Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America

1. "You Remember Dien Bien Phu!" Malcolm X and the Third World Rising

1 “I am a citizen of Asia.” So read the draft card for Malcolm X upon his induction into the Korean War. Malcolm didn’t burn his draft card, as many would later. Instead, he used it as his declaration of independence . And when asked if he had filed a declaration to become a citizen of the United States, he replied, “No.” Hip-hop’s natural mystic Rakim Allah, decades later, in his prophetic song “Casualties of War,” would defy America’s first Gulf War invasion by saying about Iraq, “This is Asia from where I came.” As the Cold War hysteria raged throughout the United States, Malcolm declared his allegiance. This wasn’t the Asia of Mao and Ho. Though it was. And it wasn’t the Asia of Cairo or Karachi. But it was that, too. This was the Nation of Islam’s radical geographic remix of Black origins, a compass of resistance that imagined Black peoples as “Black Asiatics” from the “holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia.”1 This was the “X” marking the spot, what the poet–philosopher Nas would later say on his masterpiece Illmatic is the “Afro-centric Asian, half man, half amazing.” In the post–World War II era, the struggle over the meaning and significance of race was a critical component of U.S. imperial desire for 1 “you remember dien bien phu!” Malcolm X and the Third World Rising A racist society can’t but fight a racist war—this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are the assumptions acted on abroad, and every American Negro knows this, for he, after the American Indian, was the first “Viet Cong” victim. We were bombed first. How, then, can I believe a word you say, and what gives you the right to ask me to die for you? —James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings global control and the domestic consensus needed in order to gain that control. On the one hand, how was the United States going to contend with emerging African and Asian nations who were seeking independence after centuries of European colonial racism? And on the other hand, how was the United States going to deal with Black activists who were making the connections between those liberation movements in Africa and Asia and their own demands for racial justice and equality? Malcolm X’s imaginative geography of resistance coincided with the anticolonial struggles then taking place throughout the Third World. And his conversion to Islam, his embrace of Third World internationalism , and his remapping of Black struggle in the crucible of the Cold War have had an enduring effect on Black political culture. Through the prisms of his shifting Muslim identities, from Nation of Islam firebrand to Sunni Pan-Africanist and Muslim Internationalist, Malcolm X challenged the very foundational assumptions that undergirded the logic of the post–World War II U.S. ascension to global power, the fulfillment of Henry Luce’s manifesto “the American Century,” and the Cold War liberal orthodoxy that would so limit and contain the possibilities of not only Black liberation but also the national liberation movements taking place in Africa and Asia. As such, this chapter explores how, for Malcolm X, the Muslim Third World became both a literal and an ideological backdrop to his unfolding narrative of resistance and internationalism. From Mecca to Bandung, Cairo to Algiers, Harlem to Palestine, and beyond, the Muslim Third World held a central and iconic place within his worldview. Whether influenced by the political compass and radical redefinition of the self that Mecca offered, to the historical significance of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, to the linking of ancient Black greatness with Islam that Egypt embodied, to Algiers, Palestine, Harlem, and every place in between, Malcolm’s travels, speeches, and political activity forged an imaginative geography of the Muslim International that envisioned Black peoples not as national minorities but as global majorities. As Black activists increasingly tied their demands for equality to the national liberation struggles of the Third World, the Truman Doctrine, McCarthyism, and the Red Scare sought to erase the insurgent ideas of U.S.-based Black anticolonialists who critiqued U.S. foreign intervention in Africa and Asia, a Cold War policy that sought to destroy 2 | “You Remember Dien Bien Phu!” those very same movements that Black freedom was connected to. As the...