Building the Nation

BRIAN: We’re going to turn now to a religion that didn’t grow out of older forms of Christianity, like Pentecostalism, Mormonism, or Christian Science.

PETER: In 1934, Elijah Muhammad took over the Nation of Islam from its founder, WD Fard. This new religious movement drew its practices from traditional Sunni Islam—belief in Allah, prayer five times a day, fasting during Ramadan, mandatory charity, and pilgrimage to Mecca. The Nation of Islam grew throughout the 1930s and ’40s, attracting African American migrants from the South with its messages of black empowerment, self-reliance, and moral reform, all embedded in those Muslim rituals and practices.

ZAHEER ALI: That’s the origin story of the Nation of Islam in about maybe 10 tweets.

PETER: This is Zaheer Ali. He’s writing a doctoral thesis about the Nation of Islam in Harlem, at Columbia University.

BRIAN: Now if Americans know anything about the Nation of Islam, they’re probably most familiar with Malcolm X and his famous jailhouse conversion. In fact, prisons were a hotbed for recruitment in the 1950s and ’60s, partly—says Ali—because its Muslim tenets gave prisoners lives a spiritual structure.

ZAHEER ALI: And this is true, of course, in Islam. The five daily prayers, the fasting, the dietary restrictions, the moral restrictions with regard to sexual relationships.

BRIAN: So are you saying that regimentation fit well in an environment that obviously was hyper-regimented, a prison?

ZAHEER ALI: I do, and I think what it does is it gives that regimentation a different meaning, right?

BRIAN: Right, it’s turning it to one’s own purposes.

ZAHEER ALI: Exactly. The Nation of Islam effectively created black spaces in places that had been designated for black people. So where you see a prison cell, I see a Mosque. Where you see a ghetto, I see a community.

BRIAN: The Nation’s popularity in prisons wasn’t an accident. Ali says the attributes that made the religion catch on behind bars were central to the faith from the very beginning.

ZAHEER ALI: At the core of the Nation of Islam has always been a focus on black agency, the idea that black people were original, were first, at the center of the story. Write their own story, tell their own story, build their own schools, their own homes, their own businesses. Primordial blackness is at the heart of the Nation of Islam.

BRIAN: And what was it about the United States in the early 1930s that would’ve provided a catalyst for that kind of thinking?

ZAHEER ALI: Well, one of the things in thinking about the emergence of the Nation of Islam is to think about this emergence of new religious movements during the Great Migration era in the 1910s and ’20s leading into the Great Depression. Where you have people coming from the South—mostly from a Christian background—and finding in the North not always feeling welcome in the established churches, and so people began to set up storefront churches.

And certainly the Nation of Islam comes out of this milieu, but then hand this is genesis story that no one had heard before. The white race was a genetically engineered group of people whose purpose was to bring misery to black life.

BRIAN: Sounds like the kind of thing that would be banned today under genetic modification.

ZAHEER ALI: It is, but you know what’s interesting is that during the 1920s and ’30s, American scientists were leading the ideas of eugenics, right? And so when people heard Elijah Muhammad’s story of this scientist who engineered a white race, what they heard was the inverse of what scientists were saying at the time, and what they heard was something that put black people at the top.

But the community didn’t just sit around and talk about white people beyond that. There was a strong focus on what black people could do to change their own condition. There is this verse that was very popular, “God will not change a condition of a people until they change themselves.”

And so this focus on self-reliance in the form of establishing businesses, establishing their own network of schools—within the context of American racism and Jim Crow segregation in the South and the way segregation had played out in the North—that within that context, that black people could actually construct and establish their own communities that were thriving.

BRIAN: Any why Islam?

ZAHEER ALI: So part of the appeal to African Americans with Islam is this appeal of historical recovery. We know that those enslaved people who were brought from Africa came from predominantly Muslim parts of West Africa. That doesn’t mean they were all Muslim, but certainly a significant portion of them were Muslim. And so there was this appeal to the religion of your ancestors.

BRIAN: If I’m not mistaken, the ’50s and ’60s were a tremendous period of growth for the Nation of Islam. What do you attribute that to?

ZAHEER ALI: Certainly a movement that declares the white man as the devil is assisted greatly when people turn on the television and see black children getting hosed down in Alabama, or dogs being sicked on them, or reading about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

BRIAN: So some of the same catalysts as for the Civil Rights Movement.

ZAHEER ALI: Yeah. Yeah, where maybe some people said oh my God, how horrible, you had people who had accepted the beliefs of the Nation of Islam saying to themselves, we told you. For them, this was a confirmation of how violent white supremacy had become towards black lives.

And so they argued, why would you want—the integrationists to the desegregation—why would you fight to eat from a restaurant that didn’t want to serve you in the first place? Why would you even trust those people’s food, right? Why not you have your own restaurant? The Nation of Islam’s ideas of cooperative economics, of developing black-owned businesses, these were ideas that were very popular.

BRIAN: Here’s a show on American-born religions, and you and I have talked a lot about politics in spite of that. Tell me what we might miss by conflating politics with religion when we talk about the Nation of Islam, or is that the whole point of the Nation of Islam?

ZAHEER ALI: No, I’m really glad you asked that question because there is much of the Nation of Islam that speaks to the political condition of black people in America, but that alone would not sustain a spiritual community. And so it’s important to think about how the Nation of Islam provided spiritual alternatives for its members. I’ll give an example, we’re in December. During much of the Nation of Islam’s history, it practiced the Muslim holy ritual of Ramadan in December.

Elijah Muhammad really skillfully prescribed Ramadan for his followers in December for several reasons. One, to move his community out of celebrating Christmas, so I think he understood the need for spiritual alternatives for his community. And certainly internal to this community were people who were searching for a way to connect to a higher power, for a way to connect with each other, and the rituals that helped make that happen.

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BRIAN: Zaheer Ali is a doctoral student at Columbia University, and oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Peter, earlier in the show we heard this phrase, the spiritual marketplace. And it strikes me that, that phrase might be applied to virtually all the religions that we’ve talked about today.

PETER: Yeah, I think that’s true, Brian, and it’s partly because of the separation of church and state. There is no state religion and that’s an optimal circumstance for new forms of worship to flourish.

But I think it’s important to emphasize that though there is this great range of religious expression, that every new religion has faced enormous challenges because the larger society often finds these new forms of religious faith and expression to be threatening and dangerous. It’s not just that you’re free to worship the way you want, but if you do want to worship that way you’re going to pay a price for it.

BRIAN: Peter, to what extent has that persecution, in fact, been key to creating enduring communities?

PETER: I think it’s absolutely central. I mean, you could say that all national histories are histories of persecution. And so in some ways, a faith community is like a little nation that’s within the larger nation, as in the Nation of Islam. A faith community that is aspiring to connect with their god—in a way, they transcend the idea of nation but they reflect the idea of nation.

BRIAN: And yet, once they are established, they seem—in many of the cases we’ve talked about, all of them, really—to endure, sometimes even thrive, in circumstances completely different. And that simply speaks to me about the human quest for the spiritual that we simply can’t reduce to specific place, time, and historical facts. Really, the tools of our trade, Peter.

PETER: I think that’s so right, Brian. That’s the great paradox of studying religion. We want to put them in neat little boxes so that we can explain them, when in fact what we have is fellow Americans, fellow human beings engaging in the most important effort.

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