Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [68]
Circle 7 Koran
The magical uses of “science” were not limited to the West Indies or Garvey. Indeed, the man who styled himself as Garvey’s American successor used a philosophy of mystical science to form the basis for one of the most beguiling and influential inner-city religious movements of the twentieth century, the Moorish Science Temple. Founded in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913 and moved to Chicago in the early 1920s, the movement was led by a mysterious North Carolinian named Timothy Drew, known to followers as Noble Drew Ali. In a handful of grainy photographs, Ali appears as a slender man with a thin mustache, outfitted in an Oriental silk robe and Masonic sash, alternately wearing a turban or tasseled fez, with his right hand crossed to his chest Napoleon-fashion. He told followers that he was born black in 1886 but raised among the Cherokee Indian tribes. His ceremonial title of “Noble” and other aspects of his regalia were very likely taken from Freemasonry’s Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, the order better known as the Shriners. In the late nineteenth century the Masonic group had introduced America to the imagery (if not the actual ideas) of Islam.
Some of the New York businessmen who founded the Shriners lodge in 1877 did, in fact, take a serious interest in the philosophies of the East. Members even claimed a spurious connection with the Bektashi Sufi Order, a legendary Turkish brotherhood of mystical Muslims known for wine-drinking and ecstatic worship. But by the early twentieth century, the Shriners operated chiefly as a philanthropic guild, responsible for developing a remarkable network of free children’s hospitals. The group’s Byzantine symbols—including the fez, star and crescent, and scimitar—were relegated mostly to pageantry and decoration.
While Noble Drew Ali often invoked Allah and Islam (or “Islamism,” as he sometimes called it), he had almost no ties or traffic with the actual faith of Muhammad. Rather, Moorish Science was an American inner-city mystery religion built upon New Thought, Masonry, Theosophy, and occultism. Noble Drew Ali’s marriage of Garveyite themes to esoteric rites and symbols helped respond to the yearnings for economic, cultural, and political power being felt in the cities to which the descendants of slaves had begun migrating.
Elusive as his background was, the prophet of Moorish Science was rumored to have toured America as a magician in a traveling circus. A remarkable crumbling flyer discovered by writer Prince-A-Cuba and reproduced by Peter Lamborn Wilson in his extraordinary book on apostate Islam, Sacred Drift, depicts a Noble Drew Ali close in spirit to the miracle-working Black Herman. THE PROPHET NOBLE DREW ALI, announces the 1927 advertising sheet, WILL BE BOUND WITH SEVERAL YARDS OF ROPE, AS JESUS WAS BOUND IN THE THE [sic] TEMPLE AT JERUSALEM. The flyer goes on to promise that Noble Drew Ali practices “the same art, after being bound by anyone in the audience, and will escape in a few seconds.” Here again was an emancipator in the mold of a Scriptural hero—now Jesus himself.
But the true magical key to Ali’s “science” was his ultrasecret Circle 7 Koran, which members were sworn to keep hidden from outsiders. So serious was this oath that, even long after Ali’s death in 1929, the sociologist Arthur Huff Fauset in his groundbreaking 1944 study, Black Gods of the Metropolis, would quote only from its front and back covers:
THE HOLY KORAN
of the
MOORISH SCIENCE TEMPLE
OF AMERICA
KNOW YOURSELF AND YOUR FATHER
GOD ALLAH
THAT YOU MAY LEARN TO LOVE INSTEAD OF HATE
EVERYMAN NEED TO WORSHIP UNDER HIS OWN
VINE AND FIG TREE
THE UNITY OF ASIA
The cover featured the numeral 7, a reflection of Ali’s penchant