Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [53]
Noble Drew Ali’s major appeal to black Americans paralleled Blyden’s arguments. He claimed that Islam was the spiritual home for all Asiatics, a term that embraced Arabs, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, black Americans, as well as several other ethnicities and nationalities. African Americans were not Negroes at all, Ali insisted, but “an olive-skinned Asiatic people who were the descendants of Moroccans.” Members consequently acquired “Islamic” names, as well as new identities as “Asiatic” blacks, or Moroccans. The Moorish Science Temple preached that blacks’ authentic religion was Islam; their national identity was not American, but Moorish; and their genealogy extended back to Christ. Ali’s strange quasi-Masonic creed attracted hundreds of followers in Newark, chiefly drawn from illiterate sharecroppers and landless workers who had trekked from the rural South during the initial wave of the Great Migration. By the late 1920s, the Moorish Science Temple claimed thirty thousand members, with temples in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Petersburg (Virginia), Cleveland, Youngstown (Ohio), Lansing, Chicago, and Milwaukee, among others.
Ali’s awareness of orthodox Islam’s core tenets was sketchy at best. He demanded that followers adhere to many of Islam’s dietary laws; the eating of pork was forbidden. There was some overlap between the Temple people and Garveyism, but the two movements differed in fundamental ways. The Moorish Science Temple was essentially a cult, while the Universal Negro Improvement Association was a popular movement with many different local leaders. However, as the UNIA fragmented, some of its former members joined the Temple, or began to influence it. In March 1929, Ali was arrested on suspicion of murdering an opposition leader, Sheikh Claude Greene. Released on bail, he died mysteriously several months later. His movement almost immediately split into feuding factions. The two major groups were led, respectively, by Ali’s former chauffeur, John Givens-El, who announced he was the reincarnation of Ali, and by Kirkman Bey, “Grand Sheikh” and president of the Moorish Science Temple Corporation. By the 1940s, Kirkman’s followers came under intense scrutiny by the FBI, and a significant number of their temples were investigated for sedition. The Moorish Science Temple largely disintegrated after World War II, with fewer than ten thousand members remaining nationwide, but it had prepared the path for more orthodox expressions of Islam within black America.
From a theological standpoint, the most successful sect in America was the Ahmadiyya movement, which had been founded by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (c. 1835-1908) in the Punjab. At first, it adhered to the core tenets of Islam, but in 1891 Ahmad declared himself Islam’s Mahdi, as well as an avatar of Krishna to the Hindus and Messiah to the Christians. Several years later, he further asserted that Christ did not die on the cross, but survived and made his way to India, where he did finally die and physically ascended into heaven. Such claims outraged Muslims, who declared the sect blasphemous and heretical. Following Ahmad’s own death in 1908, the Ahmadiyya cause fractured into the Qadianis, the more conservative faction connected with landowners and the merchant classes, who supported strict adherence to Ghulam Ahmad’s version of Islam, and a more liberal group, the Lahoris, who supported rapprochement with orthodox Islam.
Between 1921 and 1925, Ahmadiyya made its first great inroads in America when the first Qadiani Ahmadi missionary, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, persuaded more than one thousand Americans to convert, both white and black. Many African-American Ahmadi Muslims joined the faith in Chicago and Detroit, cities where the UNIA was also strong. In July 1921, Sadiq initiated the first Muslim publication in the United States, the Moslem Sunrise, through which he reached out to Garveyites, encouraging them to link Islam with their advocacy of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. In a January 1923 issue, he declared:
My Dear American