The Apostate Muslim

...she is secluded and protected, and her formal dress, at least, is designed to cover rather than display her sex...

...The men, conceived to be on the road to rehabilitation, regain their positions as heads of families...

...The intention, if not the result, is to obliterate the more or less typical husbandless, fatherless, mother-centered lower-class Negro family, that minimal rung on the rope ladder of Negro society...

...We dare not disown him for we are his creation and he is ours...

...and it was an air-plant...

...Another effort to cauterize the wound of slavery, to embrace the alienation of the Negro from American life, and thus to reverse the process of assimilation is the doctrine of militant self-defense...

...it cries out in defense of what it can rescue, invent, rationalize, or mobilize of its own culture...

...has so thoroughly explored the meaning of salvation, nor so realistically read the signs and symbols that identify the social maze in which we wander...

...And even that can be transcended, if we are willing to plunge into the depths out of which Malcolm was rising...

...First, it is necessary to understand the Black Muslims, not as racketeers, but as revivalists who readily become racketeers when their programs prove socially absurd...

...Christian revivalism, often oddly combined with African elements, is a familiar American Negro activity...

...This is not only a denial of the power and good intentions of the polity at large, the white police state, but also reverses the passive aggressive character of Negro social response, with its collectively non-violent, symbolic, evasive patterns of resistance...

...Its significance is to be measured, not in formal allegiance but in what the movement symbolizes to the people at large, in whose name it functions, and in how faithfully it represents the world as experienced by them...

...it is the sound of a people dying to the world as it exists and it is in this sense, above all, that nativistic movements rising within or on the margins of the expanding West, are descendants of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism...

...Here, too, we find a dwarfed reflection of the larger in the smaller, of the ancestral in the descendant messianisms...

...In all such movements, whether historical or contemporary, the original nucleus of the faith is small...

...Fundamentalist congregations, idiosyncratically splintered, sometimes ritualistically repressive, sometimes ritually expressive of the holy and profane passions of a crucified people, helped keep American Negroes alive...

...and it is not a true cure but a nostrum) has been the many forms of religious revivalism, those bizarre efforts at transcendence that we patronize or laugh at, from the slowed down jazz beat of the spirituals to the wonderful peace of Father Divine...

...To be a Negro in America, to be an ex-slave, even if now a new bourgeois, is to see society as tactic, to laugh up the sleeve, to put on the front when necessary, but to know where it is, to know the score, to know the domestic habits of the master...

...Although the whites are considered guilty forever and damned for their crimes against the Negroes, only the Negroes can emancipate and regenerate themselves...

...The only cure for this inevitable disease in a society that celebrates statuses instead of men Nora: This article is also appearing in Noetics...

...Within the movement, men are supposed to find psychological `security,' and it is expected, in return, that they will find steady jobs so as to make both their families and the movement viable...

...Unless we see it that way we do not see it at all...

...the Black Muslims crudely show us how...

...The symbols white-Christian-European are blotted out, and Black-MuslimAfro-Asian are substituted...

...For in each of these original instances, there was also a turning away from the world, a denial of mundane problems, a scourging and etherialization of conscience by prophets and, on the other hand, the contrapuntal erection of a worldly establishment, sanctifying power and even pleasure by the priests...

...It must not surprise us to find this same tension in the descendant little movements, no matter how grotesquely resonated...

...This man of inbetween color who rose out of the Negro world, our underworld, to confront us could have been born out of the head of Genet...

...Christian revivalism was expressive but insufficiently disciplined and inadequately symbolic for an increasingly disorganized people...

...No segment of our society has been closer to an understanding of evil, that is, to the sense of being seduced by an uncontrollable other...

...There is also a reversal of racism...

...When a people goes nativistic, its energies turn inwards...

...From this self-hatred arises yet another logical reversal—the manifest Puritanism of the movement, forced like sweet milk from the body of Negro amorality...

...Why does the death of Malcolm thrust the issue of the Negro, like a lance, into the American body-politic...

...Similarly pursuing the Islamic model, which is so usefully antithetical to the American Negro past, drinking, smoking, and, of course, the habit of drugs are forbidden...

...There is a logical reversal of the locus of responsibility for the Negro condition...

...But first we must learn to swim, white fish in his, in our dark sea, learning what he learned of us...

...Malcolm had graduated from a sect to a great tradition and at one stroke thereby revealed the distinction between Islam and the Black Muslims, while in his traffic with the black and white enemy, he had begun to explore solutions beyond cultism...

...At the pinnacle of the movement stands the Prophet, the underwriter of the chosen people's divine fate, reader of signs, and, simultaneously, disbursing favors, as his own chief priest, since the immediacy and novelty of the movement do not permit the separate, if linked, growth of faith and church...

...Whites are barred from the movement and cooperation with white agencies is forbidden, although all public facilities are used...

...The nativism, the messianism, which link the Muslims as a social species to the Plain's Indian Ghost Dance religion, the South African Bantu prophets, the Cargo Cults of New Guinea, the Iroquois Handsome Lake cult, can be broadly defined as a logical reversal of the usual course of assimilation, since assimilation in such situations is accurately conceived as the emasculation of the social and personal integrity of the members of the lesser by the more powerful group...

...This culturally symbolic murder of the apostate apostle reverberates throughout American Negro society, bemuses the whites, and is viewed abroad, particularly in Africa and Asia, as another spectacular example of the American habit of self defeat...

...But this philistine form of churchly corruption is always shallow...

...These sometime wives, grieving mothers, and thwarted lovers want men whom they can respect, and who will respect them...

...The historically violated Negro woman is considered sacrosanct...

...The details are of no importance, but it should be noted that Malcolm was not killed, although he had been threatened, until he had begun to change his attitude toward the enemy...

...When an immoral magazine like Time chatters piously about the sexual tastes, personal crimes, and peculation of Black Muslims, or of Malcolm, we should always bear in mind the grand example of the Renaissance clergy, the business activities of modern church and ancient temple, the Pharisees, the youth of how many saints, and the question able or false prophets who have graced the major religions...

...So as a revivalistic movement, the Muslims are not new, not to the Negroes...

...Malcolm was obsessed with the Negro condition, with the Negro being, with being a Negro, but he was not compulsively restricted to a single pseudo-solution...

...Any colored kid of twelve has a tougher sense of how it is with us than many a white academic type of fifty, whether technically in or out of the Academy...

...Only the Negroes have that power, here the whites are impotent...

...For this reason, the defection of Malcolm X was more than a schism that could be contained within the ranks...

...At that juncture he had to be executed, because to the degree that Malcolm won his identity, the Black Muslims lost theirs...

...But that cry is also one of agony...

...The real problem that will then emerge, is now emerging, is not one of color but of a self-divisive, mutually created cultural being...

...It is the corruption of the spirit that interests us, the Passion not according to the Hierarchy, but to such a one as Kazantzakis, wherein the temptations and weaknesses of Jesus are explored to their most excruciating point and wherein every degradation that we are heir to is experienced as a prelude to transcendence...

...Now let's examine more specifically how the Black Muslims, as a member of the species, logically reverse the blocked, typically persistent thrust towards assimilation...

...The Black Muslims, with little loss in meaning, and some increase in irony, might as well be called Black Zionists...

...That could only have been the ultimate secular heresy in the view of the Black Muslims...

...Caucasians are regarded as inferior...

...the leader into the promised land...

...They are means of resolving adversity, although they cannot be reduced to that func tion...

...This Puritanism also has the effect, at least in abstract, of reversing the roles of the sexes...

...It is conceived that only the Negroes can reformulate a Negro personal and social identity which is held to be degenerate...

...Surrounding the Prophet are the disciples, an elite within an elite movement, which is, in itself, the ordained instrument of a superior people...

...The Prophet is the movement incarnate, the voice of its inevitability, the recreator of its past, the interpreter of the future, the scourge of its enemies, the holy avenger, the source of spiritual good, which is black...

...First of all, a new social myth of the Negro past is invented or, to put the matter more precisely, Negro settlement in the United States is regarded as a negative diaspora, in much the classic Zionist sense, and the center of historical gravity is conceived as Africa...

...A disciplined troops supposedly replaces the random, opportunistic violence, and the patterned evasions with which Negroes customarily confront whites...

...We need him to understand ourselves...

...The religious establishments have always taken good care of themselves and they have always held out the gaunt hand of charity to the laity...

...And do his life and death not reveal how obtuse white Americans are in failing to see that all they have to do to pull the sting of the Negro as Negro is to accept him, without socio-economic reservations, into our lives...

...Therefore, many Negro women, dreadfully burdened for generations with the basic responsibilities of sheer survival, look with favor on the movement...

...When that became clear, this tough and charismatic man who drifted through the Negro landscape over ground so familiar to them and "shocking" to us, either had to be controlled or done away with...

...it had no strong nativistic root...

...It produced its tin-horn messiahs, who became confidence men in no time at all...

...Revivalism, nativism, messianism, are generic expressions of the American Negro community...

...His real religious faith would seem to have matured when he felt free to experiment with other answers...

...it gives up the impossible effort to unite with the conqueror (may, indeed, try to become a conqueror...

...Correlatively, the idea of integration is regarded as contaminating of the Negro, and a purely formal demand for a self-governing tract of land for Negro resettlement is made...

...his mere existence publicly illuminated Negroes in a way that drove the liberals back to respectability...

...Self-hatred, self-regeneration, self-defense compose a logically and historically derived progression, common to all nativistic movements, in the effort to achieve social and personal identity...

...there is even a myth of racial origin to account for it...

...The heresy lay in Malcolm's cast of mind, and in his capacity to grow, to change his mind...

...Caliban and Prospero exchange roles, and the notion of the white devil takes its logical place alongside the black and yellow devils...

...In the person of the Prophet, the climactic reversal occurs...

...But the Black Muslim movement is as close to a full-dress nativism as people without pasts can generate...

...The sophisticated and intelligent ex-con who had been rebaptized Malcolm X by the Black Muslims, was publicly killed for ideological reasons, that is, he was assassinated...

...The personal names of members of the Movement are shifted from those bestowed in slavery to either Islamic names, apparently for those who have made the pilgrimage, or the given name is maintained and the surname reduced to X, symptomatic of a degraded and anonymous patrimony...

...but even Africa, ravished by the whites, is relatively impotent, so Muslim Africa, facing Mecca, becomes the source of spiritual pride...

...It was heresy...

...But Christian revivalism was incomplete, too much had been borrowed from the immediate white environment which, moreover, rejected the Christian message of fraternity...

...It appears here with some modifications by the author...

...A Muslim in the traditional sense he became and remained, but he was ceasing to be a nativist, and was becoming a universalist...