Who calls us bitter has bitten us and from that wound
Pours Malcolm little by little-
Amiri Baraka
The great musician of yester years Bob Marley asked, in Redemption Song,
How long shall they kill our prophets*/ while we stand aside and look?
The humble son of Solomon says: They cannot kill all of us. Except if Allah pleases. In the Holy Quran it teaches that Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within them. The idea of stopping the rise of the so called Black Messiah by the FBI and CIA under the likes of J Edgar Hoover would have never had any effect if we all black man, woman and child aspired to to be that Black Messiah. The practical everyday examples of Malcolm X cannot be thrown away to the dustbins of history while we continue to cling on to romanticized ideas of the man and reducing him to a slogan, By Any Means Necessary. When do we in Sub Saharan Africa and the Diaspora start internalizing these slogans in an age where images of Che Guevara have become high fashion symbols? I saw a talk at a black college in the US by Louis Farakhan where he says refering to Malcolm, "if you say you love a man then it seems to me that you ought to act like it. He continues, we say we love Malcolm X but look at how we're living". He continues,
"I used to watch Malcolm, he was like clockwork. For example, he would pull up at the venue of a meeting a minute before time and walk up and arrive exactly on time". (To this i might add what was said of him by some of his followers who were in the habit of being a little late so they told Malcolm they'd set their watches 5 minutes before time as solution, to which he replied, "then you pull up at an appointment and waste five minutes, keep your watches as they are, just be on time every time"). Farakhan continues, "Malcolm never smoked, never drank, I never saw him even once wink at a woman. In short, he was disciplined". I might add here: Today in the age of gucci revolutionaries, a disciplined cadre has become a name without a reality, back then it was a reality without a name. The sense of urgency with which Malcolm did things is also worth mentioning. An example of this is the way he got married to his wife Betty. Go read on it. Today a young man wastes so much time and resources trying to decide on a potential suitor, he is encouraged by family and society to take his time. Precious time that could be used for other more pressing things. But like a one Shaykh Ninowy once said, for as long as all YOU see is YOU then YOU will always have YOU veiling YOU from the goal i.e. Allah. And who can doubt that the goal of Malcolm was otherworldly? He spoke and lived like a man who knew that this world and its means was not his final destination. And if we claim to love Malcolm and miss that, then how can we claim to love him? That is a love founded on ignorance. Love has conditions. You love your parent, spouse or child because of knowledge of who they are, for if you were ignorant of their essence, you would not love them, they'd all just be perfect strangers.
Malcolm was no ordinary man. For muslims he is one of the the rare and true martyrs of the 20th century in an age where scholars have differed on who in the classical islamic sense is a "shaheed" (martryr) in the wake of nihilistic suicide bomber tactics. We are all unanimous on his martyrdom. He was from the oppressed about whom the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, warned the oppressor of their prayer. He, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said or something similar, "fear the prayer of the oppressed for Allah removes all the veils between Himself and the oppressed when he supplicates, whether the oppressed is a believer or not." My prayer is that from one of Malcolm's supplication on the day of Arafat while on Hajj was that from the generations that precede there would be more like him who would not let the wool be pulled over their eyes and rather continue to fight for the real emancipation of people of colour and indeed all of humanity. Not just political but spiritually, mentally, socially and economically. It is in this spirit that we should all remember Malcolm X. No matter what coluor, creed or nationality we are because the Malcolm that is portrayed in the movie Malcolm X played by Denzel Washington where a white university student comes up to him and asks what people like her (of other races) can do to advance the cause was not the Malcolm that he left this world as. And anyone who wishes to cling on to that Malcolm of the Nation of Islam years in that regard is only a romantic cheating her/himself. Malcolm had evolved after coming back from Hajj into a Sunni Muslim. Though he had grown a beard and taken on other practicing Sunni Muslim customs, he belonged to everyone. This is something many of our religious leaders could learn from today. I see no other man more suitable to take to the disenfranchised masses of the world's youth today. The youth of Tunisia and Egypt have started. What will our contribution be to bringing justice to the world in all levels of society? These questions when i started to ponder on in my teens, Allah answered with the example of Malcolm X from our immediate history.
There was always something in the man for both the leaders and the led of our time in his post and Nation of Islam days. So finally, no, we don't have to stand aside and look while they kill our prophets anymore. If we all aided the works of our predecessor on whose shoulders we today stand, they will have to kill all of us to prevent the rise of the Black Messiah because he will not rise until all his people have risen. Do you not see what is happening in the Arab world right now? The age of popular uprising around a popular cult leader have gone. There is a Malcolm X in all of us. Some of us are just more fortunate than others in the Diaspora in that we can drop the X and put our real family names in the pages of history.
*This "prophet" is not in the classical islamic context of "nabi" one who comes sent from Allah with divine guidance, but rather those who are refered as Mujaddid al-deen (revivers of the religion) sent every 100 years or so e.g. Imam Al-Ghazali and Shehu Uthman dan Fodio of Sokoto, present day north Nigeria, though i do not deny that in Bob Marley's context in the song it could mean something with divinity.
Malik Mahlangu
Malik Mahlangu
