The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions

Four Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History

four ⭈ Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History EDWARD E. CURTIS IV The fallen sons and daughters of the Asiatic Nation of North America need to learn to love instead of hate; and to know their higher self and lower self. This is the uniting of the Holy Koran of Mecca, for teaching and instructing all Moorish Americans, etc. The key of civilization was and is in the hands of the Asiatic nations. The Moorish, who were ancient Moabites, and the founders of the Holy City of Mecca. The Egyptians who were the Hamathites, and of a direct descendant of Mizraim, the Arabians, the seed of Hagar, Japanese and Chinese. The Hindoos of India, the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Hittites, and Moabites of the land of Canaan. The Asiatic nations of North, South, and Central America; the Moorish Americans and Mexicans of North America, Brazilians, Argentinians and Chilians in South America. Columbians, Nicaraguans, and the natives of San Salvador in Central America, etc. All of these are Moslems. The Turks are the true descendants of Hagar, who are the chief protectors of the Islamic Creed of Mecca; beginning from Mohammed the First, the founder of the uniting of Islam, by the command of the great universal God-Allah. —Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple 45:1–7 Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple 71 Established in 1925 by Timothy Drew, the Chicago-based Moorish Science Temple (MST) taught that African Americans were Moors from northwest Africa. Like all other Asiatic nonwhite peoples, argued their founder, their proper religion was Islam. Noble Drew Ali, as the prophet became known, insisted that this knowledge of black people’s true national, religious, and racial origins would set them along a path of economic and political self-determination as well as moral renewal. In 1927, the prophet recorded his views for posterity in the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple, and though he died in 1929, his movement spread to other northern U.S. cities and beyond.1 Arthur Hu√ Fauset’s groundbreaking picture of the MST was among the first scholarly treatments of an African American Muslim community to appear in print. Though published in 1944, Fauset’s short ten-page chapter on the movement stood for at least two decades as an authoritative source. When J. Milton Yinger published Religion, Society, and the Individual: An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion in 1957, he included Fauset’s 1944 Moorish Science Temple chapter.2 In the 1960s, the two most carefully researched books about Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam relied on Fauset as a main source on the MST, which was depicted as a precursor to the Nation of Islam.3 Fauset’s chapter had staying power. In fact, little new scholarship on the MST appeared until the 1990s and 2000s. This new scholarship was spurred by a renewed interest in the MST on the part of black studies scholars, as well as the development of African American Islam and Islam in America as sub- fields in religious studies.4 While much of this new scholarship surpassed Fauset’s in its presentation of data, a vexing theoretical problem first encountered by Fauset continued to characterize the analysis of the MST. The problem emerged in attempting to answer questions about the origins of the group. Even though Fauset’s chapter on the MST was full of rich ethnographic descriptions of the group, his analysis was concerned mainly with its psychological, political, and social benefits.5 Avoiding cultural analysis of the movement was Fauset’s answer to those scholars, like Melville J. Herskovits , who depicted black culture in heroic, but static and nearly atavistic terms.6 Fauset’s analysis of the contemporary contexts and functions of African American religious groups provided a useful antidote to Herskovits’s ahistorical portrait of black religions in the United States. By stressing the larger contexts in which black persons lived, Fauset’s alternative narrative of black religion showed that the ‘‘African ’s religious character’’ was neither monolithic nor unchanging. But in devoting relatively little analysis to the historical origins of these new religious groups, Fauset ducked a question that would reappear with a vengeance in 72 New Religious Movement(s) of the Great Migration Era later African American studies scholarship. Herskovits’s explorations of African retentions in African American culture were revived and reconstructed...