Malcolm in Mecca By Pierre Tristam On April 13, 1964, Malcolm X left the United States on a personal and spiritual journey through the Middle East and West Africa. By the time he returned on May 21, he’d visited Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco and Algeria. In Saudi Arabia, he’d experienced what amounted to the second life-changing epiphany in his life as he accomplished the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, and discovered an authentic Islam of universal respect and brotherhood. The experience changed Malcolm’s world view. Gone was the belief in whites as exclusively evil. Gone was the call for black separatism. His voyage to Mecca helped him discover the atoning power of Islam as a means to unity as well as self- respect: “In my thirty-nine years on this earth,” he would write in his autobiography, “the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.” It had been a long journey in a brief life. Before Mecca: The Nation of Islam Malcolm’s first epiphany first had occurred 12 years earlier when he converted to Islam as he was serving an eight-to-10-year prison sentence for robbery. But back then it was Islam according to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam—an odd cult whose principles of racial hatred and separatism, and whose strange beliefs about whites being a genetically engineered race of “devils,” stood it in contrast with Islam’s more orthodox teachings. Malcolm X bought in and rapidly rose in the ranks of the organization, which was more like a neighborhood guild, albeit a disciplined and enthusiastic one, than a “nation” when Malcolm arrived. Malcolm’s charisma and eventual celebrity built the Nation of Islam into the mass movement and po
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 15:37:30 +0000
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