The Power of Popular Culture
Chapter 8
Part # 2
Islam and American Culture
The 1950s were years when Americans discovered the religions of
eastern Asia, especially Japanese Buddhism in its Zen form.
However, Hinduism was becoming increasingly visible with interest
in various religious innovators like Paramahansa Yogananda. He became
well known through his spiritual best-seller, Autobiography of a Yogi.
This was also the time when the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and
the Divine Mother became established in the United States although
there was early interest as far back as the 1920s when Woodrow Wilson's
daughter became a devotee. Aurobindo's primary appeal is to religious
intellectuals and other sophisticates. The first Aurobindo 'ashram' was
opened in Los Angeles in 1953, then called the East-West Cultural Center,
renamed the Sri Aurobindo Center some years later.
Buddhism had actually been long established in Hawaii where it peaked
in numbers in this era at about a third of the population of the islands.
There were also small communities of Taoists and Confucians, with
enclaves in Chinese neighborhoods on the mainland. The full story
was first told in Emma McCloy Layman's 1976 volume, Buddhism
in America. The "big name" among American Buddhists was a one time
Episcopalian who became famous as a champion of Zen, Alan Watts.
The story of Hinduism in the USA can be found in a 2010 opus,
Philip Goldberg's American Veda.
Who also were arriving in America were Ahmadi Muslims, winning
some converts mostly among black people. Ahmadiyyat, while it claims
to simply be fulfilling Muhammad's message, is nonetheless similar to
the Baha'i Faith in many ways and for this reason has met with relentless
persecution in Pakistan, where it originated more than a century ago.
Muslim numbers were still quite small in the post WWII years. Although
a new mosque was opened in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1945, that was
anything but a cause for alarm, there simply weren't many Muslims
to worry about. This was an era when forces for assimilation of
newcomers were at maximum strength -as they were in Canada
in the same time period- and the "Protestantization" of Islam could
be taken as a foregone conclusion, just as it was for Buddhism.
As late as the early 1960s you could still attended the
Chicagoland Buddhist Church in the Uptown neighborhood,
where services were in English. Meanwhile Canadian Muslims
were also heading in the same direction as studies of the era show.
Besides, why be concerned? There were just 20 mosques in
the entire United states in 1952.
About the only Muslim ("Moslem" was the preferred spelling at the time)
anyone knew about was naturalized citizen originally from Egypt named
Omar Sharif, the film actor. Still, there would be a foretaste of things
to come, soon enough.
Sharif had a major role in the 1962 film _Lawrence of Arabia_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Arabia_(film)) and then
in the 1965 movie _Doctor Zhivago_
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Zhivago_(film)) . Next came the 1968 hit,
Funny Girl.
Sharif's co-star was Barbara Streisand, acting in her first movie. The
"problem"
was that Streisand was Jewish and in Egypt the idea of a Muslim
romantically
involved with a Jewess was, uhhh, verboten. The film was banned in Egypt
and shortly thereafter in nearly all Islamic countries. To which Streisand
replied,
"you should've seen the letter I got from my Aunt Rose!"
Those were more innocent days.
Islam was more of a surprise than anything else for Americans of that
time.
For example, the surprise occasioned when Cassius Clay, a 22 year old
Golden Gloves boxer, won the world's heavyweight title and promptly
announced that he was a Muslim and had changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
The name change, he said, was necessary because Cassius clay was a
"slave name" and brought to mind the legacy of an unjust past. More than
that,
Clay's "theology" was borrowed whole from Elijah Muhammad's Nation of
Islam
and was as racist as anything could get -except that the target of the
condemnations was the white race -which, Elijah Muhammad assured
everyone-
had been created by a mad scientist at the Devil's bidding.
Black Muslims are nothing if not charming that way.
What was also a surprise, something that happened the year before, was the
appearance at a large Nation of Islam rally of the leadership of the
American
Nazi Party including George Lincoln Rockwell, these well coiffed men
in their finest Third Reich uniforms replete with Nazi symbols.
Photographs
of the event are available online. The story is told in a Sam McPheeters
article dated April 15, 2015, entitled "When Malcolm X Met the Nazis."
The story is incredible.
(https://www.vice.com/en_us/contributor/sam-mcpheeters)
The date was June 25, 1961 and took place before a crowd of 8000 at the
Uline Arena, in Washington, DC. That venue would soon become famous
as the setting for the first concert of a new Rock group, a music
sensation
from England called "The Beatles."
The Nazis and the Nation of Islam were about to make common cause.
Rockwell and his erstwhile storm troopers were guests of Elijah Muhammad
who had been scheduled to speak until illness made that impossible.
However,
there would be a speaker, his name was Malcolm X, who regurgitated
the Black Muslim line, but with a wrinkle, asking white people in the
audience to donate to the Nation of Islam. Rockwell gave $20,
back then a substantial sum, worth over $ 50 in today's money.
What had brought the two groups together?
As Sam McPheeters put it: "Overt anti-Semitism, it turned out, was
something
the two groups could bond over. While Rockwell pushed his hatred of Jews
to frothy extremes, Muhammad backed a range of racist theories, including
the hoax that the Jews had financed the slave trade." Malcolm X
shared this view.
It should also be noted that "to publicly rage against Jews in the summer
of 1961
may have offended the general public even more than it would today. Six
thousand
miles away, the Adolf Eichmann trial, in Israel, had captivated the world
and dramatically increased coverage of Holocaust atrocities."
How did it happen that anti-black Nazis and the anti-white Nation of Islam
reached agreement? One reason was that both were (and still are)
vehemently anti-Semitic (Judeophobic), with NOI, in this instance,
completely in sync with orthodox Islam since the Koran is uncompromisingly
anti-Jewish.
Both are also racial separatists. The difference is that the Nazis favor
mass
deportations to Africa and 'Negroes' (to use then-contemporary terminology)
of the Nation Of Islam sought an independent black country probably
within
today's United States. Or sometimes did. This is open to debate. Apparently
Elijah Muhammad said one thing at one time and another thing at a different
time.
At that get together in 1961 Rockwell was under the clear impression that
what Elijah Muhammad was after was a Negro state some place in Africa,
sort of a 'new Liberia' but run by Black Muslims. As Rockwell said at the
time:
"I am fully in concert with their program, and I have the highest respect
for
Elijah Muhammad."
Both also agreed that the other group consisted of sub humans. For Rockwell
black people were (his direct quotes) "ring-in-the-nose niggers,"
"basically
animalistic," and "no better than chimpanzees." This went along nicely with
the Nation Of Islam characterization of Caucasians as "white devils."
Incidentally, on the subject of derogatory terms for other races, there are
a
good number of insulting words that black people use to refer to whites,
some of this vocabulary going back to ca. 1800. White people are
termites,
peckerwoods, pastyfaces, and honkies (derived from honky tonk), to name
a few. White people en bloc can also be called "dandruff." And there is a
special vocabulary of insults for white women who have sex with Negroes,
including "coal hauler" and the 'endearing' SWAN (Slut With A Nigger).
For such vital information you should be referred to the Racial Slur
Database,
available on the Web.
To return to McPheeters, the actions of the Black Muslims were little more
than a continuation of policy from late 1960 or early 1961 when a secret
meeting between the Ku Klux Klan and the Nation of Islam was held in
Atlanta. The result
of that gathering was that NOI received assurances that the Klan would not
attack
its mosques; in return the Muslims would support KKK calls
for racial separation and strict segregation.
Then, in February of 1962 there was a second rally involving Rockwell and
the Nazis, this one held at the Chicago International Amphitheater and
attended by a crowd of 12,000. After Elijah Muhammad spoke it was
Rockwell's turn, and he did not hesitate to speak his mind:
"I am not afraid to stand here and tell you I hate race-mixing and will
fight it to the death, but at the same time, I will do everything in
my power to help the Honorable Elijah Muhammad carry out
his inspired plan for land of your own in Africa. Elijah Muhammad
is right. Separation or death!"
The point to make is that Cassius Clay / Muhammad Ali knew all this.
His many white supporters could have known the same thing if any had
done any research. No-one can claim that the boxer was misunderstood
or was really a white liberal except that he was black. He was a racist
bigot and an anti-Semite. And he was lionized by the mass media.
To his credit, years later Muhammad Ali quit the Nation Of Islam and
became a normative Muslim with no special anti-white animus (that
anyone knows about, anyway), but as such he remained an anti-Semite.
The next chapter in this saga takes us to the career of Malcolm X, someone
else who has been lionized, in his case maybe with at least a modicum of'
justification since he also would quit the black Muslims and turn a new
leaf.
That split would result in Louis Farrakhan taking charge of NOI and making
sure that it would not moderate the views of Elijah Muhammad in any way.
The story of Malcolm X, originally Malcolm Little, inspirational to some,
troubling to others, a horror story to his critics, is nonetheless about
as
interesting as someone's life can get. It included time in prison and a
decade as a member of the Nation Of Islam, from 1952 until 1964.
He only lived a year after that when he was assassinated by, it is
presumed,
rival Black Muslims. The case has never been solved.
In the meantime, until his break with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X preached
the Black Muslim doctrine of Negro superiority, the belief that the
original
human beings were black Africans, and that in the near future the
white race would be destroyed, beliefs still espoused by Louis Farrakhan.
Those were years when the Civil Rights movement was on the rise,
under leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Malcolm would
have none of it. For the Black Muslims the entire effort was futile and
NOI ordered its members not to vote or otherwise take part in politics.
In return, just about the entire leadership of the Civil Rights movement
denounced the Nation Of Islam -in dramatic contrast to full acceptance
of the group 40 years later by the first African-American major party
candidate for president, someone who claimed to carry the torch of
Martin Luther King.
Malcolm X regarded King as a fool and the leadership of the movement
as "stooges." As for King's famous March on Washington at which he
delivered his "I have a dream" speech, Malcolm called it all a travesty
not worth taking seriously. Yet Malcolm X's rhetoric found a strong
response among black people. At the time he joined the Nation of Islam
its national membership stood at approximately 1,000 believers.
The year he quit that number had increased to somewhere
around 50,000 members.
In December of 1963, just days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy,
Malcolm said, when asked by a reporter what he thought of the tragedy,
he said that it was nothing more than "_chickens coming home to roost_
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/come_home_to_roost) ."
Those exact same words would be quoted several decades later by the
erstwhile pastor of Barack Obama, Jermiah Wright, in describing his
reaction
to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
Of course, this brings up the question of whether Obama actually attended
Wright's church on a regular basis, which Barack frequently denied during
the course of the 2008 election campaign. There is much more to say on the
subject but for now what is critical is a direct quote from Obama as
reported
in a Fred Lucas article for May 29, 2012, published by CNSNews.com,
Conservative News Service, a business founded by Brent Bozell.
This is pointed out because there is no attempt here to disguise the
conservative
nature of the source. Why should this be a concern? Because in my
experience
as soon as some people learn that a reference is to the political Right
that
is all it takes to discredit it. Which is what is known as an ad hominem
fallacy, discrediting research because you dislike the views of the
researcher,
ignoring the research itself because you don't like what it has unearthed.
This sort of thing happens with some frequency on the part of conservatives
also, but the issue here is the mindset of people on the Left.
What this is all about is a book that was eventually published in 2012,
written by a former editor of New York Times Magazine, Edward Klein.
This was his best seller, The Amateur, about the general (and sometimes
extreme) incompetence shown in office by Barack Obama, something that
dismayed Klein, someone who had championed the cause of the Democratic
Party not only during his 11 years at the Times but also for several years
previously at the equally Left-of-center Newsweek.
To be sure, Klein as free lance author, has been justly criticized for a
number
of lapses, but about some matters he seems to be as conscientious as
anyone gets. That is, there is real substance to the sensationalism he
sometimes
indulges in. Which is what you should expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Note that Jermiah (his spelling) Wright was and probably still is good
friends
with Louis Farrakhan; indeed, Wright saw to it that Trinity United Church
of Christ gave a special award to Farrakhan based on his supposed
integrity and service to black people.
Klein spent several hours interviewing Wright for the book, during which
he asked the pastor about Obama's relationship to the church. The exact
question was: “But the church was an integral part of his politics?”
Wright's answer was an unequivocal yes.
But did Obama attend more than a few times for effect?
According to Barack Hussein himself, he certainly did.
What Klein located during his research was an interview Obama gave to
Cathleen Falsani, a religion writer for the Chicago Sun-Times on March 27,
2004. In it Obama emphasized his close friendship with Wright and noted
that he joined the church in 1992. At that, Falsani asked:
“Do you still attend Trinity?”
Obama's answer? “Yep. Every week. 11 o’clock service.”
At issue not only is Obama's relationship with Wright, whom he praised
in Audacity of Hope, but what this says about Barack Hussein's actual views
with respect to Black Muslims, about the meaning he gave to 9/11, and about
how he views Islam generally.
It also tells us that history can cast a long shadow; it certainly did in
this case.
And it tells us that the news media does not care about factual accuracy
once it has made its political bets. From 2008 onward the mainstream media
was, as idiom has it, "in the tank" for Obama. Nothing could be allowed
that would spoil the carefully crafted narrative it had fashioned in
support
of Barack Hussein's political ascendency. At no time did the media
correct the false impressions it had created to sustain Obama in power.
But let us return to the narrative about Malcolm X.
Malcolm began to write his autobiography, at least to collect notes, in
1963,
a year before he broke with the Nation Of Islam. He soon acquired the
services of _Alex Haley_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Haley) , a
skilled writer who would go on the publish a text
that proved to be a blockbuster, Roots, even though it was eventually
exposed
as partly fictional and partly plagiarized.
Regardless, Haley was a perceptive student of history who could
pull together the comments of someone who was anything but a scholar
or seasoned author, and eventually fashion everything into a memorable
book. This, however, contributed to Malcolm's growing reputation as
a man to take seriously, who was cultivating connections to 'the
establishment,'
and who was starting to emerge as a challenger to the leadership
of Elijah Muhammad. Or so we are led to believe was the background
to the events of 1964.
What is indisputable was that Malcolm walked out of the Nation Of Islam
and within weeks was under the spell of orthodox Sunni Muslims and
converted to something like normative Islam. During these months Malcolm
also did an about face with respect to the Civil Rights movement and openly
said that he had become a supporter, although on his terms inasmuch as he
insisted on armed resistance, rejecting a non-violent approach. He also
tried, with some success, to make the movement international and demanded
that it should change its goal from Civil Rights to human rights -in order
to appeal to other black movements around the world and gain a hearing
before the United Nations.
That phase of Malcolm's life did not last long, however. In February of
1965,
while getting ready to address the organization of Afro-American Unity in
Manhattan, he was gunned down. Only his legend survived.
1965 was a watershed year. The situation of black people in America
would soon change dramatically. From idiosyncratic Black Muslims
to Muslim orthodoxy would become far more than a question of which
black celebrities might convert, but who Muslims as a population
would consist of. Black leadership within America Islam was about
to be challenged and then superceded.
Demography and Destiny
What made the most difference was passage of the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965 -which took full effect in 1968. Until then
immigration to the United States was based on proportions of US citizens
by origin; the idea had been to keep the population pretty much what it
had been as of the 1920s by ethnic type. Hence priority was given to
people from Great Britain, Germany, and other European nations.
>From 1968 onward there would be no more such restrictions.
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[RC] Chapter 8 Islam and American Culture Part # 2
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:07:35 -0700
