Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [57]
Even years before his incarceration, Elijah Muhammad had revealed to his closest followers that Fard had informed him privately that he, Fard, was God in person. Fard’s elevation from prophet to savior also thrust Elijah into the exalted role of being the sole “Messenger of Allah.” Elijah later explained that an angel had descended from heaven with a message of truth for the black race. “This angel can be no other than Master W. D. Muhammad who came from the Holy City of Mecca, Arabia, in 1930.” Thus the recipient of one message became himself the messenger to his people.
Malcolm learned of all this—Fard’s teachings, his persecution, his disappearance, and the ultimate triumph of Elijah Karriem—at Norfolk. Reading the letters from his siblings and the occasional letters from Elijah himself, with whom Malcolm had struck up a correspondence, he drew further into the world and worldview of the Nation of Islam. He soon convinced himself about Fard’s divinity. “The greatest and mightiest God who appeared on the earth was Master W. D. Fard,” Malcolm would eventually profess. “He came from the East to the West, appearing at a time when the history and prophecy that is written was coming to realization, as the non-white people all over the world began to rise, and as the devil white civilization, condemned by Allah, was, through its devilish nature, destroying itself.”
Under Fard, the Nation’s preachers had always mentioned the cosmic inevitability of the white race’s decline, associating this with an apocalyptic vision of the final days. Fard and Elijah Muhammad both used the Torah’s tale of Ezekiel’s Wheel to explain the existence of a mechanical device from heaven that could save the faithful. In his most widely read work, Message to the Blackman in America, Elijah gave even greater emphasis to this than Fard, as well as the specific details for the pending apocalypse:
There is a similar wheel in the sky today which very well answers the description of Ezekiel’s vision. . . . The Great Wheel which many of us see in the sky today is . . . a plane made like a wheel. The like of this wheel-like plane was never seen before. . . . The present wheel-shaped plane known as the Mother Plane, is one-half of a half-mile and is the largest mechanical manmade object in the sky. It is a small human planet made for the purpose of destroying the present world of the enemies of Allah. . . . It is capable of staying in outer space six to twelve months at a time without coming into the earth’s gravity. It carried fifteen hundred bombing planes with the most deadliest explosives—the type used in bringing up mountains on the earth. The very same method is to be used in the destruction of this world.
To Elijah Muhammad, the world was divided into two: the community of devout believers, which included “Asiatics” and “Asiatic blacks” such as American Negroes who might be converted; and, in orthodox Islamic terms, the “House of War,” all Europeans or white people, the devils. No reconciliation or integration was possible or even conceivable. If the millions of black Americans could not physically return to Africa, then a partition of the United States along racial lines had to be instituted. Middle-aged and older African Americans who had belonged to the UNIA immediately recognized Muhammad’s program as similar to Garvey’s, but with a kind of divinely based apocalyptic fury, and it ignited a revolutionary spark that touched Malcolm in a way Garveyism never would have.
Since neither wholesale emigration nor the secession of several Southern U.S. states under blacks’ authority was immediately likely, Muhammad counseled his followers to withdraw from active civic life. America’s political institutions would never grant equality to the Original People. Muhammad