Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern blacks and American alternative spirituality in 1920s Chicago

Religion and American Culture

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 123-166

  Nance, Susan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34247437857     PISSN: 10521151     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rac.2002.12.2.123     Document Type: Article

References (184)

1. Ira De Augustine Reid, "Let Us Prey," Opportunity 4 (1926): 274-78. As late as 1964 - in the midst of the civil rights movement - some black leaders still held deep contempt for working-class southern blacks who dared to worship outside the established black church. Scholar Joseph R. Washington thus wrote of urban black new religious movements, "They are at the whim and mercy of religious pimps whose prostitution of a simple people is possible by reason of their socio-economic pain. . . . Those separated cults which are the extension of plundering sharks and unconscionable greed quickly pass out of existence as the Negro peasant gains a foothold in the ghetto."
2. Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 120-21; see also, 114-15
3. "Cult Leader Lured Girls to His Harem," Chicago Defender, March 23, 1929
4. Dewey R. Jones, "Voodoo Rites of the Jungles in Odd Contrasts with Background of the City," Chicago Defender, December 10, 1932. Bontemps and Conroy were the first to have built upon the Chicago Defender's reports to depict Ali as a charlatan, his followers as bewildered country bumpkins. Originally published in the 1940s, this journalistic rendition of Ali's teachings and life has remained the primary source of information on the Moorish Science Temple before 1930, although it is rife with hearsay and contains many inaccuracies
5. Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace But Here (1945; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 206
6. See also Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 41-51, 115-16
7. and E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1957), 358-59
8. C. Eric Lincoln, "The Muslim Mission in the Context of American Social History," in African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 345
9. Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 118-19
10. E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: The Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 33-36
11. Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 115-16
12. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 48-52
13. Lincoln, "The Muslim Mission," 345
14. Aminah Beverly McCloud, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995), 11-17
15. Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 71-72, 90-98
16. See also, Ernest Allen, Jr., "Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam," in Muslims on the Americanization Path? ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164-65
17. G. H. Bousquet, "Moslem Religious Influences in the United States," Moslem World 25 (1935): 43
18. and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith, Mission to America: Five Sectarian Communities in North America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 79-104
19. Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologists, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8, 36-38
20. A particularly bad habit of this practice includes the use of sentences that begin, "Islam teaches . . ." or "Islam requires the believer to . . .". However, "Islam" does not teach or require, it is Muslims who do - and sometimes they do not. Further, these authors use unidirectional, teacher-to-convert models of religious transmission that assume new believers will necessarily seek out information from Muslims themselves, rejecting sources deemed unconventional or inappropriate by Muslims or academics, a situation that does not accurately portray how the Moors created their religion. See McCloud, African American Islam, 2-5, 15
21. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 72. Similarly, Kathleen O'Connor, rather than engaging with the American context of black alternative spirituality, looks for similarities between medieval Islam and twentieth-century African American ideas about human divinity in a way that denies change over time to Muslims and their religious philosophies. She gives no credit to the several centuries of Western esoteric thought from which these ideas also emanate, assuming that certain seemingly Muslim religious ideas could not have occurred simultaneously among a broad spectrum of religious thinkers
22. Kathleen Malone O'Connor, "The Islamic Jesus: Messiahhood and Human Divinity in African American Muslim Exegesis," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 3 (1998): 493-532. Another common theory is typified by the attitude of Samory Rashid. Regarding the Moorish Science Temple, he states, "despite its weak authenticity resulting from its failure to maintain strict adherence to Islamic beliefs and practices, scholars are unable to explain how illiterate ex-slaves who were essentially cut off from their religious roots in Africa were able to resurrect even the faintest forms of Islam during the early twentieth century." Here he seems to be arguing for some kind of African-Muslim survival in black culture, an approach that does not give African Americans credit for having been willing and able to draw from the abundant sources of religious information available to them in interwar America
23. Samory Rashid, "Islamic Influence in America: Struggle, Flight, Community," Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19, no. 1 (1999): 23
24. In the secondary literature, it is easy to find claims that the Moors did practice certain presumably Muslim habits in the 1920s, for example, abstaining from alcohol. Yet, so did the thousands of Americans who obeyed the prohibition amendment in those years. Similarly, we should view carefully any seemingly Muslim practices Arthur Huff Fauset observed among the Moors in the 1940s, since there seems to have been an obvious movement afoot among Moors to emulate Muslims after the prophet's death. See, for example, the appearance in 1935 of the phrase "Salam Alaykum" in the Moorish Guide, as well as plans for an Arabic school. "To the Moors throughout the Nation" and "Weekly Bulletin," Moorish Guide, April 19, 1935. No Arabic appeared in pre-1929 issues of the Moorish Guide
25. McCloud, African American Islam, 13-16, 201 n. 14
26. To this day, the Moors' style of quintessentially American ideas about personal transformation and the power of right thought can still be found most famously in the story of Malcolm X. See Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964; repr., New York: Ballantine Books, 1973)
27. There is ample record of the Moors' public career during the prophet's last days in Chicago, and these events provide an interesting view of how the Moors put their religion to use in building a powerful position for themselves in the city's Second Ward Republican political machine. See, for example, "Moors to Hold National Conclave October 14," Chicago Defender, October 13, 1928
28. Noble Drew Ali, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple, also known as the Circle Seven Koran, functioned as the primary religious scripture of the movement and was read at the Moors' subdued Friday and Sunday services. Noble Drew Ali, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple (Chicago: n.p., 1927)
29. Frank T. Simpson, "The Moorish Science Temple and Its 'Koran,'" Moslem World 37 (1947): 56-61
30. Edwin E. Calverley "Negro Muslims in Hartford," Muslim World 55 (1965): 343-45
31. Levi Dowling, Aquarian Gospel: The philosophic and practical basis of the religion of the Aquarian Age of the world (1907; repr., Marina Del Rey Calif.: DeVorss & Co., 1972)
32. Per Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 78
33. Edgar J. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 15-19
34. Shawn Michael Trimble, "Spiritualism and Channeling," in America's Alternative Religions, ed. Timothy Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 334
35. Hans A. Baer, The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 92
36. Charles S. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 464
37. and Gary L. Ward, "Introduction," in Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought, ed. Gary L. Ward (New York: Garland, 1990). Black Spiritualism is a highly syncretic trend in American religion, bringing international religious texts and concepts together by drawing from Catholicism, Protestantism, hoodoo, white Spiritualism, Islamic, and Jewish elements, an interest in mystery schools, Christian Science, and New Thought, and often black nationalism. Based on their understandings of 0he transcendent truth of God's spirit in each person, many black Spiritualists believe in humankind's ability to understand the "science" of the spiritual workings of the universe and to undergo mental transformation, for a chosen few, into a divine form. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 10, 26, 40, 92, 110-39
38. The Akashic records could only be accessed by sufficiently spiritually adept persons able to write "automatically" while in a trance-like state. The most famous interpreter of the Akashic records was Edgar Cayce, the noted clairvoyant and healer, who produced readings from the records similar to that found in the Aquarian Gospel. It is not surprising that widespread belief in the Akashic records, Spiritualism, séances, and channeling coincided with the development of the telegraph, telephone, and radio broadcasting, all of which involve invisible means of information transmission. Eva S. Dowling, "Introduction," in Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 16-17
39. J. Furst, Edgar Cayce's Story of Jesus (New York: Berkley Books, 1968)
40. Kevin J. Todeschi, Edgar Cayce on the Akashic Records (Virginia Beach, Va.: A.R.E. Press, 1998), 1-4, 67-69
41. and Trimble, "Spiritualism and Channeling," 334-35
42. It is popularly believed this portion of the New Testament was edited out of the final text by leaders of the early Christian church struggling to gain authority over an expanding membership. Janet Bock, The Jesus Mystery: Of Last Years and Unknown Travels (Los Angeles: Aura Books, 1980), 4-5
43. There were other changes here or there, the meaning of which are hard to discern. For example, a passage in the introduction to the Aquarian Gospel called "Man" became Chapter One in Ali's Koran, "The Creation and Fall of Man." Within this chapter, Ali changed Dowling's line "Creative Fiat gave to man, to spirit man, a soul that he might function on the plane of soul" to "Creative Fate gave to man . . ." in his Koran. We can only speculate on the meaning of such changes, considering Ali never made them or his use of Dowling's work public. Levi Dowling, "Man," quoted in E. Dowling, "Introduction," 17
44. Ali, Koran, 4
45. Levi Dowling, "Cusp of the Ages," in E. Dowling, "Introduction," 15
46. Ali, "Koran Questions," 56
47. E. Dowling, "Introduction," 15
48. Dowling, "Man," 18
49. "'Messiah' of Love Cult Sent to Atlanta Prison," Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926
50. and Reid, "Let Us Prey," 274-78
51. Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 261
52. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 86, 91-92
53. The Ahmadiyya are a heretical Muslim sect whose own leader, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, proclaimed himself prophet in 1880. Persecution from other Muslims, plus the group's experiences as subjects of Christian missionary work in northern India, encouraged a number of them to leave Asia in the early twentieth century and proselytize in Europe, West Africa, Australia, and the United States. Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 30-31, 117, 132-35. By 1926, Sadiq's successor, Mohammed Yusuf Khan, and his converts were taking out ads on the Defender's religion and spirituality page which encouraged blacks to come to their Sunday services and learn about the religion "of your forefathers." The Islam they presented to the South Side in their tracts and newspaper was similarly crafted to appeal to black interests. In articles such as "Crescent or Cross? A Negro May Aspire to Any Position under Islam without Discrimination," the Ahmadiyya advertised an Islam that ignored the slaveholding and racial conflict that is to be found in Muslim history, or in any thirteen-hundred-year stretch of the human past. Further, Sadiq and his converts walked the streets dressed in robes and turbans, reinforcing the cliché images of Muslims that could be found on the back page of the Defender and in Shriner parades. These missionaries were only very modestly successful. One complained, in the 1950s, that he felt his movement had not been able to provide for black converts' social and political needs or accommodate their militance
54. "From a Moslem," Chicago Defender, June 4, 1927
55. Haddad and Smith, Mission to America, 197 n. 66
56. Charles S. Braden, "Moslem Missionaries in America," Religion in Life 28, no. 3 (Summer 1959): 338-39
57. and Richard Brent Turner, "The Ahmadiyya Mission to Blacks in the United States in the 1920s," Journal of Religious Thought 44, no. 2 (Winter/ Spring 1988): 61. So far, there is no direct evidence of contact between Ali and Sadiq. Ali presented himself as a prophet himself, a claim the Ahmadiyya would never have accepted considering how hard they had been struggling to improve the precarious position of their own prophet, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, in the eyes of the vast majority of Muslims worldwide who understood Muhammad ibn Abdullah of Mecca to have been God's final prophet
58. Compare Qur'an 4:157 and N. A. Faruqui, Ahmadiyyat in the Service of Islam (Newark, Calif.: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at Islam Lahore, 1983), 89-99
59. Maulana Muhammad Ali, Muhammad and Christ (Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at Islam Lahore, 1993), 82-89. To be clear, the Faruqui and Ali works are both published by the Lahori branch of Ahmadiyya Muslims and not the Qadiani branch to which the 1920s Chicago missionary Muhammad Sadiq was affiliated
60. While the two wings of the movement are hostile to one another, they do seem to agree about their interpretations of Jesus. Muslim Sunrise 3, no. 3 (July 1930)
61. H. Spencer Lewis, Mystical Life of Jesus (San José, Calif.: AMORC, 1929)
62. See also Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus, 63-64
63. and Braden, "Moslem Missionaries in America," 337-38
64. Bock, The Jesus Mystery, 2-5
65. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, 3-8
66. Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993), 19
67. See also Baird T. Spaulding, Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East, vol. 1 (Marina Del Rey Calif.: DeVorss & Co., 1924)
68. and Elizabeth Claire Prophet, The Lost Years of Jesus (Livingston, Mont.: Summit University Press, 1984). I must give credit here to Wilson's excellent discussion of the Aquarian Gospel and the larger tradition of the mystical Jesus for pointing in this direction for the analysis of Moorish Science
69. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 19
70. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 75, 86-89, 112-13, 119
71. Apparently, Bengalee gave lectures at Mizpah Spiritual Church and Fraternal Spiritualist Church, as well as the University of Chicago, lectures which were advertised, among other places, in the Chicago Herald Examiner and a magazine called Progressive Thinker. The titles of Bengalee's speeches were seemingly crafted to cater to the 1920s audience's interests in alternative spirituality and self-improvement, some sounding more like lectures on New Thought than Islam, for instance, "The Object of Life: Spiritual Progress and the Means of Accomplishing It." Moslem Sunrise described another speech as, "'The Supreme Success in Life.' This spiritually informative lecture is an outline which the speaker is prepared to elaborate into a study course." Is it possible the Ahmadiyya converts came to experience Islam, not through a conversion experience, but as a "course" in "Success"? "Activities of the American Ahmadiyya Moslem Mission," Moslem Sunrise 3, no. 3 (July 1930), 12
72. In Marcus Garvey's UNIA, the Ahmadiyya found sympathetic pan-Africanists who also saw potential in Islam for unity among all non-whites around the world. Tony Martin has shown that UNIA leadership flirted with the idea of endorsing Islam as the official faith of the movement; Garvey never settled on one religion, however, believing he might alienate potential supporters by choosing either Christianity or Islam. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), 74-76
73. "Preface: The Strange Story of this Book," in Unto Thee I Grant, ed. Sri Ramatherio (1925; repr., San Francisco: AMORC, 1995), i-viii
74. Christopher Mcintosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), 17-19, 77-78
75. Calverly "Negro Muslims in Hartford," 343. The de Laurence Company of Chicago catered to Spiritualists and their customers by selling a huge variety of books on both magic and mysticism. A large advertisement placed in the Chicago Defender in 1930 advertised not only works on magic but also works on "Spiritualism, Clairvoyance, Mediumship, Healing, Hypnotism, Mind-Reading, . . . New Thought, Mental Telepathy, Theology, . . . Metaphysical, Theosophical, Astrological" books, and the "Egyptian Book of the Dead." "de Laurence Company," Chicago Defender, National Edition, January 11,1930
76. Edward Laroque Tinker, "Mother Catherine's Castor Oil," North American Review (August 1930): 153
77. Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 23-25
78. Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 22. In spite of these teachings, Moorish American women, including the prophet's wife, Pearl Ali, held prominent positions in the movement as temple governors, managers of Moorish businesses, and writers and editorial staff for the Moors' newspaper, the Moorish Guide
79. "Concert Held January 17," Moorish Guide, February 1, 1929
80. Bontemps and Conroy, Anyplace But Here, 207
81. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1881-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186-88
82. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4-6
83. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 121-23
84. In 1920s America, the term Asiatic was commonly used in the press to describe nonwhite peoples from the Middle East, East Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, regardless of nationality or religious persuasion. Ali's ideas about the unity of nonwhites around the world appear to have been part of a trend among African American thinkers impressed with perceived political and military victories at the expense of Europe by countries like Japan. Allen, "Identity and Destiny," 187-88
85. Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 27-30. The ancient Israelites are also mysteriously absent from Ali's list. Yet, considering the several centuries of popular African American biblical interpretation that sees black history reflected in the story of the ancient Israelites' bondage and eventual escape from slavery in Egypt, and Ali's revisionist history that argues the ancient Egyptians, "Old man Cush and his family," were only distant kin of modern African Americans, this may have been a necessary omission on Ali's part
86. Ali, "Koran Questions," 57; Ruth 1-2
87. Moab was also the death and burial place of Moses; see Deuteronomy 34:5. Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 108-9
88. Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 29-30, 121
89. Charles B. Copher, "Three Thousand Years of Biblical Interpretation with Reference to Black Peoples," in African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 111-12, 117-19
90. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60
91. Joscelyn Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 82
92. Moses, Afrotopia, 55-56. The first literate slave to be handed a copy of the Bible no doubt eventually came across Psalms 68:31, "Princes shall come forth from Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands to God." African Americans have interpreted this passage as predicting the rebirth of Africa and as a reminder of their perceived glorious past, sparking a long tradition of revisionist black history. Many American blacks believed Jesus and the Israelites to have been black, in rejection of the blond, blue-eyed Christ of white Christianity. For instance, in Chicago, the well-known Reverend James Webb advertised his sermons in the Defender weekly. His notices announced "JESUS WAS A NEGRO BY BLOOD-King Tut was a Negro by Blood" and "Negro universal king with woolly hair is coming to rule the world. Proven by biblical history. . . . The race problem will be settled by him." "JESUS WAS A NEGRO BY BLOOD," Chicago Defender, February 2,1929
93. Even Robert Abbott, editor of the Defender, placed a Sphinx on his paper's masthead, since it was "a convenient popular symbol." Roi Ottley Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1955), 141. Other blacks, like Ali, had a more multiracial vision of the character of Bible-age inhabitants of the Holy Land. Randall Burkett has noted that Marcus Garvey argued that Jesus had had "the blood of all races in him" in an attempt to avoid the wrath of some of his detractors who accused him of advocating racial separatism. Considering Ali names Garvey as a harbinger of his own prophethood in his Koran, it is certainly possible that Ali got this idea from Garvey or knew many of his followers were familiar with it also
94. Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 53-54
95. Marcus Garvey, "Lesson 1: Intelligence, Education, Universal Knowledge and How to Get It," in Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, ed. Robert S. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 196
96. Moses, Afrotopia, 24, 51
97. Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 60
98. Though Morocco had become a French protectorate in 1912, it still stood as a nominally independent state with occasional diplomatic relations with the United States. Michael McCarthy, Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 79
99. Luella J. Hall, The United States and Morocco, 1776-1956 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971), 661-63. However, most white Americans, including the American government, had little interest in the citizens of Morocco, conducting diplomatic relations with Morocco through the French colonial administration in the sole interest of protecting American investment in the country
100. Paul Zingg, "Sand, Camels, and the USA: American Perceptions of North Africa," in Through Foreign Eyes: Western Attitudes toward North Africa, ed. Alf Andrew Heggoy (New York: University Press of America, 1982), 100-103
101. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 60. Later, Malcolm X recognized the irony of black Moroccan privilege in the United States. "A friend of mine who's very dark put a turban on his head and went into a restaurant in Atlanta before they called themselves desegregated. He went into a white restaurant, he sat down, they served him, and he said, 'What would happen if a Negro came in here?' And there he's sitting, black as night, but because he had his head wrapped up the waitress looked back at him and says, 'Why, there wouldn't no nigger dare come in here.'
102. Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), 36
103. See also Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947; repr., New York: Vintage, 1980), 499. Thanks go to Karen Ferguson for this citation
104. Dennis Hickey and Kenneth C. Wylie, An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993), 271
105. Other religious groups, including the Mormons, many New Thought organizations, and the Theosophical Society, have also borrowed from the structure, decoration, and philosophies of fraternal orders perhaps for similar reasons. See Charles S. Braden, These Also Believe: A Study of Modern American Cults and Minority Religious Movements (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 138
106. Cherry Gilchrist, Theosophy: The Wisdom of the Ages (San Francisco: Harper Books, 1996), 29
107. Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 280-88
108. and D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1998), 91-93
109. Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 31-71, 148-84
110. Mcintosh, Rosicrucians, 64
111. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 197, 214-15
112. W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: A Journey through Ritual and Symbol (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 28-29
113. David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1717 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 85
114. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 45-46
115. Harrison L. Harris, Harris' Masonic Text-Book: A Concise Historical Sketch of Masonry, and the Organization of the Masonic Grand Lodges, and especially of Masonry among Colored Men in America (Petersburg, Va.: Masonic Visitor Co., 1902), 10
116. Albert G. Mackey An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences, vol. 1 (1873; repr., Chicago: Masonic History Co., 1921), 226-27
117. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Charleston: Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction, 1871), 287
118. W. L. Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, 5th ed. (1927; repr., New York: Gramercy Books, 1980), 19, 29, 48, 93
119. Wilmshurst, Meaning of Masonry, 29
120. Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 38
121. See, for example, "Kaaba," "Order of Kadiri," "Koran," in Mackey, Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, 375, 378, 417
122. Albert Mackey, The History of Freemasonry: Its Legendary Origins (1881; repr., New York: Gramercy Books, 1996), 233-43
123. Harris, Harris' Masonic Text-Book, 10-11
124. J. S. M. Ward, An Interpretation of Our Masonic Symbols (n.d.; repr., Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, n.d.), 10-11
125. Ali, Holy Koran, 59
126. Hickey and Wylie, An Enchanting Darkness, 270-72
127. For more on popular African American revisionist history, see Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998), 42-50, 66-76
128. See, for example, Henry R. Coleman, Light from the East: Travels and Researches in Bible Lands in Pursuit of More Light in Freemasonry (Louisville, Ky: n.p., 1881)
129. Rob Morris, Freemasonry in the Holy Land (New York: Masonic Publishing Co., 1875)
130. Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, The Mystic Shrine: An Illustrated Ritual, rev. ed. (1921; repr., Chicago: Ezra Cook, 1959)
131. William B. Melish, The History of the Imperial Council, 1872-1921, 2d ed. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Abingdon Press, 1921), 24-32
132. Ritual of the Ladies' Oriental Shrine of North America (Phoenix, Ariz.: Grand Council of the L.O.S.N.A., 1961), 86-88
133. George L. Root, The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (Peoria, I11.: Mohammad Temple, 1903). While these books may not be the most historically accurate portrayal of the early Muslim communities, the main author behind this information, the well-known Arabist and illustrator A. L. Rawson, put extensive effort into his research, giving thousands of average Americans access to information usually restricted to academic circles
134. Regarding Rawson, see Melish, cited above, and Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 278-81, 284-87
135. and Paul Johnson, "Albert Leighton Rawson," Theosophical History 2, no. 7 (July 1988): 229-51
136. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 150-51, 204-6
137. Regarding white Shriners' explanation of the meaning of their costumes and their intention to communicate mystical messages through their pseudo-Muslim identities in parades, in spite of their comical behavior, see Shriner publications such as 100 Years of Love, 1883-1983: A Centennial Commemorative (Chicago: Medinah Temple, 1984), 1, 2, 6. Beginning in the 1920s, there was a debate among some Shriners about the meaning of their parades and regalia, some arguing for "histrionic rather than for esoteric or historical purposes" in the use of presumed-Muslim symbols and words by the order's founders
138. See, for instance, Melish, History of the Imperial Council, 10. Each Shriner probably had his own understanding of the Shrine, some more secular, some more religious
139. Noble Drew Ali was particularly well placed to take advantage of this fraternal culture in the late 1920s, a time when fraternal orders had been secularized just enough that most Americans now associated them primarily with public service. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 148-84. The Shriners were the most successful of all the orders in adapting to the precedents set by the Rotary and Lions clubs due to their highly developed public relations skills, joyful character, and colorful parades, which won over public trust and plenty of funding for white Shriner Hospitals and black Shriners' own charities. Indeed, membership in the Shriners boomed in the 1920s, their public profile becoming more prestigious every year
140. Fred Van Deventer, Parade to Glory: The Story of the Shriners and Their Hospitals for Crippled Children (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1959), 217-23. The Moors also appropriated the black fraternal tradition as a formal organizational style for the Moorish Science Temple, imitating the fraternal works of charity, community service, and mutual benefit which defined black respectability in interwar America. Publicly, the Moors staged the Moorish Science Temple as a fraternal order, holding parades, conclaves, and evenings of entertainment, such as Moorish costume balls, all of which were reported in the newspaper, not on the "Where to Worship" page, but alongside the Masons and Shriners in the main news pages of the paper
141. Sayyid al-Imaam Isa al-Haadi al-Mahdi, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? (Brooklyn, N.Y: Ansaaru Allah Publications, 1988), 81
142. Adib Rashad, Islam, Black Nationalism, and Slavery: A Detailed History (Beltsville, Md.: Writers Inc., 1995), 166
143. Years of Love, 2
144. Root, Ancient Arabic Order, 41
145. al-Mahdi, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? 85. Popular tradition holds that Ali wore feathers in his turban to symbolize his Cherokee blood
146. See, for example, "Moorish Parade," Moorish Guide, October 26, 1928
147. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 114
148. Noble Drew Ali quoted in Allen, "Identity and Destiny," 179
149. A. T. Hoffert, "Moslem Propaganda: The Hand of Islam Stretches Out to Aframerica," The Messenger 9, no. 5 (May 1927): 141, 160
150. J. A. Rogers, "Bilal ibn Rahab - Warrior Priest," The Messenger 9, no. 6 (June, 1927): 214
151. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement, 180
152. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, vol. 2 (1945; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 399
153. Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 222
154. Martin, Race First, 75-76
155. Rogers, "Bilal ibn Rabah - Warrior Priest," 213-14. The used bookstores, public libraries, and informal friendly book-lending networks of Chicago's African American neighborhoods would have contained plenty of information on Muslims in Africa and elsewhere for someone determined to find out more. A few blacks probably had some contact with the elite black intellectual tradition of Islamic studies represented by men like Edward Blyden
156. Regarding the late nineteenth-century elite tradition of black scholarship on Muslims and Africa, see Edward W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1888; repr., Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1967)
157. Anson P. Atterbury, Islam in Africa (1899; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969)
158. and Richard Brent Turner, "Edward Wilmot Blyden and Pan-Africanism: The Ideological Roots of Islam and Black Nationalism in the United States," Muslim World 87, no. 2 (April 1997): 169-82
159. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 40-42, 51-53, 63
160. See also Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, 12, 35, 62, 63
161. MacNulty, Freemasonry, 6
162. and Stevenson, Origins of Freemasonry, 80
163. "Moorish Parade," Moorish Guide, October 26, 1928
164. Allen, "Identity and Destiny," 181
165. Mustafa El-Amin, Al-Islam, Christianity & Freemasonry (Jersey City, N.J.: New Mind Productions, 1985), 119
166. Mustafa El-Amin, African-American Freemasons: Why They Should Accept Al-Islam (Jersey City, N.J.: New Mind Productions, 1985), 24-25
167. Elijah Muhammad, The Secrets of Freemasonry: That Which You Should Know (Atlanta: Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society, 1994), 28-31, 38-39
168. Malcolm X and Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 161-62. Noble Drew Ali might have disagreed somewhat to argue that the esoteric message of transformation was nonetheless still to be found in the symbols and terminology of Masonry, if only one had the mystical guidance to see it
169. Al-Mahdi, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? 81-84
170. Hugo P. Learning, "The Ben Ishmael Tribe: A Fugitive 'Nation' of the Old Northwest," in The Ethnic Frontier: Essays in the History of Group Survival in Chicago and the Midwest, ed. Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A. Jones (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 98-141
171. See also E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 226-31. Famous late nineteenth-century Persian religious reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani here is described in black Spiritualist/Masonic-style terminology as a "Master Adept." This title may not have displeased Afghani, who was known to be a freethinker and Mason and who did, in fact, visit the United States in the 1880s, though he might have been surprised to find his visit recorded in the popular tradition of such a movement as the Moorish Science Temple. It is difficult to say what kind of religious training Afghani would have theoretically given Ali's parents, since his views seem to have changed according to his audience
172. Nikki R. Keddie, Iran: Religion, Politics and Society (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 30-32
173. Many African American Spiritualists likewise adopted Eastern identities or told similar mystical-travel stories to authenticate their teachings or magic. Frazier, Negro Family in Chicago, 83
174. Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 73-81
175. Kathleen Malone O'Connor, "The Nubian Islamic Hebrews, Ansaaru Allah Community: Jewish Teachings of an African American Muslim Community," in Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism, ed. Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 118-50
176. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 13, 58
177. Braden, These Also Believe, 128-29
178. Robert S. Ellwood, Jr., Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 87
179. Victoria W. Wolcott, "The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit," Radical History Review 69 (1997): 46-75
180. Victoria W. Wolcott, "Mediums, Messages, and Lucky Numbers: African-American Female Spiritualists and Numbers Runners in Interwar Detroit," in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Jaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 287-89
181. Wolcott, "The Culture of the Informal Economy," 58-61. The most striking and intriguing examples of the likely offspring of this strain of religious thought today are to be found in two groups, the Nubian Islamic Hebrews and their Ancient Mystical Order of Melchizedek, who have a prominent profile on the Internet, and the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths of Brooklyn
182. See O'Connor, "Nubian Islamic Hebrews," 118-50
183. Yusuf Nuruddin, "The Five Percenters: A Teenage Nation of Gods and Earths," in Muslim Communities in North America, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Jane Idleman Smith (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994)
184. There are also some interracial groups of American Sufis who admire the Moors. See Wilson, Sacred Drift, 49-50; "Welcome to the Moorish Observatory," found at http://www.speakeasy.org/ibbey/mo/, accessed March 10, 1998, Internet; "Excerpts from the Apocryphal sayings of the Prophet Noble Drew Ali," found at http://www.speakeasy.org/ibbey/mo/drew.html, accessed March 10, 1998, Internet