It is somehow fitting that famed actor and activist Ossie Davis should pass in the month that both officially recognizes the phenomenon of black people in America and that marks the death of the beloved black leader he eulogized forty years ago, Malcolm X.
Unfortunately, what black people know least about Malcolm is what they may need most these days n his spiritual power.
While “Malcolm X” is transfixed in our minds, in reality, by the time his life was taken in that Harlem ballroom on February 21, 1965, that being had expired and a new man had been born: El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. That transformation has for the most part been studied and depicted in the political context of Malcolm breaking away from the Nation of Islam and its founder, Elijah Muhammad.
But what this perspective deprives us of is knowledge of the religious faith embraced by a man as learned and loving of his people as Malcolm. Malcolm X became El Hajj Malik El Shabazz upon journeying to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia shortly after being expelled from the Nation. He went for the Islamic pilgrimage, known as Hajj. What he discovered in that distant desert land was a power superior to his ideology.
Annually, more than three million Muslims of all races, colors and ethnicities sojourn from every corner of the globe to this ancient city maintained and protected by the Saudi government. The Hajj ritual, which spans fourteen centuries, is the largest annual gathering of humanity on the planet. The wonderment of Hajj taught Malcolm the error of Elijah’s dogma that white people were “devils,” as he experienced Caucasians who treated him as a brother.
Rather than diminish Malcolm’s fire for black nationalism, however, Islam clarified it.
He wrote: “Each hour here in the Holy Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white… As racism leads America up the suicide path, I do believe … that the whites of the younger generation …will see the handwriting on the wall and many of them will turn to the spiritual path of truth n the only way left to America to ward off the disaster that racism inevitably must lead to.”
Islam became for Malcolm the spiritual force that guided and strengthened his fight against America’s racism. Just before Ossie Davis rose to eulogize him for being “our manhood, our living, black manhood,” Omar Osman, a representative of the Islam Center of Switzerland and the United States, spoke these words: “We knew Brother Malcolm as a blood brother, particularly after his pilgrimage to Mecca last year. The highest thing that a Muslim can aspire to is to die on the battlefield and not at his bedside… Those who die on the battlefield are not dead, but are alive!”
In a time when Muslims are being much maligned and misunderstood, the words of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz profoundly live on: “America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.”