the socioeconomic conditions of African Americans, especially those who lived in northern urban centers but had recently migrated from the rural South (including Elijah Muhammad himself), made them particularly receptive to the radically new formulation of Islam promulgated by Wali Fard Muhammad.

Islam Comes to America

The first Muslim—in fact, the first Muslim African slave—in North America was a Moroccan named Estevan (also known as Estevanico, Esteban, Estebanico, Black Stephen, or Stephen the Moor). In 1527 he landed in what is now Florida with an ill-fated Spanish fleet, for whom he was a guide. Only four of the 506 men who were part of the fleet survived the first year. They wandered for eight years among Native Americans, but when the three Europeans were finally able to return home, Estevan stayed behind in Mexico. Later, he served as a guide for another expedition, this one north into modern New Mexico, where he was killed by natives in 1539.¹ Given that even historians had long ignored him, it is not surprising that Estevan’s origin as a Muslim had no impact on later African Americans.² Likewise, the many other early African Muslims within the Spanish and French parts of colonial North America had no discernible religious influence on later African Americans.

American Slaves

Any vestigial influence of Islam on the twentieth-century African Americans of Elijah Muhammad’s time came from their slave ancestors, first shipped to the New World in 1501. It is not certain how many of the half a million or so³ Africans brought to colonial North America and later the United States as part of the transatlantic slave trade were Muslims. The data is scarce because those who recorded it were not generally interested in slaves as Muslims. Moreover, Muslims and their descendents might be reluctant to divulge Muslim practices or ancestry. However, scholars estimate that over half of these slaves were from West Africa, where Islam was prevalent, and perhaps 15 percent⁴ of these West African slaves brought to North American were Muslims. These estimates are based not only on the names recorded in the ledgers of slave owners but also on the religious and ethnic milieu of principle regions from which the slaves originated. These figures are supported by other documents such as runaway notices, which contained names, descriptions, and, occasionally, information about geographical or ethnic origins.

The vast majority of these slaves were stripped of their names, their religion, and their culture. However, Sylviane A. Diouf argues that African Muslims resisted.

That Islam as brought by the African slaves has not survived does not mean that the Muslim faith did not flourish during slavery on a fairly large scale…. Muslims were not absorbed into the cultural-religious Christian world. They chose to remain Muslims, and even enslaved, succeeded in following most of the precepts of their religion.⁵

Historian Michael A. Gomez shares this view and contends that many Muslim slaves

made genuine and persistent efforts to observe their religion; and even though they perpetuated their faith primarily within their own families, in some cases they may have converted slaves who were not relatives… [and some] ostensibly Christian worship practices and artistic expressions… probably reflect the influence of these early Muslims.⁶

This claim is supported by evidence from the sparse but important biographical and autobiographical reports of former slaves, such as those of Job Ben Solomon (d. 1773), Ibrahim Abd ar-Rahman (d. 1829), Lamine Kebe (d. after 1837), and Umar ibn Said (d.1864). Several of them were able to obtain their freedom and return to Africa, and some wrote extensively in English and Arabic—a unique characteristic among African slaves, for the arrival of Islam in Africa had encouraged literacy.⁷ It is also clear that a few of them adopted a Christian façade in order to secure their return to Africa, suggesting that many slaves may have maintained secret connections to Islam. However, what influence these men might have had on the later Elijah Muhammad is unknown; he did not mention them in his extensive writings. It seems more likely, since he was born and raised in Georgia, that Elijah Muhammad may have heard of Bilali Mohammad and Salih Bilali and their descendents on Georgia’s Sapelo Island and the nearby St. Simon’s Island, respectively. These two friends and others in Georgia made a concerted effort to preserve within their community and families their Muslim heritage, elements of which survived well into the nineteenth century.⁸ Gomez concludes that “the Muslim presence in coastal Georgia… was active, healthy, and compelling.”⁹ Moreover, relatively positive attributes were associated with Muslim slaves; these Muslims were thought by slave owners to be a “more intelligent, more reasonable, more physically attractive, more dignified people” than other Africans.¹⁰ Similarly, these African American Muslim slaves occasionally displayed a sense of superiority over non-Muslim slaves.

There is no evidence, however, that Elijah Muhammad had a direct connection to these Muslims who were geographically so close to him. He was raised in a Christian household. Both his father and grandfather were Christian preachers. Besides, even the Muslims of the Georgia coast had by the beginning of the twentieth century begun converting to Christianity (though there is evidence of both syncretism and dissimulation).¹¹ In Brazil and the Caribbean, elements of Islam survived in the syncretic religions of Candomble, Macumba, Umbanda, Voodoo, and Santeria, yet no such continuity is evident with Elijah Muhammad’s religious formulation.¹²

American Islamicism

Elijah Muhammad was no doubt influenced by these vestiges of Islam, as well as by the white American perception of Islam. This perception has been described by Timothy Marr as “islamicism,” which he defines as an “Islamic orientalism that essentializes Islam, often in distorted and inaccurate ways.”¹³ Americans’ islamicism goes back to the colonial period and certainly did not begin with Elijah Muhammad, nor in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, nor, for a younger generation, on September 11, 2001.

American islamicist cultural rhetoric from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries was deployed to universalize national experiences and practices. Marr focuses on two types of islamicism: the domestic variety, which “othered” Islam as the idealized antithesis of domestic American situations, and the comparative variety, which involved the personal encounters of Americans with actual Muslim cultures. Islam was initially constructed as a cultural enemy, one that was despotic, anti-Christian, and morally corrupt, whereas America was imagined as democratic, Christian, and virtuous. This is demonstrated in the (mostly fictional) literature about Muslim spies and white Christians enslaved by Muslims, and in American interpretation of the events of Barbary captivity, the Tripolitan War, and the Greek war of independence from the Ottoman Empire. Later, American Protestant Christian millennialism and missionary activity to convert Muslims saw the removal of Islam and the consequent return of the Jews to the “Holy Land” as necessary precursors to the return of Jesus. The eastern Muslim (i.e., Turkish) empire was identified with various elements within the Book of Revelation. This eschatology allowed Protestants to understand the persistence of Islam simply as a temporary scourge that was part of a divine plan (to punish errant Christians). Three points are worth noting with regard to Elijah Muhammad. First, Islam is seen as the antithesis of white, Christian America. Second, Islam is largely identified with Africa even by white Americans. Third, the basic eschato-logical model was also later employed by Elijah Muhammad, except that the protagonist and antagonist religions exchanged roles. Furthermore, the fear and hatred of Islam in Europe (which was almost as old as Islam itself) were inherited by European American descendents and so made it impossible for Muslim slaves to perpetuate their faith.¹⁴ Ironically, Elijah Muhammad capitalized on this fear and hatred of Islam by Whites as he sought to persuade the African American descendents of those slaves to embrace Islam.

Later still, “Islam” was employed within the United States by the antislavery and temperance movements. Though Islam prohibits alcohol consumption and although most Muslims in the United States were slaves, the main strategy of these movements was ironically to associate both alcohol consumption and slavery with Islam, thereby hoping to make them unacceptable to Americans. However, it is more likely that a second strategy employed by these two movements would have had a greater influence on Elijah Muhammad. Islam was also used to shame Americans in that “Turkish” lands prohibited alcohol and began antislavery reforms ahead of the United States. While direct influences of America’s Islamic history and perceptions on Elijah Muhammad are difficult to establish, it is clear that the practice of slavery by Muslims was initially unknown to him.

Moorish Science Temple¹⁵

The first wave of Muslim immigrants came to the United States between 1875 and 1912, mostly from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Many were quickly assimilated. Immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924 put quotas on immigration from particular nations, so the number of Muslims allowed to enter the United States was significantly curtailed. In the 1930s, immigration was only open to relatives of those already in the country. None of these immigrants engaged in any significant or organized missionary activity with African Americans. The first immigrant Muslims to do so were the Ahmadiyyas from India—beginning just a few years prior to the birth of the Nation of Islam.

The first Muslim missionary to the United States was Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb (d. 1916), a white American who converted to Islam while in the Philippines. In 1892 he visited India, where he may have come in contact with Ahmadiyya Muslims. After his return to the United States in 1893, he established the American Moslem Brotherhood in New York City and a Muslim publishing company. His primary goal was to dispel the negative stereotypes Americans had of Islam, rather than to convert Americans to Islam. Webb made a point of emphasizing that Islam taught equality and universal brotherhood, but this message apparently did not influence Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad.

A more likely source of influence would have been the well-known Caribbean, pan-Africanist Edward Wilmot Blyden (d. 1912). He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who often wrote of Christianity’s racism and its demoralizing effect on Blacks while extolling Islam’s unifying and elevating qualities. Likewise, Henry McNeal Turner (d. 1915), an African American bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church famous for his statement in sermons that “God is a Negro,” severely criticized Christianity’s racism and was much impressed by the Muslims he encountered in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Certainly, the assumption of Islam’s blindness to race extolled by Blyden and Webb was not picked up by Drew Ali, Fard Muhammad, or Elijah Muhammad, though Blyden’s and Turner’s condemnation of American Christianity’s racism was. And, God as a “black man” would become a cornerstone in Elijah Muhammad’s formulation of Islam.

Despite the increasing presence of Muslim immigrants in American and the use of Islam in antiracist rhetoric, the first significant number of Americans calling themselves Muslims were the followers of an African American who became known as Noble Drew Ali. Timothy Drew was born in 1886 in North Carolina to ex-slaves living among Cherokee Indians. Beyond these facts, very little is known of his life, for much of the traditional biography is inconsistent hagiography. It is said that his mother foresaw great things in him, but when she died, Drew was raised by an aunt who abused him until he ran away. While living with gypsies, he heard a voice say to him, “If you go, I will follow.” So he left, and though there are various versions of this tale, it seems that he became a merchant seaman at the age of sixteen and eventually arrived in Egypt. There he is said to have passed some sort of test in the Pyramid of Cheops and so was renamed Noble Drew Ali. In 1912 or 1913, in response to a dream that told him to found a religion “for the uplifting of fallen mankind,” especially the “lost-found nation of American blacks,” he created the Canaanite Temple in Newark, New Jersey.¹⁶ Prior to this he had been a Shriner, from which organization he clearly adopted his religious symbols and paraphernalia. The sashes and fezes he adopted, as well as the affixing of “El” and “Bey” after surnames, the prohibition of pork (in fact, all meat) and of intoxicants, the practice of praying (while standing) towards the East, the segregation of women during Friday services, and the use of the word “Koran” for his own scripture were all attempts to imitate what Drew Ali (often mistakenly) believed to be Muslim or Moorish practice.¹⁷

When an Arab Muslim immigrant came into contact with Drew Ali’s followers in Newark in 1918, his more first-hand account of Muslim practice sparked tensions within the movement and led to a split. The Newark group became the Moabite Temple of the World, while Drew Ali relocated to Chicago in 1919.¹⁸ There, he formed the Moorish Divine National Movement, which in 1926 he incorporated as the Moorish Holy Temple of Science and two years later renamed again the Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc. In those years, his teachings also evolved, focusing increasingly on race. For several years Drew Ali enjoyed considerable success, amassing perhaps ten thousand followers. However, rivalries emerged once again within the movement and, when one of those rivals was murdered in 1929, Drew Ali was arrested. He was released on bond but, suspiciously, died shortly thereafter.

Drew Ali’s teachings deserve some attention not onl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 American Islam before Elijah Muhammad
• 2 The Life of Elijah Muhammad
• 3 Elijah Muhammad and the Qur’an
• 4 The Major “Islamic” Themes in Elijah Muhammad’s Quranic Commentary
• 5 Elijah Muhammad, Other Muslims, and Islam
• 6 The Legacy of Elijah Muhammad
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author