Islam for Self-Preservation and Racial Representation
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Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple that strived for black liberation and self-determination. Although the temple was for religious purposes, its goals were political. Ali used Islam as a vehicle for black nationalism.
Ali did not have a traditional Islamic education, but went to Egypt at age 16 where he met “last priest of an ancient cult of High Magic who took him to the Pyramid of Cheops, led him in blindfolded, and abandoned him… and offered him initiation in the cult” (page 47). The Moorish Science Temple’s scripture and doctrine was conceived by Drew Ali, not based on Quranic verses and teachings but from other occult literature and black empowerment leaders of that time. For example, Ali plagiarized a great portion of Levi Dowling’s theosophical text, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, and used black revolutionary Marcus Garvey’s concepts for the basis of the Moorish Science Temple’s doctrine. Ali used Islamic symbols not directly from Islamic sources but from a New York Freemasons organization called the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine which appropriated Islamic symbolism for perhaps aesthetic purposes.
While it can be argued that the Moorish Science Temple’s borrowing of Islamic vocabulary, cultural elements, and symbols can be considered cultural appropriation, this appropriation (as we have seen many racialized groups engage in throughout history within this class) was an act of self-preservation, orientalizing themselves and distancing their identity from the racist perceptions of African Americans at that time. Noble Drew Ali claimed all African Americans are actually Moors descended from Asiatic people, and Islam is a religion solely for them, therefore salvation is reserved for non-whites which strays from the universality and egalitarian teachings of the Quran. During the MST’S height between 1920’s-1940’s, segregation, oppression, and racism was terrible and inescapable in America. When Christianity was espoused with white supremacy and colonial agendas to “civilize” through forced proselytization to many black people on turtle island, there must have been an empowerment by reclaiming Islam as their true lost religion for the Moorish Temple’s congregation.
This is also true during the 50’s as Malcolm X stated in his autobiography, “where the religion of every other people on earth taught its believers of a God with whom they could identify, a God who at least looked like one of their own kind, the slavemaster injected his Christian religion into this “Negro.” This “Negro” was taught to worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slave-master.” Claiming the original man and first Muslims were African (and looked like Nation of Islam Muslims unlike the White American Christian Jesus and God) was a way of empowerment that helped mobilize black liberation efforts by the leaders of the Nation of Islam. Even though the story of Yacub genetically creating white people as a wicked race for harming the world upset Muslims of the East as Malcolm X iterates in his book, the Nation of Islam emerged naturally from its context of American racism. Unlike the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam uses many accurate Islamic schools of thought and teachings and is a valid sect and I personally don’t consider the sect to be appropriating Islam or Islamicate culture.
