Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975

Chapter Two: Making a Muslim Messenger: Defending the Islamic Legitimacy of Elijah Muhammad

chapter 2 MakingaMuslimMessenger DefendingtheIslamicLegitimacy ofElijahMuhammad Silently he comes with the multitudes of history, / Treading upon the royal battleground, receiving salutations from the Kingdom of the persecuted. / Souls, ageless, restless, weary, awakening!!! / Wounded gladiators of the lost, whose blood paints the face of the cross. / The black rose of civilization weeping from centuries of peril. / Muhammad tills the fields of damnation, ignorance, suppression, and laziness. / Tenderly he plants the seed in the fertile valleys of love. / The sacred rays of Islam replenish the followers of / Death with Life, revealing Love!! Freedom!!! Justice!!! / From the bowels of our America we bloom, among the gardens we strive. / The fields of the dead give forth a fragrance as truth and peace unfold. / Throughout this nation of bondage, the essence of souls rise to give praise to our Savior. —Joan X Bennett, Muhammad Speaks, 23 April 1965 I n 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In this moving and dramatic plea for support from white Christian clergy, King warned that the failure to bolster the nonviolent civil rights struggle would only strengthen the hand of extremism, in all its forms. He cited Elijah Muhammad’s  as a primary example of the dangers inherent in doing nothing to change the inequities of Jim Crow. The , according to King, was an expression of “bitterness” and “hatred” that was “nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination.” He offered to stand between the forces of complacency in the black community and “the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.” If it were not for the nonviolent civil rights struggle, King said, southern streets might be “flowing with floods of blood” and all of America might be heading for a “frightening racial nightmare.”1 That Martin Luther King Jr. could reference the  as a primary example of hatred and despair speaks to its emergence as a potent symbol in American national discourse during the 1960s.2 But his criticism, as outlined in the introduction , was but one of the assaults against the movement during this period. Journalists, government officials, and Muslims, including both immigrant and indigenous Americans, also criticized the . Rather than framing the  as an example of poor race relations, many Muslims questioned the Islamic authenticity of the group, arguing that Elijah Muhammad’s teachings violated basic Islamic theological tenets and preached black nationalism rather than Islamic universalism. Throughout the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the  sought to counter such criticism by defending the Islamic legitimacy of their Messenger of Allah. Like other new religious movements, the movement relied upon the support of established mainstream religious authorities, especially foreign Muslim leaders, to accredit their movement and their leader as genuinely Islamic.3 The deployment of these foreign endorsements in the official discourse of the  shows the extent to which religious and political voices from Africa and Asia had begun to compete with domestic voices like that of Martin Luther King Jr. for the ear of black America. The era of decolonization and the rise of newly independent states after World War II only accelerated a transnational exchange of liberation discourses that, since the nineteenth century, had linked the domestic struggles making a muslim messenger : 37 of African Americans to those of other persons of color around the globe.4 As the psychological, political, and cultural impact of African and Asian voices on black American consciousness continued to increase during this era, leaders of the  drew on the expertise of foreign Muslims to buoy the religious claims of their leader. But many homegrown African American Muslim intellectuals in the  also mounted a defense of Elijah Muhammad. Generally speaking, these figures were either directly employed by or closely associated with Elijah Muhammad himself . I have called them intellectuals not only because they devoted significant energy and time to articulating reasoned arguments about Elijah Muhammad’s religious thought, but also because they were a professional class of persons who were recognized at a public level for producing speech and other forms of intellectual expression. Most of the intellectuals referred to here were either ministers who spent countless hours interpreting Elijah Muhammad’s message to devoted followers and potential converts or columnists who offered interpretations of Muhammad’s message on a frequent basis in the Muhammad Speaks newspaper. Most were also close to the center of power in...