When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World — John Shaqi
When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim WorldLomax, Louis E.
Religion
When the Word is Given...: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World
Lomax, Louis E.
Black Muslims
These schools are well disciplined and skillfully run. Early in 1962
there was considerable concern in Chicago over just what the Black
Muslims were teaching in their schools. A biracial committee visited
the University of Islam there and came away stunned. Said committee
member Judge Edyth Sampson, a former U.S. delegate to the United
Nations, “These people are doing a magnificent job with their young
students. I am deeply impressed by what I saw.”
What Mrs. Sampson and her fellow committee members saw was essentially
this: Black Muslim boys and girls stand muster for cleanliness and
decorum each morning. The classes are separated, boys in one section,
girls in the other, and the students’ day is divided between religious
and secular education. They are taught both English and Arabic; they
are drilled in the history of the black man in Africa and America. Then
they are taught the history of the Black Muslim movement from Fard down
to Minister Malcolm X.
In 1963 Sister Christine X, one of the directors of the school,
authored a new first reader which is now being employed. The exercises
in the book are something American educators would do well to study:
My name is Nora X. My father’s name is James X, and my mother is
Frances X. We are Muslims. We have our own flag. Our flag is over
there on the wall. The symbols on our flag are a star and a crescent.
Then the students are told to use the following words in sentences:
Allah, black, Muhammad, God, Temple, nation, flag, Armageddon, Elijah.
Other exercises in the book call for the student to write short essays
on Mr. Muhammad and other notables within the movement. Then as the
students progress through school they are taught to link subject
matter to the history of the black man. For example, when the students
are being taught mathematics they are repeatedly reminded that much
of modern math is based on work done by the Egyptians; they are not
allowed to forget that English is not their native tongue, that their
language is Arabic, that the white man robbed them of their tongue
when he kidnaped their foreparents from Africa.
The thing that arrests me most about these schools is that they are
now turning out the first generation of youth completely schooled
in the Black Muslim doctrine. Unlike Malcolm X, John Ali, and other
prominent Muslims of today who had to be “de-brainwashed” before they
saw the light, the movement now has several score teen-agers who have
been grounded in their faith just as a devout Catholic child is reared
in his. As of now the movement suffers greatly from a lack of trained
leaders. Only a handful of capable men and women are available to the
organization and the nature of their doctrine is such that trained
Negroes are hardly apt to join. But a few more years will see the
emergence of well-trained Black Muslims who, I am certain, will give
the organization more administrative order than it now has.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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