Malcolm X (31 page)

After the ordeal of Betty’s trial, Malcolm decided that she and Attallah needed to be sent temporarily to her parents’ home in Detroit. Betty was opposed to the move, but she bent to Malcolm’s will. Her feelings did not change upon settling in, however, and in late March 1959 she complained to her husband about the arrangement, though he had little sympathy. He encouraged her to think about her absence from New York as a vacation. Though Betty worried for him in her absence, he assured her that he would survive. He missed her cooking, writing her that he had been eating regularly at the Temple’s restaurant. He found it difficult to express romantic love, or even to give Betty a compliment without qualifying it with a statement related to the NOI. For instance, he praised Betty’s cooking, but then added, “What would we Brothers do without our wonderful MGT Sisters? (smile).”

Betty’s involuntary “vacation” may have given Malcolm space, but it further taxed his already strained finances. On April 1 he sent her a second letter, enclosing twenty dollars. Malcolm urged her to spend as little as possible, reminding her that he was experiencing a “great financial burden.” He then reminded her that the airfare to Detroit had been expensive and that staying in Detroit would also be costly. Malcolm went on to offer a statement that seems almost comically paradoxical. He urged her again to “enjoy yourself but don’t buy anything” except items that were absolutely essential. To save money he instructed her not to phone him, but instead write a letter. He even enclosed some stamps in the envelope he mailed to her. Feeling spurned and stranded, Betty once again fell into a depression and entertained thoughts about fleeing her marriage. By this time Malcolm viewed his wife largely as a nuisance—someone he was obliged to put up with—rather than as a loving life partner. The wounds from Betty’s sexual taunting were still too fresh. He focused his energies instead on the Nation and the major events it had planned for 1959.

The largest public occasion involving Malcolm that year was a major rally and speech by Elijah Muhammad in July, at New York City’s St. Nicholas Arena. Muhammad declared that he and the Nation were “backed by 500 million people, who are lifting their voices to Allah five times a day.” In effect, he was laying claim to full membership within Islam’s global community, a notion that would have been vigorously rejected by the vast majority of orthodox Muslims in the United States. Within the small, mostly Sunni emigrant communities that traced their lineage to the Middle East, southern Asia, and northern Africa, Muslims understood the NOI to have little in common with their faith. “Let us fervently pray that the readers of
The Courier
will not confuse the sect of Mr. Muhammad with that of true Islam,” wrote Yasuf Ibrahim, an Algerian, in a letter to the Pittsburgh paper. “Believers in Allah recognize no such thing as race.”

Perhaps to quell outside critics, the Nation took several measures to affirm its connections with the global Islamic community. Muhammad began his 1960 publication
Message to the Blackman in America
with a Qur'anic verse: “He it is who sent His Messenger with the guidance and the true religion, that He may make it overcome the religions, all of them, though the polytheists may be adverse.” One regular feature in
Muhammad Speaks
, Muslim Cookbook, provided recipes that adhered to
halal
criteria. Arabic-language instructors were hired in NOI schools, and ministers were encouraged to make references to the Qur’an during their sermons. The most prominent woman of Temple No. 7, Tynetta Deanar, started a column in
Muhammad Speaks
on the global achievements of Islamic women.

It was in this spirit of confraternity that the NOI had cabled its congratulations to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, held from December 26, 1957, to January 1, 1958, in Cairo, under the auspices of Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The sect had much to gain from recognition or even acknowledgment by major Muslim states, and Egypt. Nasser reciprocated the gesture the following year by sending greetings to Elijah Muhammad at the Saviour’s Day convention. This was followed by an invitation from Nasser's government to Muhammad to visit Egypt and to make the hajj to Mecca. Muhammad planned to visit the Middle East, but he encountered some difficulties from the U.S. government regarding overseas travel. The decision was made to send Malcolm first, as Muhammad’s emissary. Malcolm would establish the necessary contacts for Muhammad and members of his family to follow.

Malcolm was undoubtedly thrilled to receive the assignment, but in proper NOI tradition he could not display excessive enthusiasm. He duly applied for a passport. His stated itinerary was to visit the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, intending to depart on June 5 in order to attend “the annual sacred Moslem Pilgrimage Rites at the Holy City of Mecca,” scheduled from June 9 to June 16. For various reasons, however, his journey was delayed, so he continued carrying out his duties throughout June.

When he finally arrived in Cairo on July 4, it marked the beginning of a transformative experience. Malcolm was now an international traveler, the welcome guest of heads of state, and a pilgrim in the lands of the faith that had pulled him up from despair. In Egypt, deputy premier Anwar el-Sadat met with him several times, and he was well received by religious leaders at Al-Azhar University. Nasser offered to meet him personally, but Malcolm politely demurred, explaining that “he was just the forerunner and humble servant of Elijah Muhammad.” He planned to stay briefly in Egypt before visiting Mecca and touring Saudi Arabia at length, but shortly after his arrival he fell ill with dysentery and ended up spending eleven days there. During his stay, a series of prominent Egyptians extended overnight accommodations in their homes to him. Having long practiced the NOI's peculiar version of Islam, Malcolm found himself embarrassed at times by his lack of formal knowledge of the Muslim religion. While in Egypt he was expected to participate in prayers with others five times daily, but confessed to an acquaintance that he didn’t understand the Arabic language, and had “only a sketchy notion of the [prayer] ritual.”

When his dysentery finally abated, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, where enslavement of people of African descent had existed for more than fifteen hundred years. From the perspective of most black Americans, Saudi Arabia would have appeared to be a nonwhite society, with blacks relegated to the bottom. Writing from the Kandara Palace hotel in Jeddah, he described the physical appearance of the Saudi population as ranging “from regal black to rich brown, but none are white.” Most Arabs, he noted, “would be right at home in Harlem. And all of them refer warmly to our people in America as their ‘brothers of color.’ ” His own race, so long the prism of his self-definition, receded in importance. “Many Egyptians didn’t identify him as negroid because of his color until they saw him closer,” noted one of his fellow travelers. The episode taught Malcolm that racial identities were not fixed: what was “black” in one country could be white or mulatto in another. The absence of a rigid color line apparently suggested to Malcolm that “there is no color prejudice among Moslems, for Islam teaches that all mortals are equal and brothers.”

Three weeks of mixing with commoners and statesmen in the Middle East also reinforced Malcolm’s commitment to Pan-Africanism. “Africa is the land of the future,” he wrote in a letter home that was eventually published by the
Pittsburgh Courier
.

Only yesterday, America was the New World, a world with a future—but now, we suddenly realize Africa is the New World—the world with the brightest future—a future in which the so-called American Negroes are destined to play a key role.

Throughout his trip, he kept listeners rapt with talk of the importance of the NOI, and of the cruel suppression American blacks faced at the hands of whites. Writing of their outraged reaction, he explained that “the increasing hordes of intelligent Africans find it difficult to understand” why black Americans continued to be oppressed, “without real freedom, without public school rights, and above all, relegated to slums. . . . The chief instrument by which East and West are being divided, day and night, is resentment in Africa and Asia for administrative jim-crow in the United States.” This insight underlined the need to broaden the international perspective within the Black Freedom Movement. By cultivating alliances with Third World nations, black Americans could gain leverage to achieve racial empowerment.

There were several reasons to believe that such a strategy could produce results. First, a significant number of African leaders, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, either had attended U.S. universities or had visited the United States and were familiar with its system of racial oppression. Black churches, colleges, and civic associations since the mid-nineteenth century had contacts or exchanges with African institutions. This was especially the case in South Africa, where the parallels between apartheid and legal Jim Crow were obvious. Finally, a good number of revolutionary anticolonial movements, such as Algeria’s National Liberation Front, were noncommunist. Black Americans could work with representatives of such movements without being red-baited at home.

Malcolm’s letter, filled with new ideas about Islam and Afro-Asian solidarity, found him at a philosophical crossroads. The attitudes toward race expressed by Muslims he encountered on his trip had revealed to him fundamental contradictions within NOI theology. Islam was in theory color-blind; members of the
ummah
could be any nationality or race, so long as they practiced the five pillars and other essential traditions. Whites could not be categorically demonized. Malcolm came to realize during this trip that if the NOI were to continue growing, its sectarian concepts and practices, such as Yacub’s History, might have to be abandoned, and the assimilation of orthodox Islam would need to be accelerated. Pan-Africanism presented a different problem. Using Third World solidarity to leverage change in America came to seem increasingly viable, yet this premise contradicted the NOI's dogma that reforms were impossible to achieve under white rule and that peace required a separate black state. Most troublingly, there was the question of leadership. The
shahada
confirms that only Muhammad is the final prophet of God; to move closer to true Islam meant that Elijah’s claim to be “Allah’s Messenger” would inevitably have to be questioned.

Perhaps because the trip marked the beginning of Malcolm’s private concerns with the NOI's organization, he was virtually silent about it in the
Autobiography
. He could obviously see the discrepancies between what he had been taught by Elijah Muhammad compared to the richly diverse cultures that he had observed. All Muslims clearly were not “black.” Malcolm’s letter to the
Pittsburgh Courier
, however, as well as stories he recalled of his experiences, conveyed how vividly the trip impressed itself on his mind. Its lessons continued to be heard in the developing philosophy that he expressed through his public speeches.

Malcolm’s 1959 tour was widely publicized both within the NOI and by African-American newspapers. Yet after he returned on July 22, he spoke only briefly about his trip, focusing instead on the controversy created by
The Hate That Hate Produced
. He tried to convey what he had learned about the Islamic world to Temple No. 7 members, and even then he spoke carefully, perhaps trying to avoid presenting ideas that might seem at odds with the NOI's basic tenets. “Muslims in the Far East,” he said, “were intensely curious to learn how it was that he professed to be Muslim, yet spoke no Arabic.” He had explained to them that he had been “kidnapped 400 years ago, robbed of his language, of religion and robbed of his name and wisdom.”

Plans moved forward for Elijah Muhammad to make his own trip. Sometime during the first half of November 1959, Muhammad set out with two of his sons, Herbert and Akbar. He later claimed to have accomplished a hajj, but because his journey to Mecca took place outside of the officially sanctioned hajj season, technically he had made
umrah
, a spiritually motivated visit, even though the
umrah
is widely accepted throughout the Muslim world as a legitimate pilgrimage. More important was the official acceptance of Muhammad and his small delegation by Saudi authorities, who controlled access to the city for worshippers.

Muhammad arrived back home on January 6, 1960. Like Malcolm, he had been profoundly affected, and set about implementing changes to give the NOI a stronger Islamic character. At the next month’s Saviour's Day convention, he ordered that the NOI's temples would henceforth be called mosques, in keeping with orthodox Islam. More significantly, the pace of Islamization was accelerated. Arabic-language instruction increased, and he sent his son Akbar to study at Al-Azhar University in Cairo; yet he must have seen, as Malcolm had, that his own position presented special challenges when it came to reconciling the NOI with orthodox Islam. His authority, and indeed much of the wealth and property he had accrued, derived from his special (if fictive) status as Allah’s Messenger—a status he had no intention of relinquishing. To maintain his supremacy while remaking the face of the NOI would prove a difficult balancing act.