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By Root 1673 0

an organization that says Mecca is the only place in the world where a white man can’t go . . . ,” he explained. Malcolm’s affirmation that whites also could be Muslims meant a wholesale rejection of the Nation’s theology, which may have fit his own emerging outlook but remained deeply problematic for a group that had only recently departed the Nation and still found much to speak for in its views on race. At first, James 67X didn’t know what to do. “I’m walking around with this letter, saying, how am I gonna tell this to [these] people? . . . What do you mean by ‘white’? What did Malcolm mean by ‘white’?” After several days, James 67X circulated the letter to the MMI. However, he refused to believe that Malcolm “had embraced Sunni Islam.”

The ambiguity and confusion that surrounded the letter probably inadvertently helped keep Muslim Mosque together during Malcolm’s absence, as members were free to read their own interpretations of Malcolm’s feelings into the letterʹs message. Though Malcolm would go on to make his ideas more concrete upon his return, the question of his true, deep-seated beliefs continued to be debated by his followers. Herman Ferguson thought that Malcolm “had offered to white people the possibility of Islam correcting their sense of values,” but that, deep in his soul, he knew “they could never accept the teachings of Islam.” Even after Malcolm returned to the United States and personally spoke to MMI and OAAU members about his new views, Ferguson remained adamant that Malcolm’s inner politics were still race based. “Because if I had for a moment even suspected that Malcolm was changing his thinking,” Ferguson swore, “I would have walked away.” Over several decades, Betty gave inconsistent answers to questions about what impact the hajj, Islam, and travels to the Third World had on her husband’s racial views. In 1989, however, when Haley biographer Anne Romaine interviewed her and asked, “Do you think that your husband changed his views?” Betty curtly replied, “No.”

Despite the intransigence of many of his followers, the notion that Malcolm was undergoing some sort of transformation began to spread in the mainstream and black presses. On May 8, the New York Times published an article by M. S. Handler with a surprising title: “Malcolm X Pleased by Whites’ Attitude on Trip to Mecca.” Quoting an April 25 letter Malcolm had written in Saudi Arabia, Handler wrote that the black leader would soon return to the United States “with new, positive insights on race relations.” Throughout his hajj, Malcolm wrote in words that would be much quoted in years to come: “I have eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God . . . with fellow Muslims whose skins was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue . . . [for] the first time in my life. . . . I didn’t see them as ‘white’ men.” What he had witnessed was so profound, Malcolm admitted, that it had “forced me to ‘rearrange’ much of my own thought-pattern, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.” Yet if Malcolm expressed optimism that America could transform itself on racial matters, he also professed to see Islam as the key to that transformation. “I do believe,” Malcolm wrote, “that whites of the younger generation, in colleges and universities, through their own young, less hampered intellect, will see the ‘handwriting on the wall’ and turn for spiritual salvation to the religion of Islam, and force the older generation of American whites to turn with them.”

Several weeks after the Times article, James Booker of the Amsterdam News posed the provocative question “Has the visit of Malcolm X, now El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, to Mecca and with Muslim leaders in Africa changed him to become soft in his anti-white feelings and to become more religious?” A clue to this apparent “change in his militant racial attitudes” was contained in a letter he had sent to the newspaper about one week earlier, in which he had written that the proponents of Islam were obligated “to take a firm