Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [107]
When his dysentery finally abated, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, where enslavement of people of African descent had existed for more than fifteen hundred years. From the perspective of most black Americans, Saudi Arabia would have appeared to be a nonwhite society, with blacks relegated to the bottom. Writing from the Kandara Palace hotel in Jeddah, he described the physical appearance of the Saudi population as ranging “from regal black to rich brown, but none are white.” Most Arabs, he noted, “would be right at home in Harlem. And all of them refer warmly to our people in America as their ‘brothers of color.’ ” His own race, so long the prism of his self-definition, receded in importance. “Many Egyptians didn’t identify him as negroid because of his color until they saw him closer,” noted one of his fellow travelers. The episode taught Malcolm that racial identities were not fixed: what was “black” in one country could be white or mulatto in another. The absence of a rigid color line apparently suggested to Malcolm that “there is no color prejudice among Moslems, for Islam teaches that all mortals are equal and brothers.”
Three weeks of mixing with commoners and statesmen in the Middle East also reinforced Malcolm’s commitment to Pan-Africanism. “Africa is the land of the future,” he wrote in a letter home that was eventually published by the Pittsburgh Courier.
Only yesterday, America was the New World, a world with a future—but now, we suddenly realize Africa is the New World—the world with the brightest future—a future in which the so-called American Negroes are destined to play a key role.
Throughout his trip, he kept listeners rapt with talk of the importance of the NOI, and of the cruel suppression American blacks faced at the hands of whites. Writing of their outraged reaction, he explained that “the increasing hordes of intelligent Africans find it difficult to understand” why black Americans continued to be oppressed, “without real freedom, without public school rights, and above all, relegated to slums. . . . The chief instrument by which East and West are being divided, day and night, is resentment in Africa and Asia for administrative jim-crow in the United States.” This insight underlined the need to broaden the international perspective within the Black Freedom Movement. By cultivating alliances with Third World nations, black Americans could gain leverage to achieve racial empowerment.
There were several reasons to believe that such a strategy could produce results. First, a significant number of African leaders, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, either had attended U.S. universities or had visited the United States and were familiar with its system of racial oppression. Black churches, colleges, and civic associations since the mid-nineteenth century had contacts or exchanges with African institutions. This was especially the case in South Africa, where the parallels between apartheid and legal Jim Crow were obvious. Finally, a good number of revolutionary anticolonial movements, such as Algeria’s National Liberation Front, were noncommunist. Black Americans could work with representatives of such movements without being red-baited at home.
Malcolm’s letter, filled with new ideas about Islam and Afro-Asian solidarity, found him at a philosophical crossroads. The attitudes toward race expressed by Muslims he encountered on his trip had revealed to him fundamental contradictions within NOI theology. Islam was in theory color-blind; members of the ummah could be any nationality or race, so long as they practiced the five pillars and other essential traditions. Whites could not be categorically demonized. Malcolm came to realize during this trip that if the NOI were to continue growing, its sectarian concepts and practices, such as Yacub’s History, might have to be abandoned, and the assimilation of orthodox Islam would need to be accelerated. Pan-Africanism presented a different problem. Using Third World solidarity to leverage change in America came