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  • One Black Allah: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955–1970
  • Melani McAlister (bio)

The Christian church itself—again, as distinguished from some of its ministers—sanctified and rejoiced in the conquests of the flag, and encouraged, if it did not formulate, the belief that conquest, and the resulting relative well-being of the Western population, was proof of the favor of God. God had come a long way from the dessert—but then, so had Allah, though in a very different direction. God, going north and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, had become—for all practical purposes anyway—black.

—James Baldwin, 1962 1

The Arabs, as a colored people, should and must make more effort to reach the millions of colored people in America who are related to the Arabs by blood. These millions of colored peoples would be completely in sympathy with the Arab cause!

—Malcolm X, 22 1960 2

Two events, separated by just over a year, in two very different spheres of cultural activity, marked the extraordinary influence of Islam in the African American community in the 1960s. Two prominent African American men, one an athlete, the other a poet and a playwright, took highly visible and conscious steps away from their old identities and affiliations and began instead to articulate a black [End Page 622] consciousness and politics based on the teachings of Islam. These two public transformations—rituals of self-identification and self-naming—point toward an often-neglected genealogy of black political and cultural affiliation: an African American imagined community in which the Arab Middle East is central.

On 25 February 1964, the twenty-three-year old fighter Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston and took the world heavyweight boxing title, the most lucrative prize in professional sports. On the day after his triumph, Clay, who had already become one of the most well-known and controversial figures in boxing world, announced at a press conference that he was a Muslim. 3 Until that day, Clay had been known as a playful, rather apolitical youngster with a fondness for pink Cadillacs, extravagant bragging, and comic poetry. 4 But in the months before the fight, rumors of his association with the Nation of Islam (NOI) had circulated widely; he had been seen frequently in the company of Malcolm X, whom he had invited to his training camp in Miami. 5 A few weeks after the victory, Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, bestowed on Clay his Muslim name, Muhammad Ali. Ali’s victory and subsequent announcement were widely reported; his association with the NOI was often viewed with skepticism or anger. In the spring of 1964, when Malcolm X left the Nation, Ali stayed, and quickly became the most famous Black Muslim in the country and one of the Nation of Islam’s most prominent spokespersons. 6 Just a few months later, Ali embarked on a tour of Africa and the Middle East. When he returned, he announced to the press: “I’m not an American; I’m a black man.” 7

In 1966, Ali’s status as political figure took a new direction when he refused his induction into the U.S. Army, saying “I’m a member of the Black Muslims, and we don’t go to no wars unless they’re declared by Allah himself. I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” 8 That refusal—that risky stand on behalf of the politics of his religious belief—transformed Ali’s image: he soon became one of the most visible and influential antiwar figures in the country. He was, in the words of poet Sonia Sanchez, “a cultural resource for everyone in that time,” a man whose refusal to fight in Vietnam became an emblem of the far reaching influence of the black nationalist critique of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. 9

In 1965, a little over a year after Muhammad Ali’s highly public conversion, the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones left his literary circles [End Page 623] in Greenwich Village to move uptown to Harlem, where he founded...

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