A Longing for Belonging
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In the reading on Noble Drew Ali, and the excerpt from Malcolm X’s autobiography, there is an over-arching theme of a recognition and rediscovery of a once lost identity. There is a great and even radical desire to take back what was once taken away in centuries of demonization, slavery, and dehumanizations of Africans.
Drew Ali’s perspective on nationhood, for “Every nation” to “worship under their own vine and fig tree” to me is the outward cry for rebuilding of what is lost, to reconnect with an identity, to become whole and fulfilled, to then have the ability to live in peace.
Malcolm X says in his autobiography “this ‘Negro’ was taught to worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin as the slave-master”. To Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam is looking for those roots that defy the ‘injection’ of the Christian religion into African Americans and being taught “to hate everything black, including himself”.
What is rather astounding and slightly troubling to me is the extent to which members of these particularistic Islamic movements in the U.S. go to create their lost roots, crossing the red line of orientalism. As I did the readings, I notice Islam is more an aesthetic than a way of life. Esoteric spirituals using Arabic symbols, or free masons using orientalist symbols to express particularity in rather ‘exotic’ ways.