Source: AutoBiography of MalcolmX as told to Alex Haley
MalcolmX, I finally started reading his autobiography and thought why not? So here we are. This will be an evolving post as I will be updating this every now and then until I finish the book.
I find MalcolmX and what he stood for as an interesting and a dear subject, provided I am a Muslim interested in anything that is to do with revolutionary movements.
More precisely, I find the notion of abandoning everything simply for your beliefs in any environment but especially in hostile environments, fascinating. There are those who diverge from the mainstream when there is no safe space with pure courage and then there are those who only have the courage to diverge if someone had already done it and others had started doing it.
There are leaders, and those who are lead.
El-Hajj Malik Al Shabazz is one of those fierce leaders whom emerged around the late World War II era,
Whom, if given an inch would’ve took the entire world by storm;
Whom would’ve served as a bastion for islamic integrationism; as a very potent force that combatted islamic alienation propaganda in the wake of the 21st century. (Quite ironically)
Currently as I am reading his biography, with my limited knowledge gained from other sources about this extraordinary figure; there are three things that I find impactful and interesting,
- His evolution after returning from his trip to Mecca from a pure black sovereign seperatist philosophy to one that was still in the works with islamic integrationism at its core.
- The aspect of his evolution itself. The ability to tear down everything that he believed in, and reinvent himself based on his own compass even when most of his close confederates stood against him including Muhammadh Ali.
- His letter from Mecca after performing Hajj that emphasized how Islam as a way of life is the only religion that removes from its society, the race problem. (I had downloaded and listened to this video many many times)
Notes
I came to know that three chapters were omitted as they were drafted in his later years.
Alex Haley, the biographer on a letter to the publisher had apparently said that,
those chapters were the one with the most impact of them all, some of them lava-like.
I am searching but I dont think all three are available to the public.
The Chapters were titled (according to Wikipedia):
“The Negro”, “The End of Christianity”, and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”
Below are some notes from his autobiography that I find interesting,
Chapter Two “Mascot”, Page :37
My restlessness with Mason - and for the first time in my life a restlessness with being around white people - began as soon as I got back home and entered eigth grade.
I continued to think constantly about all that I had seen in Boston, and about the way I had felt there. I know now that it was the sense of being a real part of a mass of my own kind, for the first time.
The white people - classmates, the swerlins, the people at the restaurant where I worked - noticed the change. They said, “You’re acting so strange. You don’t seem like yourself, Malcolm. What’s the matter?…
… It went on that way, as I became increasingly restless and disturbed through the first semester.
The yearning for a sense of belonging… I get that.
Chapter Five “Harlemite”, Page :78
The sandwich man I’d replaced had little chance of getting his job back. I went bellowing up and down those train aisles. I sold sandwiches, coffee, candy, cake and ice cream as fast as the railroad’s commissary department could supply them. It didnt take me a week to learn that all you had to do was give white people a show and they’d buy anything you offered them.
Just put on a show to farm the admiration of the customer(s) before selling anything.