New Publication: The British Birth of the Occult Revival, 1869-1875

In February 2016, I posted online a paper I had written a few years earlier but had failed to get published. For whatever reason, the journal that I had submitted it to either lost the paper or it was simply ignored. In any case, apparently word about the paper spread and last summer I was contacted by a member of the Scottish Rite Research Society, a group of Freemasonic researchers, who requested to publish the article in their annual journal, Heredom. That journal has just been published, and I am extremely pleased to say that for my article the editor, Brent Morris, went out of his way to dig up several photographs--some of which are very hard to find--of the prominent 19th-century Masons and occultists who are discussed in the piece, including John Yarker, F.G. Irwin, Robert Wentworth Little, W.W. Westcott, and others. If you're interested in seeing faces to go along with the names, I encourage you to pick up a copy.

New Essay: "Propaganda in the Early NOI"

My new book chapter "Propaganda in the Early NOI" appears in the recently-published New Perspectives on the Nation of Islam, edited by Dawn-Marie Gibson and Herbert Berg. You can check out excerpts from the book on GoogleBooks and Amazon.

Below is an abstract of my essay:

While in the scholarship on the NOI there has been much discussion about the press’s coverage of the NOI in the early 1930s, there has been almost no attempt to analyze the group’s own use of media to promote its message during this initial phase of the movement. In 1933 and 1934, NOI members wrote a number of letters and editorials that were published in both Detroit and nationally-distributed African American newspapers. And, in the late summer of 1934, the group published its first periodical, the Final Call to Islam. Although for the most part, the content of these publications simply reflects the known ideology of the NOI of the early 1930s, this chapter will argue that these pieces add depth to our understanding and appreciation of both early NOI voices and of what was important for the movement at the time. For instance, in addition to promoting Fard’s principal doctrines about the origins and destiny of African Americans, there is a strong emphasis on the current activities of Muslims around the world, which shows for us how much the early NOI identified with Muslims generally. We also see a stress on having a proper diet and good health, echoing Fard’s ideas about “how to eat to live.” Perhaps the most valuable aspect about these publications, however, is that they give us a closer look at the leaders and followers of the early NOI. We see, for example, how precisely early NOI members—including Elijah Muhammad, who wrote several of the pieces that will be examined—interpreted and put in their own words Fard’s teachings. This gives us a better glimpse at how NOI ideas were constructed and expressed by its African American members at the time. Most scholarship discussing early NOI discourse has not relied on pieces written by followers during this initial phase of the NOI—instead, there has been a reliance on the group’s official teachings written by Fard, original NOI members’ interviews and speeches that were often recorded many years after 1934, and early 1930s sensationalist newspaper reports about the NOI, which often contained quotes from members that might have been edited or taken out of context. A brief comparison will be made between these 1930s pieces and some 1950s NOI writings. Finally, these early publications also give us a few small, but reliable and important details about the group’s structure and growth at the time. 

Book Received: "Bilali Muhammad's Meditations"

One of the oldest and most intriguing mysteries in the field of the history of Islam in America was for many years that which surrounded "Ben Ali's Diary", a thirteen-page document authored by Ben Ali--or Bilali--an enslaved Muslim in the Georgia Sea Islands. Although the document was written in Arabic script, the language used was not modern standard Arabic: it contains what appeared to be misspellings, contractions, and non-standard letter formation, as well as African and other idiomatic terms that had been hard to identify. In addition to these difficulties, pages from the document are missing and ink blotches make the identification of some of the words nearly impossible. Beyond these issues, the text is clearly based on classical Islamic teachings, but, even when the excerpts are relatively easy to translate, no traditional sources fully and precisely match what was written.

After seven years of effort, in 1996 Muhammad al-Ahari, the well-known independent researcher of Muslim American history, published a "free flow" translation of the text, which, although some scholars have since that timed refined the analysis of the text's language (see here, e.g.), has remained a respected translation. Using this and other versions, academics have more firmly established the text's likely sources and have expanded on the value of the text as a piece of American/African American/Muslim American literature.

I was recently sent a copy of the new edition of al-Ahari's translation, entitled "Bilali Muhammad's Meditations". The current version contains greatly expanded annotations as well as a significant amount of additional contextualizing information regarding classical Islam, Islam in West Africa, and research on Bilali and other early Muslims in America. As al-Ahari makes clear, the book is primarily written for American Muslims and calls them to use Bilali's text as a source on which to help build a Muslim American identity. Al-Ahari's discussions of the classical and West African Islamic backgrounds of topics covered in "Meditations" (a word written on the inside cover of Bilali's otherwise untitled manuscript) provide readers unfamiliar to these topics--as surely many of the younger people in its intended audience are--with information that conceptually links the text to the larger Islamic tradition. Accompanying the main book are appendixes that include full, annotated transcriptions of Bilali's text in both its original form as well as in standard Arabic.

Despite the fact that in a few instances Al-Ahari fails to directly and thoroughly address all of the aspects of the minor academic debates surrounding the text and Bilali's life, such as whether the text should be considered a work of  jurisprudence and the rumor that Bilali was buried with a Qur'an (for a summary of these critiques, see Progler), overall "Meditations" provides an enlightening and accessible introduction to Bilali's manuscript and life for almost any reader. Those who wish to look into the subject deeper will be well-prepared after reading this book.

NEW PAPER: The Moorish Presence in the Early Nation of Islam

The Moorish Presence in 

the Early Nation of Islam: Notes on 

the Chicago Herald-American's 1942 Exposé

From the paper:

In 2015, while researching the NOI’s activities in the years following World War II, I came across an article about the group in the 1960 edition of the newspaper Chicago’s American. The author of this article explains that in 1942 his newspaper’s predecessor, the Chicago Herald-American, “exposed” the NOI and other black nationalist organizations that supposedly were aimed at uniting “the world’s dark skinned people under Japan and exterminate the white race.” For anyone familiar with the history of World War II-era alternative movements in the US, this was an obvious reference to the major FBI investigation into the various black American groups that at some point had had a connection with Satokata Takahashi, a Japanese national who in the 1930s and 1940s attempted to form and influence numerous pro-Japanese, anti-American organizations. Much in-depth research has in fact been produced on these groups—which include both the NOI and certain factions of the MSTA—as well as on the federal investigation. However, this research has largely been dependent on available FBI files, and no previous author has mentioned a role played by the Herald-American. Curious about the claim, then, I examined the 1942 issues of the Chicago newspaper and discovered that it had indeed been an important participant in the exposure of the Takahashi-influenced groups, an event that came to light in a series of articles published in late September of that year.

What made these articles so fascinating and historically important is that they revealed that at that time, the Chicago branch of the NOI taught a unique brand of Islam wherein there was an overt identification as 'Moors.' Scholars of the Nation have long been aware that the organization emerged from the remnants of the Detroit Moorish Science Temple of America--a number of the NOI's original ministers had been in the MSTA and W.D. Fard seems to have incorporated a few MSTA teachings. However, as early as 1935 the Chicago branch of the NOI seemed different. In newspaper articles that year, it was reported that several Chicago NOI members explicitly identified as 'Moors' despite the fact that this was not what had been taught by Fard, who instead preached that African Americans were from the Tribe of Shabazz, whose home between Mecca and the Nile River--not the El and Bey tribes from North Africa, as was the 'Moorish' teaching of Noble Drew Ali, the MSTA prophet. Because of these obvious contradicting views, many scholars--myself included--assumed that in 1935 the Chicago reporters, not knowing the intricacies of African American Islam, had simply confused the MSTA members with the NOI members.

However, the newly-discovered 1942 Herald-American articles show that this was not a case of confusion. Not only did the Herald-American reporters record multiple instances of Elijah Muhammad himself saying that African Americans were 'Moors,' they discovered that the Chicago NOI temple was using for its texts Noble Drew Ali's Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America and the MSTA catechism--but apparently with all references to Drew Ali and the MSTA removed. In addition, the reporters observed a practice that had been rumored in 1935 but was believed by many scholars (again, myself included) to have simply been an expression of racist newspaper sensationalism: the performance of a 'blood' initiation ritual. As will be seen in my paper, this ritual is one of several clues that give substance to additional old rumors concerning the influence of yet another movement on the Chicago NOI: black communism. The early Chicago NOI, it seems, was far different from the NOI that would become famous in the 1950s and 1960s, which showed few to no obvious MSTA or communist influences. In fact, the dramatic change in the NOI in the mid-to-late 1940s was most likely a product of the mass arrest of NOI members that the Herald-American investigation helped instigate--it was almost certainly in prison where Elijah Muhammad decided to refocus the organization and remove the overt Moorish and communistic elements. 

This paper is the first of my many writings that will be appearing in 2017. Be on the lookout for new and previously unpublished essays that will be appearing in journals and edited volumes, as well as my long-in-the-works A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States Volume 2 (HCTIUS2), which focuses on African American Islam before 1975 and will contain, in addition to a synthesis of all my previous research, many new little pieces of information as well as one very big discovery that I hope will help transform the very way we think about African American Islam.   

View/download "Moorish Presence" here

Shaykh Hajj Hesham Jaaber, 1968

1917

Dr. Thomas Drew, the "Egyptian Adept Student" UPDATED 9/2/16

In his groundbreaking article, "Before the Fez," Fathie Abdat demonstrated not only that Noble Drew Ali, the famous founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America, had probably been born in Virginia--not North Carolina, as tradition held--but also that he had gone by the name Thomas Drew, not Timothy Drew, as was commonly believed. Moreover, even if he had not started his Newark-based movement in 1913, Abdat showed that Drew was verifiably preaching in the streets of the Tri-state region as "Prof. Drew, the Egyptian Adept."

However, despite Abdat thoroughly documenting Drew's travels using government records and city directories, there were still some lingering doubts as to whether or not the Thomas Drew from his research was indeed the same person as Noble Drew Ali.

Today, however, I am confident that they were one and the same.

My confidence primarily comes from my recently finding multiple newspaper articles about a "Dr." Thomas Drew from Virginia who was working as a mystic and using practices, teachings, and biographical claims that are very much consistent with those that are associated with both "Prof. Drew" and Noble Drew Ali.

Here is a sample.

Another reason that I am so confident that this Thomas Drew was the man known as Noble Drew Ali is the fact that Moorish Americans--in other words, followers of Noble Drew Ali--were the very individuals who left the clues that helped me find these articles. I discovered these clues in a manuscript that was written over a half century ago and contained information given to the author by individuals who were affiliated with the Moorish Science Temple of America.

I will be discussing this new fascinating evidence, as well as many more untold pieces of the history of Islam in America, in my forthcoming second volume of "A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States", subtitled "The African American Islamic Renaissance", due out in early 2017.

For those who have already seen my dissertation, be aware that the book will go FAR beyond the dissertation in terms of presenting previously unknown information and analysis. For this book, I have dug very deep, and I hope that it will contribute to a new appreciation of the diversity, complexity, and depth of African American Islamic history.


UPDATE 9/2/16: 

I have obtained some new information about Noble Drew Ali's following and practices during the early 1920s. At that time, as far as this information suggests, he was claiming to be a "Moslem" and for his practices he used an "adept chamber"--both of which are concepts that would exist in the MSTA. However, I have not yet located any references to "Moors" or "Moorish Science" from this period.