The human beast—the serpent, the dragon, the devil, and Satan—all mean one and the same: the people or race known as the white or Caucasian race, sometimes called the European race.
Since by nature they were created liars and murderers, they are the enemies of truth and righteousness, and the enemies of those who seek the truth....
But their certification of the white man as a devil, one incapable of doing good, rests on more than metaphysical grounds. It involves history. To make their historical point the Black Muslims part company with the established world historians. They begin their argument by establishing—with some accuracy—that the black man in Africa had a developed civilization at the time that, in Malcolm’s words, “the white savages of Europe were living in caves and crawling around on their all-fours.” It was the intrusion of the white man into Africa that spoiled things and brought slavery to the New World.
The decline of the black man in Africa is only temporary. The white devil was given about six thousand years to flaunt his evil and then he was to be destroyed as the black man returned to power. The white man’s time ran out just as World War I was raging; the Black Muslims overcame the fact that this was an excellent time for the prophecy to come true—after all, white people were out to destroy each other—with the argument that sets the American stage for the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
The only reason the destruction of the white man didn’t come off on schedule, according to the Muslims, is that so many black men are all mixed up with the white, that it is impossible to destroy the evil men without destroying some “originals,” that is to say, Negroes. This, then, is what Muhammad and Malcolm are talking about when they speak to “the lost-found black man in the wilderness of North America.” They are really saying that the restoration of black men to world power is being delayed because of the American Negro; the white man has been given a new dispensation, actually, not because he deserves it but to give the Negro time to separate from those scheduled for destruction.
Herein lies the reasoning behind Muhammad’s talk about a separate state; this is why the Black Muslims with their tremendous power over people are unable to participate in any of the current civil-rights actions; they can’t help fight for better jobs, better schools, or better housing. They are committed to getting out from among the white man as soon as possible, lest they share his doom of the fire, which is sure not only to come next time, but to come soon.
To plug up the logical and emotional leaks in such an argument as this, the Black Muslims must propagate a continuously expanding “line.” They must maintain the “Islamic” tinge but at the same time keep their teaching within American terms of reference that Negroes can understand; they must take Negroes who have a struggle with English and teach them Arabic; they must convince the most Western of men that they are Arabs.
This cultural island-hopping can backfire, sometimes with amusing results. I attended a Black Muslim bazaar with writer Alex Haley. Elijah Muhammad was scheduled to appear but sent his son, Akbar, instead. Akbar, a slender, dark-brown twenty-five-year-old, came before the crowd of some two thousand garbed in a flowing white sheet. In Middle Eastern Arabic circles Akbar would have been considered in his Sunday best, but to Harlem Negroes Akbar’s dress smacked of the Ku Klux Klan, hardly an image one wishes to raise in a man he hopes to convert. Yet this is the cross-cultural problem the Black Muslims must continually deal with.
I have seen Malcolm X do this with tremendous effectiveness. I once debated with him on TV in Los Angeles. He took the stand of a Muslim, saying that the Moslem faith was the black man’s original culture. Malcolm must make this basic thrust or all else he says rests on historical sand. As we were leaving the studio, we were greeted by several white students, Moslems from Persia, who complained to Malcolm that they had attempted to visit Muhammad’s temples and were refused entry because they were white blue-eyed devils. Malcolm glossed the matter over, and they all parted wishing Allah’s blessing each upon the other. In reality, Malcolm is not interested in any white people, Moslem or not. These Persians could no more get in a Black Muslim temple than Governor Faubus could. “Let’s look at it this way,” Malcolm told the Persians. “If a lion is in a cage, his roar will be different from the roar of the lion who is in the forest. That,” he concluded, “is why you couldn’t get in our temple. But both the lion in the forest and the lion in the cage are lions. That is what matters. Lions love lions; they hate leopards.”
Translated, Malcolm was saying that the American Negro, as a Moslem, must make different noises from the free Moslems of, say, Persia, because the American Negro is in a cage. The cage, of course, is white civilization; that is why the roar of the American Negro Moslem is so provincial; that is why Persians would do well to worship Allah in their own way in their own temples, while the Black Muslims and Allah have their rendezvous in a dinky auditorium over a pool hall in Los Angeles’ Negro ghetto.
It is in such meetings that Malcolm adds the historical ingredient to his theology. It takes two forms: