Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [237]
At a meeting with Seyyid Omar el-Saghaf, the vice minister of Saudi Arabia’s foreign affairs department, Malcolm presented his proposal and request for funds to establish a mosque, or Islamic center, in Harlem, to promote orthodox Islam. On September 22, writing to M. S. Handler, Malcolm praised the “quiet, sane, and strongly spiritual atmosphere” of Saudi Arabia, a place where “objective thinking” was possible. Under the Nation of Islam, “I lived within the narrow-minded confines of the ‘straightjacketed worldʹ . . . I represented and defended [Elijah Muhammad] beyond the level of intellect and reason.” He vowed that he would “never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many innocent Negroes” and affirmed that he was now “a Muslim in the most orthodox sense; my religion is Islam as it is believed in and practiced by the Muslims here in the Holy City of Mecca.”
His new political goals, he went on, were firmly within the civil rights mainstream. “I am not anti-American, un-American, seditious nor subversive. I don’t buy the anti-capitalist propaganda of the communist, nor do I buy the anti-communist propaganda of capitalists.” He was trying hard to establish for himself a relatively objective Third World position of nonalignment. Unlike his earlier endorsements of socialism over capitalism, in these comments to Handler he appears to retreat toward a more pragmatic economic philosophy. “I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity (human beings) as a whole whether they are capitalist, communists or socialists, all have assets as well as liabilities. . . .” Then, in a remarkable passage, he seems to repudiate not just Yacub’s History but the fascist-like concept that all blacks, as blacks, had to exhibit certain cultural traits or adhere to sets of rigid beliefs, in order to justify their racial identity:
I am a Muslim who believes whole heartily that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad ibn Abdullah . . . is the Last Messenger of Allah—yet some of my very dearest friends are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and even atheists—some are capitalists, socialists, conservatives, extremists . . . some are even Uncle Toms—some are black, brown, red, yellow and some are even white. It takes all these religious, political, economic, psychological and racial ingredients (characteristics) to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.
In a second letter to Handler, dated the following day, he criticized his former belief in Elijah Muhammad “as a divine leader who had no human faults.” What had prompted the letter, however, was the news that Surur al-Sabban had named Malcolm as the World Islamic League’s representative in the United States, with the authority to start an official center in New York City. The league offered fifteen scholarships to American Muslims to attend the Islamic University of Madinah (Medina). This gift, combined with the twenty scholarships offered in Cairo, gave Malcolm thirty-five fully funded fellowships.
In the final week of September he was back on the move. After a brief stop in Kuwait, where he tried unsuccessfully to obtain financial support for the MMI from the foreign secretary, Malcolm traveled to Beirut on September 29. He was welcomed at the Lebanese airport by a student leader named Azizah and about ten white American students, who informed him that the American University dean had extended permission for him to speak in one of the lecture halls. Malcolm, Azizah, and several other students had lunch