This lecture
is based on the following article by Prof. Moustafa Bayoumi.
Bayoumi, Moustafa. East of the Sun (West of the Moon):
Islam, the Ahmadis, and African America. Journal of Asian
American Studies 4:3:3 (2001). 251-263. Copyrighted
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reprinted with permission
of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Prologue
This article attempts to
intervene in the standard narrative of African American Islam,
where ideas of separation and exclusion reign. Far less
inscribed, however, is a history of African American Islam
which views the faith as a religion of universal belonging but
one which arrives at it through a particular aesthetics of
living. Music is an important part of this story and of this
article and, when it was originally delivered, the paper began
with Yusef Lateef's "Meditation" (Prestige, 1957) and
concluded with John Coltrane's "Acknowledgment" (Impulse,
1964).
Sepia Tones
Traveling somewhere between living in a racialized state and
stating the life of a race lies the story of African American
Islam. Found in narratives of struggle and spirit, of
edification and propagation, of incarceration, incarnation,
and ideology, and of Blacks, Asians, and Middle Easterners,
this is a tale seldom told and even less often heard. When it
does get some play, the way is in a single key. Separation is
sounded brassily as the dominant chord, modulating being minor
into a major ideology. The dissonances of dissidence. From
Moorish Science to Garveyism, from Elijah's honor to Malcolm's
rage, Islam is understood as a tool of politics, pliant to
complaint and made to speak a language of plain truth against
[End Page 251] the tricknology of white folk. The soul almost
disappears, replaced with an iconography of militarized Islam,
boots and bowties battling white supremacy, dividing One
Nation Under God with the Nation of Islam.
The fate of Malcolm
concludes this narrative by necessity. Epiphanies of a
universal spirit clash with narrow-minded parochialisms in a
death match of blood and assassination. Malcolm is lionized
and history, tragically, marches on. But did this battle
between the particular and the universal, between Islam as a
unique expression of African American political aspirations
for separation and Islam as a universal religion of belonging
first find its articulation with Malcolm's rupture with Elijah
Muhammad, or has the customary story we have up until now been
unable to comprehend the complexity of Islam in the African
American experience? Is the divide between the universal and
the particular so easily drawn as a picture in black and
white, or are there sepia tones of black, brown, and beige
that call out to be seen? This article is an examination of
the browns and beiges, a look at the notes and tones of the
Muslim experience.
I would like to start with
three tableaus, one involving an Asian immigrant, another
looking at Brother Malcolm, and the third a study in sound.
All three are signifying the idea of Islam in the United
States, finding a context in which to belong along with a
place to disagree, and providing me a text with which to
continue.
The Mufti
Islam in African America has a history as long as memory, when
Muslim slaves from Africa wrapped their faith tightly around
them as invisible armor against daily degradation. But the
practice does not seem to continue. Religious revivalists in
the early part of the twentieth century, mostly in the North
where large numbers of new migrants sought the strength of a
community, found populations willing to listen and eager to
believe. In 1913, Timothy Drew donned a fez and claimed
Moroccan heritage for his people in the Moorish Science
Temple. For all its imaginative reconstruction, the Moorish
Science Temple has little under the surface to connect it to
worldwide Islam. But its spirit of displacing the term "Negro"
from Blacks, of thinking of darker skinned peoples as Asiatics
and Moroccans, [End Page 252] of allying Drew Ali with "Jesus,
Mohamed, Buddha, and Confucius" 1 is part of the productive
tension between separatism and universalism that will follow
all African American Islam throughout the rest of the century.
But it would be in the next decade, with the growth of the
Ahmadiyya community, that the Asian connection forges ahead.
One night in January 1920, a
gentle and bespectacled Muslim by the name of Mufti Muhammad
Sadiq left London for New York to become one of the first
"Pioneers in the spiritual Colonization of the Western world."
2 This phrase, conveyed by the then leader of the Ahmadiyya
movement in India, Mirza Mahmud Ahmad, to the Mufti's work,
interestingly linked Ahmadiyya missionary activity with
British rule and with its own missionary activity, along with
the pioneer mythology of the New World. The Ahmadis had
objected to the manner in which British missionaries were
defaming Islam by reviling the Prophet Muhammad, and set out
not just to correct this error but also to illustrate how
Jesus was a prophet of Islam. They had observed how
missionaries in the East had succeeded in misrepresenting
Islam and felt that a proactive agenda of missionizing was
needed to counteract this damage. Recent Hindu-only movements
in India also fueled the drive to survive in a world of plural
faiths. "Reason itself revolts against this exclusiveness,"
wrote Ahmadi founder Ghulam Ahmed. 3
The Ahmadiyya community
began in late-nineteenth-century India with the figure of
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a charismatic reformer who believed he had
received divine revelations, starting in 1876, requiring him
to promote the unity of all religions as manifest through
Islam, whose chief object is "to establish the unity and
majesty of God on earth, to extirpate idolatry and to weld all
nations into one by collecting all of them around one faith."
4 It is a particular universalism. In seeking this unity,
Ahmad would call himself "the Mahdi of Islam ... the Promised
Messiah of Christianity and Islam, and an avatar of Krishna
for the Hindus," 5 a claim which would ultimately oust him and
his movement from the mainstream Muslim establishment. We
should note how Ahmad's ideas are an attempt to confront
communal feelings in India of his day, and how this
relationship between faith and nation would resonate in the
American Ahmadiyya movement. [End Page 253]
We can note then the links
between the putative universalism of colonialism, which saw
the spread of Western values as a mission manifest in direct
and indirect colonial rule (la mission civilisatrice), to the
missionary activities of the Ahmadis. Ahmadi missionizing,
particularly in its pioneering New World aspects, thus borrows
heavily from the script of European expansion and accepts
modernity's commonplace division between the spiritual and
secular worlds ("the spiritual colonization") where the East
is spiritual and the West material. A significant difference,
however, divides the methodologies of Western expansionism and
Ahmadi missionary activity, for the Ahmadis were addressing
the rest of the world as a colonized people and the religious
foundation of their work is thus by definition a minority
religion, unencumbered by state apparatuses or ideology. Its
universalism percolates from below rather than being dusted
from above, thus achieving a kind of dissident political
flavor separate from the tastes of dominant rule.
In 1920, the movement, fresh
from its missionary successes around the world (including
England and West Africa) and full of the optimism that the new
world is supposed to hold, sent its first missionary to the
United States. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq boarded his ship in London
and, each day, entertained his fellow passengers with his
erudition. "Say, if you love Allah, follow me; then will Allah
love you," he is reported to have intoned. Before the end of
the trip, Sadiq is said to have "converted four Chinese men,
one American, one Syrian, and one Yugoslavian to Islam."
The American authorities
were hardly as sanguine with Sadiq's sagacity. They seized him
before he could leave the ship, accusing him of coming to the
United States to practice polygamy, and placed him in a
Philadelphia detention house. So began a dark hour for the
gentle Sadiq. Seven weeks later, he was eventually released
but not before making nineteen other converts in jail, from
Jamaica, British Guyana, Azores, Poland, Russia, Germany,
Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and France.
What Sadiq
found when he reached the welcoming shores of the U.S. was a
history of institutional racism and Asian exclusion laws for
which he was unprepared. White nationalism would already be
working against the Mufti's message. Later he would write
that "if Jesus Christ comes to America and applies for
admission to the United States under the immigration laws,
[he] would not be allowed to enter this country because:
[End Page 254
Prof. Bayoumi explained the
Islamic
roots in
John
Coltrane's
jazz music.
1. He comes from a land
which is out of the permitted zone. 2. He has no money with
him; 3. He is not decently dressed. 4. His hands have holes in
the palms. 5. He remains bare-footed, which is a disorderly
act. 6. He is against fighting for the country. 7. He believes
in making wine when he thinks necessary; 8.He has no
credential to show that he is an authorized preacher. 9. He
believes in practicing the Law of Moses [polygamy]." 6
Originally conceiving of his work as broad-based, ecumenical,
multiracial missionary activity, Sadiq soon realized that
Whites were bitter and fearful of his message and African
Americans interested and open. Early reports indicate that
several Garveyites attended his lectures and were among his
first converts, and the white press seemed generally baffled
and lost in its own prejudices when considering the movement.
One account tells us that "all the audience has adopted Arabic
names.... There is the very dark Mr. Augustus, who used to
belong to St. Marks church in this city [Chicago], but who now
sings a pretty Arabic prayer and acts rather sphinx-like. Half
a dozen Garvey cohorts are counted, one in his resplendent
uniform. There is one pretty yellow girl and another not so
pretty." 7
The fact is that the
Ahmadiyya movement attracted women and men. It formed a
community made up of black, brown, and white people in a
scattering of cities across the eastern half of the country
(and St. Louis). But it mostly attracted African Americans,
who were also given early leadership roles. 8 Participating in
Islam vitally meant discovering the history of black
contributions to Islam, a topic generating some interest
broadly in the black press at the time. In these years,
articles appeared in The Crisis (1913), the Messenger (1927),
and Opportunity (1930) about Islam, notably about Bilal, the
Abyssinian slave freed by Prophet Muhammad and Islam's first
muezzin, illustrating Islam's historic connection with Africa.
9 It is important to underline that Islam within the Ahmadiyya
community was not considered a religion just for Blacks but a
religion in which Blacks had an alternative universal history
to which to pledge allegiance. Christianity and narrow
nationalisms allowed no such thing, as The Moslem Sunrise, the
Ahmadi journal argued. In 1923, it printed a half-page
exhortation on "the real solution of the Negro Question"
calling on African Americans to see that [End Page 255]
Christian profiteers brought
you out of your native lands of Africa and in Christianizing
you made you forget the religion and language of your
forefathers--which were Islam and Arabic. You have experienced
Christianity for so many years and it has proved to be no
good. It is a failure. Christianity cannot bring real
brotherhood to the nations. So, now leave it alone. And join
Islam, the real faith of Universal Brotherhood. 10
Universal brotherhood, of course, sounds similar to Universal
Negro, as in the Improvement Organization, and links should be
made between the philosophy of Garveyism and the Ahmadis, but
again not simply through the lens of separatism but a
reconfigured universalism. Considering the racial and
religious divisions in the world, the Ahmadis reinterpreted
the Islamic concept of tawheed, the one-ness of God, as
unifying the world, people, and faith around Islam (as Ghulam
Ahmad wanted for India). In the American context, then, Ahmadi
thought opened a critical space for race in the realm of the
sacred. In this way, African Americans could metaphorically
travel beyond the confines of national identities. They could
become "Asiatics" and remain Black, could be proud of their
African heritage and feel a sense of belonging to and
participation with Asia. Being plural in this scheme meant not
having to feel the psychic tear of double consciousness, but a
way of living wholly in the holy. This ecumenicalism could be
very powerful, both spiritually and politically. By being
opened-palmed about life when the secular world is clenching
fists at you meant that your pluralist unity viewed the
divisions of the world as contemptibly parochial.
By 1940, the movement could
claim around ten thousand converts. Its impact would be wider
still, and in his early years it would reach the ears of
Malcolm X.
Brother Malcolm
Malcolm X, the eloquent minister of information for Elijah
Muhammad, is commonly seen as speaking the fire of separatism
and black pride until his fateful Hajj in 1964 tamed his
message, as he discovered the true universal spirit of Islam.
Conventional as this story is, with its Augustinian turns of
the will, it fails when confronted with history. The rise and
development [End Page 256] of Malcolm's message is a story of
the conflict between the particular universalism of Ahmadi-type
Islam against the more narrow confines of Nation of Islam
creed. 11 When we understand this, we can view the
intellectual development of Malcolm as a way of thinking
through the role of faith in determining consciousness, and
that that activity itself for Malcolm was hardly a settled
issue.
Consider, for example, the
fact that early in his life and while considering the value of
Islam while in prison, Malcolm was visited by an Ahmadi, Adbul
Hameed, who was on his outreach to local populations. Abdul
Hameed even sent Malcolm a book of Arabic Muslim prayers,
which Malcolm memorized phonetically. 12 This contact may help
to explain why, after being released from Charlestown prison
on parole, Malcolm too identifies himself at least once as an
"Asiatic," which I have been arguing is not false
consciousness of African American history or self-hatred, but
a strategic belief in the particular universal of Islam. The
incident was as follows.
In 1953, Malcolm, who was
now a fully fledged Muslim and member of Elijah Muhammad's
flock, was pulled aside one day at his work at the Gar Wood
factory in Wayne, Michigan by the F.B.I. He had failed to
register for the Korean War draft, the agent needled him, and
was thereby jeopardizing his parole. Malcolm heeded the
warning and registered, but how he registered is noteworthy.
Under the section on citizenship, which read, "I am a citizen
of ...," Malcolm inscribed "Asia." In his form on being a
conscientious objector, he stated his belief that "Allah is
God, not of one particular people or race, but of All the
Worlds, thus forming All Peoples into One Universal
Brotherhood." Asked to identify his religious guide, Malcolm
wrote "Allah the Divine Supreme Being, who resides at the Holy
City of Mecca, in Arabia." 13
Unlike orthodox Nation of
Islam creed, which would connect Allah with W.D. Fard and the
religious guide as Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm identifies Allah
with the God of Islam and, like the Ahmadis, stresses the
universal character of God. We could perhaps cynically see
this move as a means to defeat the draft by identifying with a
more orthodox religion than the Nation, but to do so is to
miss the manner in which Malcolm would later repeatedly seek
to integrate the Nation into the fold of worldwide [End Page
257] Islam. In 1960, after the scholar C. Eric Lincoln coined
the term "Black Muslims" for Nation followers, Malcolm
objected vehemently. "I tried for at least two years to kill
off that 'Black Muslims,'" he said. "Every newspaper and
magazine writer and microphone I got close to [I would say]
'No! We are black people here in America. Our religion is
Islam. We are properly called "Muslims"!' But that 'Black
Muslims' name never got dislodged." 14
This tension, between the
Ahmadi vision of a particular universal vision of Islam and
the Nation's notion of an Islam for black people underscores
the conflict between two very different roles for religion in
the political sphere. Admittedly, the Ahmadi spirit is less
confrontational, less public, less typical of the struggle we
have come to recognize as identity politics, and yet it is
still revolutionary in its own way by providing a radical
ontology of self. To reorient one's body towards the Orient
means a refusal to engage with the first principles of white
America's definitions of blackness, but instead to cut to the
heart of an old American principle, the freedom of worship.
Yet unlike the primary demand placed upon American religion,
that religion be relegated solely to the private sphere,
Islamic faith is seen as enveloping and thereby surpassing
national belonging.
Reverberating through the
African American community, this notion that a reconfigured
universal faith can free your mind and body gained ground.
While the Nation used the media (and the media used the
Nation) to promote its belief, this other vision of Islam was
quietly seeping into the pores of African American communities
around the country, giving them a spiritual place to repudiate
the nation of America not with the Nation of Islam but with a
new universalism. Genealogically, this idea should be seen as
descending from the Ahmadiyya movement, and musically it had a
soundtrack that large segments of the American public were
listening to. Many of the major figures of mid-century jazz
were themselves directly influenced by the Ahmadiyya movement,
and the yearning for a universal and spiritual sound was in
large part a result of Ahmadiyya labor. [End Page 258]
A Love Supreme
In 1953, Ebony magazine felt the rise of Islam among the jazz
musicians of the era was sufficiently important to publish its
article on "Moslem Musicians." "Ancient Religion Attracts
Moderns" spoke its headline, and it centered on the importance
of jazz among musicians. Drummer Art Blakey, we are told,
"started looking for a new philosophy after having been beaten
almost to death in a police station in Albany Ga., because he
had not addressed a white policeman as 'sir'." 15 Talib Dawood,
a former jazz player and Ahmadi, introduced Blakey to Islam.
Blakey's house was a known center for Islamic learning, and in
an important engagement at Small's Paradise in Harlem, he
organized a seventeen-member band, all Muslim, as the
Messengers. Later, the band's personnel would change, as would
the name (to the Jazz Messengers), but the Islamic influence
in jazz would continue. 16
Other important figures of
the period also converted to Islam. Yusef Lateef, Sahib Shihab,
Ahmed Jamal, and McCoy Tyner would all convert, and Dizzy
Gillespie, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane would all be
significantly influenced by its spirit. It is with John
Coltrane that I want to conclude this article, since his
influence has been so remarkable in the jazz sound and because
his debt to other Eastern philosophies is relatively well
known. But his relationship to Islam has not, to my knowledge,
been sufficiently acknowledged despite the fact that it can be
heard in his most famous work.
To have a soundtrack to a
movement does not mean to play an anthem. Rather than
indicating a representational scheme of signifying a specific
community, I am interested in listening for the ways in which
the yearning for a new kind of community, one based on a new
universalism that has a (but not by necessity the only) base
in Islam, can be heard in the ways in which the music is
pushing itself. Coltrane's search for a tone that could extend
the saxophone is well known, as is the critics' initial
bewilderment to his pitch. He himself talked about his desire
to incorporate the fullness of expression in his music. "I
want to cover as many forms of music that I can put into a
jazz context and play on my instruments," he wrote in his
notebooks. "I like Eastern music; Yusef Lateef has been using
this in his playing for some time. And Ornette Coleman
sometimes [End Page 259] plays music with a Spanish content."
17 In an unreleased session from his Village Vanguard
recordings, Coltrane is also playing with Ahmed Abdul Malik, a
Sudanese bass and 'oud player who was part of Monk's band, a
regular partner to Randy Weston, and an innovator in
incorporating Middle Eastern modal organization in jazz
improvisation. Coltrane's sideman regularly included Muslim
musicians from Philadelphia, and he himself, married to Naima
(a Muslim) and, after 1957, increasingly interested in all
things spiritual, regularly engaged his friend, piano player
Hassan Abdullah, in discussions about Islam.
Space prevents me from
etching in detail the milieu in which Coltrane repeatedly
encountered and considered Islam. Instead I want to move
towards a conclusion in a musical note by considering the
ecumenical sound of Islam found in Coltrane's most
commercially successful recording, A Love Supreme.
Significantly, Coltrane was often portrayed by the media of
his day as blowing the sounds of black rage. The Angry Young
Tenor was the musical equivalent of the angry Malcolm X. But
Coltrane never saw his music this way. Responding to his
critics, he said, "If [my music] is interpreted as angry, it
is taken wrong. The only one I'm angry at is myself when I
don't make what I'm trying to play." 18 Later he would be
quoted as saying this about the philosophy of his music:
I think the main thing a
musician would like to do is to give a picture to the listener
of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the
universe. That's what music is to me--it's just another way of
saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's
been given to us, and here's an example of just how
magnificent and encompassing it is. 19
If there is a tendency to view this wisdom as apolitical,
liberal claptrap, it is I think misplaced. Searching for the
universal in a minor key is less about escape, or about
colonizing the spiritual experiences of the dark world to
rejuvenate an exhausted Western sensibility, in the mode of
Richard Burton through George Harrison. Coltrane's universal
is a search for a big philosophy of sound, which repudiates
the thin, reedy existence of American racial politics, and it
does so, often, by an invocation of Islam.
"During the year of 1957, I
experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which
was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive [End Page
260] life." So wrote Coltrane in the famous liner notes for A
Love Supreme. The notes continue in this tenor, and anyone
with an ear attuned to Islamic language will hear its echoes.
"NO MATTER WHAT...IT IS WITH GOD. HE IS GRACIOUS AND MERCIFUL.
HIS WAY IS IN LOVE, THROUGH WHICH WE ALL ARE. IT IS TRULY--A
LOVE SUPREME--." Al-rahman, al-raheem. The Gracious, the
Merciful. The two qualities which follow God everywhere in the
Muslim tradition are invoked by Coltrane, who ends his text
with "ALL PRAISE TO GOD." Al-hamd'ulillah. Consider the first
track, "Acknowledgement." Built around a simple, four note
structure, this piece is an attempt to unify and capture the
rapture of the divine. Listen how, two-thirds of the way
through, Coltrane meanders around the simple theme in every
key, as if to suggest the manner in which God's greatness
truly is found everywhere, and then the ways in which the band
begins to sing the phrase "A Love Supreme," like a roving band
of sufi mendicants singing their dhikr. The words could
change. As the Love is extolled, the phrase begins to include
the sounds of "Allah Supreme," another Arabic expression,
Allahu Akbar. Coltrane makes the connection from A Love
Supreme to Allah Supreme for his entire listening audience,
forever delivering a sound of Islam to the world of American
music.
To appreciate the depth of
mutual involvement between Blacks and Asians means
acknowledging not just how histories of faith exist to be
excavated, which illustrates a level of shared struggle
towards an acceptable ontology for living in the racialized
United States, but it also means investing the sacred with the
possibilities for radical thought, even if its effects are
less visible to us than the legacy of political activism
through ideologies of separatism. Ahmadi Islam was the space
where this place was opened up for many African Americans. It
defines a certain aesthetics of living, where the text to life
is in a language white America cannot read and the sounds of
existence flutter beyond white America's ears. This isn't
about being Omni-American, to use a phrase associated with
Albert Murray, but it is about assimilating into the
omnipresence of a just universal order. It is where Blacks
become Asians and Asians Black, under color of divine law.
Footnote
1. C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims of America (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Erdmanns, 1994), 49.
2. The Moslem Sunrise (July
1921): 3.
3. Quoted in Yvonne Haddad
and Jane Smith, Mission to America: Five Islamic Sectarian
Communities in North America (Gainsville: University Press of
Florida, 1993), 55.
4. Hazrat Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad, Message of Peace (Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman
Isha'at Islam Lahore, 1993 [1908]), 23.
5. Quoted in Richard Brent
Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997),112.
6. "If Jesus Comes to
America," The Moslem Sunrise (April 1922): 55-56.
7. Roger Didier, "Those
Who're Missionaries to Christians: Prophet Sadiq Brings
Allah's Message Into Chicago and Makes Proselytes," reprinted
in The Moslem Sunrise (October 1922): 139.
8. Aminah McCloud reports
that eventually, dissension arose among Ahmadis over the fact
that more African Americans were not appointed to leadership
positions and that the Indian customs of the missionaries and
the immigrant Muslims eventually clashed with the African
American desires to apply the faith to domestic situations.
See Aminah McCloud, African American Islam (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 21. However, in the early years, the
community was certainly highly multiracial in many ways,
including in its leadership roles. The Moslem Sunrise contains
many such photographs and examples, including highlighting the
role of one early "zealous worker for Islam, appointed a
Sheikh to work among his people in the district of St. Louis
and vicinity," named Sheikh Ahmad Din (formerly P. Nathaniel
Jonson). See, for example, The Moslem Sunrise (July 1922):
119.
9. J. A. Rogers, "Bilal Ibn
Rahab--Warrior Priest," The Messenger 9 (July 1927): 213-14.
Rogers states: "When the Christian Negro points with pride to
St. Augustine, the Numidian Negro, and tells what he did to
advance Christianity, the Mohammedan one can point to Bilal,
and tell what he did for Christianity's greatest rival. The
Mohammedan Negro is, however, hardly likely to do as Islam not
only in theory, but in actuality, knows no color line. This
probably accounts for its success in Africa." Also see A.T.
Hoffert, "Moslem Propoganda: The Hand of Islam stretches out
to Aframerica," The Messenger (May 1927): 141, 160. Hoffert
describes, "A woman convert who had belonged to various
churches spoke of her previous life like that of a dog or cat
before its eyes are opened; they are going to have their share
of good things and stand on their own feet. She spoke of the
universality of Islam, its way of life, one God, one aim, one
destiny." Blanche Watson, "The First Muezzin," Opportunity
(September 1930): 275.
10. "True Salvation of the
American Negroes: The Real Solution to the Negro Question,"
The Moslem Sunrise (April-July 1923): 184.
11. It should be stressed
that the dichotomy I am establishing here, between the
particularism of the Nation and the ecumenicalism of the
Ahmadis is obviously more complicated in many circumstances,
and that the Nation has at its heart the ability to see itself
as a universal theology in certain respects, just as Ahmadi
creed can be (and is often, by the mainstream Muslim
community) understood as a narrower and more particular
vision, especially since the Ahmadis themselves are
marginalized by the mainstream Muslim establishment. The
Nation also often employed Sunni Muslims as advisors and
teachers, such as Abdul Basit Naeem, editor of a couple of
small publications (Moslem World & the USA and The
African-Asian World) and author of the introduction to Elijah
Muhammad's The Supreme Wisdom, 2 (Atlanta: Messenger Elijah
Muhammad Propagation Society, n.d.), 3. These advisors and,
later, Elijah Muhammad himself recognized the radical
differences between the Nation of Islam creed and mainstream
Sunni beliefs yet justified the Nation's theology as being the
best way to bring African Americans to Islam. At the very end
of his life, it appears that even Elijah Muhammad believed in
mainstream Islam. Similarly, Louis Farrakhan, now facing his
mortality as he battles cancer, has made significant gestures
towards reforming Nation of Islam creeds towards an acceptable
form of mainstream Islam.
12. Louis DeCaro, On the
Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York:
New York University Press, 1996), 136.
13. Ibid., 97-98.
14. The Autobiography of
Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 247.
15. "Moslem Musicians Take
Firm Stand Against Racism," Ebony (April 1953): 111.
16. Charley Gerard, Jazz in
Black and White: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Jazz
Community (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1998), 75.
17. C. O. Simpkins,
Coltrane: A Biography (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1975),
118.
18. Ibid.,84.
19. Ibid., 151.
