To the Editor:
In “How Elijah Muhammad Won” [June], Daniel Pipes intelligently explores an important issue—the growing nexus between African-Americans and Islam. One can cavil about a few points. Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist organization was called the Universal (not United) Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). More substantively, Mr. Pipes’s assertion that Elijah Muhammad’s son, W. Deen Mohammed, has adopted more “radical” political views in recent years is open to question. Mohammed steered clear, for instance, of a special session at this year’s Nation of Islam (NOI) “Saviors’ Day” featuring a televised appearance by Libya’s Qaddafi. And there is still no smoking gun showing that Louis Farrakhan “supervised” the NOI thugs who assassinated Malcolm X.
My main concern, however, is the adequacy of Mr. Pipes’s sociological answer to the question of “How Elijah Muhammad Won.” He stresses the appeal of Islam’s moralistic and patriarchal social teachings to black males in search of father figures. But this explanation, though part of the truth, does not really tell us why African-Americans have been tempted for a very long time to leave behind Christianity (a religion certainly not without father figures) for Islam. Why should there be mass conversions by African-Americans to Islam rather than, say, to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose apocalyptic vision also influenced the NOI’s founding generation?
Some African-American historians are currently trying to prove that there were pious, African-born “black Muslims” on virtually every slave plantation. This is fantasy, but the theological affinity between Islam and African-American historical experience is not. Islam’s remarkable plasticity has encouraged many aggrieved ethnic groups to make heterodox claims to prophetic status akin to those made by Elijah Muhammad. The Indian-Muslim Ahmadiyyah movement, for instance, carried a belief in its leader’s status as the “divine messenger” from the subcontinent to U.S. cities at precisely the same time the NOI was taking shape.
African-Americans may also have been drawn to Islam because of the strong Old Testament orientation of their Christianity. While overtly identifying with the children of Abraham who were delivered from Egyptian bondage, they covertly sympathized with the Bible’s dispossessed. In particular, Afrocentrists believe that the Egyptians and Ethiopians are Ham’s African offspring.
Harold Brackman
San Diego, California
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To the Editor:
The question is not only “How Elijah Muhammad Won” but how Islam itself has done so well among Africans. Notwithstanding the statement by the Baptist mother of an American convert quoted in Daniel Pipes’s article, Islam did not “come out of Africa” but out of Southwest Asia. Within a century of Muhammad’s death, his sword-wielding Arab disciples were actively stealing black Africans away from their own religions and traditions. Descendants of these Arabs appeared later on the continent to enslave black Africans. Indeed, American slavery could not have existed without the wholesale raids of Muslim intermediaries into the African interior.
Stephen A. Berger
Tel Aviv, Israel
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Daniel Pipes writes:
Harold Brackman is right about the full name of UNIA, but wrong about W. Deen Mohammed. To give just one illustration of Mohammed’s continued radicalization: his organization, the Muslim American Society, joined with a host of Islamist institutions in May 1999 to cosponsor American Muslims for Jerusalem (AMJ), a group that promotes the theory of a Jewish conspiracy controlling the United States. At one AMJ fundraising dinner in November 1999, according to a participant, the evening was full of “battle cries and a declaration of war on American Jews.”
As for Louis Farrakhan’s role in the murder of Malcolm X: the circumstantial evidence may not sway a court of law, but it is certainly enough to convince most observers, including Malcolm X’s own immediate family.
The appeal of Islam to African-Americans is a complex subject that I only touched on in my article; Mr. Brackman’s points are reasonable and complement my own.
Stephen A. Berger points to the enduring irony that substantial numbers of blacks were enslaved by Muslims when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was flourishing. Perhaps yet sadder is the fact that many black Muslims in the United States refuse to see the tragedy of enslavement that is unfolding even today in Mauritania and Sudan. Some of their leaders (notably Louis Farrakhan) have gone so far as to deny its existence. (“Where is the proof?,” Farrakhan asks, intimating that the very suggestion is part of a “Zionist conspiracy.”) To make matters worse, these leaders stand in close solidarity with the same governments that enslave black Africans.
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