“Malcolm X at 100” is Word In Black’s series honoring the life, ideas, and legacy of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz on what would have been his 100th birthday.
Growing up as a preacher’s kid, Malcolm Little was no stranger to the Christian faith, including the Black nationalist version his father embraced as a devout member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.
After his father died under mysterious circumstances, the young man traded the Bible for the streets, and it didn’t long for him to end up serving six to 10 in a Massachusetts prison. But like many Black men searching for faith but disillusioned with Christianity, Malcolm X found God again behind prison walls — this time, in the pages of the Quran and the Nation of Islam, a strident Black nationalist sect.
Spiritually reborn, the man who became Malcolm X said in his autobiography that, to him, his brothers in Islam seemed to live their faith, a sincerity he found appealing, but that also contradicted his experience with Christianity.
“I had seen too much hypocrisy in the churches, and the Muslims whom I met seemed to really practice what they preached,” he said.
His conversion story is legendary, but Malcolm X’s experience — turning to Islam out of disillusionment with Christianity — mirrors that of many Black men who convert to the faith. Data is hard to find, but experts estimate Black men are becoming Muslims by the tens of thousands and counting, making Islam one of the fastest-growing religions in the U.S. if not the world.
Looking Within for Power and Purpose
”What Islam does is affirms humanity and it affirms the strength and the manhood of those who look towards things on the outside rather than the inside,” says Los Angeles resident Farajii Muhammad, who grew up in Baltimore with a Muslim father and Christian mother. “It challenges with the question: ‘But who are you on the inside?’”
With Islam, Muhammad says, the spiritual journey includes a path where you start to look within for power, for strength, and a sense of purpose.
“It gives men an understanding of who they are, but then also it starts to nurture this inner love for other people. So there are so many different benefits, especially for Black men,” he says.
Cultural, Historic, and Emotional Appeal
Scholars say the appeal of Islam among Black men, however, is cultural and historic, as well as emotional. They note the faith has roots in the U.S. that stretch back to slavery: some enslaved African Muslims held on to the faith, while modern converts often do so as a rejection of Christianity’s history as an instrument to control Black people — one of Malcolm’s more pointed critiques about the religion.
“My mother was a Christian and my father was a Christian and I used to hear them when I was a little child sing the song ‘Wash Me White As Snow,’” he said in a 1962 speech. My father was a black man and my mother was a black woman, but yet the songs that they sang in their church were designed to fill their hearts with the desire to be white.”
By contrast, the teachings of the Nation of Islam are “designed to undo the type of brainwashing that we have had to undergo for four hundred years at the hands of the white man,” he said.
Cellus Hamilton, a rapper from New York City, concurs. In a recent blog post that reads more like a research paper, he dissects Islam’s appeal for young Black men, pointing to a faith that “appears more dignifying and disciplined.” Having experienced a lifetime of microaggressions and perceptions as a threat, Hamilton said, Christianity’s reward in the afterlife is far less empowering than the sense of control Islam offers.
“As one sociologist observes, ‘All too often, [the conversion of Black men] reflects a serious inadequacy in their religious environment,’” Hamilton wrote. “The [Christian] church’s “fuzzy Christology” and its inability to address the real pain and questions of African American life leave many vulnerable to religious alternatives that speak more clearly to their experience.
Sects like the Nation of Islam and other Black nationalist versions of Islam “may not hold theological credibility within mainstream Islamic tradition, but they speak powerfully to systemic oppression and the hunger for dignity,” he says.
Finding Freedom in Islam’s Discipline
One of the biggest areas of growth for Islam is in the nation’s prisons, where Black men are disproportionately represented. While data is hard to find, experts say men seeking spiritual nourishment behind bars more often turn to the faith because of the freedom they find in its required discipline.
“There is so much confinement, then finding that Islam is the one thing that gives them that freedom because it has a level of submission,” says Sheikh Rami Nsour, founding director of the Tayba Foundation, an organization that provides traditional Islamic education within the US prison system.
By submitting to daily regimens, including 5 daily prayers, the spirit is elevated, he says, and “those walls can’t hold them any more.”
With Islam, Muhammad says, the spiritual journey includes a path where you start to look within for power, for strength, and a sense of purpose.
“The model of a Muslim man, whether wearing a suit and a bow tie or a Kofi, is that he’s a model of strength and when he walks into a room he commands attention and power,” Muhammad says. “I remember hearing the Honorable Minister Farrakhan say on many occasions, ‘You’ve never seen a man of God until today.’”
