The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America by Jacob S. Dorman (review)

We're only a couple of pages in when Jacob Dorman breaks the news: Noble Drew Ali was not a native of North Carolina, nor was he born as Timothy (or Thomas) Drew. No, the man who would come to establish the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) was born as John Walter Brister, a native of Carlisle, Kentucky (6, 22, 124). The evidence: a mole on the right side of his nose, which Dorman identified by blowing up and comparing two photographs. "A microhistorical proof has seldom rested on such microscopic evidence," he concludes with a flair of drama (11).

Dorman's monograph—his second, following the well-received and more conventionally academic Chosen People (2012)—reads like a detective novel. To some degree, Dorman's aims seem to align with other scholars intrigued by the quest for the "true" origins of Black religious leaders (the many theories that exist about Fard Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, are perhaps the most obvious example); a quest that, when it begins to border the sensational, can become problematic. Dorman's revelation and the book as a whole are, however, evidently the result of over fifteen years of meticulous archival research that offers more than a new interpretation of Noble Drew Ali's identity; it presents a new interpretation of the role and position of Islam in Black—and white—America.¹

We meet Brister at the age of thirteen, as bandleader of a famous "kid band" that performed on Broadway. At eighteen, Brister exchanged his cornet for a turban, performing as a "hindoo magician" who went by the name of "Armmah Sotanki." Between 1898 and 1913, the "Sotanki" troupe, which also included Brister's wife Eva Alexander (the princess of the title), would don a number of "Oriental disguises" as part of their stage magic acts (103–5). A skilled snake-handler, Eva would soon outshine her husband in fame, even when the latter, upon taking up residency in Chicago, "resumed his musical career" sometime after 1902 (113). It is at this point in the story that Dorman delivers another bombshell revelation: digging up a record from the Freeman, he announces that in 1914, Walter Brister was pronounced dead (115). Dorman speculates that Brister may have taken on the identity of his half-brother, Thomas Drew. At some point during 1913 or 1914, he began to identify as "Moslem" and started the Canaanite Temple, in a barbershop in New Jersey.

Brister/Drew returned to Chicago in 1925 where he began preaching on street corners, applying "everything he had learned as a performer, magician, and healer to the new role of Noble Drew Ali, but also incorporat[ing] a strong new element of religious reform and economic solidarity" (185) as well as a heavy dose of patriotism and respectability politics. Dorman convincingly depicts Brister as a religious bricoleur—or "cultural virtuoso" (201)—who created a new identity and movement based on a wide variety of sources, including the rituals of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine and Rosicrucian and Theosophical writings. Only a few years later, on July 20, 1929, Noble Drew Ali passed away. His death remains a mystery. While others have attributed it to tuberculosis or police violence, Dorman floats the possibility that the Prophet's intimate connections with Chicago's corrupt political scene—to which he dedicates a few chapters—might have had something to do with it.

Shedding new light on Noble Drew Ali, The Princess and the Prophet will prove indispensable for those interested in (this) Black esoteric religion; the more so because, as Dorman emphasizes in his Epilogue, the Prophet has had a lasting influence on African-American Islam. For instance, the Nation of Islam, whose founder is rumored to have been a member of the MSTA but...