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The news reports last week sounded like the premise for a novel: a treasure trove of Malcolm X's papers, provenance murky, to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Malcolm's copy of the Qur'an; notebooks of his trips to Africa and the Middle East, after which he renounced the Nation of Islam in favor of orthodox Islam; letters, drafts of speeches, and more: extraordinary. How to keep the collection intact and open its contents to researchers? You can bet the details will be worked out—and down the road, biographies and other scholarly studies will emerge, changing what we thought we knew. While we wait, close at hand is Karl Evanzz's recent book, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (Pantheon), essential reading not only to understand Malcolm X but also to provide some context for all those post-9/11 stories referring vaguely to the appeal of Islam among African Americans.

Rarely one to miss an occasion for poetry (or publicity), Jesse Jackson waxed eloquent at the Honorable Elijah Muhammad's funeral in Chicago on February 26, 1975. Muhammad had "turned alienation into emancipation," Jackson said. "He concentrated on taking the slums out of the people and then the people out of the slums. He took dope out of veins and put hope in our brains." Early Jesse, vintage stuff. Undoubtedly, Jackson meant to uplift: focusing not on the past but on things that last, he reached out (not down) to hearts torn apart. But, as readers of Evanzz's very fine biography of Elijah Muhammad will discover, the truth is a little more complicated than Jackson's rhymes suggest.

It is true, for instance, that Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) gave a sense of purpose and dignity to many "alienated" blacks in urban American. But it's also true that, until the very end of his prophetic career, the Messenger preached hatred of Caucasians ("blue-eyed devils") and consistently blamed black Americans' problems on others—hardly a recipe for "emancipation." It's also true that many felons became law-abiding citizens upon their conversion to the religion of Elijah Muhammad; yet, at the same time, Muhammad had nothing to say against murderers within the NOI who killed backsliders and "hypocrites" such as Malcolm X and, in another case, a seven-day-old baby.

It's also true that thousands who sat under the teaching of Elijah Muhammad in the decades preceding his death gave up illicit drugs. But in his later years the Messenger did little to stop the peddling of narcotics by NOI ministers, chiefly those attached to the "mosque" in Philadelphia. Finally, there's no doubt that thousands of formerly promiscuous men settled into monogamous marriages at Muhammad's behest, and that is a clearly good thing. Meanwhile, Muhammad himself—devout sower of "divine seed"—was impregnating NOI secretaries at an alarming rate, and thus bestowed thirteen "illegitimate" children (Evanzz's term) on the world. Needless to say, Elijah Muhammad was and remains complicated.

In Elijah Muhammad's own mind, he was the final prophet of Allah, who, in the words of the NOI creed delineated in a document titled "What the Muslims Believe" (see appendix E in Evanzz's book), "appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad, July 1930." The Messenger actually believed his own message. Evanzz notes that a psychiatrist once determined that Muhammad suffered from delusions but was nevertheless functional.

As for Master Fard, Evanzz demonstrates that he was a New Zealand-born hustler of semi-Pakistani descent who looked white and who illegally entered the United States via Canada with his parents in 1913. A witness to the depredations some whites foisted upon American blacks in the early twentieth century, Fard despised Caucasians, preached hatred of them, and in the thirties and forties encouraged his disciples, Elijah Muhammad among them, openly to support Japan's military aggression against the United States.

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March (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46