New Roots

ED: If you’re just tuning in, this is BackStory, and we’re talking about the history of Islam in America. Earlier in the show, we heard about the prevalence of Islam among African slaves in the New World, and the traces the religion and culture left behind. Now you’ve probably heard how, in the mid-20th century, Islam became important again for African Americans.

The most influential black Muslim group, the Nation of Islam, preached that instead of focusing on integration, black people should work within their own communities to empower themselves. Under such leaders as Elijah Muhammad and the charismatic Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam inspired followers to reclaim a past tied not to slavery, but to what they called a superior culture and higher civilization with North African roots. One they felt slavery had tried to erase.

RICHARD TURNER: By the 1960s, the Nation of Islam was the wealthiest organization in African American history.

ED: This is historian Richard Turner.

RICHARD TURNER: They accumulated that wealth by selling newspapers, buying real estate, establishing small businesses, grocery stores and restaurants, in major American cities.

ED: It turns out this model wasn’t new. The Nation of Islam owed a lot of its economic practices, as well as its religious and cultural principles, to an earlier organization called the Moorish Science Temple, and to its founder, who went by the name Noble Drew Ali.

BRIAN: Ali was born in North Carolina in 1886 and was one of the more than one million African Americans who left the South for cities in the North in the 1910s and ’20s. Ali set up is temple in Newark, but later moved it to Chicago, where the group became an influential voting bloc in local elections.

Its followers worshipped one god and called him Allah. They read from the Circle Seven Koran, a version that Ali himself compiled from different sources. The men dressed in fezzes or turbans, and the women, in long dresses and sometimes hijabs. They prayed on Fridays and followed Muslim dietary rules.

By the 1920s, the group had upwards of 30,000 followers. I asked Turner to tell me about Ali and about the philosophy of the Moorish Science Temple.

RICHARD TURNER: He claimed to be a prophet of Islam for African Americans. And this is one of the reasons why Noble Drew Ali is very important, because he is the first major figure in US history who signals the reemergence of Islam in the United States after Reconstruction.

BRIAN: What did the word “science” mean? Take us back 100 years and explain to me– I get the Moorish. I’m Jewish– I get Temple. What did Science mean?

RICHARD TURNER: You know, that’s a hard one to unpack. But my thinking on this is that he was attempting to look at the history of people of African descent in the United States through an objective, scientific lens, rather than through the non-scientific lens of institutional racism. Because Noble Drew Ali believed that racial categories were not essential categories, that they were socially- and politically-constructed categories.

BRIAN: Ahead of his time, in that regard.

RICHARD TURNER: He was way ahead of his time, in that regard. He truly believed that people of African descent who had been enslaved in the Americas should not call themselves Negro or colored. That instead they should claim a connection to a nation. And for Noble Drew Ali, the important nation was Morocco, where there had been a great ancient Islamic civilization.

BRIAN: Why would 30,000 or so African Americans need to embrace something as foreign-seeming as the Moorish Science Temple?

RICHARD TURNER: First of all, they made a critical decision that Christians were involved in the thousands of lynchings and burnings of black people at the stake that were taking place throughout the South and the Midwest in the early 20th century. You know, they were moving away from that racist element of Christianity– of course, which had also supported enslavement.

And I think, you know, as people moved to the North and the Midwest, and some people were moving to California also, they were open to new religious messages and political messages because they felt they were free. And some of this made sense to people, because we do know that there were African Americans who remembered Muslims who were part of their family heritage from the period of enslavement. They remembered ancestors who prayed at sunrise on a mat every day, and who fasted at particular times of the year, and wore veils. And so there were these memories of Islam.

BRIAN: Did Noble Drew Ali have in mind the “melting pot” model that some Americans held dear? Was he looking at the way, let’s say, Italians and Poles and Jews were being treated, and noting that they were nationalities, in many instances? Was this a conscious move on his part, to kind of trump race and hope that his followers would be treated like some of these white ethnicities?

RICHARD TURNER: I think that may have been one of his motivations. Noble Drew Ali was trying to claim respectability for African Americans by getting rid of the stereotypes of people of African descent. By getting rid of the mammy and the Jezebel, the Sambo, the pickaninny, the brute, stereotypes of African Americans that were invented to oppress people. And then reclaiming a whole different history, and looking to the Islamic world for inspiration, for peoplehood and nationhood and pride.

BRIAN: Well, thank you for joining us today on BackStory.

RICHARD TURNER: My pleasure.

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BRIAN: Richard Brent Turner is a professor of religious history at the University of Iowa.

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