Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  As the beneficiary of Saudi nepotism, Malcolm was given his own private car, which allowed him to cover much of the 120-mile hajj route without worry of falling behind. He was up well before dawn on Tuesday, April 21, and after morning prayers and breakfast he was off to Mount Arafat. The sight before him on the road to Arafat moved him deeply, as he watched thousands of pilgrims of many races jostle and bump their way along, some walking, others packed into buses or riding camels or donkeys. He had not thought possible the egalitarianism he was now witnessing. “Islam brings together in unity all colors and classes,” he observed in his diary. “Everyone shares what he has, those who have share with those who have not, those who know teach those who don’t know.” The common faith shared by all participants appeared to eradicate class divisions, at least as Malcolm could perceive them.

  The next morning, Malcolm and other pilgrims awoke around two a.m. and traveled to Mina, where they each “cast seven stones at the devil,” a white monument. They then traveled to Mecca, where Malcolm did two rounds of circling the Kaaba seven times each; he attempted but was never able to touch the sacred site. “One look at the fervor of those crowded around it made me see it was hopeless to try,” he wrote. Again he was struck by the tremendous diversity of the hajjis. During the hajj rituals, “everyone was in white, the two-piece horum, with right shoulder bare,” he observed. At the end of the hajj, “everyone is wearing their own national colors (costumes) and it is really a beauty to behold. It seems every nation and form of culture on earth is represented here. . . .ʺ

  Yet as much as Malcolm saw race and class distinctions dissolved in the uniting experience of the hajj, his own pilgrimage was anything but representative. The diplomatic difficulties that had almost kept him from the hajj had been sliced through by accommodating white Arabs with connections to the Saudi royal family, and he himself had been made a guest of state. Then, on one of the last days of the hajj, he joined a caravan led by “his excellency, Crown Prince Faisal . . . which included dignitaries from all over the world.” Across the hall from Malcolm’s hotel room was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, a cousin of Yasser Arafat’s. In his diary, Malcolm observed that Husseini “seems well loved. He’s well up on world affairs and even the latest events in America.” Then, without a hint of irony, Malcolm added that the Grand Mufti “referred to New York as Jew York.”

  Still, the powerful sight of thousands of people of different nationalities and ethnicities praying in unison to the same God deeply moved Malcolm, as he struggled to reconcile the few remaining fragments of NOI dogma he still believed in with the universalism he saw embodied in the hajj. Like many tourists, Malcolm purchased dozens of postcards and sent them to acquaintances back home. These letters revealed the profound shift in his attitudes about white people. Writing to Alex Haley on April 25, Malcolm confessed, “I began to perceive that ‘white man,’ as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it describes attitudes and actions.” In the Muslim world he had witnessed individuals who in the United States would be classified as white but who “were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been.” Malcolm was quick to credit Islam with the power to transform whites into nonracists. This revelation reinforced Malcolm’s newfound decision to separate himself completely from the Nation of Islam, not simply from its leadership, but from its theology.

  If Malcolm found much to rejoice over in his travels through the Middle East, he also wished for a more active role for Islam on the world stage. Here the seeds of his role as a kind of evangelist for true Islam were planted, but he saw in the Arabs’ unwillingness to proselytize a problem that could hinder the religion’s spread. “The Arabs are poor at public relations,” he wrote. “They say insha Allah [if God wills it] and then wait; and while they are waiting the world passes them by.” Malcolm hoped that one day Muslims would understand “the necessity of modernizing the methods to propagate Islam, and project an image that the mind of the modern world can understand.” But his thoughts of returning home with a new knowledge of the religious rituals filled him with genuine pride and excitement. “America’s Black Muslims would fit right into the best of the earth’s Muslim[s] anywhere in the world if they would first be encouraged to learn the true prayer ritual and how to say their prayers in Arabic,” he wrote.

  Upon his arrival in Jeddah, Malcolm encountered an “outspoken” African, a cabinet minister of Nigerian prime minister Ahmadu Bello. The minister informed Malcolm about recent civil disobedience demonstrations by blacks at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and recounted his own unhappy experiences with American racism. “He had suffered many indignities that he could now describe with intense passion, but could not understand why Negroes had not established some degree of business economic independence,” Malcolm observed.

  Malcolm then flew to Medina, Saudi Arabia, on April 25, and en route he continued to make detailed notes in his travel diary. He was convinced that on the pilgrimage “everyone forgets Self and turns to God and out of this submission to the One God comes a brotherhood in which all are equals.” He embraced an inner peace he had not known since the years he was incarcerated in Massachusetts. “There is no greater serenity of mind,” Malcolm reflected, “than when one can shut the hectic noise and pace of the materialistic outside world, and seek inner peace within oneself.” Later that evening Malcolm wrote, “The very essences of the Islam religion in teaching the Oneness of God, gives the Believer genuine, voluntary obligations towards his fellow man (all of whom are One Human Family, brothers and sisters to each other) . . . the True Believer recognizes the Oneness of all Humanity.”

  Returning to Jeddah the next day, he toured the local bazaar and purchased an attractive head scarf for Betty. His eyes were drawn to a beautiful necklace, but he could not afford it. Although Malcolm had prepared to depart Saudi Arabia for a quick visit to Beirut, Lebanon, Prince Faisal contacted him at his hotel, requesting to meet him at about noon the next day. Malcolm delayed his trip, and when the two men met, the prince explained “that he had no ulterior motive in the excellent hospitality I had received . . . than the true hospitality shown all Muslims by all Muslims.” Faisal also questioned Malcolm about the theological beliefs of the Nation of Islam, suggesting that “from what he had been reading, written by Egyptian writers, they had the wrong Islam”—in other words, their understanding and rituals were alien to orthodox Islam, beyond the boundaries of the community of the faithful. After his experience at Mecca and the hajj, Malcolm could not contest or deny this. In taking the necessary steps to become a true Muslim he had regained the certainty that had abandoned him with each new revelation of Elijah Muhammad’s perfidy or infidelity. He could also now see the role Islam would play not just in his spiritual life, but in his work. As Malcolm reflected on his hajj experiences, he concluded that “our success in America will involve two circles, Black Nationalism and Islam.” Nationalism was necessary to connect African Americans with Africa, he reasoned. “And Islam will link us spiritually to Africa, Arabia and Asia.”

  Malcolm flew from Jeddah’s crowded airport and arrived in Beirut in the middle of the night of April 29; he secured a room at the Palm Beach Hotel upon the advice of his cab driver from the airport. Part of his agenda in Beirut was to become acquainted with Lebanon’s Muslim Brotherhood organization, which was dedicated to directing the tenets of Islam to political ends. The Brotherhood was originally established in Egypt in 1928, and it spread to other Arab countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan, during and after World War II. Advocating national independence against European colonialists, social reform, charity, and political change in harmony with Islamic practices, by the 1950s it had developed a strong base among middle-class professionals, many workers and intellectuals. In Egypt, the most prominent theoretician in this regard was Sayyid Qutb, who advocated the expansive use of jihad.

  Malcolm’s attraction to the Brotherhood was probably due to its Islamic foundations, grounding real-wo
rld politics in a spiritual basis. Ironically, it was exactly the opposite position he had reached in the United States, having concluded that he would need to keep separate his religious and political groups. In Beirut, he visited the home of Dr. Malik Badri, a professor at American University, whom he had previously met in Sudan in 1959. Badri informed Malcolm that he was scheduled to give a lecture the following day. Later that evening Malcolm met with a group of Sudanese students, who “were well informed on the Black Muslims,” Malcolm wrote, “and asked many questions on it and the American race problem in general.”

  On April 30, after a lunch at the home of Dr. Badri, Malcolm gave a talk at the Sudanese Cultural Center in Beirut. The local Beirut Daily Star covered the speech, printing a front-page article about it the next day. The New York Times also briefly reported on Malcolm’s lecture, characterizing it largely as an attack on King. According to the Times, Malcolm “told students at the Sudanese Cultural Center that Negroes in the United States had made no practical gains toward achieving civil rights.” He also declared that “only a minority of Negroes believed in nonviolence.”

  That evening, Malcolm mentioned in his diary that he visited “the offices of the Muslim brothers”—that is, the Brotherhood. Early the next morning, as Malcolm made his way to fly to Cairo, Dr. Malik “and others of the M. B. [Muslim Brotherhood] gave me a very touching send-off.” Arriving in Cairo the next morning, he met up with his local contact, Hussein el-Borai, an Egyptian diplomat who had accompanied Malcolm around Cairo in 1959 and would play the same role during Malcolm’s 1964 visit. The two men traveled by train to nearby Alexandria, reaching the ancient seaport city in the evening.

  Malcolm spent several days as a tourist in Alexandria, where he soon discovered that photographs taken of himself with heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali had been widely circulated in the Egyptian press; consequently Malcolm was treated like a ʺVIP,ʺ he noted, being besieged by autograph seekers. “Just saying I was an American Muslim who just returned from hajj was enough,” Malcolm wrote in his diary. “Then mentioning Clay caused a real ‘landslide.’ ” Most of Malcolm’s day was spent at Alexandria’s harbor, “trying to unravel red tape and get imported items through customs.” After a late afternoon nap, that evening he returned to Cairo, and over several days reacquainted himself with local Muslim contacts, most of whom he had previously met in the United States or on his 1959 trip. Malcolm also kept encountering Egyptians who refused to believe that he could possibly be both an American and a Muslim. One waiter dismissed his assertions, telling el-Borai that Malcolm “was probably from Habachi (Abyssinia).”

  On Tuesday morning, May 5, the nineteen-year-old son of Dr. Shawarbi, Muhammad Shawarbi, came by Malcolm’s hotel to accompany him around the city and later out to the airport to catch a flight to Lagos, Nigeria. After some delays, on May 6 he arrived in Lagos. A Nigerian official at the airport recognized Malcolm and escorted him to the Federal Palace hotel.

  For the next few days Malcolm visited Nigeria, but due to his limited schedule he essentially toured only two major cities, Lagos and Ibadan. Unlike in Cairo, his arrival in Nigeria amid a sea of black faces informed him that he had landed in the center of the long historical struggle that had increasingly found expression in his rhetoric back in Harlem. Yet the situation on the ground hardly matched the idealization promised by his speeches. Here in West Africa he found a land battered by the effects of fierce internecine political battles; the political promises made when Nigeria had gained its independence in 1960 had not been fulfilled, and two years after Malcolm’s trip the country would descend into a nightmare of military dictatorship from which it would not emerge for decades.

  On Thursday, May 7, he met with several reporters at his hotel, and in the late afternoon toured Lagos by car. Waiting at the hotel for him upon his return were several local contacts, including scholar E. U. Essien-Udom. The group departed for Ibadan by car, a trip Malcolm described as “frightening.” That night Malcolm delivered a powerful address at Ibadan University, sponsored by the National Union of Nigerian Students, to an enthusiastic audience of about five hundred. Malcolm would later note that a riot had barely been averted there when angry students mobbed a West Indian lecturer who had criticized Malcolm’s address. Most memorable for Malcolm, however, was the honor bestowed upon him by the Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria: a membership card in their society with the name “Omowale,” which in the Yoruba language means “the son (or child) who has returned.”

  With the exception of Mecca, the high point of Malcolm’s trip in April-May 1964 was his visit to Ghana, where he arrived on May 10. He came at the invitation of the small African-American expatriate community in the capital city of Accra, which was informally led by the writer/actor Julian Mayfield. Best known for the racially charged novels he wrote during the 1950s, Mayfield had fled to Ghana in 1961 following the kidnapping incident in North Carolina that had also sent Robert F. Williams into exile in Cuba. He was joined in Accra by a number of fellow African-American radicals, which included his wife Ana Livia Cordero, Maya Angelou, Alice Windom, Preston King, and W. E. B. and Shirley Du Bois.

  Malcolm had first met Mayfield a few years before his arrival, at the home of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, and they had kept in touch as Malcolm’s interest in postcolonial politics grew. When Malcolm informed him of his African tour, Mayfield and the other expats grew excited at the chance to bring America’s strongest voice for black nationalism to the country that had long epitomized African hopes of a better future. Since becoming the first black African nation to gain its independence from colonialism in 1957, Ghana had come to symbolize possibility for many different groups. The rise to power of Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party provided a template for African self-rule for other colonized countries throughout the continent, while the peaceful transfer of power from the British colonial government, celebrated by blacks around the globe, gave further validation to American advocates of nonviolence, who saw in the transition clear proof of the efficacy of their methods. The nonviolent strategy also found support within the U.S. State Department, which was eager to limit Soviet influence in Africa.

  Yet as in Nigeria, by the time of Malcolm’s arrival the bloom had come off the rose of Ghana’s celebratory moment. The controversial murder of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961 had marked for many a terrible turn in the continent’s affairs, as the policies of Western nations toward Africa complicated the already strained politics of new nations struggling with civil unrest and governmental chaos. The use of violence by the enemies of the African independence movement—and similarly by white supremacists in the United States—increasingly made nonviolence seem like an anemic response, and bolstered the influence of those in favor of a more revolutionary approach. By Malcolm’s visit, Ghana was suffering from many of the same political difficulties that he had seen in Nigeria, and his appearance had the dual effect of exciting a population hungry for the ideals he represented while making government officials uneasy about embracing him.

  All this did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Accra’s African-American expat community, which had been anticipating Malcolm’s arrival for several weeks. When he arrived at Mayfield’s home early in the morning of Monday, May 11, Mayfield told Malcolm that he had already arranged two major speaking events for him. One was a lecture at the University of Ghana organized by Leslie Lacy, who had been radicalized during his student years at Berkeley and upon moving to Ghana had worked to set up the popular Marxist Study Group at the university. After Malcolm settled in, Mayfield took him to a lunch at Lacy’s home, where Alice Windom also joined them. Having first encountered Malcolm when he gave a talk at Chicago’s Mosque No. 2 in the early 1960s, she was happy to be reunited with him abroad.

  Over lunch, Malcolm explained that he intended “to lend his talents to the building of unity among the various rights groups in America,” recalled Windom. “[I]n his view,” she wrote, “no useful purpose could be served by exposing
all the roots of dissension.” This left open the question of Malcolm’s quite public struggle with the Nation, leading him to explain his departure from the NOI “in terms of the disagreement on political direction and involvement in the extra-religious struggle for human rights in America.” His first day in Ghana in the company of the expats left him feeling welcomed and contented, and late that same night back at his hotel, writing in his diary, Malcolm pondered the possibility of relocating to Africa: “Moving my family out of America may be good for me personally but bad for me politically.”

  In a May 11 letter to the MMI updating his followers on his travels, Malcolm recounted his triumphal lecture at Ibadan University, where he had given “the true picture of our plight in America, and of the necessity of the independent African Nations helping us bring our case before the United Nations.” Politically, the highest priority was building “unity between the Africans of the West and the Africans of the fatherland [which] will well change the course of history.” This letter marks Malcolm’s final break with the NOI concept of the “Asiatic” black man and the beginning of his identification with Pan-Africanism similar to that espoused by Nkrumah.