Malcolm X and Blackamerican Islamic Liberation Theology

our individual sorrows. As Judith Butler pointed out in her Time article (April 21, 2021, https://time.com/5953396/ judith-butler-safe-world-individuality/), “However differently we register this pandemic we understand it as global; it brings home the fact that we are implicated in a shared world. The capacity of living human creatures to affect one another can be a matter of life or death. Because so many resources are not equitably shared, and so many have only a small or vanished share of the world, we cannot recognize the pandemic as global without facing those inequalities.”

Unfortunately, not all pundits and politicians agree with her, for some would rather spend their time manufacturing their own truths and worrying about the next election. Over the last year up until today, it grieves me to watch such divisive pandering while people are dying.

One hopes that this country’s leadership will soon understand that we Americans are as bruised and battered by the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and our raw, sustained racial reckoning as the British people were by the devastation brought about by World War II. As a consequence, in 1948, Britain’s political leadership stepped up by creating a more just, inclusive single payer national healthcare system that today outperforms the U.S. healthcare by every important metric, including cost (See the recent PBS Special “Health Care: America vs. the World,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BytzrjEfyfA).

One waits for our politicians to stop their self-serving partisan fighting long enough to face the raw truth that Covid19 has revealed — our much too expensive health care “system” provides subpar care. This is a golden opportunity to find our humanity and fix it now!

As Malcolm X famously said in a letter written during his hajj: “I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda. … I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole” (“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”). ih

James (Jimmy) Jones, DMin, is professor emeritus, Manhattanville College, and board vice chair, executive vice president, The Islamic Seminary of America.

Hajj and the path of self-transformation

BY EMIN POLJAREVIC

Have you ever wondered why Malcolm X has a beard in some of his TV interviews and photos, while in most video recordings he does not? His beard is a cultural and religious symbol for his last major transformation — from Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik el-Shabbaz — initiated by his hajj.

In the last year of his life, his religious and political understanding takes another radical turn marked in part by his immersion into Islamic teachings and his travel experiences, including numerous meetings with Muslim activists, dignitaries, scholars and students overseas.

This year is also perhaps the least studied period of his life. And yet it contains some of his most lasting messages and insights — ones that continue to impact the ethical and moral trajectory of some contemporary Muslim youth’s struggle against anti-Black racism and Islamophobia particularly in North America and Europe.

From his official break with the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Elijah Muhammad (March 1964) to his assassination (Feb. 21, 1965), Malcolm underwent a radical shift in his theology and activist thought. During these tempestuous 11 months, he performed the hajj; made two tours of the Middle East and various newly independent North, East and West African states; and briefly stopped over in Europe. He met with no less than 33 African and Arab heads of states and numerous anticolonial leaders, students and activists, all of whom heard him deliver a damning analysis of his country’s systemic racism.

During the same period, he took an intensive course in Sunni Islamic teachings at Egypt’s al-Azhar University. This training was an extension of Malcolm’s initial interactions with Elijah Muhammad’s sons, the young Warith Deen [upon announcing his distancing from his father’s ideology, he changed his last name’s spelling to Mohammed] and Akbar Muhammad, both of whom were well versed in and later embraced Sunni Islam. His older sister, Ella Collins, herself a Sunni Muslim since 1959, was a key supporter of this educational process and religious transformation. Equally

MALCOLM’S HAJJ CAUSES HIM TO NO LONGER REGARD WHITENESS AS NECESSARILY PHYSICAL OR BIOLOGICAL FEATURES, FOR “WHITE PEOPLE WHOM I HAVE MET, WHO HAVE ACCEPTED ISLAM, THEY DON’T REGARD THEMSELVES AS WHITE BUT AS HUMAN BEINGS. AND BY LOOKING UPON THEMSELVES AS HUMAN BEINGS, THEIR WHITENESS TO THEM ISN’T THE YARDSTICK OF PERFECTION OR HONOR OR ANYTHING ELSE…”

important is Malcolm’s exposure to Sunni Islam by Ahmed Osman, a young Sudanese Dartmouth College student, and later connections with Dr. Mahmoud Shawarbi, an Egyptian activist-scholar and imam associated with the Islamic Cultural Center in Manhattan, both of whom contributed significantly to his religious evolution.

Malcom X’s core commitment to Blackamericans’ freedom and self-worth manifested itself early in his NOI activist life and remained strong until the end of his life, despite his deep disappointment with the NOI leader’s defense of his moral failures. Rejecting the NOI’s narrow theology of Blackamerican separatism, he focused his activism on developing a sense of urgency among his audiences: improving his people’s sociopolitical conditions, spiritual restitution of collective dignity and, subsequently, liberation from centuries of racial oppression. His newly acquired and hajj-reinforced understanding of Islam’s basic tenets enabled him, together with his activist determination, to transcend his people’s collective struggle for physical liberation and launch the equally important fight for their spiritual liberation.

In his letter to his family and supporters back home, he states, “We [the pilgrims] were truly all the same, because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude” (Herb Boyd and & Ilyasah Shabazz et. al., “The Diary of Malcolm X: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” [Chicago, Illinois: Third World Press, 2013]).

His diary entry of April 21 1964, reads, “People from every rank, from king to beggar, are all here [at Muzdalifa] eating & sleeping alike — of every color & class — the Hajj equalizes all’’ (ibid.). These words give a sense of his newly acquired priorities and a keen analysis of some of the major problems that Blackamericans and other non-White people have — and still — experience.

His hajj experiences and travels through Muslim-majority societies transformed him from the main NOI minister into a Blackamerican Muslim liberation theologian. A eulogy-like entry in his diary from April 25, 1965, reveals his theological development, “The brotherhood, people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming together as one, which proved to me the power of the One God. This also gave me an opening to preach to them a quick sermon on American racism & its evils [...] For me the earth’s most explosive evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the West. The Hajj makes one out of everyone, even the king, the rich, the priest loses his identity (rank) on the Hajj — everyone forgets self & turns to God & out of his submission to the One God comes a brotherhood in which all are equals” (ibid.)

His search for the moral and ethical equality of all people compels him to intensify an information campaign that primarily targets his own people: You must first and foremost reform your mental state by liberating yourselves from your centuries-long “psychological castration” and “self-hate” (Malcolm X, and Alex Haley, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” [New York: Ballantine Books, 1965]).

As his goal is to reinstate his audiences’ humanity, his answer to the question of equal rights goes well beyond those given by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

Malcolm X argues that Blackamericans need to reconstitute themselves as a people by re-creating their collective dignity around their common history and collective suffering in order to achieve equality in American society. At its core, therefore, the civil rights struggle isn’t really about a citizen’s rights

Gravesite of Hajj Malik El Shabazz and Betty El Shabaz, Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester, N.Y.

at all, but about reaffirming people’s basic human rights and self-worth.

Theologically speaking, human rights emerge from God’s creative act of humanity from a single soul (Adam) and appointing humanity as Earth’s vicegerent. Any subsequent denial of a person’s dignity and right of existence therefore implies the denial of God and Its sovereignty over creation. Malcolm asserts that Islam, through the rites of hajj and other practices, contains convincing evidence for the possibility of spiritual reformation and is an authentic method through which Blackamericans and all other peoples can reconstitute their dignity. In other words, Black lives matter because all lives matter, and vice versa.

What stands in the way of this process is the repressive, idolatrous and destructive nature of White supremacy. Malcolm argues that this attitude enables the social denigration of anyone who doesn’t fit the established profile of a worthy human being and, by extension, citizen. It both facilitates political oppression and marginalizes anyone who doesn’t conform to the system’s ideals. His analysis effectively institutes the concept of “systemic racism.”

Malcolm X identifies the idolatry of his time and place — and perhaps even of our own — as White supremacy, a system that presents “whiteness” as the supreme signifier of being fully “human.” Anything that contradicts this “truth” becomes undesirable and subordinate to “whiteness.” Malcolm’s hajj causes him to no longer regard whiteness as necessarily physical or biological features, for “white people whom I have met, who have accepted Islam, they don’t regard themselves as white but as human beings. And by looking upon themselves as human beings, their whiteness to them isn’t the yardstick of perfection or honor or anything else. And, therefore, this creates within them an attitude that is different from the attitude of the white that you meet here in America […] it was in Mecca that I realized that white is actually an attitude more so than it’s a color. And I can prove it, because among Negroes we have Negroes who are as white as some white people” (Stephen Drury Smith and Catherine Ellis (eds.), “Free All Along: The Robert Penn Warren Civil Rights Interviews,” [New York: The New Press, 2019]).

Just as jahiliya (spiritual ignorance) was the hallmark of the Quraysh’s vanity and oppressive nature, White supremacy has been the hallmark of the U.S.’s nationalist self-image and power structure. This form of jahiliya seems to be equally based on systems that deliberately perpetuate inequality and injustice regardless of the amount of melanin in one’s skin. Malcolm’s Islamic liberation theology is born out of his struggle for personal redemption and grounded in his high level of perseverance and desire to overcome the effects of White supremacy. Echoes of his struggle can be heard through subsequent generations of activists well beyond North America. His last attempts to implement his version of liberation theology was based on including people in a broader struggle and collective mobilization via the social and religious organizing of poor and oppressed people.

Malcolm’s hajj experiences reveal the high potential of both a spiritual and a political transformation during the global mass meeting of people intent upon answering Prophet Ibrahim’s call to serve God. Borne out of these experiences, his liberation theology shows how a principled commitment to the freedom of and justice for an oppressed people, if based upon universal human dignity, diametrically opposes this idolatrous worldview of White supremacy and its gospel of racial chauvinism. Pilgrims of all skin-tones, whether performing their hajj or making their way through life, ought to critically reflect on this reality and then act upon it, justly. ih

Emin Poljarevic (associate professor, Department of Theology, Uppsala University, Sweden) has published numerous scholarly articles on Malcolm X. His latest one is a co-edited special issue of the Swedish Theological Quarterly (2020), “The Political Theology of Malcolm X” (https://journals.lub.lu.se/STK/issue/ view/3128). His podcast lecture, “The Critical Method of Malcolm X,” is available at https://podtail.se/podcast/religion-och-teologi/ emin-poljarevic-the-critical-method-of-malcolm-x.