Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [173]
An audience of about seven hundred attended, a majority of them congregants of Mosque No. 7, but a significant minority were non-Muslim blacks. Captain Joseph had ordered Larry 4X to serve on Malcolm’s security detail; as instructed, he drove out to the minister’s home in Queens and tailed Malcolm’s Oldsmobile on its way to the Manhattan Center. Once Malcolm was secure in the building, Larry directed other Fruit of Islam to bar any whites, except reporters, from entering.
“God’s Judgment of White America” began with a sophisticated argument about political economies. “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us . . . it was the evil of slavery that caused the downfall and destruction of ancient Egypt and Babylon, and of ancient Greece, as well as ancient Rome,” Malcolm told his audience. In similar fashion, colonialism contributed to “the collapse of the white nations in present-day Europe as world powers.” The exploitation of African Americans will, in turn, “bring white America to her hour of judgment, to her downfall as a respected nation.” Malcolm’s core argument was that America, like the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, was in moral decline. The greatest example of its moral bankruptcy, Malcolm argued, was its hypocrisy. “White America pretends to ask herself, ‘What do these Negroes want?’ White America knows that four hundred years of cruel bondage has made these twenty-two million ex-slaves too (mentally) [Malcolm’s parentheses] blind to see what they really want.”
“God’s Judgment” made an effort to put the NOI’s religious practices and beliefs within the larger Muslim world. Malcolm explained that Elijah Muhammad’s “divine mission” was essentially that of a modern prophet, not unlike “Noah, Moses, and Daniel. He is a warrior to our white oppressor, but a savior to the oppressed.” This claim that Elijah merited the status of prophet directly contradicted orthodox Islam’s interpretation of Muhammad of the Qur’an as being the Seal of the Prophets. Despite this deviation, Malcolm insisted that “the Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us not only the principles of Muslim belief but the principles of Muslim practice.” Nation of Islam members, he insisted, adhered to the five pillars of Islam, including prayer five times daily, tithing, fasting, and making “the pilgrimage to the Holy City, Mecca, at least [once] during our lifetime.” He observed that Elijah and two of his sons had visited Mecca in 1959, adding that “others of his followers have been making [the Mecca pilgrimage] since then.” He deliberately avoided presenting Islam as a black religion, portraying it as a faith with an emancipatory message for African Americans.
There was an urgent emphasis on the coming apocalypse, which, while part of the Nation of Islam’s theology, was merged into a political jeremiad of destruction. A Muslim world could not come into existence unless God himself destroyed “this evil Western world, the white world, a wicked world, ruled by a race of devils, that preaches falsehood, practices slavery, and thrives on indecency and immorality.” America had now reached “that great Doomsday, the final hour,” where all the wicked would perish and only those who believed in Allah as God and who affirmed Islam as their faith would be saved.
Midway through this apocalyptic vision, however, Malcolm did an about-face, turning from eschatology to racial politics. He accused the government of “trying to trick her twenty-two million ex-slaves with promises she never intends to keep.” To retain power, liberals and conservatives alike cynically manipulate civil rights issues and Negro leaders who align themselves with white liberals “sell out our people for just a few crumbs of token recognition and token gains.” He equated the approximately three million blacks who were registered to vote as of 1960 with the “black bourgeoisie,” “who have been educated to think as patriotic ‘individualists’ with no racial pride, and who therefore