Malcolm X, the Hajj and White Supremacy

This is the season of the pilgrimage for Muslims around the world. Over 2 million Muslims - about 15,000 of them Muslim-Americans - have gathered in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, to perform the Hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime religious obligation for believers who can afford to do so physically, mentally and financially.

In April of 1964, Malcolm X, who had recently embraced Islam and taken the name Malik
El-Shabazz, performed the Hajj. It was a cathartic experience for him, one that has relevance to the events in Charlottesville earlier this month and our response to the violence and racism of the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klansmen and the White Supremacists.

Because of his traumatic, near-deadly childhood experiences, Malcolm X came to regard the entire white race as exclusively evil and black separatism the only answer to white oppression.

But the Hajj changed all that. In powerful, heartfelt words - as told to Alex Haley, the author of Roots - he summarized his feelings: “Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and such overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham and all the other Prophets of Holy scriptures … There were tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black skinned Africans. But we were all practicing the same rituals, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.”

With the flexing of power by white supremacists in Charlottesville and their tacit endorsement by President Trump through his policies and toxic Tweets, it has become easy for some of us to speak of whites in monolithic terms. As a Muslim-American, I am particularly sensitive to this because we too are often painted with a broad brush for the terrorist acts of a few. As I see it, there is no difference between James Alex Fields, Jr., the 20-year-old neo-Nazi who drove his car into the counter-rally protesters in Charlottesville, killing 1 person and injuring 19, and Younes Abouyyaqoub, the 22-year-old ISIS-inspired terrorist who drove his van into a crowd in Barcelona, Spain, killing 15 people and injuring dozens more.

Their ideology is the same: homicidal hatred for the Other.

Most whites disapprove of white supremacists and are at the forefront in the fight against racism and bigotry. In the many protest rallies I attended against president Trump’s policies, over 90% were whites. It was a reflection of their genuine conviction that treating others badly because of faith and color and race was morally wrong.

To make progress, it is instructive to ask what contributes to the feeling of supremacy, or a superiority complex, and how we can curb it. It may surprise us to learn that a superiority complex afflicts many of us even as we condemn its most visible practitioners, like the ones we saw in Charlottesville.

In its most extreme and visible form, a superiority complex arises from the color of one’s skin, the fanatical conviction in one’s faith, or the race one belongs to. But in its insidious forms, it can also arise from wealth, power, beauty, lineage, social status, knowledge and education. I know of religious chauvinism that afflicts some of my fellow Muslim Americans (“my religion is superior to yours;” “I have a monopoly on Truth that you can never have,” etc.) but I have also come across Americans of all persuasions who look down on others because of the expertise they have in a certain field or the power they possess to dominate other lives. They demand respect but are incapable of respecting others and are unable to deal with anything other than their version of the truth.

They have many laudatory characteristics but humility is not one of them.

If this seems uncomfortably familiar, it is because many of us carry one form of superiority complex or another, however much we may deny it. In that sense, Malcolm X was among the lucky ones. The scales fell from his eyes only when he was performing something as momentous as the Hajj. He realized that a blanket denunciation of whites was a form of superiority complex, the very thing he had spent most of his life condemning.

But what about the rest of us? This is where the tragic spectacle we saw in Charlottesville comes in. While unequivocally condemning the neo-Nazis and the White supremacists, we can also use their tiki-torch terror to look within ourselves to see if we harbor similar, albeit latent, habits. We cannot fight racism and bigotry if we practice them ourselves in subtler forms.

In his farewell sermon 1400 years ago delivered during the Hajj, Prophet Muhammad said: “All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab. Also, a white has no superiority over a black and a black has any superiority over white, except by piety and good action.”

In his own way, Malcolm X was saying the same thing when he experienced his pilgrimage epiphany. By cleansing ourselves of any trace of superiority, we can turn the ugliness of Charlottesville into something beneficial for America.