In return, the tribesmen insist that god make demands upon them. And god grants their request: He commands them to bow down and worship him, and to put no other god before him. He commands them to love one another even as they love him and he loves them. His commandments on social ethics always parallel the social history of the tribe involved. If one day some members of the tribe feel sick from having eaten the meat from a given animal, then god decrees that such meat is unclean and that it is sinful to eat of it. If the social history of the people discloses that the affinity between the man and his woman is so intense that the intrusion of any other man or woman upon that relationship brings on community disorder, then god decrees that a man shall have one wife and a woman one husband, and then commands that the neighbors covet not the man’s wife or the woman’s husband. And when the tribe matures to the point of having old men, elders, steeped in the history of the tradition of the people, god orders that the aged be respected and all be venerated as his leaders on earth.
Thus it is that the god of a tribe becomes “their” god. History is replete with battle scars left when the gods of an opposing people fought it out on the plains and in the valleys. When tribe meets tribe in war, at least one of the tribes is bound to lose. But even in defeat the god of the tribe becomes more powerful than ever before as the tribe is convinced that, though it has lost a battle, it will eventually win the war. Thus, in the words of one of the great tribal leaders, “Our god is able to deliver. But if not, we will not bow down and serve your god.”
Although tribal life revolves around the god concept, few tribal states have actually become theocracies. Religious leaders have taken their place beside temporal leaders, and they function in concord, under the umbrella of their god to make the state a practical institution.
With the dawn of modern history, gods began to fuse and merge as people began to widen the circle of their experience and accept the reality of tribal pluralism, and civilizations that have survived to matter in the context of the current world are those that fly the banner of the world’s four or five major religions.
Modern man knows little of all this because he inherited already thought-out religions. Thus he has no idea how primitive and crude his gods once were. And it is precisely because of modern man’s religious sophistication that the Black Muslims rasp: At stage center, and before an audience that is weary of racism and religious bigotry, the all-black Nation of Islam gleefully re-enacts the shoddy scenes of our cultural beginnings.
“We are in the image of God,” Malcolm says.
“Make it plain, Brother Minister. Make it plain.”
“That means that God—we call him Allah—must be black like me!”
“All praise due to Allah.”
“God was here in the beginning.”