The argument that the Black Muslims are not a valid religion because of the exclusivity of their fellowship, then, is clearly spurious. Every religion is a sort of sanctified country club, a coming together of peers in the name of their god. The second argument against the religiosity of the Black Muslims is equally spurious: Like all faiths, the Black Muslims never say hate the other fellow; they say love your own kind. Religious bigotry is Western civilization’s major moral blind spot, and Malcolm X has taken up squatters’ rights just there.
Thus it is that secularism must save the church—the layman must lead the clergyman to the mourner’s bench and make him confess brotherhood in the name of a democratic and pluralistic society. The nature of our social moment demands that we free God from racialism and dogmatics. Racialism, the malignant one of the two cancers, must be dealt with first since it is the prime moral issue of our time. And it must be dealt with by all peoples of all faiths working in concert. Should our social order change, should we somehow come to grips with the evils that have spawned the Black Muslims, the movement would be forced to refine itself or perish.
Malcolm X is the best authority for this. I have often pressed him on his categorical denunciation of the white man as a devil, and his reply is always the same: “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us that the white man is a devil. We hold to that teaching because history proves the white man is a devil. If he is not a devil,” Malcolm X concludes, “then let him prove it. Let him give justice, freedom, and equality to our people.”
I have deliberately kept my analysis of the Black Muslims in personal terms of reference because this is precisely how most Negroes feel about the matter—after all, the attraction of the movement for Negroes is one of the major points of this essay.
“Of course I disagree with Malcolm,” the wife of a Negro newsman told me. “But I disagree with a lot of other religions, too. If he teaches hate, so do they; what’s the difference? I wonder why the white people are after him.” She smiled. “Could it be because he is colored?”
The Black Muslims have their God, their gospel, their ritual trappings, their approval from official heads of the Islamic faith. As a religion, then, there is little left to do but disagree with them and then leave them alone.
This, of course, pains liberals, Negro and white, who want to hear a ringing denunciation of the Black Muslims. Negro leaders are always quick to denounce Elijah, but the Negro masses are strangely silent. There is a reason for this silence, something both the Negro leadership and the white power structure would do well to examine: Deep down in their hearts, as James Baldwin so accurately states, the black masses don’t believe in white people any more. They don’t believe in Malcolm either, except when he articulates their disbelief in white people. In the end—and this is the thing white people will be a long time in grasping—the Negro masses neither join nor denounce the Black Muslims. They just sit at home in the ghetto amid the heat, the roaches, the rats, the vice, the disgrace, and rue the fact that come daylight they must meet the man—the white man—and work at a job that leads only to a dead end.
This brings me to the core of the matter, to the final measure of every religion: it is a thing called compassion, a concern and caring about the other fellow. It is rooted in the glaring awareness that we all have fallen short of the high mark set for us, and thus we need the honest sympathy and understanding of all men everywhere.
For though you may have your God, your holy book, your ritual, and your symbols; though you may give of your wages to build the temple; and though you may have been to Mecca, or Jerusalem, if you have not compassion you are but meanness couched in Scripture, you are but an ancient stink, a reason for men to hold their noses as they crawl on toward a land of human understanding and brotherhood.