Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [52]
During the nineteenth century, a series of black intellectuals from the Caribbean and the United States were attracted to Islam. This was an era of evangelical Christianity, and social Darwinism, which promoted religious and scientific justifications for white supremacy. People of African descent increasingly became attracted to Islam as an alternative to Christianity. By far the most influential black intellectual of the period was Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), who came to the United States from the Danish West Indies as a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which permitted blacks to be arrested and deported to the slave South, Blyden left for Liberia in 1851. During the next sixty years he had an extraordinary career as a scholar, traveler, and diplomat.
Blyden’s contributions to Malcolm Little’s spiritual and political journey were threefold. First, long before W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Blyden argued that the black race possessed certain spiritual and cultural strengths, a collective personality, uniting black humanity throughout the world. During the 1960s, this insight would form the basis for what would be called “black cultural nationalism”—a deep pride in African antiquity, history, and culture, together with the celebration of rituals and aesthetics drawing upon Africa and the black diaspora.
Second, long before Garvey, Blyden had envisioned a program of “Pan-Africanism”—the political and social unity of black people worldwide—leading to a strategy of group migration back to Africa. Blyden was convinced that conditions for American blacks would eventually become so oppressive that millions would return to the land of their ancestors. His writings on Pan-Africanism paved the way for the back-to-Africa movement among Southern blacks in the 1890s, and provided the intellectual arguments for Garveyites a generation later.
His most original contribution, however, was to link Pan-Africanism with West African Islam. In his classic 1888 treatise, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, he argued that Christianity, despite its Middle Eastern origins, had evolved into a distinctly European religion that was discriminatory and oppressive. He insisted that among the world’s great religions, only Islam permitted Africans to retain their traditions with integrity.
By the early twentieth century, the first significant religious organization in the United States that identified itself as Islamic was the Moorish Science Temple of America. The group’s founder, a North Carolina–born African American named Timothy Drew, established the cult in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913, as the Canaanite Temple. Proclaiming himself Noble Drew Ali, he told followers that he was the second prophet of Islam, Mahdi, or redeemer. In orthodox Islam, Muhammad is widely described as the Seal of the Prophets, the last of a line of Qurʹanic prophets beginning with Adam. Any such claim to the status of prophet is inherently blasphemous, but Ali’s deviation from Islam’s five pillars didn’t stop there. The sacred text of his cult was the Holy Koran, also known as the Circle Seven Koran, a sixty-four-page synthesis that drew on four sources: the Qurʹan, the Bible, the Aquarian Gospels of Jesus Christ (an occult version of the New Testament), and Unto Thee I Grant (a publication of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a Masonic order influenced by the Egyptian