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Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Susan Nance
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In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches were “a general nuisance. Neither their appearance nor their character warrants the respect of the Community.” Mortified, he described the founders of these informal assemblies: “He conducts his Services on such days as he feels disposed mentally and indisposed financially. To this gentleman of the cloth… the church is a legitimate business.” More to the point, he described his perception of the many southern migrants who aspired to found their own churches and religions, recounting how one “young swain” had announced to the leadership of a large traditional black congregation that he had had a dream. “In this dream a still small voice told him to ‘G. P. C.’ and when he heard it he knew that he was instructed to ‘Go Preach Christ.’ After further questioning by the Council, the chairman told him that he had misinterpreted his dream, for it certainly meant ‘Go plant corn’” For many educated African Americans, the idea of southern migrants presuming to enjoy their own religious traditions on their own terms in the urban North was ludicrous.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 123 - 166
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Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2002

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References

Notes

1. Reid, Ira De Augustine, “Let Us Prey,” Opportunity 4 (1926): 274-78Google Scholar. 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.” Washington, Joseph R. Jr., Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 120-21Google Scholar; see also, 114-15.

2. “Cult Leader Lured Girls to His Harem,” Chicago Defender, March 23, 1929; 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. Bontemps, Arna and Conroy, Jack, Anyplace But Here (1945; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 206 Google Scholar. See also Fauset, Arthur Huff, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 41–51, 115-16Google Scholar; and Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro in the United States (1949; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1957), 358-59Google Scholar.

3. Lincoln, C. Eric, “The Muslim Mission in the Context of American Social History,” in African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. Wilmore, Gayraud S. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 345 Google Scholar.

4. Baer, Hans A. and Singer, Merrill, African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 118-19Google Scholar; Essien-Udom, E. U., Black Nationalism: The Searchfor an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 33–36 Google Scholar; Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 115-16; Lincoln, C. Eric, The Black Muslims in America, 3d ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 48–52 Google Scholar; Lincoln, “The Muslim Mission,” 345.

5. McCloud, Aminah Beverly, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995), 11–17 Google Scholar; Turner, Richard Brent, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 71–72, 90-98Google Scholar. See also, Allen, Ernest Jr., “Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam,” in Muslims on the Americanization Path? ed. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Esposito, John L. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 164-65Google Scholar; Bousquet, G. H., “Moslem Religious Influences in the United States,” Moslem World 25 (1935): 43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Smith, Jane Idleman, Mission to America: Five Sectarian Communities in North America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 79–104 Google Scholar.

6. di Leonardo, Micaela, Exotics at Home: Anthropologists, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8, 36–38 Google Scholar.

7. 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 modeis 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; 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. O'Connor, Kathleen Malone, “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 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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 exslaves 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. Rashid, Samory, “Islamic Influence in America: Struggle, Flight, Community,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 19, no. 1 (1999): 23 Google Scholar.

8. 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. Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 51; McCloud, African American Islam, 13-16, 201 n. 14; Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 97-98.

9. 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 X, Malcolm and Haley, Alex, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964; repr., New York: Ballantine Books, 1973)Google Scholar.

10. There is sample 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 Tiefender, October 13, 1928; “Mrs. Drew Ali Organizes Young Moorish People,” Chicago Tiefender, December 1, 1928; and “Moorish Leader Attends Inauguration of Governor,” Chicago Tiefender, January 19, 1929. Old copies of the Moors’ newspaper, the Moorish Guide, are also loaded with further intriguing evidence and can be found in the Moorish Science Temple collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

11. 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. Ali, Noble Drew, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple (Chicago: n.p., 1927)Google Scholar; Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 48-51. Fauset's description of a Moorish Science Service results from his participant-observation research of the movement in the early 1940s and is the only study of its kind. Though he described the Moorish Science Temple of ten years after the prophet's death, it is likely the Moors did read the Koran at Services before 1930 also.

12. Simpson, Frank T., “The Moorish Science Temple and Its ‘Koran,’” Moslem World 37 (1947): 56–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calverley, Edwin E., “Negro Muslims in Hartford,” Muslim World 55 (1965): 343-45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Unfortunately, Noble Drew Ali left no personal papers or autobiography that we could use to reconstruct how his religious ideas were formed or which movements or thinkers inspired him. I have excluded works written by followers published after the prophet's death. After Ali's death, the splintering of the Moorish Science Temple into competing factions, each led by a man claiming to be a reincarnation of the prophet Ali, resulted in some dramatic changes. The internecine violence that resulted in Ali's death, and later the deaths of two white police officers, brought the movement under intense FBI surveillance as a suspected subversive organization. The unwanted attention of the FBI and the Chicago Police Department, and a falling out with the editorial staff of the Chicago Defender, caused the Moors to become increasingly secretive. Further, without the prophet present to enforce his Interpretation of Moorish Science, reinterpretation by the movement's leaders became pervasive, though rank-and-file Moors had been reinterpreting Moorish ideas to some degree all along. See “Moorish Cult Follows Chicago Convention with Murder of Two Policemen” and “To Disband Moorish Cult; Two Policemen Dead,” Chicago Defender, September 28, 1929; Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 101-5.

14. Dowling, Levi, 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)Google Scholar.

15. For students of mystery religions, there is a distinction between the Christ and Jesus, who became a Christ through his spiritual transformation. Christs of other ages include the Buddha, Melchizedek, Zoroaster, and sometimes Muhammad, among others.

16. Beskow, Per, Strange Tales about Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 78 Google Scholar; Goodspeed, Edgar J., Modern Apocrypha (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), 15–19 Google Scholar; Trimble, Shawn Michael, “Spiritualism and Channeling,” in America's Alternative Religions, ed. Miller, Timothy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 334 Google Scholar; Baer, Hans A., The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 92 Google Scholar; Braden, Charles S., Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 464 Google Scholar; and Ward, Gary L., “Introduction,” in Spiritualism I: Spiritualist Thought, ed. Ward, Gary L. (New York: Garland, 1990)Google Scholar. 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 the transcendent truth of God's spirit in each person, many black Spiritualists believe in humankind's ability to un-derstand 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.

17. 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, seances, 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; Furst, J., Edgar Cayce's Story of Jesus (New York: Berkley Books, 1968)Google Scholar; Todeschi, Kevin J., Edgar Cayce on the Akashic Records (Virginia Beach, Va.: A.R.E. Press, 1998), 1–4, 67-69Google Scholar; and Trimble, “Spiritualism and Channeling,” 334-35.

18. 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. Bock, Janet, The Jesus Mystery: Of Last Years and Unknown Travels (Los Angeles: Aura Books, 1980), 4–5.Google Scholar

19. 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; Ali, Koran, 4.

20. Levi Dowling, “Cusp of the Ages,” in E. Dowling, “Introduction,” 15.

21. Ibid., 14.

22. Ibid., 15. Ali defined “Holy Breath” in his catechism alternately as “Truth” and “Allah,” perhaps also meaning Holy Spirit. Noble Drew Ali, “Koran Questions for Moorish Children,” in Zwemer, Samuel M., “A Moorish Science Catechism,” Moslem World 32 (1942): 55–59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It may be that this catechism was produced after Ali's death in 1929, but we may use it cautiously to get some sense of the language rank-and-file Moors used when talking about the ideas in the Koran.

23. Ali, “Koran Questions,” 56; E. Dowling, “Introduction,” 15.

24. Dowling, “Man,” 18.

25. Ali, Koran, 4-5.

26. See, for example, “East Indian Teils of Native Religion,” Chicago Defender, August 31, 1929; “East Indian Mystic Sets Miami Astir,” Chicago Defender, February 11, 1929; “White Widow Aims to Wed Cult Leader,” Chicago Defender, February 18, 1928; “Indian Prince Teils His Side of Love Suit,” Chicago Defender, January 12, 1929; “'Messiah’ of Love Cult Sent to Atlanta Prison,” Chicago Defender, May 29, 1926; and Reid, “Let Us Prey,” 274-78.

27. Ali substituted “Allah” for Dowling's “AM.” Ali, Koran, 31; Dowling, Aquarian Gospel, 261.

28. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 86, 91-92.

29. 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. Friedmann, Yohanan, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 30–31, 117, 132-35Google Scholar. 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 cliche 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 feit his movement had not been able to provide for black converts’ social and political needs or accommodate their militance. “Islam or Mohammedism Means the Religion of Peace,” Chicago Defender, October 23,1926; “From a Moslem,” Chicago Defender, June 4, 1927; “East Indian Teils of Native Religion,” Chicago Defender, August 31, 1929; Haddad and Smith, Mission to America, 197 n. 66; Charles S. Braden, “Moslem Missionaries in America,” Religion in Life 28, no. 3 (Summer 1959): 338-39; Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 126-30; 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.

30. Charles Braden has speculated that the Ahmadiyya may have gotten their belief in Jesus’ life in India from the Notovitch book, but I would argue it comes from their own Interpretation of the Qur'an and northern Indian popular religious tradition. Braden, “Moslem Missionaries in America,” 337-38. In fact, the Ahmadi Jesus was, in part, a product of the Ahmadiyya's experience with aggressive Christian missionaries in British India. These missionaries had attempted to play on local Muslim belief, which held that Jesus survived crucifixion and ascended to heaven in human form, in order to win them over to the Christian idea of the resurrection. As religious reformers, Ahmad and his followers attempted to reinterpret scriptural Islam in such a way as to eliminate interpretations that opportunistic Christian missionaries might liken to Christian doctrine. Indeed, the Ahmadi missionaries in Chicago had certainly turned the tables, appealing to the people of a Christian country on their own terms, just as Christian missionaries in India had done by appealing to Muslim beliefs about Jesus. Compare Qur'an 4:157 and Faruqui, N. A., Ahmadiyyat in the Service of Islam (Newark, Calif.: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at Islam Lahore, 1983), 89–99 Google Scholar; Ali, Maulana Muhammad, Muhammad and Christ (Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha'at Islam Lahore, 1993), 82–89 Google Scholar. 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. 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).

31. The Ahmadi attention to Notovitch's book is hard to understand since his Version of the events, which upholds the divinity of Jesus and places Jesus in India before his thirties, contradicts theirs. Ahmadi doctrine agrees more fully with prominent Rosicrucian H. Spencer Lewis's Mystical Life of Jesus, which argues that Jesus’ transformation on the cross was only mystical in nature, such that he was able to live out his life afterward secretly with his disciples in Galilee, though never visiting India or Tibet. H. Spencer Lewis, Mystical Life of Jesus (San José, Calif.: AMORC, 1929). See also Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus, 63-64; and Braden, “Moslem Missionaries in America,” 337-38.

32. Bock, The Jesus Mystery, 2-5; Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, 3-8; Wilson, Peter Lamborn, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993), 19 Google Scholar.

33. Bock, The Jesus Mystery, 2-5, 20-21, 23. Janet Bock's volume, The Jesus Mystery, is in fact a prominent example of a modern retelling of the story of the mystical Jesus. Desiring to investigate the Aquarian Gospel and the earlier Notovitch text, Bock and her husband trekked through India and Tibet speaking with a number of Swamis and religious leaders regarding the tradition of Jesus there. She also lists two further books published by men who traveled to Tibet in search of the same manuscripts which she says may now be lost. Indeed, the Aquarian Gospel is unusual in that its source was automatic writing, rather than travel experiences. See also Spaulding, Baird T., Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East, vol. 1 (Marina Del Rey, Calif.: DeVorss & Co., 1924)Google Scholar; and Prophet, Elizabeth Ciaire, The Lost Years of Jesus (Livingston, Mont: Summit University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. 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. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 19.

34. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 75, 86-89, 112-13, 119.

35. 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 Herold 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.

36. In Marcus Garvey's UNIA, the Ahmadiyya found sympathetic pan-Africanists who also saw potential in Islam for unity among all nonwhites 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. Martin, Tony, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976), 74–76 Google Scholar.

37. “Preface: The Strange Story of this Book,” in Unto Thee I Grant, ed. Sri Ramatherio (1925; repr., San Francisco: AMORC, 1995), i-viii. 38. Ibid., vii.

39. Mclntosh, Christopher, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology and Rituals of an Occult Order (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), 17–19, 77-78Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 135-41.

41. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 21; 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.

42. Edward Laroque Tinker, “Mother Catherine's Castor Oil,” North American Review (August 1930): 153.

43. Ali, Koran, 34-35; Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 23-25.

44. Ali, Koran, 32; Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 19-20.

45. Ali, Koran, 33; 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. “Mrs. Drew Ali Organizes Young Moorish People,” Chicago Defender, December 1,1928; “Concert Held January 17,” Moorish Guide, February 1,1929.

46. Ali, Koran, 36; Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 26.

47. Ali, Koran, 38; Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 30.

48. Bontemps and Conroy, Anyplace But Here, 207; Fauset, Black Gods ofthe Metropolis, 43.

49. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1881-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186-88Google Scholar; Gaines, Kevin K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 4–6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Ali, Koran, 44; Ramatherio, Unto Thee I Grant, 44.

51. Bay, Mia, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American ldeas about White People, 1830-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 121-23Google Scholar.

52. 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.

53. Ali, Koran, 56-57.

54. Ali, Koran, 58. 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.

55. Ali, Koran, 57-58.

56. Ali, “Koran Questions,” 57; Ruth 1-2.

57. Moab was also the death and burial place of Moses; see Deuteronomy 34:5. Silberman, Neil Asher, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 108-9Google Scholar.

58. Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 29-30, 121; Copher, Charles B., “Three Thousand Years of Biblical Interpretation with Reference to Black Peoples,” in African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Wilmore, Gayraud S. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 111-12, 117-19Google Scholar; Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 17. Regarding these “archetypal sins” and evil deeds, see, for example, 2 Kings 13:20, Arnos 2:2.

60. Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 120-21; Godwin, Joscelyn, Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 82 Google Scholar; 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; “Negro Universal King,” Chicago Defender, March 17,1928. Even Robert Abbott, editor of the Defender, placed a Sphinx on his paper's masthead, since it was “a convenient popular symbol.” Ottley, Roi, Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1955), 141 Google Scholar. 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 cer-tainly possible that Ali got this idea from Garvey or knew many of his followers were familiar with it also. Ali, Koran, 59; Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 94; Burkett, Randall K., Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization ofa Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 53–54 Google Scholar; Garvey, Marcus, “Lesson 1: Intelligence, Education, Universal Knowledge and How to Get It,” in Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, ed. Hill, Robert S. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 196 Google Scholar; Moses, Afrotopia, 24, 51.

61. Sernett, Milton C., Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Ali, “Koran Questions,” 56.

63. Ali, Koran, 58. Ernest Allen has rightly pointed out that the legend of Atlantis Island has a long history in the West among all sorts of Americans interested in mysticism and alternative spirituality, most famously in the nineteenth Century among members of the Theosophical Society. More recently, Shirley MacLaine has popularized the idea of a lost chosen people of Atlantis. Allen, “Identity and Destiny,” 186-87.

64. 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. McCarthy, Michael, Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 79 Google Scholar; Hall, Luella J., The United States and Morocco, 1776-1956 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1971), 661-63Google Scholar. 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. Zingg, Paul, “Sand, Cameis, and the USA: American Perceptions of North Africa,” in Through Foreign Eyes: Western Attitudes toward North Africa, ed. Heggoy, Alf Andrew (New York: University Press of America, 1982), 100–103 Google Scholar.

65. Washington, Booker T., Up front Slavery (1901; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 60 Google Scholar. 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.’ X, Malcolm, “The Bailot or the Bullet,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. Breitman, George (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), 36 Google Scholar. See also Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (1947; repr., New York: Vintage, 1980), 499 Google Scholar. Thanks go to Karen Ferguson for this citation.

66. Hickey, Dennis and Wylie, Kenneth C., An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993), 271 Google Scholar.

67. Ali, Koran, 60.

68. Ibid., 59.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid., 3, 57. Ali puts fellow Asiatics at the center of this ancient philosophy, calling the modern Arabs of the Saudi Peninsula “olive”-skinned “Angels” sent by God to guard Mecca and “keep the unbelievers away.” Ali, “Koran Questions,” 58.

71. 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 Braden, Charles S., These Also Believe: A Study of Modern American Cults and Minority Religious Movements (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 138 Google Scholar; Gilchrist, Cherry, Theosophy: The Wisdom of the Ages (San Francisco: Harper Books, 1996), 29 Google Scholar; Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment, 280-88; and Quinn, D. Michael, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1998), 91–93 Google Scholar.

72. Dumenil, Lynn, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 31–71, 148-84Google Scholar.

73. McIntosh, Rosicrucians, 64; Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 197, 214-15.

74. MacNulty, W. Kirk, Freemasonry: A Journey through Ritual and Symbol (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 28–29 Google Scholar; Stevenson, David, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1717 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. Carnes, Mark C., Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 45–46 Google Scholar.

76. Harris, Harrison L., 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 Google Scholar; Mackey, Albert G., An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences, vol. 1 (1873; repr., Chicago: Masonic History Co., 1921), 226-27Google Scholar; Pike, Albert, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (Charleston: Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction, 1871), 287 Google Scholar; Wilmshurst, W. L., The Meaning of Masonry, 5th ed. (1927; repr., New York: Gramercy Books, 1980), 19, 29, 48, 93Google Scholar.

77. Wilmshurst, Meaning of Masonry, 29.

78. Ibid., 23-24, 203-4; Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 38.

79. See, for example, “Kaaba,” “Order of Kadiri,” “Koran,” in Mackey, Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, 375, 378, 417; Mackey, Albert, The History of Freemasonry: Its Legendary Origins (1881; repr., New York: Gramercy Books, 1996), 233-43Google Scholar; Harris, Harris’ Masonic Text-Book, 10-11; Pike, Morals and Dogma ofthe Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 29, 35, 38, 53, 78-82; Wilmshurst, Meaning of Masonry, 40, 64, 178-82. These references are usually positive with respect to Muslims, though on occasion Masons desiring to Christianize Masonry made more critical Statements, such as J. S. M. Ward: “[Freemasonry] is by no means so exalted as that of the Christian faith, to which most of its members subscribe. Indeed if we accepted it as the best code, we should be going backward, not forward, in spiritual evolution, quite as effectively as if we became Mohammedans and gave up Christianity” J. S. M. Ward, An Interpretation of Our Masonic Symbols (n.d.; repr., Kila, Mont: Kessinger Publishing, n.d.), 10-11.

80. Ali, Holy Koran, 59.

81. Compare Ali's revisions of world history with this history from Harris's Masonic Text-Book, written by an African American Grand Master Mason around the turn of the Century:

Nimrod or Belus, the son of Cush, the eldest son of Harn, and founder of the Babylonian monarchy, kept possession of the piain [Craft], and founded the first great empire at Babylon. From Shinar the science and the art were carried to distant parts of the world, notwith-standing the confusion of the dialects and which is presumed to have given rise to the universal practice of conversing without speaking, and Communications between Masons by tokens and signs.

Mizraim, the second son of Harn, carried to, and preserved in Egypt, the original skill, and cultivated the arts—monuments of which are still extant in that country under the name of Pyramids…. It is presumed that the offspring of Shem propagated the science as far as China and Japan. Abraham, born two years after the death of Noah, had learned the science, before the Grand Architect of the Universe called him to travel from Ur of the Chaldees. He communicated it to the Canaanites, for which they honored him as a prince.

Harris, Harris’ Masonic Text-Book, 10-11. Around 1920, black scholarship on African history began to be overshadowed by a populär counterpart that exaggerated ancient African achievement in order to promote racial pride. Marcus Garvey and many other more obscure African Americans self-published books and pamphlets containing revisionist histories of the continent which described the ancient Holy Land, Ethiopia, or Egypt as sources of ancient knowledge that would set blacks free were they to rediscover it. Offen these works were, like Ali's Koran, millennial in tone and written by men present-ing themselves as renewers of black culture. These books go on to argue that ancient African wisdom proved whites had been lying to blacks about black history for centuries in order to keep them powerless. Hickey and Wylie, An Enchanting Darkness, 270-72. For more on populär African American revisionist history, see Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998), 42-50, 66-76.

82. Wilson explains, “If [the] Masonic reading of Islam can be called a misreading, nevertheless it contains a fortuitous element—an example of heresy acting as a means of cultural transfer. That is: an image of Islam (however distorted) had in fact moved from East to West and brought about cultural ferment.” Wilson, Sacred Drift, 26.

83. See, for example, Coleman, Henry R., Light from the East: Travels and Researches in Bible Lands in Pursuit of More Light in Freemasonry (Louisville, Ky.: n.p., 1881)Google Scholar; Morris, Rob, Freemasonry in the Holy Land (New York: Masonic Publishing Co., 1875)Google Scholar.

84. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 26-27. Shriner publications, in particular the George Root volume, contain an astonishing amount of detail regarding Muslim practices and beliefs, the names and stories of well-known men and women from early Islamic history, and Arabic words and phrases transliterated into English. Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, The Mystic Shrine: An Illustrated Ritual, rev. ed. (1921; repr., Chicago: Ezra Cook, 1959); Melish, William B., The History of the Imperial Council, 1872-1921, 2d ed. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Abingdon Press, 1921), 24–32 Google Scholar; Ritual ofthe Ladies’ Oriental Shrine of North America (Phoenix, Ariz.: Grand Council of the L.O.S.N.A., 1961), 86-88; Root, George L., The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (Peoria, Ill.: Mohammad Temple, 1903)Google Scholar. 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. Re-garding Rawson, see Melish, cited above, and Godwin, Theosophical Enlighten-ment, 278-81, 284-87; and Johnson, Paul, “Albert Leighton Rawson,” Theosophical History 2, no. 7 (July 1988): 229-51Google Scholar.

85. “Texas Lodge Case to Get Final Airing,” Chicago Defender, January 21, 1928.

86. Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 150-51, 204-6.

87. 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. 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.

88. “Shriners to Get Welcome in Big Style,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1929. The Chicago Defender approvingly reported on another parade in Boston that included a participant calling himself “Sahara Lizzie” who “resplendent in yellow, purple, blue and orange with weird sleeve decoration … performed a wild dance along the route to the music of his own tambourine.” “Shriners End Fine Session in Bean City,” Chicago Defender, September 4, 1926.

89. 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. Deventer, Fred Van, Parade to Glory: The Story of the Shriners and Their Hospitals for Crip-Children (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1959), 217-23Google Scholar. The Moors also appropriated the black fraternal tradition as a formal organizational style for the Moorish Science Temple, imitating the fraternal works of charity, com-munity Service, and mutual benefit which defined black respectability in in-terwar 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.

90. Isa al-Haadi al-Mahdi, Sayyid al-Imaam, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Ansaaru Allah Publications, 1988), 81 Google Scholar; Wilson, Sacred Drift, 28.

91. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 26; Rashad, Adib, Islam, Black Nationalism, and Slavery: A Detailed History (Beltsville, Md.: Writers Inc., 1995), 166 Google Scholar.

92. 100 Years of Love, 2; Root, Ancient Arabic Order, 41; al-Mahdi, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? 85. Popular tradition holds that Ali wore feathers in his turban to symbolize his Cherokee blood. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 28.

93. See, for example, “Moorish Parade,” Moorish Guide, October 26, 1928; and “Hold Session of Moorish Science Body,” Chicago Defender, October 20, 1928.

94. Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 114 Google Scholar.

95. Noble Drew Ali quoted in Allen, “Identity and Destiny,” 179.

96. “Off for London—High Highness, the Sultan of Zanzibar,” Chicago Defender, June 1, 1929. Another story presented four black Muslim men from Aden who stated they had proof of their direct “descent from Abraham through Ishmael, his son, and Hagar, his wife, commonly known as the forerunner of the Ethiopian race.” The story goes on to claim that these men were Arabs to confirm “the old opinion of a double origin of the Arab race.” “Trace Ancestry to Mighty Sampson,” Chicago Defender, June 1, 1927; “Mohammedan Religion Spreads to Africa,” Chicago Defender, April 28, 1928; “Endanger Christianity in Africa,” Chicago Defender, October 20, 1928. Other articles documenting the spread of Islam in Africa and the United States were also widely circulated in, for example, the Messenger, published by black union leaders A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, and Marcus Garvey's Negro World. A. T. Hoffert, “Moslem Propaganda: The Hand of Islam Stretches Out to Aframerica,” The Messenger 9, no. 5 (May 1927): 141, 160; J. A. Rogers, “Bilal ibn Rahab—Warrior Priest,” The Messenger 9, no. 6 (June, 1927): 214; Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement, 180; 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; Lorini, Alessandra, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 222 Google Scholar; Martin, Race First, 75-76; Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 88-90.

97. 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. 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); Anson P. Atterbury, Islam in Africa (1899; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969); and Turner, Richard Brent, “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): 169-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98. However, a significant portion of news articles portrayed Islam as militantly anti-Christian and spreading at an alarming pace through previously Christian parts of Africa and America. Blacks partial to black Spiritualism or other forms of alternative spirituality may have disregarded these articles as propaganda for white Christianity, of which they were suspicious in any event. “Sees Islam Making Bid for Converts,” Chicago Defender, May 14, 1927; “Changing Religions,” Chicago Defender, May 14, 1927; “Endanger Christianity in Africa,” Chicago Defender, October 20,1928.

99. Lears, Jackson, Fahles of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 40–42, 51-53, 63Google Scholar.

100. Arthur Fauset reported in the early 1940s, “The members were also taught to believe that a sign, a star within a crescent moon, had been seen in the heavens, and that this betokened the arrival of the day of the Asiatics, and the destruction of the Europeans (whites).” Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis, 42.

101. “The Wonder Medicine of the Present Age,” Moorish Guide, February 1, 1929.

102. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 85-89; Melish, History of the Imperial Council, 38-39; “Let Me Teil You,” Chicago Defender, Jury 16, 1927; “Bungleton Green,” Chicago Defender, June 19, 1926. Regarding Noble Drew Ali's career as a magician and performer, see Wilson, Sacred Drift, 30; “Sheiks, Prophets Figure in Great Moorish Drama,” Chicago Defender, May 14, 1927.

103. Recall the Mason, Harris, mentioned above, who noted, “the confusion of the dialects … which is presumed to have given rise to the universal practice of conversing without speaking, and Communications between Masons by tokens and signs,” as a form of universal mystical communication. Harris, Harris’ Masonic Text-Book, 10. See also Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, 12, 35, 62, 63; MacNulty, Freemasonry, 6; and Stevenson, Origins ofFreemasonry, 80.

104. “Moorish Parade,” Moorish Guide, October 26, 1928; “Hold Session of Moorish Science Body,” Chicago Defender, October 20, 1928. Further, since at least the 1950s, some African American Muslims have viewed fraternal Orders, in particular the Shriners, as a representation of Islamic ideas. Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam criticized not only white but also African American Freemasons and Shriners, claiming fraternal Symbols and rituals constituted a mockery of Islam. He argued whites had sold blacks this misrepresentation either out of ignorance or disingenuousness, causing blacks to be unable to take the religion of Islam seriously. Moreover, Ernest Allen has intriguingly discovered that Wallace Fard, early founder of the Nation of Islam, instructed members of the Nation, in the 1930s, that the Shriners were a white means of access to “Islamic” wisdom. Allen, “Identity and Destiny,” 181; El-Amin, Mustafa, AI-Islam, Christianity & Freemasonry (Jersey City, N.J.: New Mind Productions, 1985), 119 Google Scholar; El-Amin, Mustafa, African-American Freemasons: Why They Should Accept AI-Islam (Jersey City, N.J.: New Mind Productions, 1985), 24–25 Google Scholar; Muhammad, Elijah, The Secrets of Freemasonry: That Which You Should Know (Atlanta: Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society, 1994), 28–31, 38-39Google Scholar; 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. Al-Mahdi, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? 81-84.

105. Wilson, Sacred Drift, 16. Informants in 1970s Chicago spoke of a folk tradition among urban blacks that held that Noble Drew Ali's earliest followers in Chicago had been members of a nomadic people of African, Native American, and white ancestry who practiced a centuries-old American religion derived from contact between Native Americans and Muslim African slaves. Leaming, Hugo P., “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. Holli, Melvin G. and Jones, Peter d'A. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 98–141 Google Scholar. See also Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 226-31Google Scholar. 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 re-corded 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. Keddie, Nikki R., Iran: Religion, Politics and Society (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 30–32 Google Scholar.

106. 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; McKay, Claude, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 73–81 Google Scholar; O'Connor, Kathleen Malone, “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. Chireau, Yvonne and Deutsch, Nathaniel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 118-50Google Scholar; Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 92-93.

107. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 92; Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 13, 58; Braden, These Also Believe, 128-29; Ellwood, Robert S. Jr., Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 87 Google Scholar; Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 25; Wilmshurst, Meaning of Masonry, 5. One modern observer of Noble Drew Ali, who likewise leads a fraternal/black Spiritualist-style religious group, has explained Ali's use of the word “science”: “The word ‘science’ represents Noble Drew Ali's … belief that the black man's true culture is science, meaning AI Islaam is a science and through this science the black man can be independent of the white man in solving his problems…. The use of the word science is based upon the belief that everything finds its roots in mathematics. All the questions in the universe can be answered through the application of the 360 degrees of knowledge contained in the universe.” Al-Mahdi, Who Was Noble Drew Ali? 16.

108. Wolcott, Victoria W., “The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” Radical History Review 69 (1997): 46–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolcott, Victoria W., “Mediums, Messages, and Lucky Numbers: African-American Female Spiritualists and Numbers Runners in Interwar Detroit,” in The Geography ofldentity, ed. Jaeger, Patricia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 287-89Google Scholar.

109. In particular, Moorish Science bears startlingly close resemblance to Father Hurley's Detroit-based Universal Hagar's Spiritual Church, which flourished between 1923 and the mid-1940s. Ali's teachings also bear a strong resemblance to some of the religious ideas presented by Marcus Garvey. Baer, Black Spiritual Movement, 82-109, 148; Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement, 45-62; 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. See O'Connor, , “Nubian Islamic Hebrews,” 118-50; Yusuf Nuruddin, “The Five Percenters: A Teenage Nation of Gods and Earths,” in Muslim Communities in North America, ed. Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck and Smith, Jane Idleman (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994)Google Scholar. 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.