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

Chapter Four: The Ethics of the Black Muslim Body

TheEthicsoftheBlackMuslimBody Islam has made a woman of me— the woman that was supposed to be. It has made me respect our men, It has made me a queen again. The women in Islam are beautiful to see Just the way I’ve wanted to be. The clothes they wear are neat and clean, The lengths they are befit a queen. Beautiful sisters all can tell Everything they do—is done so well. When you see them, you know who they are— Their beauty stands out like a shining star. I give thanks to Allah every day For guiding me to the righteous way. Black women everywhere, hear what I say, follow the Messenger, you’ll get respect this way. Black women everywhere, reclaim your own, Ascend onto your rightful throne. —Sister Linda X, “The Queen of the Earth,” Muhammad Speaks, 4 March 1966 chapter 4 F rom slave times until the present day, the care and protection of the black body has been a central concern in the formation of African American culture.1 For much of American history, persons of African descent have been denied the most basic rights to protect themselves and their families from bodily harm and humiliation.2 Even today, dramatic events such as the 1998 lynching of James Byrd in Texas or the sexual assault of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by New York City police in 1997 continue to show how bodily safety can become a key concern of African American life. As a result, the black body has been and continues to be an important symbol of the struggle for black liberation more generally.3 In the past, some African Americans have responded to the challenge of bodily safety by vigorously asserting the right to defend oneself against violence. Antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, for example, famously declared that a “Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every home.”4 But African Americans have also proposed many other strategies for the protection of the black body, as well—some of these have been explicitly political, while others have been more social and cultural in nature. To cite one example from this tradition in African American culture, nineteenth-century female poet and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins emphasized that individual black bodies, including female bodies, could be protected from slavery and other forms of violence through the collective actions of black families, the black race, and the American nation.5 As scholar Michael Bennett has argued, “Watkins’ bodily politics is based on an understanding that freedom can only be won through acts of resistance within the domain of power,” including her own racial community and the nation-state.6 Many of Watkins’s late-nineteenth-century black peers took a similar approach, but also emphasized what might be regarded as the social and cultural dimensions of the struggle for equality. Advocates of what Wilson Jeremiah Moses dubbed “civilizationism” called for the disciplining, beautifying, and cleansing of the black body, assuming that a “civilized” black body would command more respect and recognition from whites. As clergyman and missionary Alexander Crummell explained in his 1895 Atlanta and Cotton States Exhibition speech, becoming civilized meant recognizing the “body, with its desires and appetites and passions as a sacred gift, . . . under the law of divine obligation.”7 Elijah Muhammad and a broad array of  members, who might be regarded ethics of the bl ack muslim body : 97 as twentieth-century heirs of these nineteenth-century African American traditions , shared the goals of protecting and civilizing the black body, which was constructed as a sacred gift from Allah. Like the poet Watkins, members of the  insisted that the protection of individual black bodies would only be possible through the nurturing of black families and the uplift of the black race. Unlike Watkins, however, they gave up on the idea that the American nationstate would protect them. Echoing the sentiments of nineteenth-century black predecessors like Crummell, Elijah Muhammad and his cadre of leaders and intellectuals also promoted the “civilizing” of the black bodies, associating civilized behavior with the values of thrift, sexual propriety, industriousness, and temperance, which they found sorely lacking in many of their black contemporaries . They argued that too many black men were emasculated, impure, and lazy, and blamed white supremacy and blacks themselves for the sad state of the black body, and by extension, the black race. In appropriating racist images of...