To tell what the eye beholds: a post 1945 transnational history of Afro-Arab “solidarity politics”

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content

To Tell What the Eye Beholds:
A Post 1945 Transnational History of Afro-Arab “Solidarity Politics”

by
maytha Maha Yassine Ziad alhassen

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

December 2017

Copyright 2017 Maytha Alhassen

2

DEDICATION

To the Yassine-Alhassens and all witnesses for freedom, justice and equality (FJE). To
main character dignity!

3

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication 2
List of Figures 4
Abstract 8
Introduction: “Engaged Witness” in Afro-Arab Solidarity Politics 10
Chapter 1: Lovingly Dedicated to The Asiatic Asmar Man 79
Chapter 2: Malcolm X in the Mashriq (and Africa) 121
Chapter 3: Dialectics of American Blackness in Cairo 217
Chapter 4: Dream Defending in Palestine 278
Epilogue: Witnessing a Genocide in Real Time 389
Bibliography 396
Appendix:
Translation of “Chapter 10: Black People and the Islamic Organization in
Chicago” from Islam in America 412
Excerpts from Original Proposal to Funders (DDPalestine) 422
DDPalestine Invite to Delegates 423

4

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Hans Wehr entry for Shin ha dal.

Figure 2: Aliya Ogdie-Hassan with her parents and a brother in Kadoka, South Dakota.
Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) records, Michigan
Historical Collections Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Michigan.

Figure 3: Aliya Ogdie-Hassan in an Egyptian dress. ACCESS Main Gallery, 1999.04.16,
Accessed from Arab American National Museum online archive.

Figure 4: Aliya Ogdie-Hassan with Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser at the first
major Arab American delegation to Egypt. ACCESS Main Gallery, 1999.04.18,
Accessed from Arab American National Museum online archive.

Figure 5: With the inscription “To: Dr. Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi” still legible on the
copy in Islam in America, the photo of Jamal and his family sits on an unnumbered page
between pages 128 and 129 in Chapter 10’s “Black People and the Islamic Organization
in Chicago.” Author’s collection.

Figure 6: “Welcome!...All the Kings and Heads of African Nations at the Summit
Conference” advertisement for Organization of African Unity Summit. From Egyptian
Gazette, July 17, 1964. Newspapers of Africa on Microfilm, Lehman Library, Columbia
University.

Figure 7: Water is Stronger than the Rock” by Reem Al Faisal. From Joobin Bekhrad,
“Shiny Happy People,” Reorient Magazine, March 1, 2016.

Figure 8: "Afro-America" section in Arab Observer "Oases in the City" issue, August 17,
1964. Arab Observer, Von Kleinsmid Library of World Affairs, University of Southern
California (USC).

Figure 9: Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah gracing the front cover of Arab Observer’s
issue dedicated to forthcoming African Summit in Cairo, July 13, 1964. Arab Observer,
Von Kleinsmid Library of World Affairs, USC.

Figure 10: “Cairo…the Vibrant Heart of Africa” advertisement for Organization of
African Unity Summit. From Egyptian Gazette, July 17, 1964. Newspapers of Africa on
Microfilm, Lehman Library, Columbia University.

Figure 11: Front cover of David Graham Du Bois’ 1974 …And Bid Him Sing novel.
Author’s collection.
5

Figure 12: Front cover of Poems for Niggers and Crackers, by Ibrahim Ibn Ismail, James
V. Hatch and illustrations by Camille Billops, May 1965. Author’s collection.

Figure 13: Write up for Poems for Niggers in Crackers (Camille Billops’ illustration) in
the “Afro-America” section of the Arab Observer. Arab Observer, Von Kleinsmid
Library of World Affairs, USC.

Figure 14: “With My Black Egyptian Brother Said,” by Camille Billops in Poems for
Niggers and Crackers. Author’s collection.

Figure 15: Tahia Halim in front of her "Nubia Period" work. ArtTalks private archive,
courtesy of Fatenn Mostafa.

Figure 16: Gazbia Sirry. ArtTalks private archive, courtesy of Fatenn Mostafa.

Figure 17: "Racial Discrimination," Gazbia Sirry, 1963. ArtTalks private archive,
courtesy of Fatenn Mostafa.

Figure 18: Illustration of “Pity Sticks” (Ibrahim Ibn Ismail) in James Hatch’s Cairo: Nine
Lives. Illustration by Camille Billops. Author’s collection.

Figure 19: Illustration of Drucilla (Maya Angelou) flipping over the bike of an Egyptian
who called her “Lumumba.” Illustration by Camille Billops in Cairo: Nine Lives.
Author’s collection.

Figure 20: Post-solidarity demonstration in downtown Nazareth. Photo courtesy of Chris
Hazou.

Figure 21: Ahmad’s picture with Jesse Jackson at the Dream Defenders Sit-In Against
‘Stand Your Ground’ at Florida’s capitol building. Ahmad Abuznaid, Instagram post,
summer of 2013.

Figure 22: Charlene, Aja, Ahmad, Ciara and Tara actively listening to Jeddah's
storytelling in the Old City. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 23: Patrisse listening to Mohammed El Kurdi begin to narrate his story in front of
what remains of his family's home. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 24: DDPalestine delegates Cherrell, Ciara, Carmen, Sherika, Aja, Charlene, Tara
and I and Diana poise in front of the graffiti on the "West Bank separation wall.”
Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 25: Aja Monet and author, at Darna Restaurant, in Ramallah listening to Omar
6

Barghouti speak. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.
Figure 26: At the Mahmoud Darwish museum in Ramallah. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 27: At the Qalandia checkpoint, entering 48 from 67. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 28: DDPalestine and Vivien with the Shoruq rap group in their studio. Courtesy of
Chris Hazou.

Figure 29: Isshaq of Campus in Camps explaining the project's conceptual frameworks.
Ahmad is to the right of Isshaq and Thor filming him on the other side. Courtesy of Chris
Hazou.

Figure 30: Steven and Tef in front of a mural at Campus in Camps. Courtesy of Chris
Hazou.

Figure 31: Tara, Carmen and I literally warming our hands over chestnuts burning on an
open fire in downtown Bethlehem on Christmas. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 32: Snowed in on Christmas in Bethlehem, DDPalestine delegates answer Thor's
first and only confessional question: "What to you is a dream?" Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 33: Saleh of Adalah in front of the organization's Martin Luther King Jr. poster, in
Haifa. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 34: Tara, Charlene and Carmen misjudging the force and size of waves at a beach
in Haifa. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 35: The surprisingly low-key and quotidian church in Nazareth where Jesus was
said to have delivered his early sermons. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 36: In the midst of chanting during our "flash mob" in downtown Nazareth.
Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 37: DDPalestine, Najwan and Diana watching Thor's capture of our solidarity
demonstration at the lobby of our hotel in Nazareth. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 38: Overcome with trenchant grief at Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron; Tef, Charlene,
Tara and Cherrell seek solace in each other's arms. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 39: Aja and Tara critiquing IDF logic on Hebron's Shuhada Street. Courtesy of
Chris Hazou.

Figure 40: Charlene, Cherrell, Tara and Charlene with their purchases of Ayed's artwork
at Singer Cafe in Bethlehem. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.
7

Figure 41: At Singer Cafe in Bethlehem, saying goodbye to Diana, who helped me
weather the psychological blizzard of an Israeli border crossing interrogation. Courtesy of
Chris Hazou.

Figure 42: #Blacksleepmatters headquarters/joy-making epicenter/our mobile
sanctuary/the tour bus. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 43: DDPalestine delegate femmes prep for protest with matte red lipstick
application. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Figure 44: The Last Poets' Abiodun Oyewole with Shoruq rap group and coach
Mohammad in Harlem, NY. Photo by author.

Figure 45: Aja Monet with Shoruq rap group on the eve of their performances in New
York City. Photo by author.

8

ABSTRACT

To Tell What the Eye Beholds: A Post-1945 Transnational History of Afro-Arab
“Solidarity Politics” explores the transnational intersections between Black American
internationalism and Arab diaspora, a convergence of “Afro” and “Arab” insurgencies
towards freedom and justice. As a historical-anthropological project employing the
assemblage of a multilingual archive, translation, oral history interviews and participatory
action research; the manuscript begins in the post-WWII moment, tracking the legatos of
the Black freedom movement alongside decolonizing, pan-Arab nationalist movements.
It ends with encounters between the Black radical tradition (Movement for Black Lives)
and social justice movements in the mashriq/maghreb—namely Boycott, Sanctions and
Divestment (BDS). The project culminates with a study on a Black social justice activists
(from Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, and Hands Up United (Ferguson/St. Louis))
delegation to Palestine, #DDPalestine, I co-organized as part of assessing the impact of
delegations on political theorizing and organizing work. In probing sustained and
contingent solidarities of “South-South dialogue" between Black internationalism and the
Arab diaspora, my work also takes note of tensions and failures that emancipatory
projects and solidarity grapple through.
Through the organizing principle of the “delegate," theorized as an "engaged
witness,” we see both moments of connection and dissonance in the messy, uneven work
of transnational solidarity building. “Engaged witness” draws from shahādah, which in
Arabic is the act of bearing witness, a witness that is bound to testify to what the “eye
beholds.” Conjoined with scriptural context, this witness is explicitly tasked to bear
9

witness and testify for justice. The “with-ness” of this kind of “witnessing” is further
underscored by putting shahādah in conversation with the Arabic concept of takāful
(duty of social solidarity), and thus is constitutive of what it means to practice “engaged
witness.” Centralizing the figure of the engaged witness opens a window into
the convergences between the Black radical tradition and mashriq/maghreb (the people
and geographic imaginaries), convergences that while challenging the logic of US
imperialism, are at times facilitated by the practices and apparatuses of empire. I examine
the role of race, Islam, gender, aesthetics/art, travel and friendship-making in generating
artifacts of critical analysis as a basis for forging transnational and local solidarities. To
study the political role of friendship-making to transnational organizing work, I draw
from Islamic studies and Feminist/womanist literature, highlighting the foundational role
dignity and love play in inspiring global friendship and freedom struggles
(“movementships”).

10

INTRODUCTION:
“ENGAGED WITNESS” IN AFRO-ARAB SOLIDARITY POLITICS
At the 2013 Arab Women’s Conference, I was tasked by the organizers at the Arab
Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco to speak to a predominantly Arab
audience about racism, anti-Blackness and ethnocentrism in our community. I thought I
was prepared. I thought my years of organizing around prison abolition, my writing and
media work on anti-Blackness in the Arab-American community, and academic research
on Black-Arab solidarity would have prepared me for this moment. I initially began by
asking the audience to raise their hands if they identified as “Arab.” Almost all did. I
asked for a show of hands of people who identified as white. To my surprise, a couple
hands shot up. Then, I asked who identified as Black. Half the room raised their hands.
The framing of my entire talk was that of addressing “Black-Arab relations.” It didn’t
account for the fact that for half the room, these two identities were not disparate
categories.
For the rest of my allotted 15 minutes, I clumsily struggled with every utterance
of the phrase “Black-Arab relations,” even pausing moments prior to scour my mind for
more suitable frameworks. How could I speak of Black and Arab relations as constituting
two different communities that required reconciliation when half the room of Arabs
identified as Black? What framework would best address this conundrum of mapping the
overlap, and intersect the discreteness of both categories? Pulling back from this
question: what is even meant when we use terms like “Black” and “Arab”? What peoples,
populations, imaginaries and geographies are we referring to? How did the meaning-
11

making around “Black” and “Arab” shift historically and geographically? And do the
multiplicity of answers to that question influence the “solidarity politics” of Black
American and Arab diasporic peoples?
This project is interested in exploring the contemporary transnational history of
Afro-Arab solidarity politics around questions of freedom and justice. Starting at the
close of WWII, I interrogate TransAtlantic movement building between Black Americans
and Arabs in the diaspora (from the United States to the mashriq and maghreb) through
delegations, friendship-making and art.
1
Broadly interdisciplinary, I contribute my
research and the theoretical framework of “engaged witness” to disciplines and fields that
include History, Anthropology, Critical Race and Ethnic studies, Critical Migration
studies, Black studies, African Diaspora, Arab American studies, Middle East studies,
Transnationalism, Arabic and Islamic studies and Feminist and Women’s studies.
Engaged witness, I hope, offers an explanatory framework to think through some of the
messiness of transnational movement building and solidarity. This dissertation
interrogates engaged witness across Black and Arab geographies and imaginaries to
locate the production of “generative artifacts”—new knowledge, critical analysis,
theoretical frameworks, art and friendship—that inform movement work.
Offering transparency around my commitments and inclinations should aid the

1
In this dissertation, by “Black,” I am primarily speaking about a Black American population, at
times Black Arab identified peoples (like Afro-Palestinians), and addressing some African
diaspora debates around 1960s Egypt. Although not in this project, I hope to expand the focus of
“Afro-Arab solidarity” to include more populations and geographies within the African diaspora
and Black globality like the Caribbean. At the close of this Introduction, I will elaborate on my
choice of “mashriq/maghreb (MM)” to describe what is conventionally referred to in Area studies
as “the Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) and what activist and progressive academic
circles as “Southwest Asia and North Africa” (SWANA).
12

reader in understanding the “why” of my decision-making process for the central focuses
of this dissertation. I know no other way to communicate the choices for this work. As an
international journalist, poet and organizer, I acknowledge a bias in my work to privilege
the power of travel, art and see possibilities in building across Black American and Arab
geographies of struggle. From working with incarcerated youth at maximum security
prison Rikers Island to refugee camps in Greece, Turkey, Haiti and Palestine, I cannot
help but see the linkages of our movements to free and dignify our captive peoples and
dismantle the systems that trap, occupy, exploit, contort and endanger our very existence.
As a practitioner of mystical dimensions of Islam, I am moved to refract the spiritual
lexicon and metaphor embedded in Islamic metaphysics into academic scholarship. In
fact, the inspiration for centering witness in thinking through freedom and justice work
comes from one of my late mentor’s focus on returning to Iraq to “bear witness”—the
multiple Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anthony Shadid. Lastly. Furthermore, as a
Transnational American studies scholar, I have been trained to intersect race, class,
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, faith, and other frameworks and formations with a
global lens.
Lastly, I see this study on the history of Afro-Arab “solidarity” struggling towards
freedom as a transnational project that uses delegations to look at the role of eyewitness
as part of a project of developing a sharper analysis on what it takes to become free. To a
certain degree, this analysis is informed by friendships and art. I’m interested in how
travel, friendships, and art influence a witness that develops a piquant analysis. Within
each chapter, I explore political and critical analyses that comes out of engaged
13

witnessing. New thought and “sight” arise from being at a place, participating in critical
exchanges, and beholding another’s plight and joy-making. It influences people to testify
to what they witness.
Through the assemblage of a multi-lingual archive consisting of oral history
interviews, magazines, newspapers, travel itineraries, visual art, poetry, participatory
action research, life writing and community literature, I hope to contribute not just a
theorization of engaged witness but new material accessible for scholars, organizers and
enthusiasts of Afro-Arab solidarity. This introduction will cover the literature in Arab
American Studies, Black American and Critical Muslim Studies, Black-Arab solidarity,
friendship, and travel. Interwoven through this literature review will be my contributions
to these fields and a deconstruction of the “engaged witness” theoretical framework.
Then I close with an explanation of my methodological approaches, a chapter breakdown
and a note on the use of mashriq/maghreb (MM).
Afro-Arab Islamic Racialization
It was not only in a room of women in San Francisco in 2013 where the
slipperiness of Arab and Black was apparent. There's a long history of shifting
epistemological and ontological notions of Blackness and Arabness—which even include
operating as a race, colorism descriptor, class distinction, “de-Negroizing” device,
linguistic marker, cultural and ethnic identity, hopes for nationhood, a kind of Islamic
legal thinker and poetic device. This is further complicated when intersected with Islam.
Here, I look at history of Arab, Black and Muslim intersections and transmutations
through their constitutive racializations and then cover the literature on Afro-Arab
14

solidarity. The literature on Afro-Arab solidarity could be best defined as a literature of
"Black-Arab solidarity," as it extends the practice of embracing a clear binary of
disparate categories of identity. Much of the literature on Black-Arab solidarity treats
Black and Arab as separate categories, most neglecting the significance of Islam within
the framework. Even within Critical Race and Ethnic studies (including Black and Arab
American studies) literature on “Arabs” oscillates between being an approximate for
whiteness or racialized terror, treats Blackness as distant from Arab and Muslim, and
assumes the racialization of “Muslim” as a brown foreign other. Histories tell us
otherwise.
Islam, Race, and American Blackness
Throughout the 19
th
century to the present, academic scholarship has been fecund
with literature on the relationship of Black Americans and Islam, even though it still
remains to be seriously integrated into Black and African American studies. Studying
Black subjectivities through Islam has contributed alternative accounts and narratives not
only to American History but also to African diaspora studies. Non-Muslim West Indian
writer Edward Wilmot Blyden, a leading pioneer of 19
th
century pan-Africanism, opined
in his 1887 Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race that Islam was a preferable religion
for the African diaspora and was also important because it could offer an internationalist
perspective and enable global connections.
2

This is an attempt at a survey of the literature on Islam and Black Americans,

2
Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Baltimore: Black Classic
Press, 1994 (1887)).
15

including the appeal of Islam as a mechanism for transcending race/de-racializing,
recovering genealogical linkages obliterated by the institution of slavery, self-discipline
or a perceived radical politics. In the survey of this literature, a nagging question arises:
beyond the political motivations for converting (sometimes called “reverting”) to Islam,
what is the account of the spiritual motivations for practicing Islam? In his study of
Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s “Islamic experimentalism” for Africa Speaks, America Listens,
historian Robin Kelley follows this “de-Negroizing” through-line from antebellum
slavery to understand the popularity of Islamic conversion for jazz musicians in the post-
WWII period. According to Kelley, “conversion was primarily about worship, self-
discipline, and about changing one’s identity, escaping the degradation of being ‘Negro;
in order to become human and, for better or worse, exotic.”
3
Kelley also illustrates the
centrality of worship in locating the appeal of Islamic conversion for jazz artists (some of
whom are covered in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 of this dissertation). He opens the chapter
with a quote by Abdul-Malik on beauty, “People think I am too far out with religion…
How can you play beauty without knowing what beauty is, what it really is?
Understanding the Creator leads to understanding the creations, and better understanding
of what you play comes from this.”
4

How does Islam, not just as Islamic cultural symbolism as argued by Melani
McAlister or a “de-Negroizing,” “orientalizing,” “Asiatic” or “exotic” self-signifier to
resist American hegemonic identity studied by Robert Dannin, Robin D.G. Kelley,
Hisham Aidi, Manning Marable and Richard Turner, confer a certain kind of radical

3
Robin D.G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Listens: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 96.
4
Ibid, 91.
16

imaginary around social justice and a possible basis for solidarity? How have scholars
accounted for the radical political work that manifests from practitioners’ attraction to the
praxical spiritual dimensions Islam—like Abdul-Malik’s quest of understanding beauty
and Malcolm X’s praise of Islam’s “spirit of brotherhood” (as covered in Chapter 2)?
What identity, grammar of national liberation, new ontology, subjectivities does Islam
provide Black Americans? What was the function of espousing an “Asiatic” identity that
traced its genealogy to the “tribe of Shabazz” and called for an “X”-ing out of a “slave
name”? Did conversion entail cloaking in Arab-centric ideology and aesthetics?
Historian Manning Marable and political scientist Hisham Aidi’s “The Early
Muslim Presence and Its Significance” in Black Routes to Islam addresses the desirability
of claiming an Arab, Moorish or North African/Berber heritage in order to gain
manumission or elevate one’s standing in the developing US’s racial hierarchical order
(Chapter 1 addresses this). Since the Enlightenment era viewed literacy as “the visible
sign of reason” (as Henry Louis Gates observed), the presence of literate enslaved
African Muslims during the antebellum period presented an interesting challenge to slave
system logic. Do the African Muslim enslaved narratives point to a history of radical
resistance to white supremacy by providing for stripped “identities” and “naming” or an
opportunistic acquiescence to its precepts? Is it more complicated than this? Are these
narratives counter-narratives? How has the early construction of Muslim-ness shaped
contemporary articulations and representations? And how have contemporary post-9/11
racializing discourses and practices around the “Muslim” (primarily as consistent with an
Orientalist imaginary of a brown, foreign other), shaped how we appraise this early
17

history of Black American encounters with Islam?
5

Historian Michael Gomez divides his study on African Muslims in the Americas
into two sections. Starting with the Christopher Columbus’s cross-Atlantic journey in
1492, the first begins with a geographically expansive history of the presence of African
Muslims in the Americas. The second part examines Islam’s development in the United
States. Gomez’s central argument connects both sections by insisting that the “pioneers
of theologies at variance with the conventional” (otherwise popularly referred to in
academic literature as leaders of proto-Islamic movements like Noble Drew Ali’s
Moorish Science Temple and Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam), successfully socio-
engineered a religious practice that would lay the groundwork for an eventual
reattachment to the original practice of Islam observed by their African forefathers.
Gomez credits Malcolm X for ushering in the reconnection process of Islam and Africa
with his marriage of Pan-African nationalism with Sunni orthodoxy and Noble Drew Ali
for setting the foundation for such syncretism.
Anthropologist Robert Dannin precedes his oral history project with a historical
introduction to African American Islam, a project he phrases as “the tracking of the red
fez.” This “tracking of the fez” starts with locating Islam in the cultural symbology in
early African-American masonry and fascinations with Moorish culture adopted by
Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Temple—what he calls “the unchurched culture of Black
Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”—and continues on to the popularity

5
Manning Marable and Hisham Aidi, “The Early Muslim Presence and Its Significance,” in
Black Routes to Islam (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
18

of Islam for jazz musicians of the 1950s.
6
After setting the historical stage, Dannin colors
the outline of African-American Islam with individual conversion narratives. Dannin’s
main objective is to tell the oft-times neglected story of Black American Islam through
history and narratives. Dannin’s use of narratives comes from a strong belief in the
powerfully transcendent quality of storytelling, both generally and culturally defined.
According to Dannin, “Narrative has long served as one of the main sources of folklore in
the African-American community, important because it has provided a common vehicle
for the expression of literary and artistic talents where no one is excluded by race or
class.”
7

Religious studies scholar Richard Brent Turner’s history of African-American
Islam is divided into two sections. The first part, “roots twentieth-century African-
American Islam in the themes, structures, and history of global Islam in the Middle East,
West Africa, and antebellum America.”
8
Part II narrates the story of leaders of proto-
Islamic movements, which he calls “urban-based African-American Muslim
movements.”
9
Turner appropriates Religious studies scholar Charles H. Long’s concept
of signification as a thematic mode to apply it to the signification Islam performs in
contemporary African-American culture. Whereas Black Pilgrimage into Islam author
Robert Dannin accuses the discipline and practitioners of American history of ignoring
African-American Islam, Turner tailors his charge of academic neglect to historians of

6
Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,,
2002), 15.
7
Ibid. 6.
8
Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington IN: Indiana
University Press, 2003), 5.
9
Ibid.
19

American religious studies. Relevant to my research, in the introduction to his second
edition, Turner hints at a tension between African-American Muslims and Arab Muslim
immigrants explored with greater theoretical depth by Islamic studies scholar Sherman
Jackson.
Jackson powerfully opens Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Towards the
Third Resurrection on the ideological encounter between Blackamericans and Islam with
the provocative charge that what he phrases as “Immigrant Islam” uses false
universalizing of the particular, which leads to sustaining immigrant superiority in
American Islam. Jackson offers the new lexical construction for imagining people of
African descent’s relationship to America, Blackamericans. “Blackamerican” a term re-
purposed by Jackson from C. Eric Lincoln, becomes more sufficient in explaining “the
force of American history (that) has essentially transformed these erstwhile Africans into
a new people” than terms like “black American” and “African-American.”
10
Caught
between the agenda of Black Religion and ontological universal fallacies advanced by
Immigrant Islam, Blackamerican Muslims are challenged to create a self-definition that,
is “functionally enabling” and “sufficiently authentic,” and cultivates a “dignified, black,
American existence” independent of these two worlds. For Jackson, the proper response
to this challenge is the “Third Resurrection,” which he defines as a Blackamerican
Muslim “mastery and appropriation of the Sunni super-tradition.”
11
Jackson’s work also
addresses a tradition within Cultural Nationalism and Afrocentrism of employing
Orientalist frameworks to look at the MM (which he characterizes as “Black

10
Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.
11
Ibid. 5.
20

Orientalism”), but also critiques Arab supremacist thought and practice within American
Islam (imposing the “false universal of the particular,” that of imposing Arab culture, on
American Islamic religious practice).
Considering the demographic and historical realities of Islamic practice in the
U.S.—Black Americans have historically outnumbered Arabs and the Muslim population
in the continent of Africa exceeds the population of Muslims in the Middle East—it is
curious how and why Arabs assume not only featured roles in Western imaginaries
around American and global Islam but also cultural and religious authority within
American and global Islam. In fact, Syrian American Christians emphasized their
geographic relationship to the “cradle of civilization” and demonstrated their ability to
own property (as part of an appeal to racial capitalism) in 1910s and 1920s naturalization
cases to actually “prove” their “whiteness.”
Nation of Islam co-founder Wallace Fard Muhammad, as Turner evinces, at one
point was even identified as Syrian (as part of his possible mysterious origins). Echoing a
similar hagiography assigned to reggae musician Bob Marley, Fard was characterized by
as “a black Jamaican whose father was a Syrian Moslem.”
12
As will be discussed in
Chapter 1, people from mashriq were included in NOI’s geography of a non-white
Asiatic world (mirroring with what we call today the “global South”). If early Syrian
Americans appeared to “successfully” fuse their identity with Christian whiteness, how
did Arab become popularly synonymous with Muslim, and therefore “non-white,” while
still maintaining a federal racial classification of “white”? And how are Afro-Arabs

12
Richard Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, 161.
21

(“Black Arabs”) accounted for in Jackson’s construction of an “indigenous” American
Islam (rooted in the Black American experience) and Immigrant Islam (circuited through
the mashriq, South Asia, and Southeast Asia)? Where do Arab American Muslims like
Suheir Hammad who proclaimed she was “Born Palestinian, Born Black” and Dream
Defender’s Ahmad Abuznaid, who pledged a Black fraternity (which laid the
groundwork for his Black-Palestine solidarity work), fit? How differently would our
understanding of the identities, geographies, and imaginaries of Black, Arab and Muslim
be if we examined the interstitial spaces between them instead of treating them as
separate, isolated categories that at times interact? Covering the scholarship underpinning
these questions, and thinking through the community histories (outside the folds of
academic scholarship), I argue, permits critical work towards Afro-Arab solidarity.
Arab American Studies
Arabs are the perfect metaphor for the paradoxical nature of race: one that is
simultaneously unstable and rigidly essentializing. “Arab” based on the scholarly
literature in the field of Arab American studies begins with the narrative of Christian
groups from the Levant under Ottoman Turkish rule as the Arab Americans genealogical
heir, and incrementally makes room for newly arriving migrants from different regions,
other intersectional identities and reconstitutes the language around social identity
mirroring the change in phenomenological categories in the mashriq and maghreb.
13

Some scholars cite the political events unfolding in Israel-Palestine, the anti-colonial and

13
Here I am referring to the historically changing subjectivities in MENA, city/region (or
autonomous zones and districts in the Ottoman era), to colonial subjects, to nation-state, to Pan-
Arabism, to religious identifiers.
22

imperial nationalism of Egyptian president and Third World leader Gamal Abdel-Nasser
as landmark moments that constructed the shifting contours of Arab American ethnic and
racial identities (and consequently politics), while others also underscore the role of
popular cultural representations of the Arab and Muslim as informing a fixed, monolithic
imagination around Arab “otherness.” Edward Said, in his conceptual framework of
“Orientalism” asserts that this construction of an immutable binary opposition between
East, “The Orient,” and West had its roots in a Western European production of
knowledge centuries before. Where does this story even begin?
14

The social history of Arabs as a group defined as “invisible” or “visible” and as
either “insiders” or “outsiders” flattens out heterogeneity and oversimplifies a very messy
history of the state of being “Arab” in the U.S. Even the notion of “Arab” as a formal
marker of difference is a historically contested term traded in at times for “Middle
Eastern,” religious sect, ethnic minority or nation-state identities. Taking the racial and
ethnic formation of Arabs as a sociohistorically contingent process riddled with
inconsistencies and elisions, Arabs stand in American racial and ethnic history as socially
and legally vulnerable “whites” who are racially transmutable; invisible white insiders at
times and visible outsiders at others (and even times in one individual’s life cycle!). The
moments that they are “invisible citizens” they have also been a racialized “problem
posing” Other that troubles hegemony by being “caught-in-between” national belonging
and transnational onto-epistemologies, sometimes challenging and expanding boundaries
of citizenship intended for Northern European whites, getting pushed outside the margins

14
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
23

of this structure and even serving as the imperial state’s object for foreign expeditions.
But mostly, this is a history that begs to be imbued with more stories from
multiple, intersecting subjectivities. While calls for gendered analysis have been taken
up, as ethnographic studies on Arab women like Evelyn Shakir’s 1997 Bint Arab: Arab
and Arab Women in the United States and articles on “Arab Feminisms” have been
published—especially in the wake of a post 9/11 obsession with Arab American Muslim
head-covering. The lacunae in the history revolves around differing class, educational,
regional and nation-state identities.
15
I wonder, how do we even come to these
conclusions of defining features of the Arab American racial experience when we rely so
heavily on a Levantine Christian migratory history?
Historian Sarah Gualtieri reveals the paradoxical nature of the legal whiteness
“won” by early Syrian migrants. Syrians successfully litigated their whiteness by
endorsing “common knowledge rationales” by demonstrating their ability to acquire
property and by invoking a civilization argument that the Caucasian race had its origins
in Syria.”
16
Even within this legal framework of whiteness, they continued to be unstably
white, a “inbetweenness” between white, Asian and Black as laws like 1917 immigration
bill and Johnson Reed Act (National Origins Act) were passed and as they became
victims of violence, which included a bombing by the KKK in Marietta, Georgia in 1923,
and the lynching of a Syrian man in the Jim Crow South in 1929.
17
According to

15
Also Greater Syrian Christian women in the U.S.
16
Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American
Diaspora (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 3.
17
Syrian family in Marietta, Georgia in 1923, (Gualtieri: 2009, 4) and Syrian Nicholas Romey in
Florida in 1929. Sarah Gualtieri, “Strange Fruit? Syrian Immigrants, Extralegal Violence and
Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South,” Arab Studies Quarterly 26(3) (2004).
24

Gualtieri, Syrian immigrants, “were victims of racism and, at the same time, attempted to
challenge it by claiming sameness with the peoples and instituted that perpetuated it,”
adding that, “in certain instances Syrians participated in white supremacy, but in others
they resisted it and forged alliances with people of color.”
18

Contemporary Arab American studies incorporates this legal history, critical
whiteness studies, Ethnic studies and Critical Race studies to problematize and reappraise
the standard narrative around Arab American assimilation into “whiteness.” Perhaps the
more fascinating disruptions on the historical narrative advanced by Alixa Naff’s
temporary sojourner assimilationist model are Helen Samhan’s historical portrait of anti-
Arab political racism in “Politics and Exclusion: The Arab American Experience” (1987),
Elaine Hagopian’s “Minority Rights in a Nation-State: The Nixon Administration's
Campaign against Arab-Americans” (1975), an analysis of Nixon era surveillance of
Arabs coded as “Operation Boulder,” Sarah Gualtieri’s documentation of pre-National
Origins Act hate crimes on the Syrian migrant community, and Evelyn Alsultany’s Arabs
and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (2012) which examines
how Arabs (conflated with Muslims of course) are rendered “hypervisible” by Orientalist
media and cinematic representations.
19

These scholars’ work not only disrupts the standard narrative on Arab
racialization, they also expose the ways Arabs in the US were imagined as a problem-

18
Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 11.
19
Helen Hatab Samhan “Politics and Exclusion: The Arab American Experience,” Journal of
Palestine Studies (1987); Elaine Hagopian’s “Minority Rights in a Nation-State: The Nixon
Administration's Campaign against Arab-Americans,” Journal of Palestine Studies (1975),
Evelyn Alsultany’s Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New
York: New York University Press, 2012).
25

posing “impossible subject,” as victims of political, social and material racism before
9/11. Even artists like Brooklyn bred Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad, in the midst of
this discourse on whiteness, assertively rejects this category by instead insisting that she
is “Born Palestinian, Born Black.”
20
To Alsultany’s point of “hypervisibility,” how does
visibility work as a conceptual framework for understanding the racial formation of
Arabs? Are they transformed from “invisible citizens” to “visible subjects” by 9/11, as
anthropologist Nadine Naber contends?
Drawing upon research conducted by scholars of Arab American history, Nadine
Naber explores the material consequence of the Arab American racialization process in
“Ambiguous insiders: an investigation of Arab American invisibility,” one she sees as
continually reaffirming their “invisibility.” This “invisibility” has been shaped by four
central paradoxes of Arab American identity. The US government’s arbitrary issue of
racial categorical identifications to Arabs, like "white" or "nonwhite.” Such labels very
deliberately exclude Arabs from receiving white or minority privileges and protections.
The Arab who doesn’t recognize his or her legal status as white and does not recognize
his or her social status as “nonwhite” is rendered what Naber calls “invisible.” They are
nonwhite enough to be victims of political racism, but “white” enough to receive no legal
or political preferential protection or treatment for their nonwhiteness. Does this mean
that “Arabness” connotes an experience of marginality and alterity? Once again, that

20
The title for her 1996 poetry book is an ode to a line from June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving
Towards Home,” wherein she declares “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become
a Palestinian,”
26

history is complicated.
21

Naber also argues that racial and ethnic formations of Arabs in the U.S. was
heavily shaped by sociopolitical movements in their respective “homelands.”
22
Anti-
colonial nationalist liberation struggles against the Ottomans first, and then European
occupiers directly proceeding, influenced a shift from a regional group identity to a
nation-state identity—especially with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s
successful nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. This period of a Third World
movement saw the birth of Pan-Arab nationalist identity that stretched beyond the
homeland into diaspora communities. However, this identity shifted after the Arabs
defeat in the 1967 war (referred to as the “Six Day War” or “1967 Arab-Israeli war”), a
time that also marked a transition of socialist autocrats to neoliberal autocrats, relying on
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and structural adjustment loans to organize state
economics, concomitantly opened the door for previously repressed Islam-inspired
political movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) to provide social services to
communities that were being neglected by their dictators.
The Arab defeat in the ‘67 war signaled the death of pan-Arab nationalism, a
dream of trans-continental unity across twenty-two Arab countries. In a desperate attempt
to retrieve a formal marker for a group identity that expressed a pre-colonial history of
civilizational greatness, Islam was a source for reinventing community bonds. In the
1970s and 80s, referred by scholars as a period of “Islamic revivalism,” Islam in the
mashriq and maghreb transformed into a social identity with political currency,

21
Nadine Naber, “Ambiguous Insiders: an investigation of Arab American invisibility,” Ethnic
and Racial Studies (2000).
22
Ibid.
27

assembling under the Western neologism of “Islamism.” These changes were reflected in
the changing self-identity constructions of Arab Americans, leading to Nadine Naber to
conclude in her ethnographic study of Bay Area Arabs, that they were “Muslims First,
Arabs Second.”
23

At the margins of this literature however are racial and ethnic experiences of non-
Levantine and non-Egyptian Arabs (not to mention the full-out erasure of Nubian-
American populations from Egypt). Yemeni migration (composed mainly of Muslims
and some Jewish people) to the US, occurring on a similar timeline is only now being
engaged in labor and Leftist histories of Arab American organizing.
24
Arriving in the late
19
th
century, many worked at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant in the 1920s and
some gained their citizenship fighting the in world wars. Others like Nagi Daifullah and
Ahmed Yahya Mushreh in the post-WWII moment marched alongside Cesar Chavez and
the United Farmworkers in the California Central Valley. Peculiarly, these histories have
been largely elided in the narrative construction of Arab American social history—which
would offer a more complicated racial, class and gender understanding of Arab American
migration (and their politics).
25
A Yemeni mention might be invoked to illustrate the
ambiguity around Arab “whiteness” in the racial prerequisite case decisions (e.g. the case

23
Nadine Naber, “Muslim First, Arab Second: A Strategic Politics of Race and Gender,” The
Muslim World, 95 (4), (2005): 479–495.
24
See Sally Howell’s “Southend Struggles: Converging Narratives of an Arab/Muslim American
Enclave,” Mashriq & Mahjar 3 (1), (2015); Pamela E. Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American
Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s, (Chapel
Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
25
Tynche Hendricks, “Legacy of Yemeni immigrants lives on among union janitors/Farmworkers
organizer to be honored in S.F.,” The San Francisco Gate, August 16, 2002,
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Legacy-of-Yemeni-immigrant-lives-on-among-union-
2782183.php#photo-2202337 .
28

of Ahmed Hassen v. United States (1942)), or as previously stated, to speak to an Arab
American labor organizing history.
This suggests an invisibility in the literature of possibly its most historically
“visible” members. Constructing a comprehensive experience of invisibility/visibility
with insider/outsider status for such a religiously, phenotypically, economically,
geographically diverse community flattens out all those differences and elevates the most
dominant narrative available: and that is currently the one of the multi-generational,
relatively affluent Levantine Christian. It also weakens possibilities within the framework
of Afro-Arab solidarity.
Not only does this literature exclude or disavow a history of Arab and Black
American automotive labor organizing—like Arab American labor organizers joined
forces with the radical Black Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) to address
labor conditions within the automotive plants and anti-Black racism in the United
Automobile Workers (UAW)—it discounts possible intersections Arabs have with
Blackness.
26
Recent scholarship is emerging on the Arab American Left and radical
labor organizing within Arab American history (the 2017 Yemeni Tri-State Bodega strike
is not a singular event!), including Nadine Naber’s “Arab and Black Feminisms: Joint
Struggle and Transnational Anti-Imperial Activism” (2016) and “Imperial Whiteness and
the Diasporas of Empire” (2014), and Penny Pennock’s The Rise of the Arab American
Left: Activists, Allies, and their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s
(2017) that make the connections between the inherently transnational nature of radical

26
Sally Howell, “Southend Struggles.”
29

Arab American organizing that ties anti-racism work with anti-imperialism.
27
Once
again, these literary productions treat “Arab” as a separate category from “Black”—
especially when writing about alliance building projects. Online communities, interesting
enough, are exploring the overlapping of Black and Arab within the framework of “Afro-
Arab.”
In the online roundtable “Authentically Black, Authentically Arab—A
Roundtable on Afro-Arab Identity,” cultural workers Shereen Abyan, Amani Bin
Shikhan, Habiba Khaled, grapple with the boundaries and possibilities of “Afro-Arab,”
defining it as “bridging seemingly conflicting identities and ‘colour-blindness.’”
28
For
Abyan, who views Arab as, “a fluid term transcending race and seen as a cultural marker
however at most times policed, leaves me questioning the boundaries of where it stops
and who can own it.” She ties current “anti-Arab sentiment” with “the trauma of
Blackness across the diaspora.” Khaled also speaks to this slipperiness of “Arab,” which
“theoretically” celebrates Arabic colorist descriptors like sumra (which will be further
examined in Chapter 1) that connote Blackness and beauty, yet competes with whiteness
as “the desired ideal of beauty, even amongst Arab Egyptians” (calling it “contradictory

27
See Nadine Naber, “Imperial Whiteness and Diasporas of Empire,” American Quarterly, 66
(4), (2014): 1107-1115; Nadine Naber, “Arab and Black Feminisms: Joint Struggle and
Transnational Anti-Imperial Activism,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 5 (3), (2016):
116-125; Penny Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and their Fight
Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s-1980s (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2017).
28
Shereen Abyan, Amani Bin Shikhan, and Habiba Khaled, “Authentically Black, Authentically
Arab – A Roundtable on Afro-Arab Identity,” ed. Shereen Abyan and posted by Kiri Rupiah on
Afripop!, February 4, 2016 http://afripopmag.com/2016/02/04/authentically-black-authentically-
arab-a-roundtable-on-afro-arab-identity/ .
30

duality”).
29
Amani tackles the academic scholarship that incorporates Arab Americans
into critical whiteness studies and narrates their Brown dreams of ascendancy into middle
class whiteness that is generated alongside public discourses and media imagery that
demonizes Arabs (speaking to the “political racism” Arabs confront):
It’s interesting to me that Arabness is often associated with people who are white-
passing, or of a very specific demographic associated with stereotypes of silenced,
waif women and brutish, volatile men. Or an ambiguous Brown, often striving to
whiteness by way of liberal thought or an embarrassing dilution of self in hopes of
an extended tolerance of their very existence.
In most conceivable spaces, the Arab is regarded as an intrinsically political
person, both a victim and villain, all of their own doing. What does this mean
when compounded with the stereotype of the African—or any member of the
broader African diaspora—as one who embodies the same characteristics with the
additional violence of visible Blackness in an anti-Black world? This isn’t to play
a game of oppression olympics by any means, but is merely the truth: what does it
mean to embody the traumas of both the Arab and Black body simultaneously?
To understand the ludicrousness of assumptions on the body, autonomy and
legacy (both good and bad) of the Arab is to understand its heightened presence in
the Black experience, in the Arab world and otherwise.
Abyan, Bin Shikhan and Khaled argue that a more complicated, multi-dimensional
understanding of Blackness attentive to the way it travels through geographies and
diaspora, aids in appraising the epistemological fluidity of Arabness; with Khaled
concluding “The term ‘Afro-Arab’ in itself is reconciliatory.”
30

In an investigation of the literature, we do see a vulnerable whiteness, that is
racially transmutable, but what else could be gleaned by gathering, documenting,
compiling and infusing this historiography with diverse stories and intersecting them with

29
Khaled (transliterating sumra as samra) explains that, “In Egypt, being samra, or samara—
translating to tanned or coloured,—implies Blackness. Being samra is good in theory as samar,
the root of samra, is understood as authenticity and theoretical beauty” (Habiba Khaled,
“Authentically Black, Authentically Arab”).
30
Shereen Abyan, Amani Bin Shikhan, and Habiba Khaled, “Authentically Black, Authentically
Arab.”
31

and possibly situating within Black studies (not merely an Ethnic studies project)? Naber
and Pennock’s interventions are consistent with the general assumptions of Black-Arab
solidarity literature (the ones I embraced at my Arab Women’s Conference talk in 2013),
that these are two separate hegemonic identities “interacting.” Stuart Hall’s analysis on
cultural identity suitably captures my anxieties interacting with the frameworks of current
Arab American studies racial frameworks: “There can be few political statements which
so eloquently testify to the complexities entailed in the process of trying to represent a
diverse people with a diverse history through a single, hegemonic ‘identity’.”
31

Black-Arab Solidarity
At the start of the twenty-first century, there has been a surge of interest in
exploring Black and Arab intersections—ranging from political to the imaginary (and
almost always framing them as separate bounded categories). In my appraisal of literature
in transnational Black and Arab encounters concerned with Islamic transcripts, a full-
length study on the history of the global circuitous flows and cross-cultural exchange of
this encounter remains unattended to; especially one that is interested in contributing a
new conceptual language around “movement” for migration studies, tracing Blackness in
modern Arabic thought, and critically addressing dissonances in solidarities.
Most scholarship on Black-Arab encounters and solidarity, ones I use with much
gratitude as my guides in traversing this research, track the Arab Islamicate imaginaries
in Black radicality. These include Alex Lubin’s Geographies of Liberation: The Making

31
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture and Difference,
ed. Jonathan Rutherford, (London: Lawrence And Wishart, 1990), 236.

32

of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (2014), Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters:
Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East (2001) and “One Black Allah,”
Robin Kelley’s Africa Speaks, America Listens, Keith Feldman’s A Shadow Over
Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015), Samir Meghelli’s work on the
Black Freedom Movement and Algeria, Lanita Jacobs “The Arab is the New Nigger,”
Hisham Aidi’s global explorations of New Muslim Youth Culture, and Moustafa
Bayoumi’s writings on Arabs and Muslim in the African American imagination.
I am concerned with the feedback loop that includes the Black imaginary in
Arabic grammar and geopolitics, a loop that at times is intersected by Islam.
32
What is the
sociocultural and political imaginary exchange between Black Americans and Arabs?
What role do imaginations around racial formation play in forging affective ties and
solidarities? Has a scholar tracked Blackness in the genealogy of modern Arabic lexicon
to assess the impact on affective ties and solidarity with Black Americans? Why would
Palestinian-born Dream Defender Ahmad Abuznaid pledge a historically Black
fraternity? For the variety of Arabic words encompassing Blackness that experience
etymological valence—simr (dark-complexioned people), sud (Blacks), zanj (“land of the
Blacks” designated for the Swahili coast), al-habash (the Abyssinians, Horn of Africa,
part of Afro-Asiatic family), and the problematic, ‘abeed (slaves)—can the choice of
which denote a specific kind of politics? What are the sociopolitical implications of the
use of simr to describe Black Americans, as Cairo University professor Mahmoud
Shawarbi did in his 1960 chapter on the Nation of Islam in his ethnographic report on

32
Not just the examination of Black imaginaries of mashriqi and maghrebi geographies and
grammar, but also the Arab and Arabic-speaking imaginaries around Blackness as a geography
and identity.
33

American Islam (which will be engaged in Chapter 1)? Does a certain kind of
hermeneutics around racialization engender a radical politics?
In “The Arab is the New Nigger,” Linguist Anthropologist Lanita Jacobs argues
that Black comedy’s 9/11 jokes highlight and produce an alternative political narrative
and lay the groundwork for solidarity with Arabs through the recentralization of issues of
race. The use of the Arab as the new nigger metaphor in African-American linguistic
spaces is helpful for understanding the racial categorical reality of Arabs in the Black
American imagination.
Alex Lubin’s construction of “geographies of liberation,” identifies “dialectical
spaces produced in the collision between nationalism and colonialism, on one hand, and
subaltern decolonial and liberation politics on the other.”
33
Focus is placed on
intersecting and overlapping histories of Jewish diasporic politics, Black internationalism
and Palestinian exile to form what Lubin terms an “Afro-Arab political imaginary.”
Thematically organized, Lubin recruits a Mignolo- and Quijano-informed decolonial
analytic to explore “conjunctural moments of encounter” through five “geographies of
liberation” that chronologically map this Afro-Arab imaginary: diaspora, pan-Islamism,
binationalism, intercommunalism, and Afro-Arab international. Lubin is interested in
exploring, “shared and sometimes overlapping politics of exclusion, statelessness, and
exile in order to excavate how a variety of subalterns throughout the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries reconstituted the geographies of modernity into what I am calling a
geography of liberation” through the interactions of Jewish exile, Palestinian exile and

33
Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary.
(Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 7.
34

Black internationalism.
34

Outside of literature explicitly concerned with the contours of Black-Arab
solidarity, scholars ranging from political scientists to sociologists interrogated the “Afro-
American” and “Middle Eastern” connection as the 1967 Six Day War precipitated a
“crisis” in Black-Jewish relations in the States. As the defeat of the Arab nations in the
war of ’67 crushed dreams of Pan-Arab nationalism, it paradoxically endeared Black
American groups and leaders to the Palestinian plight and, with the passage of the
Immigration Act of 1965, influenced a “white ethnic revival” in the States. This
illustrates once again how Arabs and Middle Eastern politics triggered a refashioning of
American notions of ethnicity, race and citizenship. In Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival
in Post-Civil Rights America, Matthew Frye Jacobson contends that the Arab-Israeli ’67
war shifted the relationship between African-Americans and Jews during the Civil Rights
Movement from one based on “universalistic values” to one of “group action” structured
around “narrowly conceived group identities and interests,” as Black Power and Zionist
activists confronted an impasse in terms of commitments and how they viewed the events
in the “Middle East.”
35
Black radicals began to view Israel as a project of Zionist
imperialism and incorporated this position in its language, platform and resolutions.
36

Jacobson argues that this shift influenced a larger change in American racial and ethnic
politics—especially in a climate of “reviving” and locating ethnic group identities in
emergent liberal multiculturalism and neoconservative movements. He credits this

34
Ibid.
35
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America,
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Jacobson quoting Clayborne Carson on 224-5.
36
Ibid, 222.
35

moment as a catalyst for the disintegration of an already fracturing New Left, who were
now moving in the direction of emphasizing identity and heritage and “their particular
legacies of struggle.”
As the post-Civil Rights era ushered in a legislating of integrative practices and
formal de-segregation, it also inspired a radical counter-reaction. Global solidarity
building with the decolonized world and radical challenges to American international and
domestic imperialism continued after Malcolm X’s death in 1965. In his Black Routes to
Islam Chapter “From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities Between the African
American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962-1978,” Samir Meghelli argues that this
period ushered in a framing of transnational identities as Civil Rights struggles and
African nations’ decolonization struggles became linked.
37
As a result of the victorious
defeat of their French colonizers, Algeria transformed into a symbol of revolutionary
struggle and a model for success for radicals. Meghelli tracks the emergence of
transnational solidarities between the African-American freedom movement and Algeria
during Civil Rights and Black Power.
American Studies scholar Melani McAlister explores racialization (Black
nationalist radicalism), religious affiliative practices (Islamic cultural symbolism), and
anticolonial politics (nonalignment and Third Worldism) of Black American intellectuals
between 1955 and 1972, which made the Middle East legible as “a rich resource within

37
Samir Meghelli, “From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities Between the African
American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962-1978, in Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning
Marable and Hisham Aidi (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 99-119.
36

African American communities.”
38
In her masterful Epic Encounters: Culture, media,
and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, McAlister examines these cultural and
political encounters between the U.S. and the Middle East to develop an argument about
“political self-reflexivity.” She argues that the politics of identity in the U.S. significantly
shaped U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East, “The struggles over the meanings of
Middle East History and the control over Middle East resources profoundly affected
American self-fashioning.”
39
McAlister’s Chapter “The Middle East in African American
Cultural Politics, 1955-1972” opens with an analysis of a W.E.B. Du Bois poem lauding
Egyptian President Gamal Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, a 1967 Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Central Committee newsletter
condemning Israeli war-mongering, and other cultural objects and moments that
investigate the relationship between Black Americans and Middle Eastern-centric
nonalignment/Third World politics through transnational contacts and cultural
productions in the discourse of community. McAlister contends that for Du Bois,
“[Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s authority lay in his role as a racial spokesperson; the ‘great
black hand’ of his power came from the fact that both “blackness” and “slavery” united
colonized peoples.”
40
Nasser, as the self-proclaimed locus of pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism
and pan-Africanism (described as “Three Circles” of Egyptian identity in his 1955
Philosophy of Revolution handbook) was heralded as an “international symbol for

38
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East
since 1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 86.
39
Ibid, 42.
40
Ibid, 85.
37

anticolonial nationalism.”
41
As early as 1958, Malcolm X even referred to Nasser as “my
president.” Did the ways Malcolm and Du Bois racialize Nasser confer a certain kind of
radical politics onto him? During these Cold War bookend years, the Third World
became a “sociopolitical language for the alliance of nonwhite nations” where Black
freedom movements like the NOI “identified with colonized nations politically, from the
standpoint of “colored” nation oppressed by whites.”
42

Were resistance and revolution the umbilical cord and womb, linking and
incubating the Black American and Arab social movements? Did the notion of common
colonial and imperial oppressors connect them in the historic moment of decolonization?
Did the victims of a Western-style Orientalism and Primitivism craft unity through a
common struggle with a common oppressor? Or is there something more to the basis of
solidarity between Black and Arab communities? Were they more than victims to be
defined by their oppositions? Were they instead dreamers, scaffolding a vision of a
dignified, liberated ontological totality that realigned epistemology by cultivating what
Lacan terms “imaginaire” (Appadurai and Hall)? Moreover, can a particular freedom
imaginary undergirding possibilities for solidarity between Pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism
and Black Freedom movement be historically located?
Arabs and Muslims (racialized as brown foreign others), as a terrorist threat, are
the new Red Scare, deployed by the state as a foil to institute policies that render Black
American communities vulnerable. Assata Shakur’s placement on the list of the top ten
most wanted terrorists can be seen as a culmination of a long history of the settler state

41
Ibid, 84.
42
Ibid, 99.
38

intersecting international threats with the Black domestic embodiment of that foreign
threat. We do see colonized and racialized peoples sharing in commonalities of imperial
violence. However, I want to untangle the ways statecraft interweaves these domestic and
international projects to re-entrench state power and re-center itself. But more
importantly, I want to track and think through the resistance, the beautiful struggle to
untangle imperial interweaving and also the stitching of transnational dreams of
collective freedom—especially to think through the counterterrorism logic that puts
Shakur on a “top ten” list almost exclusively dominated by Arab Muslim males. This
project is interested in complicating and troubling facile constructions of ‘Afro-Arab
diaspora’ and ‘Black-Arab solidarity’ that still miss the mark in explaining Shakur’s
inclusion on a global terrorism list.
Afro-Arab Solidarity
As I have covered, scholars have written about these encounters as Black-Arab,
Afro-Asian, Afro-Asiatic, and more recently, explored incorporating Arabic-speaking
populations into formations of Blackness (“Afro-Arab”). In its more contemporary
conception, “Afro-Arab” colloquially encompasses Arabs on the African continent, as a
signifier for “Black Arabs.” However, there is no hard, fast, clear definition of what this
term connotes in the present Arab and Black imaginary. “Afro-Arab” has also been
invoked by Black phenotypical Arabic-speaking people as a social identity.
43
This

43
As part of a future project, I intend on exploring the Afro-Arab Muslim as “The Moor,”
tracking how it was used as a collapsible term, deployed differently historically and
geographically, from late Medieval Europe to multiple waves of European colonialism to
American chattel slavery and settler colonialism. This derogatory term used to describe the
39

phenomenon and my decades of work around Afro-Arab solidarity has also inspired an
expansion of racial and ethnicity analysis of racial formation in modern Arabic thought to
include colorism. For, what do we mean by Arab? And exploring formations of Arab-
ness and Blackness in the “Middle East”? Although there is much literature
genealogically tying the formation of “Middle East” as a geography to Orientalist
projects, it becomes difficult divesting from that language when Arabic speakers continue
to use this term to self-identity and when acknowledging the pre-modernity reflexive use
of mashriq.
44

What possibilities lie in thinking of the dash in “Afro-Arab” as operating in two-
fold manner: as both a connection across two disparate communities and also a signaling
of blurring lines, of overlapping “Arab-” and “Afro-ness”? Can this construction be seen
not as a conjoining of two words, but as one word? How does that change the way we
think through the relationship of Blackness (specifically American Blackness) and
Arabness? We see in Chapter 1 the slipperiness of the term simr, plural for “dark-
complexioned,” in Chapter 2 an exploration of the way Gamal Abdel Nasser and
Malcolm X viewed African-ness, Arab-ness, and Islamic-ness in conversation with each

Muslim, “Arab,” “Maghrebi,” Berber and African taking its name from “uncultivated upland,”
was one of the earliest sites of the Western European civilizational project.
44
As an important side-note for this project, I intend to explore the notion of the mashriq and
maghreb for use in my project. Fundamentally, I am concerned with articulating such concepts
through the self-identity language of people on the ground and critically assessing and excavating
the genealogy Arabic grammar and geopolitical imaginaries. By opting for Arabic terms, we
begin to disrupt the European Orientalist and contemporary Western academic tradition of
mapping political projects informed by alterity onto geographies. Deeply rooted in Islamic
theosophical imaginaries, the formation of Mashriq and Maghreb reveal ontoepistemological
systems that trouble the grammar borders of contemporary and modern Western naming practices
and geopolitical borderlands.

40

other (the “three circle construction”), the (at times) incomprehensibility of Afro-
Arabness in Egypt in Chapter 3, and lastly the presence of an “Afro-Palestinian”
community in East Jerusalem in Chapter 4. Allow me pull back from the particularities of
interrogations into Afro-Arab solidarity and probe solidarity as framework. Is solidarity
even a useful construct?
Political Intimacies: Solidarity, Movementship, and Friendship
“Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my
mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now,
that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of
it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
-Eugene Debs, court statement at his sedition trial on September 18, 1918

“But then it would be a totally different meaning: ‘Your sisters and brothers in
the struggle’,” responded Suhad Khatib with the above Arabic translation of “in struggle
through solidarity.” A Palestinian-American organizer, Khatib factored prominently in
“solidarity” organizing in St. Louis/Ferguson after the murder of eighteen-year-old
Michael Brown.
45
We initially met when I joined the Muslims for Ferguson and Council
on American Islamic Relations - St. Louis (CAIR-MO) contingents at the Weekend of
Resistance in St. Louis/Ferguson, October 10-13, 2014.
46
Suhad and I later deepened our

45
Suhad Khatib, test message correspondence with author, September 23, 2016.
46
Other organizations that joined to express solidarity with the Ferguson resistance to the killing
of Michael Brown included: St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, U.S. Palestinian
Community Network, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Palestinian BDS National
Committee, National Students for Justice in Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, and
41

movementship by working on an “Arabs for Black Power” statement in response to the
Movement for Black Lives’ “Vision for Black Lives Platform” released August 2016. We
exchanged text messages regarding translating “in struggle through solidarity” into
Arabic. Sharing in the unease of culturally and linguistically translating “solidarity,”
Khatib expressing it first: “My Arabic is uncomfortable with solidarity phrases for
obvious reasons. So that would be my least suspicious [translation]” I followed with a
reply a split-second later, “Hmmm, makes me think how much deeper ummah
(community of believers) is than solidarity.” “Yes,” she agreed. “Solidarity seems empty
compared to that.”
Even at the beginning stages of writing this historical-anthropological
investigation into Afro-Arab transnational organizing around visions of freedom and
justice, I could not help but feel plagued by the socio-political emptiness and expediency
imbued in “solidarity.” Why are singular words like “solidarity” relied on to do so much
labor, to carry exactness, and to unify across difference? Others have problematized the
usefulness of solidarity as a framework for organizing radical politics.
Black Studies scholar Jared Sexton is critical of solidarity as a conceptual
framework for people of color political alliances, in particular, the language of “common
oppression” paralleling the historical processes under the regimes of colonialism and
chattel slavery. Sexton adopts “people-of-color-blindness” to characterize a deeply

American Muslims for Palestine. “Palestine Contingent: Ferguson Weekend of Resistance,” US
Palestinian Community Network, September 27, 2014, http://uspcn.org/2014/09/27/palestine-
contingent-ferguson-weekend-of-resistance/ .

42

embedded antiblackness in multiracial coalitions.
47
“People-of-Color-Blindness”
describes a “refusal to admit to significant differences of structural position born of
discrepant histories between blacks and their political allies, actual or potential,”
continuing “a form of colorblindness inherent to concept of ‘people of color’ to the
precise extent that it misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or
insists upon the monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy.”
48
For
Sexton, Black subjectivity, formed through chattel slavery, and “people of color”
postcolonial subjectivity, formed through colonialism, generated hierarchically different
structural positions that make the Black and People of Color (PoC) liberation projects
incommensurable. The implications of this analysis are that it would “undermine
multiracial coalition building as a politics of radical opposition, and to that extent, force
the question of black liberation back to the center of discussion.”
49

Sexton’s analysis highlights the anxieties I have with readily applying decolonial
thought to an assessment of Black liberation. It is not entirely clear if solidarity, or
rhetoric around solidarity, fundamentally operationalizes antiblackness, and if so, what
other conceptual framework would guard against such a tendency. Also, the racialization
of Arab in the U.S. as a “people of color,” “Afro-Asiatic,” “Moorish,” “Black,” “not-
quite-white,” “vulnerably white,” or “invisible” in the US and on a global racial order
remains equivocal. How would the way Arabs are racialized impact the relational
paradigm of Black liberation projects? Although Sexton expresses similar anxieties I

47
Jared Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery,” Social Text
28:103 (2), (2010): 31-56.
48
Ibid, 48.
49
Ibid.
43

have with solidarity encouraging “oppression Olympics” competition, I am troubled by
the insistence on categories like PoC and Black as coherent ahistorical
ontoepistemologies.
Sexton’s critique of PoC as “natural allies” towards a radical politics assumes an
immutable anti-Black world(s); one that rarely engages temporal, spatial and historical
specificity. When Arab and Black have been infused with multifarious meanings across
histories, geographies and language, the construction of PoC to describe “non-Black,”
“non-white” people appears to rely heavily on a contemporary Americanist framework.
What does it even mean to speak of PoC in MM? I critique solidarity and constructions of
“Black-Arab solidarity,” for different reasons; mostly consistent with Hall’s reservations
about hegemonic identity formations (and its concomitant capaciousness). Can we unify
through our difference instead of unify through flattening out our difference?
Islamic studies offers us some interesting directions in thinking through a unity of
difference. Maybe beyond or consistent with notions of ummah, it is written in verse
49:13 of the Qur’an: “We have created you male and females, and we have made you
from nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another.”
50
In this sense,
difference is the foundation for generating social intimacies, for “knowing one another.”
The Eternal Message of Muhammad, anti-colonialist Islamic thinker and Arab League
founder Azzam Pasha deploys takāful, “social solidarity,” as part of a theory of “knowing
one another.”
51
He characterizes takāful as “indispensable for the righteous community.”

50
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15.
51
Abd al-Rahman Azzam, The Eternal Message of Muhammad (Cambridge UK: Islamic Society
Texts, 1993 (1938), 54-55.
44

In hopes of continuing to interrogate historical and contemporary notions of “solidarity,”
I find Hans Wehr’s definition of takāful as also a “joint responsibility” and “mutual
agreement” equally intriguing.
52
Azzam underscores his point by referencing a hadith
(that is resonant with Debs’ “kinship with all living beings”) in which it is said, “You
will see that the faithful, in their having mercy for one another and in their kindness
toward one another, are like the body; when one member of it ails, the entire body ails, as
one part calls out to the other with sleeplessness and fever.”
53
In this way, takāful,
grounded in a sense of a recognized duty to assist (“joint responsibility”), communicates
a wit(h)ness in which the “entire body ails” when “one part calls out to the other with
sleeplessness and fever.” What if we viewed this shared struggle as one of joint
responsibility for curing the condition of “the entire body of living beings ailing”? In
what ways can our analysis change or provide complications that have not been
considered or probed?
What becomes clear when further reading Azzam is that takāful is more than a
brotherhood of struggle against something, against fever or sleeplessness, but rather that
he sees takāful as a foundational building block for a society based on “right-doing.”
This dissertation originally framed intersecting Arab and Black American freedom
struggles through “solidarity.” I was initially compelled to see solidarity as operating
from a “mutually identified” oppressor that fashions a “we-ness” in co-struggling, as a

52
Hans Wehr, The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Arabic (Ithaca NY: Spoken Language
Services, 1993), 976.
53
From Sahih Bukhari Volume 8, Book 73 (Good Manners and Form (Al-Adab)): Narrated An-
Nu’man bin Bashir: Allah’s Apostle said, “You see the believers as regards to their being
merciful among themselves and being kind, resembling one body, so that, if any part of the body
is not well then the whole body shares the sleeplessness and fever with it.” In Azzam, The Eternal
Message of Muhammad, 79.
45

mobilizing in opposing. But through a common desire towards “right-doing,” not simply
to resist and live in opposition, we complicate these histories.
My work hasn’t fully found or developed the language around a replacement term
for solidarity (ergo the quotes around my subtitle’s “solidarity politics”), but it attempts
to further this exploration through proximate compound concepts inspired by takāful such
as “engaged witness,” and in some cases Arabic grammar translations (more like
transpositions) reconfigured to apply to Anglophonic contexts. In developing this
theorization, I lead with questions I have long been curious about regarding social and
political solidarity: how should we speak about what solidarity should look like, how it
should feel? Have we examined the work that precedes a just solidarity? What is the
labor of producing a kinship, an “allyship,” a comradeship, an accomplice-ship, a
solidarity grounded in right-doing and unity through difference? Who are you willing to
see as your sister, a different tribe worth knowing, or part of your fevering body?
46

Engaged Witness

Figure 1: Hans Wehr entry for Shin ha dal.

"Be steadfast in your devotion to God, bearing witness to the truth in all equity, and
never let the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice.”
-Quran, 5:8
“O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for God,
even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives. Whether one is rich or poor, God
is more worthy of both. So follow not [personal] inclination, lest you not be just. And if
you distort [your testimony] or refuse [to give it], then indeed God is ever, with what you
do, Acquainted.”
-Quran, 4:135
“I don’t really know what I am, you know, politically speaking. I don’t consider myself to
be a leader. I consider myself to be a kind of witness I suppose. I don’t know. But my
weapon, no my tool, is the, my typewriter, my pen.”
-James Baldwin
54

54
Sedat Pakay, James Baldwin in Turkey: Bearing Witness from Another Place (Seattle WA:
Northwest African American Museum, 2012).
47

This project conceptualizes “engaged witness” as an amalgamation of the English
transpositions of takāful and shahādah, while being attentive to the way they are
contextualized within Islamic scripture (Quran and Hadith). Shahādah draws from the
Arabic root of shin ha dal, which contains multiple meanings. Classical and Modern
Standard Arabic (MSA) is composed of a sophisticated grammar system that operates on
three-letter roots as the foundation for all words within the lexicon. Shin ha dal offers a
basis for related terms and parts of speech that address witness, testimony and
martyrdom. Shahādah, can best be transposed to mean profession or act of belief: to
testify to witnessing God. It carries the dual meaning of “to bear witness” and “to give
testimony,” or more poetically, “to tell what the eye beholds.”
One of shin ha dal’s variants, shahīd, is associated with the word martyr, which is
another limited and limiting translation as it doubles as “witness.” In an effort to
recuperate the richness of the double meaning of shahīd, and to retrieve it from
conservative discursive framing, I transpose it within the context of “engaged witness” to
illuminate a possible application of death to justice-work.
55
In the process of witnessing
events that alter your conception of the world and your place in it, your former self may
“die,” in a sense. And if you find the level of commitment that leads you to testify, even
at great danger to yourself, you may find you are willing to die to testify to the truths you
have encountered for the sake of justice. Writer and translator Lina Mounzer underscores
this understanding of the act of witness, bound up in “martyrdom,” leading to another

55
In an era of linking shahīd to counterterrorism rhetoric preoccupied with “radicalization of
Muslim youth, engaged witness inquires, what does a deep critical optics look like and
engender—especially one that shatters the way shahīd has been coded as a reckless martyr within
a settler colonial framework?
48

kind of death, “the act of bearing witness, followed to the end of one of its branches,
snaps under the weight of what is seen, and you fall to your death. As if to die for a cause
in Arabic is to bear witness to something until it annihilates the self.”
56
The concept of
martyrdom therefore points to the gravity of the act of transforming oneself from
bystander to engaged witness.
What, after all, compels one to move from bystander to decide to stand with
another and see themselves as a part of their struggle? Malcolm X spoke of Arab
hospitality or “spirit of brohood” (as he frequently to it in his diaries) and his visit to
Medina revolving his heart and inspiring his analysis around Black liberation. An
engaged witness signs up for more than just a trip. They sign up to give testimony, to be
the protecting sight, to be a friend in co-struggling. Put in conversation with takāful, an
engaged witness “tells what the eye beholds” in the way of justice so that the entirety of
the ailing body can heal from sleeplessness and fever.
The act of seeing and bearing witness is enhanced through the framework of
friendship-making and art-making. Though art, friendship and travel might seem like
disparate parts, they are crucial features of transnational delegation work, especially for
the shaping of radical political visions that bleed through borders. Art delivers a certain
kind of sight and produces a different critical analysis. Friendship-making through
delegations offers an organizing network that is transnational and will grapple with the
difficult questions around intersectional struggle and inspires people who will testify on
your behalf. I propose thinking through witness as a multi-sensory experience, as one that

56
Lina Mounzer, “War in Translation: Giving Voice to The Women of Syria,” Literary Hub,
October 6, 2016, http://lithub.com/war-in-translation-giving-voice-to-the-women-of-syria/# .
49

does not simply “eye witness” but actively engages with the totality of one’s being—in a
kind of revelry of death and rebirth. This is how we come to understand the centrality of
the arts and friendships in political work, as modes for and manifestations of engaged
witness.
Engaged witness is chiefly concerned with exploring the analytics we learn from
witnessing each other, how we “know one another,” and how art and friendship practices
animate those analytics. From over a decade of studying these archives, conducting oral
history interviews, doing close readings of texts, speeches, letters, correspondences,
manuscripts, and translations, what emerges is a language of political struggle written in
the grammar of friendship. This dissertation seeks to move away from the framing of
linking speciously separate freedom struggles as “acts of solidarity” to a process of
“bearing witness” that emphasizes relationship-building, more commonly referred to in
this dissertation as “friendship-making.”
By emphasizing the work of friendships and friendship networks, art and travel
(conceptualized as “engaged witness”), my concern is to explore the “how” of
intertwined transnational freedom-making. Captivated by a deep history that explores
what makes moments of resistance possible, I’m interested in starting with questions of
“how” organizing happens, not merely “what happened.” “Engaged Witness” is an
attempt to transpose politics of witness from Arabic to English, to imagine a kind of
delegation that escapes the problematic designs and outcomes of “solidarity tourism.”
What is the generative outcome of engaged witness? Based on the definition of
generative as “capable of propagating or reproducing” and the Latin etymological
50

breakdown of “artifact” as something made with skill, I will consider a generative artifact
beget from engaged witness to be “something made with skill that is reproducible.” That
“skill” is made through struggle, through an active practice of witness and testimony for
justice. Generative artifacts can include analytics (critical and political analyses), art,
filmmaking, and writing. Or put more simply, an engaged witness generative artifact is
that which is produced from the marriage of witness and Baldwin’s tool. This study is
primarily concerned with friendship-making, art, and travel’s impact on developing
critical analytics and cultivation of political thought, the fullest expression a politics of
“engaged witness.”
I look at Afro-Arab co-struggling because I’ve seen these dynamics intimately at
play. I have seen what makes the difference between the mechanic solidarity of “common
oppressor/common enemy” and the enduring organizing of engaged witness that will
wrestle with hard questions of anti-Blackness and American Orientalism. The latter has
seen something they cannot unsee, felt something they have become bound to, become
‘martyred’ in the way of justice. This is the juncture between organizing around a
common enemy and organizing an intersecting takāful vision of freedom. One has to see
(vision/sight) and feel (friendship) a stake with each other to see a future with each other.
Engaged witness invites us to ask: what changes, in these instances of “solidarity,” if we
see “bearing witness” as an act of martyrdom—as Sufi practitioners frequently admonish
“die before your death”? Is it perhaps the hope that oppression and injustice dies with our
mercy-driven testimony to “what the eye beholds”? Said more succinctly: perhaps when
one witnesses an injustice a part of them dies, and they can only be re-born in the telling?
51

FRIENDSHIP
“Rarely do we talk about friendships and production of knowledge.”
- Vijay Prashad
57

Movement building is relationship building, which involves taking those
relationships seriously. From Aristotle’s notion of philia to Jacques Derrida’s speeches on
friendship and democracy to contemporary Feminists Studies works like Elora
Chowdhury and Liz Philipose’s edited volume on “dissident friendships,” friendship
within a framework of politics has been studied academically for millennia.
58
A recent
issue of Feminist Studies, with a focus on “Women’s Friendships,” squarely looks at the
relationship between women and movement work, asking how Black, Brown, and Third
World feminists articulate their collective work in a particular political moment: “From
these complex collaborations, feminist friendships emerge, friendships whose central

57
Vijay Prashad, “The Legacy of Edward Said” memorial at American University of Beirut,
October 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Ud3eXo-xo .
58
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999);
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997); Elora Chowdhury and Liz
Philipose, eds., Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity
(Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Niharika Banerjea, Debanuj Dasgupta, Rohit
K. Dasgupta, and Jaime M. Grant, eds., Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical
Solidarities in a Global Perspective (Salt Lake City UT: Seagull Books, 2017); Marilyn
Friedman, “Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community,” Ethics 99 (2),
(1989): 275-290; Maria Lugones and Pat Alaka Rosezelle, “Sisterhood and friendship as feminist
models,” in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia,
1995); Alison Winch, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013); Audre Lorde, I am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writing, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd,
Johnetta Betsch Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Nawal El Saadawi, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader
(London: Zed Books, 1997); Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism
and Iran (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
52

characteristic is a praxis of love that requires becoming radically vulnerable together.”
59

Feminist and womanist scholars emphasize the love and affect embedded in friendship as
grounds for a radical politic. The praxis of sisterhood and kinship or Sarah Ahmed’s
study of “affective economies,” offers revolutionary organizing potential.
60
The politics
of friendship conceived as feminist strategy, in the ways it emphasizes emotional bonds,
can possibly be seen as a mode of organized survival under oppressive and often
racialized systems like racial capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, neoliberalism and
settler colonialism. A friendship mediated by racial capitalism internalizes its social
politics, reducing relations to hierarchal transactions. Can we think about friendship as a
radical site for not only “producing knowledge” (as Prashad speaks to) but also, in this
sense, practicing the mediating of relations outside of racial capitalism?
I do not wish to suggest that friendship is a prerequisite to movement work,
because that would leave most people outside of our vision of community. As Audre
Lorde contended, “Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not
mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not
exist.”
61
Thus, friendship can facilitate our political awakening and can be integral to
facilitating transnational political ties and granting fuller access to different analyses and
vantage points. Friends may challenge you to think deeper and to persist through difficult
conversations that can be obstacles for building communities through movement work.

59
“Feminisms, Collaborations, Friendships: A Conversation,” based on a collective interview
with feminist scholar Richa Nagar and Özlem Aslan, Nadia Z. Hasan, Omme-Salma
Rahemtullah, Nishant Upadhyay, and Begüm Uzun (the Toronto Group), “Women's
Friendships,” Feminist Studies, 42 (2), (2016): 502-519.
60
Sarah Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79 (2), (2004): 117-139.
61
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.
53

Critical friendships explore disagreement and develop practices for communicating
differences of opinion; nourishing an “ethics of difference.” In a sense, movement work
is relationship-building work.
Not everyone whose liberation is bound with yours is going to be your friend.
And not everyone in movements for liberation are going to affectively gel. I’m
suggesting something different. My attempt here is to chart the radical political work that
friendship-making can perform in organizing and movement work; how these feelings or
affects become embodied social praxis that can turn into organizing. Through studying a
takāful that is rooted in friendship, one which I examine through the transnational and
sometimes internationalist practice of delegations, I hope to contribute to new language
around friendship. A friendship conceived as a grassroots assemblage, an organizing of a
commons network; a friend who will feel affectively compelled to bear witness and give
testimony for your justice. And more specific to social movements, perhaps this
relationality can be called a “movementship.” In short, a movementship considers
friendship as embodying a built-in architecture for sociopolitical intimacies and
possibilities; where freedom dreams are tested out and practiced in a laboratory of social
relations.
With my work on engaged witness, I hope to add another dimension to this
discussion. I wonder, could friendship be another embodiment of engaged witness, that
act of “knowing one another”; that protecting friend, who sees you, hears, and walks with
you? Someone who practices what visual artist and philosopher Bracha L. Ettinger’s
54

theorizes as “beside-ness” and “wit(h)ness”?
62
Someone who witnesses and gives
testimony to “secure justice”? This “knowing” requires a certain kind of relationship
building that is not necessarily bound by time or geography, but may joyfully,
sorrowfully and vulnerably struggle through and to that active knowing.
Friendship could be then understood as a practice of “knowing” (49:13)
undergirded by love and mercy and that is informed by a commitment to witness and
testifying. This focus on love and mercy is inspired by Malcolm X’s praise of Islam’s
“spiritual brotherhood” (drawn from a concept of ummah) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s
philosophical prescription of a “beloved community.” Love and mercy, developed
through friendship practices, can be viewed as creating a sanctuary, a space to deepen
political and critical analysis. Friendship, then, is a way of socially organizing a politics
of witness.
Critical Migrations: Travel, Transnationalism and Delegations
In the same way this project treats Black studies as part of a larger African
diaspora, I position what is deemed the field of “Middle Eastern” and Arab American
studies in a transnational—or mahjar (migration)—context; eschewing the spatial and
epistemic constraints of an Area studies framework. Internationalism operates under

62
See Bracha L. Ettinger on “beside-ness” in Bracha L. Ettinger, “From Proto-ethical
Compassion to Responsibility: Besideness, and the three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-
enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment,” Athena: Philosophical Studies, 2 (2006): 100-135;
Bracha L. Ettinger, “Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating,” in Practices
of Procrastination, Parallax, 10 (1999); Bracha L. Ettinger, “Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the
Gaze,” The Fascinating Face of Flanders, ed. P. Vandenbroeck and B. Vanderlinde (Stad
Antwerpen BE, 1998). Bracha’s wit(h)ness makes me think about the commitment embedded in
the language of shahādah, that of bearing witness and testimony. In light of this definition,
“bearing witness,” just as solidarity does feel “empty.”
55

similar fixities of Area studies; namely hermetic categories of nations and populations.
Postcolonial studies contributed to a “transnational turn” adopted by American
Studies; which included literature on diaspora by James Clifford, Brent Hayes Edwards
(décalage), Arjun Appadurai, Rogers Brubaker, and Stuart Hall.
63
Nina Glick Schiller,
Linda Basch, and Blanc-Szanton hinge transnationalism on the axles of origin and
settlement. For, Basch, Schiller and Blanc, transnationalism is described as “The
processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link
together their societies of origin and settlement.” Social fields are built “cross geographic,
cultural and political borders.”
64

In between imaginaries of origins and destination, in this in-between space, there
is a translation process (as argued by Brent Hayes Edwards and Edward Said), a traveling
through differences. In contrasting with internationalism, American studies scholar Alex
Lubin argues that Transnational American studies, “concerns the movements of ideas,
objects, peoples across national borders and in this way is a form of scholarship that
exceeds the nation as a unit of analysis” and the “interstitial areas beyond international
relations,” focuses on “spaces in-between destinations and origins.” Lubin underscores a
point made by American studies scholar Donald Pease, who explains that “the

63
See James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9(3), (1994); Brent Hayes Edwards,
The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Arjun Appadurai,
“Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990);
Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘diaspora’ diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1), (2005); Stuart Hall,
“Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan
Rutherford, (London: Lawrence and Wishart , 1990), 222-38.
64
Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic
Framework for Understanding Migration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645
(1992).
56

transnational lacks an origin as well as a destination. It is always in process.”
65

Furthermore, McAlister gestures towards this unbounded understanding of
transnationalism by defining “transnational cultural contact” as “travel across borders and
barriers” and argues that it “has provided the framework for spatial imaginations and
historical narratives that transcend narrow nationalism.”
66

In Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” essay, focus is placed on the
production of consciousness through movement and the process of translation, how ideas
and theories “move from one culture to another” because of a “process of representation
and institutionalization different from those at the point of origin.”
67
It is in this
transnational space that we see global flows, the circuiting of bodies and ideas, producing
knowledge can even cultivate thinking that is subversive to status quo internationalist
forms. And it is these diasporic peoples—in global movement—that have constructed
cartographic imaginaries that rupture internationalism frameworks that rely on origin,
settlement and bounded notions of nation-state borders.
As cliché as it may sound, I believe the fully-embodied experience of travel and
migrations offer a recalibration of lens, transforming sight and insight in the process of
engaged witnessing. And this is precisely why, for example, Black internationalism (and
Black radical transnationalism), migratory border transgressions, and delegations to
Palestine have either been controlled or disciplined by the imperial American state.

65
Alex Lubin, “American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine,” American
Quarterly 68 (1), (2016): 1-21.
66
McAlister, Epic Encounters, 87.
67
Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory Reconsidered," Reflections on Exile and other Essays
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

57

Because, they produce dangerous new knowledge and transnational friendships.
Soul Power author Cynthia Young describes travel as a “technology of time-space
compression,” and explains that as “people of color had greater opportunity and means to
voluntarily travel, migration from the South to the North, immigration from colonies to
metropoles, and circulation to international conferences transformed local and global
landscapes, simultaneously shortening and stretching ideological and demographic
boundaries.” Young makes a similar argument about people of color traveling producing
critical analysis and new knowledge through witnessing: “These various modes of and
reason for movement and boundary crossing exposed individuals and groups to a wider
array of experiences and influences than ever before as the greater circulation of bodies
and texts from the Third World to the First World made its indelible mark on local
political cultures.”
68

Travel for the seeking of knowledge and spiritual enrichment has long been a
feature of Islamic pedagogical tradition.
69
And in Islam, travel is not just encouraged, it is
an edict; the fifth pillar of Islam is that of pilgrimage, sacred migration. There is also a
doubleness to the notion of being a “traveler” in the world in Islam. A hadith narrated by
Abdullah bin Umar as relayed by Mujahid highlights the prophetic guidance to “Be in
this world as if you were a stranger or a traveler.” What does it mean to be a traveler in
the world? To traverse being life detached from the flesh-bound world, as a wanderer
seeking knowledge through studies on the “straight path”? I’m attempting to

68
Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of the U.S. Third World
Left (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 9-10.
69
See Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search
of Knowledge (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
58

conceptualize travel as a geographic practice of radical flow, delegations as part of a
critical migrations practice, and to investigate delegations’ grassroots transnational
possibilities. The delegation as a migratory practice of political wandering produces
critical analysis and new knowledge through engaged witnessing.
70

Black American Travel
“And the first thing the American power structure doesn’t want any Negroes to start is
thinking internationally.”
- Malcolm X
71

To an extent Malcolm was not fully aware of, the American power structure did
in fact escalate its aggression toward him after his Memorandum that “called upon the
leaders of independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation by the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights into the problem of racism in America and
the growing violence being inflicted on America’s Afro-Americans,” which he presented
to the Heads of African States at the Organization of African July 1964.
72
Malcolm did
express his suspicion that U.S. agents had poisoned one of his meals in Egypt but could
never know what else the “American power structure” was plotting in response to his
“thinking internationally.”
73
As Manning Marable’s 2011 biography Malcolm X: A Life of

70
In this way that time-space compression allows for not just a different kind of access to
material and people, but the spiritual transformation embedded (as I mean “sight”/bashir in the
experience of “time-space compression”). More on that later when I am afforded more liberty to
write on material outside of academic structuring and suturing of ideas.
71
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1998 (1965)), 353.
72
“Mister X,” Arab Observer 218, August 24, 1964, 31-32.
73
Malcolm discusses being surveilled by an agent during his travel across Africa. Malcolm X,
Autobiography, 378-379.
59

Reinvention exposes, then Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote to FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover in September 1964 requesting Hoover investigate whether Malcolm
violated the Logan Act, which considered a U.S. citizen negotiating with Heads of State
without American governmental authorization an act of treason.
74
Malcolm was not the
only Black American whose international thinking—“dangerous new knowledge and
transnational friendships”—triggered U.S. State Department intervention.
Another tactic of the racialized capitalist state to prohibit Black radical
internationalism and transnationalism has been passport revocation. Black radical activist
and singer Paul Robeson first had his U.S. passport revoked in the 1950s for international
critiques of U.S. treatment of Black Americans.
75
W.E.B. Du Bois was barred from
international travel between 1951-8. And in 1951, executive director of the Civil Rights
Congress William Paterson was ordered to surrender his passport to the U.S. Embassy in
Paris when he traveled as part of the “We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the
United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the
Negro People” delegation.
76
More recently, after the late Libyan leader Muammar al-
Qaddafi offered to gift the Nation of Islam $1 billion in 1996, the Clinton administration
and U.S. representatives threatened to intervene. Long Island Republican congressperson

74
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking Press, 2011), 366.
75
Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-
1957 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
76
At the time, “We Charge Genocide” signatures Robeson and Du Bois could not travel with the
delegation to Paris. Robeson could not obtain a passport (likely connected to earlier passport
issues) and W.E.B. Du Bois was classified by the U.S. State Department as a ““unregistered
foreign agent.” Clearly, there were repercussions for not only “thinking internationally” but
accusing the U.S. of racial apartheid and genocide at an international body like the UN. The We
Charge Genocide document can be found: Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The
Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government
Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951). xi-xiii, 3-10.
60

Peter King even went so far as to order the revocation of NOI leader Louis Farrakhan’s
passport should he follow through with another visit to Libya.
77
Another part of the
American power structure’s historic campaign against Black radical internationalism has
also included deportation of figures like pan-African nationalist leader Marcus Garvey,
who was sent back to Jamaica on “mail fraud” in November 1927.
Lastly, there has also been a robust Black radical practice of self-exile in the last
century, including James Baldwin’s to Turkey and later France, with Shirley Du Bois and
Maya Angelou both spending years in Ghana and Egypt, Vicki Garvin working in Ghana
and then China, and W.E.B. Du Bois moving to Ghana to commence his Encyclopedia
project.
78
Lay this unique tactic of disciplining Black radical internationalism over the
matrix of a traumatic history of forced migration, perilous travel across the U.S. South
and North and entrapment/enclosure, and we can see how mobility across borders (and
“imaginary” ones like “North-South”) can become a radical political act, as are the
(re)production of alternative systems and practices of ensuring mobility like marronage,
Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad, and The Negro Motorist’s Green Book
(introduced in 1936).
A Stranger in the Village, edited by Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish, covers the
national and international Black American travel tradition from early 19
th
to late 20
th

century. Acknowledging this departure from literature on forced migration (“such as the
Middle Passage and the international slave trade”) of the African diaspora, Griffin and

77
Richard Stevenson, “Officials to Block Qaddafi Gift to Farrakhan.” The New York Times,
August 28, 1996.
78
Two years later the U.S. government threatened to not renew his passport, so Du Bois became a
Ghanaian citizen.
61

Fish expound upon the contribution this collection makes to studies on African American
mobility: “Although the slave experience is central to the literature of the African
diaspora, this book takes as its focus narratives of journeys by African Americans who
wrote about their experiences as tourists, emigrants, expatriates, sailors, educators,
missionaries, philanthropists, artists, and leaders of political or nationalistic
movements.”
79
Griffin and Fish’s intervention is one of historically situating African
American travel within the genre of travel writing. In the genre of travel writing within
the Black American tradition, from antebellum narratives to Black Women’s Global
South travels during the Clinton era, the search for “alternative homelands” emerges as
an overarching theme.
80

In addition to Griffin and Fish’s collections, writing on Black internationalism
and Black radical internationalism has included works by scholars Brent Hayes Edwards,
Michael Gomez, Cynthia Young, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Robin D.G. Kelley, Kevin K.
Gaines, Minkah Makalani, Penny M. Von Eschen, Robeson Taj Frazier, Alex Lubin and
Keith Feldman.
81
In fact, Brent Hayes Edwards argues that Black internationalism is a

79
Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish. A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-
American Travel Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), xiii.
80
Ibid, xv.
81
See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003); Michael Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004); Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the
Making of the U.S. Third World Left (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Brenda Gayle
Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill NC:
University of North Carolina, 1996); Robin D.G. Kelley Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the
Black Working Class (New York, 1994); Robin D.G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers:
Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kevin K.
Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom:
Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2014); Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz
62

form of radicalism, and Young urges us to then explore its “counterhegemonic value.”
82

Black American travel in this dissertation will also look at alternative ways of “seeing”
the performance of American imperialism and to think through its international
relationship to the African diasporic experience and its radical politics of witnessing and
testifying. As has been mentioned, this radical politics of witness includes that of
“seeing” during travel and relaying the “sight” of Black American life.
Delegations
In 2001, the Women of Color Resource Center invited Arab Women’s Solidarity
Association San Francisco chapter members to join their delegation to the United Nations
Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa. In an interview in April 2016, Linda
Burnham, co-founder of the Women of Color Resource Center, commented on the
intersectional internationalist politics of delegation work: “We developed relationships
with people who represented those struggles that were located here in the U.S. or we sent
a delegation. This was integral to how we understood the work of women’s liberation.”
83

What do delegations do? We typically think of them in a diplomatic sense within
the field of Area studies and International Relations. Most delegates and delegations in

Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Penny Von
Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca NY:
Cornell University Press,, 1997); Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the
Black Radical Imagination (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Michelle Commander,
Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (Durham NC: Duke University
Press, 2017); Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political
Imaginary (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Keith Feldman, A
Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015).
82
Young, Soul Power, 11.
83
Quoted in Nadine Naber’s “Arab and Black Feminisms,” 119.
63

this dissertation would be more so considered a part of transnationalist delegations, but I
also include internationalist delegations who have traveled through the U.S. State
Department’s Fulbright program. What does it mean when a delegation is done for
another? What are the expectations for delegations and delegates? Typically, delegates
are framed as political representatives traveling on behalf of a community. Of course, one
can go on a delegation and observe, but what makes the difference between someone who
comes as a traveler and someone who returns home and testifies to the what the eye
beheld for the sake of justice? An engaged witness signs up for more than just a trip,
more than just a delegation. They sign up for testimony, to be the protecting “sight” and
‘insight’ of a co-struggling friend.
As we will see in this dissertation, extensive measures have been taken to
complicate or prohibit Arab American and Black radical travel into 67/48, which
underscores the significance of the practice of engaged witness, of “delegations of
resistance.” Essential to the maintenance of Zionism is controlling the dissemination of
accounts of witness that might challenge “Zionist logic” but also its relationship to
American imperialism. Again, we see mobility across borders, sea, checkpoints, perilous
zones of white terror, and a wall.
As much as this dissertation is framed around delegations as part of a radical
political project, I cannot neglect the ways delegations have been used to reinforce
hegemonic orders of empire. Therefore, there are different types of delegations to
consider, that of “delegations of resistance,” “delegations as hegemonic reinforcement”
and ones like Fulbright meant for imperial knowledge production and international brand
64

management that could be used (and as will be illustrated have been used) subversively
as resistance in a program intended for hegemonic maintenance. For example, Chapter 1
translates from Arabic the production of a 1960 ethnographic study on the Nation of
Islam (NOI) by an Egyptian Fulbright recipient, who also develops friendships with NOI
leadership. And Chapter 3 offers a close reading of generative artifacts—poems, books,
and friendships—that emerged from an American academic’s Fulbright to Egypt in the
1960s. These chapters hope to contribute a more critical analysis of State Department
sponsored “cultural exchange programs,” which scholars have characterized as soft-
diplomacy imperialism (while rarely pillorying their own or their colleagues’
participation in Fulbright programs).
84

Zionist organizations have a long history of reinforcing hegemonic discourses on
Zionism and reproducing Zionism through delegations. Most well-known among them is
the Taglit Birthright program. Founded in 1999 by prominent Zionist Jewish
businessmen, this ten-day “educational trip to Israel” is offered free to Jewish adults
between the ages of 18 to 26 but provides no education about the daily realities faced by
Palestinians (erasing from narrative and land).
85
Similarly, the Anti-Defamation
League’s (ADL) “Bearing Witness Advanced Program” recruits Catholic school
educators to travel to Israel for a week.
86
Visiting exclusively “sites sacred to Jews and
Christians,” and with an explicit aim of deepening understanding of the Holocaust and

84
See the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs website: https://eca.state.gov/video/cultural-
diplomacy-action
85
See Birthright website: https://www.birthrightisrael.com/about-us-content?scroll=art_1
86
See Anti-Defamation League website on educational programming:
http://www.adl.org/education-outreach/holocaust-education/c/bearing-witness-program.html
65

contemporary anti-Semitism; the oppression of Palestinians is effectively whitewashed.
Similarly, the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Institute (MLI) uses a
strategy journalist Sana Saeed calls “faithwashing” to derail critiques of Zionism.
87

Through faithwashing, Zionism, as portrayed on ADL and MLI delegations, is a political
project that embraces religious diversity and reinforces the specious logic that critiques of
Zionism are inherently anti-Semitic.
88

Driven by truth-telling as opposed to propaganda, delegations of resistance can
function as apertures for a practice of engaged witness, for shedding “light” on the optical
capture of justice, and also an organizing principle in the study of transnational social
movement building. For example, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has sent delegations and
delegates to South Africa, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Colombia and the Netherlands
to connect with local Black movements and to Palestine and Standing Rock as part of an
engaged witness of indigenous struggles against settler colonialism. Members of the
Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a transnational grassroots movement of
Palestinians in Sweden, the U.S. and France, have traveled to Greece as part of service

87
Sana Saeed, “An Interfaith Trojan Horse: Faithwashing Apartheid and Occupation,” The
Islamic Monthly, July 1, 2014, https://www.theislamicmonthly.com/an-interfaith-trojan-horse-
faithwashing-apartheid-and-occupation/ .
88
In response to the heated divide MLI has inspired in the American Muslim community, The
Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) sponsored a “Boycott vs. Engagement”
debate at Islamic Society of North America’s (ISNA) Annual Convention in 2015. U.C. Berkeley
professor and Zaytuna College co-founder (first Muslim liberal arts college in the U.S.) Hatem
Bazian explicitly condemned the political expediency embedded in MLI participation by
Muslims: “but please don’t possess us by trying to strike your own ecumenical deal here in
America about access, about circles of influence…and don’t come to Palestine and try to ride our
backs [Palestinians] into positions of influence and power.” Hatem Bazian, who is a vocal
proponent of BDS, mentions working in the anti-apartheid movement and witnessing U.S.
government’s strategy of “constructive engagement,” which sponsored trips to South Africa to
“to understand [South Africa] from the White South Africans.” Hatem Bazian, “Hatem Bazian
Opening Statement,” ISPU “Debating Engagement vs. Boycott,” ISNA Convention, September
10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7DyOyW8wVg .
66

delegations to assist and witness the “refugee crisis.” Under this same rubric of
delegations of resistance, I explore Malcolm X’s 1964 travels to the mashriq in and
Africa in Chapter 2 and my own work co-organizing a Black social justice delegation to
Palestine in Winter of 2015 in Chapter 4.
The more I probe the genealogy of these solidarity commitments, I find the
practice of delegation-making to be a catalyst for active mobilizing, rhetorical
imaginaries, and poetic interventions. For example, June Jordan’s line in “Moving
Towards Home” “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become a Palestinian” is an
engaged witness account of her trip to the Middle East. As an artist, I am inclined to see
art as incubating emancipatory possibilities and as a protest and space for imagining
alternatives. Through my academic research on delegations, I have begun to wonder: Can
the delegation, as a poetics of political wander (or a politics of poetic wander?), be seen
as an artistic practice?
Methodology
My methodological approaches draw from my training in History and
Anthropology;

which includes researching and assembling archives, conducting 30
qualitative interviews (oral histories and interviews), participatory action research (PAR),
ethnographic fieldwork, translations and qualitative content analysis of multilingual data.
This project has already involved me traveling through four continents (Africa, North
America, Asia, and Europe), six languages (Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
and English) and multiple disciplines (History, Anthropology, Critical Race and Ethnic
Studies, Critical Migration Studies, Black Studies, African Diaspora, Arab American
67

Studies, Middle East Studies, Transnationalism, Arabic & Islamic Studies and Feminist
and Women’s Studies).
Before re-framing my project from one that was a chronologically driven
narrative to a thematically engaged one with the through line of the “delegate” at its
centerpiece, I had imagined this dissertation to be predominantly dictated by Historical
method and the historiographic tradition. This would have bracketed my project to a Cold
War time frame. However, this conversion required I enlist other disciplines to analyze
presentist data. Although I recognize the role Anthropological methods plays in my
engagement of material after the end of the Cold War (especially the #DDPalestine
delegation), I would like to consider the value of “history of the present” approach. Not
only can historical method provide a context and a sociohistorical process to analyze the
emergence of presentist events and actors but it also acknowledges the vitality of history,
history continues to “live.” How can we acknowledge the vitality of historical process
and production in the present?
In analyzing content and conducting interviews as a time- and space-traveling
scholar, I will rely on Michel Trouillot’s understanding of two-sides of historicity to track
power in historical production and the sociohistorical process of historical production. As
Trouillot explains “the materiality of the sociohistorical process (historicity 1) sets the
stage for future historical narratives (historicity 2).”
89
Integral to this project is the
question of why these narratives or visuals have been under-researched or –theorized, and
what new “historicity 2’s” can be constructed when archives of Afro-Arab solidarity

89
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1997), 29.
68

narratives (“historicity 1”) are archivally assembled and accessed.
Like Trouillot’s father, my father’s daily storytelling sessions at the dinner table
and afternoons at my ummo’s (paternal uncle) listening to him narrate our Bedouin tribe’s
genealogy (Sahani of the umbrella Anzieh tribe) through oral tradition; served to
constantly remind me that production of knowledge about our histories and our land were
on the margins of Western epistemologies. My mother and father’s families consisted of
ordinary women and men extraordinarily connected to a mashriq in transition from
transient nomadic tribes settling, an Ottoman Empire crumbling, European powers inking
in arbitrary and not so arbitrary borders, anticolonial independence movements, the rise
of new dynastic monarchies and dictators and settler colonialism, pan-Arabism and pan-
Islamic ambitions that eventually decayed in the face of neoliberal projects.
Additionally, although engaging in research on state-sponsored cultural
diplomacy programs, heads of states, international figures and organizational leadership
entails a very top-down focus on history, I also hope to marry that focus with a “history
from below” approach that highlights the sociocultural and political production generated
from people-to-people convergences, that even at times are orchestrated at the behest of
state power, that of a “South-South dialogue.” I am interested in the imaginaries and
affective ties of these artists, activists and academics who either intentionally meet or
serendipitously collide. I want to understand the source and profundity of their “freedom
dreams,” as Robin Kelley terms it, while dialectically assessing the influence of state
projects on their liberatory process and visions.
90

90
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press,
2002).
69

Concerning my fieldwork for the #DDPalestine delegation to 48/67, Chapter 4, I
re-invoked my anthropological training, relying on direct participatory action research
(PAR) as methodology. Since the trip only took place over a period of 10 days (but also
included 10 months of organizing), the research time clearly disqualifies it from standard
disciplinary understandings of ethnography, and is better described as direct participatory
action research. PAR emphases a collaborative, democratic processes involving
“with those people whose life-world and meaningful actions are under study” that
produces a “practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in
a participatory worldview.”
91
Besides the explicit PAR that went into co-organizing
#DDPalestine, my history of direct participatory action research can also be extended to
include work for the Malcolm X Project, writings on Ferguson and participating in
solidarity actions, contributing to an “Arabs for Black power” solidarity with the
Movement for Black Lives.
92

91
Jarg Bergold and Stefan Thomas, “Participatory Research Methods: A Methodological
Approach in Motion,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 13(1), (2012). From the Abstract:
“Participatory research methods are geared towards planning and conducting the research
process with those people whose life-world and meaningful actions are under study.” Peter
Reason and Hilary Bradbury, eds., Handbook of Action Research: Participative inquiry and
practice (London: Sage Publications, 2001): “A participatory, democratic process concerned with
developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a
participatory worldview….[and bringing] together action and reflection, theory and practice, in
participation with others in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to
people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and communities.”
92
The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University, Center for Contemporary Black History,
Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS),
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccbh/mxp/staff.html; Maytha Alhassen, “The biographer who
shattered Malcolm X myths,” CNN, April 5, 2011,
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/05/alhassen.author.malcolmx/
Maytha Alhassen, “Faces from Ferguson: Ashley ‘Brown Blaze’ Yates,” Huffington Post,
Feburary 25, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maytha-alhassen/ashley-yates-
ferguson_b_6573746.html; Maytha Alhassen, “Faces from Ferguson: Johnetta Elzie,” Huffington
70

Employing the concept of PAR within a tradition of socio-cultural
Anthropological methodological training inspired some inventiveness around engaging
anthropological method. This including the back-end work of co-organizing a delegation
(writing grant proposals for funding of the delegation, curation of delegates, constructing
the itinerary of travel, and creating a bibliography on Palestine and Zionism for
delegates) and the “ethnographic fieldwork” that involved participant-observation,
informal and semi-structured interviews, field note-taking and self-reflexive analysis.
Karen O’Reilly’s “iterative-inductive research,” which honors what Douglass Ezzy’s
argument that, “all data are theory driven,” explains that “Iterative implies both a spiral
and a straight line, a loop and a tail; inductive implies as open a mind as possible,
allowing the data to speak for themselves as far as possible.”
93
Harnessing O’Reilly’s
“iterative-inductive research,” I’m of the mind that the design of ethnographic research
should leave space for fluidity and flexibility; much like worthwhile travel hinges on
adaptability, on a wander with radical flow.
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN
Through the life writing of Lebanese-American Muslim feminist Aliya Ogdie-
Hassan and Egyptian Muslim soil chemist Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi, Chapter 1 charts
the critical analytical interventions made by their engaged witness testimony and takāful

Post, October 9, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maytha-alhassen/faces-from-
ferguson_b_5937078.html
Kirsten West Savali, “#Arabs4BlackPower Releases Movement for Black Lives Solidarity
Statement, The Root, September 26, 2016,
http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/09/arabs4blackpower-releases-movement-for-black-
lives-solidarity-statement/ .
93
Karen O’Reilly, Ethnographic Methods (New York: Routledge, 2005), 10, 27.
71

friendships. Hassan and Shawarbi, members of the Federation of Islamic Associations of
the U.S. and Canada (FIA), broke ranks with Traditional Muslim communities’
condemnation of the Nation of Islam, by actively embracing and collaborating with the
NOI and other Black American Muslims—including Black American Jazz pianist Ahmad
Jamal, an Ahmadi convert to Islam. The generative artifacts that emerge from this
engaged witness interaction between the Arab American and Arab diasporic community
with the Black American Muslims include Hassan’s designation of NOI as the “best in
America,” and Shawarbi’s deployment of the plural of “asmar” (dark-complexioned
person) to describe the Nation’s members.
Shawarbi, who initially entered the U.S. in 1954 as a Fulbright scholar in soil
chemistry, eventually moves into becoming a full-time organizer for FIA in New York
City. Before his transition as Director of FIA, Shawarbi conducted an Arabic
ethnographic study, Islam in America—a survey of American Muslim life and
communities in the U.S. for Egyptian funded International Society for the Dissemination
of Islamic Culture. Published in 1960, perhaps its most interesting contribution is a
chapter on the Nation of Islam that referred to its members—labeled “Black Muslims” in
American mainstream press—by the Arabic word for “dark-complexioned people”
(simr). This chapter dissects the potentially radical politics behind the linguistic choice
counterweighted by overtures to conservative and Traditional Islam paternalism. My
Arabic to English translation of the little-known chapter is included in the appendix of
this monograph.
Chapter 2 is a re-assessment of Malcolm X’s 1964 trips to mashriq and maghreb,
72

an examination of his critical political and spiritual development through a politics of
engaged witness and the friendships. As partly a spiritual pilgrimage and partly a political
internationalism mission, Malcolm toured Africa and mashriq from April till November
as an informal delegate on behalf of the “22 million victims of democracy”—Black
Americans. Malcolm’s witness of a “spirit of brotherhood” through displays of
hospitality and generosity inspired Malcolm’s critique of American whiteness and
advocacy of an anti-racist “ummic imperative.” This intervention challenges prevailing
narratives that contend that Malcolm’s trips to the “Arab world” catalyzed an adoption of
an understanding of Islam that transcended race consciousness. Furthermore, Malcolm’s
witnessing of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s “three circles” construction
animated by his long-term sojourns in Cairo and friendship interactions, led Malcolm to
proclaim that Nasser was “my President.” This chapter focuses on friendships with Arab
compatriots—from Saudi royal family members to Sudanese in the diaspora to Lebanese
Muslim feminist and American University of Beirut student Azizah al-Hibri—to not only
demonstrate the critical laboratory of ideas friendships and friendship networks make
politically and spiritually possible. This chapter ends with a case of study of Malcolm’s
engaged witness to trip to Gaza in the Fall of 1964 and the generative critical articles that
emerged from that encounter with refugees and a Palestinian poet.
In “Dialectics of American Blackness in Cairo,” Chapter 3 of this dissertation
extends this exploration of Nasser’s “three circles” construction by focusing on the
appeal of 1960s Egypt’s nonalignment politics and promotion of pan-Africanism. I’m in
interested in the engaged witness of Black American delegates to Cairo; how they read
73

Egypt as a central node in African diaspora, and how Cairo transformed into this Black
Atlantic Islam metropole. Malcolm X’s diaries, coupled with journalist David Graham
Du Bois’ 1975 novel…And Bid Him Sing, African American theater scholar James V.
Hatch and Black American artist Camille Billops’ Cairo: Nine Lives, and the Ibrahim
Ismail-Hatch-Billops collaboration Poems for Niggers and Crackers, provide a blueprint
of this Black American Muslim community and the larger Black American diaspora as it
interacts within Cairo. Cairo housed Black American diplomats who “broke” foreign
service barriers to rise to the ranks of the U.S. embassy in Cairo. It also attracted Black
American radicals who like Maya Angelou, Vicki Garvin, Shirley Du Bois and her son
David Graham Du Bois actively traveled between Third World geographies. Ties to the
U.S. embassy and its Cairine network enabled a South-South dialogue to emerge between
Black Americans and Egyptians—where some of these tensions of Black American
incorporeality were addressed and theorized through. They also produced generative
artifacts, like decades long friendships, illuminative monographs, and highly valued art.
After researching a history of Afro-Arab solidarity politics through delegates and
delegations in a post-WWII, Cold war period, and harnessing my history of womanist,
commons-centering, anti-racism social justice organizing, a history of decades of healing
Afro-Arab and transnationalist movement-building; I was inspired to organize a Black
American delegation to Palestine for the last chapter of this dissertation.
94
Assisting
Dream Defenders co-founder and Palestinian-American Ahmad Abuznaid with his vision

94
This history is one predominantly characterized by nourishing friendships that revolved around
critical conversations about radical politics with Black American artists and organizers.

74

of sustained American movementship solidarity with Palestine, we collaborated on the
first Dream Defenders delegation to Palestine (dubbed “DDPalestine”). This delegation—
composed of leadership from Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter, St.
Louis/Ferguson’s Hands Up United, New York’s Justice League and Chicago’s Black
Youth Project—arrived into Jerusalem less than 5 months after the police killing of
Ferguson’s Michael Brown.
Picking up from Malcolm X’s 1964 trip to Gaza, I briefly appraise a history of
Black American delegations to Palestine geographies from 1967 to 2014; highlighting the
diverse political climate they emerge from. I also explore the significant role that Afro-
Arab friendships—including my own with poet Aja Monet, forging a friendship with
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors in Ferguson, introductions to filmmaker
and life-magician dream hampton and Dream Defender Ahmad Abuznaid—played in
organizing, curating and shepherding these delegations. Employing PAR methods, I offer
my own life-writing (inspired by Malcolm X’s travel diary work)—a journal composed
of ethnographic fieldnotes punctured by critical analyses for each day of the 10-day
delegation. Chapter 4 closes with several takeaways from the trip and a reproduction of
our proposal letter to funders.
MENA geographies: SWANA, Mashriq/Maghreb, and Palestine:
As one of the members of Arabs for Black Power, a group formed to write a
statement of solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives during Black August of 2016,
I have been involved in discussions between global Arabic-speaking radical activists and
organizers interested in disrupting the compulsion to center Palestine in solidarity actions,
75

constructions of Arabic-speaking geographies as colonial and Western elitist artifacts like
“the Middle East” and “SWANA,” celebrity culture around activism in Western media,
and the hegemonic narrative of an “Arab peoples” that erases ethnic and racial groups
like Kurds, Afro-Arabs, Nubians, Imazighen, Armenians and communities of migrant
workers, refugees, gender nonconforming individuals, and queer folk. The compulsion to
center Palestine contributes to its political isolation and lays the groundwork for nation-
state nationalisms like two-state and one-state formulations. We re-imagined hegemonic
geographies imposed on Arabic-speaking regions known as the Orientalist
epistemological formation of “the Middle East and North Africa” (MENA) and yet
another Western construction that preserves a colonial artifact “Southwest Asia, North
Africa” or “SWANA” as mashriq and maghreb.
In an attempt to speak to overlapping geographies that are locally produced
epistemologies, we explain our deployment of mashriq and maghreb in the statement,
“maghreb and mashriq are locally referenced geographies within predominantly Arabic
speaking regions spanning from the maghreb (Western Africa) to the mashriq (Eastern
Africa and Western Asia).” I extend my refutation of these geographies, MENA and
SWANA, by also centralizing the historical significance of the East in Arabic grammar.
Employing mashriq/maghreb to describe the “Middle East and North Africa” displaces
the Orientalist centering of Europe as the ultimate cartographic laboratory for global
knowledge production. It also presents a critical challenge to another neologism produced
in Western intelligentsia thought circles, SWANA. Even with its Leftist impulses,
SWANA reproduces the imperial imaginary of a disparate “North Africa” from the rest
76

of Africa and presents “Asia” as affective geography for understanding the Eastern
Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. It also makes assumptions. Furthermore, this
dissertation explores John Henrik Clarke and Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael)
mapping of the Middle East as “Northeast Africa” as another exploration of a radical
geography that ruptures Orientalist and Western imaginaries.
Fundamentally, I am concerned with articulating such concepts through the self-
identity language of people on the ground and critically assessing and excavating the
genealogy Arabic grammar and geopolitical imaginaries offer. By opting for Arabic
terms, we begin to disrupt the European Orientalist and contemporary Western academic
tradition of mapping political projects informed by alterity onto geographies. I argue this
with full knowledge that there are non-Arabic speaking populations in these regions, but
still advocate for use of these terms to speak to “Arab worlds” mapped onto Arabic-
speaking geographies. This lexicon is also rooted in Islamic theosophical imaginaries, the
formation of mashriq and maghreb reveal ontoepistemological systems that trouble the
grammar borders of contemporary and modern Western naming practices and
geopolitical borderlands.
Speaking to this Arabic grammar, it is worth noting the cosmological genealogy
of terms like “East” and “West” in the Arabic and Andalusian discursive tradition. Arab
studies historian Albert Hourani covers the theosophy of the Arab philosophers in
Andalusia in his the pioneering The History of the Arab Peoples. In this germinal text, he
reveals ishraq, Arabic for irradiation, or in Ibn Sina’s cosmology “radiation of divine
77

light,” came to stand for the “ancient esoteric wisdom of the East” (sharq in Arabic).
95

When we consider the origins of gharb, Arabic for “West,” we see a similar
phenomenon, wherein ghareeb is a marker for “strangeness.” This is not the work of this
dissertation, but of future publications, but it will be the conventional way I refer to the
“region” and “Arab world” in this dissertation.
96

Lastly, we need to critically approach how we deploy the term “Palestine” in
studying the circuitous contours of resistance to Zionism in the region—which I argue
needs to be thought of beyond territoriality. Palestine is a dream of liberation, a dream of
an end to occupation, and not just for people who came to be territorially defined as
Palestinian (which is even a contested political identity by radical refugee thinkers in
Dheisheh, Bethlehem). At other times, Palestinian political bodies are moved to different
countries in the mashriq and maghreb, as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
transferred offices from (what became known as) the West Bank to Lebanon and then
Tunisia. Palestinian students in Cairo, Egypt formed the General Union of Palestinian
Students (GUPS) in 1959. Thus, we can think of these nodes of Palestinian organizing
and life as “Palestine Geographies,” as a multi-nodal spatiality. We need a more
capacious understanding of Palestine that traverses and transcends the boundaries of
nation-state imaginaries (such as borders, flags, and passports), one that is transnational.
Furthermore, as a settler colonial project, Zionism has and continues to territorially
encroach on bordering nations land—Syria’s Golan Heights, Southern Lebanon, Jordan
and Egypt.

95
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 176.
96
The other tradition I want to investigate further is this use of historical dates to refer to regions
like “48/67.”
78

Lastly, I am also starting to re-evaluate the different possibilities in embodied in
pluralizing “Arab world” to “Arab worlds.” I wonder if this could be another critical
intervention to persistent colonial geographies and impulses to find mono-referents for
regions of the world. Mapping different “worlds” (like “Muslim worlds”) onto
overlapping geographies also acknowledges the diversity of racial, ethnic, cultural and
linguistic communities and spiritual traditions and faith practices. Instead of the way that
mono-referents flatten geographies, it could inspire us to think of different worlds
overlapping, blurring, hybridizing and even in conflict on the same geography.

79

CHAPTER 1:

LOVINGLY DEDICATED TO THE ASIATIC ASMAR MAN

In a November 3, 1959 letter addressed to his “Holy Apostle,” Malcolm X writes
to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad to update him about strides made with
African American newspaper Pittsburgh Courier. Towards the end of the letter, Malcolm
topically shifts:
This lady (Aliya Hassen) of the Muslim Federation was at the Amsterdam News
office yesterday denouncing Talib Dawud and Dakota Staton as not being
Muslims, and that you and your followers were the best in America. From what I
understand, it left them “shook up.” All praise is due ALLAH. More information
on it to follow. I strictly believe it pays to make friends in all walks of life.
97

This singular paragraph, concentrated with rich historical conjunctures between Arab
American, Muslim American and Black American circles, has strangely received little
attention from Malcolm X studies scholars and scholars on American Islam. With
contemporary American Islam discourses on intractable tensions between Black
American Muslims and Arab Americans around exploitative merchant class relations,
Arab authoritative supremacy within Islam, practices of anti-Blackness embedded in
colorism and racist grammar, and reproductions of American Orientalist discourses (what
Sherman Jackson has called “Black Orientalism”), moments like Hassen’s overture and
Malcolm’s acknowledge of friendship are rarely recorded into the history of Afro-Arab
Muslim encounters. While this punctures some foundational logics undergirding

97
Malcolm X to Elijah Muhammad, November 3, 1959 (microfilm: reel 13), Malcolm X
Collection: Papers, 1948–1965 (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York
Public Library, New York).
80

narratives of Afro-Arab Muslim tensions, it curiously re-inscribes notions of Arab
supremacy on Islamic authority. Malcolm ascribes Hassen, a South Dakota born
Lebanese Muslim woman, with authoritative power to determine who falls within the
folds of Traditional Islam, a collection of Muslim communities upholding “Sunni
Orthodoxy” that have historically marginalized the Nation of Islam (NOI) and Ahmadis
in the way it defines the boundaries of Muslim practices.
98
Dawud and Staton, prominent
jazz artists, were visible converts to Islam through the Ahmadiyya movement—as were
many jazz artists like pianists Ahmad Jamal and McCoy Tyner, saxophonist Yusef Latif
and drummer Art Blakey during this epoch.
This extolling of Hassen’s position on the NOI can probably be explained by the
recipients of Hassen’s “denouncement”: Talib Dawud and Dakota Staton and Malcolm
were embroiled in a years-long bitter feud over this question of the Nation’s place within
Traditional Islam and the group’s positioning of Elijah Muhammad as a prophet (Dawud
and Staton characterizing Muhammad as a “phony”).
99
What about Hassen’s testimony to

98
I intentionally deploy “Traditional Islam” or “Sunni Orthodoxy” to disrupt the normalization of
an epistemological approach to Islam that refers to this practice or community simply as
“orthodox” or more pointed in its false universality as “True Islam.”
99
An example of the “bitter” verbal exchange is explicitly demonstrated by newspaper articles
placed in Black press like Chicago’s New Crusader from summer of 1959 to 1960 by Dawud and
Staton and in statements about the NOI in Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and in New
York’s Amsterdam News from 1959 to 1962. Less than a month after writing to Muhammad
about Hassen’s “denouncement” of Staton and Dawud, Malcolm X’s counter to Amsterdam News
coverage of Station and Dawud’s years of describing the NOI as an “aberration” disconnected
from global Islam (“Muslim Leader Calls Moslem Leader ‘Phony,’” New York Amsterdam
News, October 3, 1959) is published in the Amsterdam News: “Sir: I’m surprised to see so much
space provided by the press for hip-swinging, blues singing Dakota Staton to continue her
insanely jealous attack on Messenger Elijah Muhammad.” “If Talib Dawud is a religious leader,
where are his followers? If he is a Muslim spokesman, where is his audience? When Messenger
Elijah Muhammad speaks, millions listen…but when Talib Dawud speaks, only Dakota Staton
listens; she is his follower, his audience…he is her leader, her spokesman.” Malcolm X, “Pulse of
New York’s Public: No Compromise,” Amsterdam News, December 1, 1962.
81

Malcolm made it significant enough to include in a letter to Muhammad? Is it not
interesting that Malcolm and Arab American Hassen meet and converse about local and
global Muslim politics of belonging at the Amsterdam News office, a Black newspaper?
What does this tell us about Hassen’s politics on race in U.S.? And more critical to the
work of this dissertation, how is it that Hassen broke from the prevailing logic of
communities practicing Traditional Islam, like the “Muslim Federation” (a community
she belonged to), to develop a critical analysis that not only included the Nation into its
body politic but considered NOI followers the “best in America”? This passage reveals
the work of understanding the role of engaged witness in transforming encounters into
experiences of relationship-building and co-struggling.
This was not a one-off moment for Malcolm X or Aliya Ogdie-Hassen. Hassen’s
collections at University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library (Aliya Hassen Papers:
1910-1990) and at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan boast a
polycultural assemblage of clippings, international newspapers and Black and African
diasporic press profiling Malcolm’s travels to the mashriq and Africa.
100
Her collection
includes the Islamic Center of Geneva’s 1965 Al-Muslimoon newsletter interview with

100
Press Uganda Argus, Ebony magazine, and unreferenced layout with a quote from David
Graham Du Bois’s 1975 novel …And Bid Him Sing (which will be analyzed in Chapter 3)
describing Malcolm X in conversation with Du Bois: “For me, religion, Islam, has been like a
harness, a guide to how I should behave. You know the life I led before I found The Nation.
Everybody knows. I needed to be reigned in. I needed guidelines—limits beyond which not to go.
Islam provides these for me.” Also: “Perhaps everybody doesn’t need guidelines imposed from
outside, a harness to keep him on the straight and narrow, on the right road. I suppose built-in
controls are part of everybody’s equipment. But, a hard life is hard on those controls. Tears’em
down. In some of us, almost destroys them.” And: “When I see the good sisters, the mothers of
our people, so many of them holdin’ on to those controls, livin’ by them, in the face of the white
man’s deviltry, and struggling to teach us how to live by’em—sometimes using their version of
the man’s religion, oftentimes not—well, I guess, there’s something bigger, something like the
angel that Allah put in each of us, pushing outward to—be.”
82

Malcolm X (which will be examined in Chapter 2 as it relates to the impact of engaged
witness on Malcolm’s political analysis), letters and postcards she received from
Malcolm, the Federation of Islamic Associations of U.S. and Canada (FIA) newsletters
and Islamic ritual pamphlets given to Malcolm. Hassen’s collection of published and
unpublished writings and artifacts of friendships, point to a history of contesting the
edicts of Traditional Islam through her grappling with gender and racial politics—which I
suggest are likely influenced by her affective ties with Black American Muslim brothers
Malcolm X and jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal.
In this chapter, I explore the coverage of and “life writing” of two central
members of FIA, Lebanese American private investigator and later director of Arab
Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) Aliya Ogdie-Hassen
and Egyptian soil chemist and Fulbright recipient Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi.
101
Both
of whom had relationships as delegates and delegation-makers with Malcolm X and
Ahmad Jamal, and interfaced with NOI through the vehicle of engaged witness.
I will lay out brief biographies of Hassen and Shawarbi and use Hassen’s
collection and Shawarbi’s Arabic writings and newspaper coverage of his Muslim
community work in New York City to understand the intervention these figures make to
disrupt, reconfigure and in some cases, reinforce prevailing Arab Muslim imaginaries
around Blackness and Traditional Islamic epistemologies in the 1950s and 1960s. The
generative artifacts that emerge from these delegative encounters with the NOI and the

101
Here, I am referring to Literary scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson notion of “life
writing,” “life writing requires an audience to both confirm the writer’s existence in time and
mark his or her lived specificity, distinctiveness, and location.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson,
Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis MN: University
of Minnesota, 2011), 13, 16.
83

fortification of affective ties with Malcolm and Ahmad Jamal include Hassen’s
designation of the NOI as the “best in America” and Shawarbi’s deployment of the
Arabic asmar to describe NOI followers as a marker of extended kinship. Furthermore,
through Hassen’s life writing in this chapter and my archival work and interviews with
Azizah al-Hibri in Chapter 2, we are offered a glimpse into a history of radical Arab and
Muslim feminists in the U.S.
Black feminist scholars like Farah Jasmine Griffin, Patricia Hill Collins, Ula
Taylor, Erik McDuffie and Komozi Woodard have contributed to a growing literature on
Malcolm X’s gender and sexual politics, and in some cases emphasizing a radical Black
feminisms lens.
102
Work by Asian Americanist scholars Diane Fujino (Heartbeat of
Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005)), Scott Kurashige and Grace
Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First
Century (2011)), explore Malcolm’s relationships between women of color radical
organizers and thinkers like Japanese-American Yuri Kochiyama and Chinese-American
Grace Lee Boggs.
103
Not to my knowledge, has there been writing or work on Malcolm
X’s relationships with radical and liberal feminist Arab diasporic women.

102
See Erik S. McDuffie and Komozi Woodard, “If you're in a country that's progressive, the
woman is progressive": Black women radicals and the making of the politics and legacy of
Malcolm X,” Biography—An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 36(3), (2013); Farah Jasmine Griffin,
“‘Ironies of the Saint’: Malcolm X, Black Women, and the Price of Protection” in Sisters in the
Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, ed. V.P. Franklin
and Bettye Collier-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Patricia Hill Collins
“Learning to Think for Ourselves: Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism Reconsidered,” in Malcolm
X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Ula Taylor, Making a
New Woman: Women and the Nation of Islam, 1930-1975 (in progress).
103
Diane Carol Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
(Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota, 2005), Scott Kurashige and Grace Lee Boggs, The
Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).
84

Scholars on Afro-Arab diasporas like Michael Gomez, Edward Curtis, and
Hisham Aidi historicize some of the Arab diasporic and global Islamic connections
Malcolm X makes while traveling abroad, but missing is an engagement of these figures
life writing, which offers deeper insight into the inter-workings of these friendships on
Malcolm X’s political consciousness, spiritual transformation and internationalism/Third
Worldism framing. And women are missing in this scholarship as well. While Manning
Marable’s biography on Malcolm X (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011)) and Herb
Boyd and Ilyasah Shabazz’s reproduction of Malcolm X’s travel diaries (The Diary of
Malcolm X: El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, 1964 (2014)) outline Malcolm X’s almost daily
interactions with these figures, they are still treated as cursory actors. Lastly, treating
these figures simply as connections or interesting nodes in Malcolm X’s travels detracts
from the significance they might have had on his intellectual and ideological
development. Furthermore, minimizing friendships to connections precludes us from
investigating how Malcolm and other Black American Muslims might have possibly
transformed Arab Muslim friends’ politics on race in American and global politics. By
examining Hassen and Shawarbi’s life writing, I hope to contribute to answering these
questions and filling these lacunae in the fields of Malcolm X Studies, Afro-Arab
diaspora, Critical Muslim Studies, Global Islam and Black Studies.
McDuffie and Woodard contend, “The impact of black women radicals in shaping
the life and legacy of Malcolm X constitutes one of the most significant gaps in the study
of this key figure of the post-World War II Black Freedom Movement.”
104
I tend to agree

104
McDuffie and Woodard, “If you’re in a country that is progressive,” 508.
85

with McDuffie and Woodard’s critique that prominent biographies on Malcolm, which
include the heavy-handed role played by Alex Haley in structuring and shaping the
Autobiography of Malcolm X (many forget the subtitle “As told to Alex Haley”)
marginalize or wholly neglect revolutionary women’s voices. Historian Manning
Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention acknowledges the centrality of women to
Malcolm’s life and to Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) organizing but
does not apply gender or women’s studies lens. In the narrative construction of Malcolm
X’s political radicality, McDuffie and Woodard conclude that, “an examination of
women, gender, and sexuality in shaping Malcolm’s life remains largely absent in
prevailing biographical portraits of him.”
105
However, in their use of the framework of
“radical women of color,” focusing on Vicki Garvin, Queen Mother Moore, other radical
Black women with brief mentions of Chinese American philosopher and organizer Grace
Lee Boggs, they neglect deep engagements with non-Black women of color. They also
frame Malcolm’s relationships with Garvin, Moore, Angelou, and others as one’s of
“collaborators” and “teachers,” whereas I intend to apply the framework of friendship to
understand the dimensions of these relationships. I am arguing friendship encounters
developed another kind of theory and politics. Not only were these women teachers and
collaborators; but they were also friends. In addition to Malcolm X, I am attentive to the
relationships forged between Ahmad Jamal and FIA’s Aliya Ogdie-Hassen and Director
Mahmoud Shawarbi.

105
Ibid, 509.
86

Aliya Ogdie-Hassen
My Dearest Friend—Greetings from Mecca. Have told many of your constant help, was
so busy preparing to leave didn’t have time to phone you. At this last minute (Saturday
night) call. Jamillah and went over that same night. At any rate all is well, the book was
most helpful. Hope to see you in a few weeks.
Always,

B. Shabazz
106

Mailed to Aliya Ogdie-Hassen’s Brooklyn address on 150 Smith Street from
Saudi Arabia, this note from Malcolm X to Hassen is written on a postcard with the
image of the Kaaba of Mecca on the reverse. Who is this woman, a “dearest friend”
gifting Malcolm books but yet never mentioned in any biographies on Malcolm X or in
scholarly writings on Malcolm X’s circle of radical feminists of color “collaborators,” but
yet known to Detroit and Dearborn’s Arab Muslim community as “the woman who
helped Malcolm X make hajj”?
107

106
One other correspondence between Hassen and Malcolm appears in the Bentley Historical
Library’s Aliya Hassen Papers (Aliya Hassen Papers, Michigan Historical Collections Bentley
Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan). This time the greetings begin
with “As Salaam Aliakum Dear Sister” and end with “Bro. Malcolm X”: “I haven’t forgotten nor
forsaken you but I’ve been keeping a pretty rough schedule these past few months which I hope
will taper off soon. Do you know how to contract Abdullah BulKhair?”
107
As told to me by numerous Arab Michiganians I have encountered throughout the years and
also noted in Detroit Free Press profile of Hassen’s grandson Ismael Ahmed” “Ahmed's mentor
was his maternal grandmother, Haji Aliya Hassen, a Muslim feminist and confidante of civil
rights leader Malcolm X who "counseled him to take a more universal approach to Islam,"
Ahmed said. Hassen, who participated in a cleansing ritual at Malcolm X's funeral after his
assassination in 1965, moved from New York City to Detroit in the mid-1970s to lead ACCESS.”
“Profile of Ish Ahmed” by Jack Kersnack, Detroit Free Press, September 16, 2007,
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070916/NEWS06/709160565/1001/NEWS .

87

Figure 2: Aliya Ogdie-Hassan with her parents and a brother in Kadoka, South Dakota. ACCESS records, Michigan
Historical Collections Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Michigan.

Born on April 30, 1910 in Kadoka, South Dakota to Lebanese immigrants, Aliya
Al-Ogdie Hassen, is one of those local leaders who remain alive in a community’s story-
telling tradition, in its community history, but not necessarily part of a national narrative
of notable Arab American or Muslim American leaders. Her work as the Executive
Director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS),
co-founded by her grandson, Michigan political figure and long-time United Auto
Workers activist Ismael Ahmed, is remembered in Nabeel Abraham and Andrew
Shryock’s Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream. Following the entry, her great-
grandson, fantasy writer Saladin Ahmed, eulogizes her through his poem Important
Things to an Eight Year Old, opening with her monumental role in his life, “Experience
with matriarchs begins with Haji.” Saladin Ahmed continues with an embedded reference
88

to her generative artifacts, the hidden achievements of a woman, “Amid the mountains of
social justice.”
108
However, very little else is examined about her writings and life’s
work, which squarely focused on elevating feminist interpretations of Islam and bridging
racial divides between Muslim American groups as early at the 1950s.
Her lived experience also speaks to how friendship-making, poetry writing and
delegation organizing can transform politics. Hassen’s life writing offers us insight into
why she broke ranks with Sunni Orthodox Traditional Islam communities that censured
the NOI to warmly embrace the Nation as “the best in America.” Her iconoclastic
analysis of race, gender and women helps us understand how Hassen’s life work pushed
against the grain of prevailing moral geographies and social norms upheld by her Arab
and Muslim American communities—even choosing cremation as possibly her most
profound (final) challenge to myopic interpretations of Abrahamic traditions. Hassen’s
life writing gives us clues into her radical life living.
Aliya Hassen’s Life Writing and Life Living

“She was very unconventional for anytime: single, out in male spaces, smoking,
translating poetry. She was a very New York City woman.”
–Saladin Ahmed
109

After narrating stories of feminine poets and political figures in Islamic history,
Hassen inquires, in her 1965 series on Feminine Participation in Islamic Affairs (likely
based on writings from years prior) for the FIA’s Journal, “With such impressive

108
Saladin Ahmed, “Important Things to an Eight Year Old: For Haji Aliya Hassan,” in Arab
Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream, ed. Nabeel Abraham and Andrew Shryock (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2000), 319-320.
109
Saladin Ahmed, interview with author, November 21, 2016.
89

examples to follow, how did the position and status of Muslim women degenerate? How
did it come about that the women allowed themselves to be veiled and secluded from
public life and participation in Islamic affairs? Where did the vicious circle begin?”
110

Reflecting on the gender traditions and customs of the Babylonians who previously ruled,
she credits the movement of the “Muslim Empire” from Damascus to Baghdad for
transforming women from their historic role of “helpmates” into “petted and pampered
playmates.” She continues by tracing the effect of systems of patriarchy on Islamic
jurisprudence, critiquing what she regarded as a practice of ahistoricizing verses from
scriptural text to be, “used to inhibit and restrain women from activities common to
women of the seventh century, were narrowly interpreted that they might serve the ends
of the now inflated male ego.”
However, Hassan’s counter to Islamic patriarchy becomes fixated on policing
modest dress as a guard against sexual violence. Consistent with pre-Second-Wave
Feminism commitments, Hassen reproduces the misogynistic practice of framing a
woman's body as an object of temptation (strangely juxtaposed next to her calls to
disassociate veiling from Islamic practice) to be protected from male predatory behavior
reminiscent of a “promise of protection.” In “’Ironies of the Saint’: Malcolm X, Black
Women, and the Price of Protection,” American and African American literature scholar
Farah Jasmine Griffin critically dissects Malcolm X’s gender politics during and after his
time in the NOI by characterizing it as a “promise of protection,” a patriarchal discourse

110
The Arab American National Museum’s archive, under “Aliya Al-Ogdie,” dates the
publication of Feminine Participation in Islamic Affairs at 1953, but on the first page of the typed
copy she handwrote “1960” and describes it as a manuscript.

90

hinged on protecting the purity and preciousness of Black women from the misogyny
engendered by a racist patriarchal system. In much the same way, Hassen strategizes for
and problematizes the fragility of femininity within a misogynistic system but does not
formally call for the uprooting of patriarchy:
The Bikinis and short shorts and skin-tight pants of today that women of ultra
sophistication wear, draw lewd insults to those who wear them, as well as danger
of molestation, and those who place themselves in such a position, have
themselves alone to blame. Modesty of dress could have avoided insult and harm
to them. But men of the day we are discussing, neglected to remember the
underlying reasons for those injunctions, just as they neglected to remember that
in the Qur’an 24:30, it also instructed the men to, “Say to the believing men that
they should lower their gaze and guard their chastity…” Had not temptations been
placed before their eyes by the immodest apparel of that day, they too would not
have been warned to avoid sin by looking away and thinking purely, when such
sights net their gaze.
In another interesting rhetorical move, after devoting several paragraphs to explaining
and historicizing “adequate” modest attire in Muslim tradition, Hassen chalks this focus
on a woman's dress up to “excuses” that “contributed heavily towards the segregation of
women from public life and secular affairs.” She rails against similar paternalistic
“promises of protection” (like gender segregation) socially instituted by “Emirs and
Governors,” accusing them of regressing Islamic tradition’s commitment to emancipating
women.
111

111
“The men who were once masters of most of the known world and its seas, now added, “it’s
for your own protection, my dears,” to the multiple excuses of the past. Protection indeed! But it
happened and it came to pass that the helpmate, the Amazon, the educator, the business woman,
the social service worker, the spirited companion, became the decorative but spineless hothouse
flower relegated to obscurity behind veils and barred doors—a position she did not emerge from
again until the twentieth century.”
91

Figure 3: Aliya Ogdie-Hassan in an Egyptian dress. ACCESS Main Gallery, 1999.04.16, Accessed from Arab
American National Museum online archive.
Superseding her detours into a politics of promising protection, Hassen’s central
argument calls for the inclusion of Muslim women into religious and secular affairs, a
practice she contends was actively observed during the time of the Prophet. She writes,
“O daughters of Islam, where do you go from here? Your status and position in the faith
has been stripped of the artifices which relegated you to obscurantism,” and concludes
with a Ghazzalian admonishment, to “first know yourself.” Hassen’s life writing gives us
a complicated snapshot of her gender politics and, as we shall see in one of her speeches
as ACCESS Executive Director, complications around her understanding of Arab racial
formation and American racial imaginaries.
Hassen’s 1978 speech on the history of Arab migration to what becomes known
as the United States opens with the demographic composition of Arabs in U.S., a
92

population she estimates at two million in size.
112
Hassen begins her historical rendering
of a genealogy of Arab migration to the U.S.in the 16
th
century (1528), emphasizing the
relationship of Arabness to both Spanish colonialism and the system of American chattel
slavery. She does the latter by drawing attention to language in the 1790 South Carolina
Sundry Moors bill:
1733 so many North Africans Arab and Non-Arabs were brought here as slaves,
all of whom were Arab speaking, created such a problem in South Carolina that
the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1790 passed a bill stating:
“Sundry Moors” subject to the Emperor of Morocco are to be tried in court in the
laws of Morocco citizens. I have seen documents with names like Ahmed …
Omar … Hassan…and Ali, from this period.
This petition advanced by eight “Sundry free Moors,” calling themselves “subjects of the
Emperor of Morocco” declared themselves to not be subject to the “negro law” (“not
triable by the Law for the better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and other Slaves”)
so that they could sit on juries and eschew payment of the “free negro” head tax.
113
Legal
scholar and historian of race and gender law Ariela Gross considers this petition another
attempt to “de-Negrorize” through linking to Moorish genealogies, “Out of this one
document in which eight individuals claimed Moroccan ancestry, an entire community in
South Carolina known as ‘Moors’ claimed whiteness. I view the South Carolina Moors as
essentially the same as the Melungeons and Croatans I write about in “Of Portuguese
Origin”; creating mythologies of origin to escape ‘negro’ identity.”
114
Manning Marable

112
I find it interesting that she refers to this population as “Arab speaking people.”
113
In 2012, attempting to invoke the 1790 petition in a ahistoricized racialization manner, Al-
Murakush society petitioned the US government to recognize their tribe of the "Sundry Moors" as
" an Indigenous Native American non-Indian Class of People for U.S. Citizens and Non U.S.
Citizens alike.” http://murakushsociety.com/projects/sundry-moors-act-of-2012/
114
Email exchange March 17, 2014. Also, see Ariela Gross. What Blood Won’t Tell: Racial
Identity on Trial in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
93

and Hisham Aidi posit a similar argument in their co-authored introduction to Black
Routes to Islam, explaining that, “The preferential treatment afforded Muslim slaves by
the American racial order encouraged other blacks to claim Moorish or Arab descent and
event ‘incentivized conversion to Islam.’”
115
In this case, the kind of “preferential
treatment” a Muslim identity provided enslaved Blacks was that of “passing.”
Unbeknownst to the Sundry Moors, a couple months later, the Naturalization Act
of 1790 passed, limiting citizenship applications to, “Alien being a free white person,
who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States
for the term of two years” and “of good character.” This law thus categorically excluded
American Indians, free Blacks, enslaved peoples, indentured servants, and Asians.
Hassen invokes the law to speak to a centuries long history of Afro-Arab Islamic
presence in the United States. However, in acknowledging the institution of chattel
slavery accounting for the forced migration of Muslims, this case she points to is part of
an extended history of Africans (and later Black Americans) seeking manumission or
alternative cartographies of freedom through the “de-Negroizing” racial imaginary of the
Moor. It also sits within an Arab racial historiography of Levantine and Persian Gulf
Arabs successfully and unsuccessfully petitioning for naturalization through racializing
the geography of “cradle of civilization” as white.
116
What is striking is the different

115
Manning Marable and Hisham Aidi eds., Black Routes to Islam (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 11-12.
116
For cultural and material manumission through “de-Negroizing” the racial imaginary of the
Moor see Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Sylviane
A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York
University Press, 1998); Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington IN:
Indiana University Press, 2003); Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy
94

ways this petition is re-imagined in the Arab/Moorish American imaginary. Hassen, in a
speech on Arab American immigration in the 70s, located this community’s legacy
within an African American narrative of racialization (especially since "Arab" as a social
identity at that time (in the 18
th
century) was assigned to anyone who spoke Arabic)
beginning with chattel slavery bondage.
117

In addition to published works on Islamic feminism, speeches on Arab migration
to the U.S., and correspondence with Malcolm X; Hassen’s collections house copies of
her unpublished manuscripts, FIA materials (including the research she conducted on
Muslim organizations in the Tristate area),

and itineraries from an “Arab expatriate”
delegation to Egypt (including a trip to Rafah refugee camp in Gaza and the Mahalla
Textile factory in the middle of the Nile Delta) in July 1961 and a 1963 Palestine Arab
Delegation.
118
On the 25
th
of July, this Arab Expatriate delegation was slated to spend

of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For
prerequisite and naturalization cases that invoked the “cradle of civilization” argument to “prove
whiteness,” see Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York:
New York University Press, 2006); Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on
Trial in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Sarah Gualtieri, Between
Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).
117
Other speech highlights include Hassen’s description of ACCESS’s work in the Dearborn’s
South End neighborhood. She discusses their efforts to assist “poor, uneducated, unskilled laborer
and their families” and refugees who, at the time, were the victims of urban renewal that
“destroyed about 400 dwellings which have never been replaced.” She also recounts the story of
her father’s step migration to the U.S. Traveling between Lebanon and the U.S. to South
America, back to Lebanon, her father eventually returned to the U.S. with twelve other relatives
to apply for homesteading, arriving to South Dakota from Omaha, Nebraska on horseback. She
explains that the construction business that Hassen’s father started with his uncles laid most of the
highways in Sioux Falls. Gregory Orfalea and Brian Clark, “The Arab Americans,” Saudi
Aramco, (1986):16-25, http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/198605/the.arab.americans.htm .
118
From Aliya Hassen Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan and Aliya
Ogdie Hassan collection, Arab American National Museum. FIA membership cards in her
collection indicates that she at least been active in the organization since 1956 and served as a
Treasurer from June 1956-June 30, 1957. Decorated with a crescent star in the upper left corner,
95

four and half hours in Gaza, visiting sites like the Statue of the Unknown Soldier and
touring official state bodies like the Legislative Council and the Governor’s Residence,
and the refugee camps in Rafah and Buroij. The organizing of a FIA delegation with an
extensive tour of Gaza in a post-Khan Younis massacre moment (will be discussed in
Chapter 2) suggests that Hassen understood the significance of coordinated international
travel to crafting critical political analysis.

Figure 4: Aliya Ogdie-Hassan with Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser at the first major Arab American
delegation to Egypt. ACCESS Main Gallery, 1999.04.18, Accessed from Arab American National Museum online
archive.

the membership card includes an English translation of the basmala underneath the FIA insignia.
Considering that this delegation was titled “The Delegation of the 3
rd
Congress of the Arab
Expatriates” it is likely to be a continuation of what Sally Howell in Old Islam in Detroit (2014)
describes as “tours” facilitated by FIA to Egypt that started in 1959, at the invitation of Egyptian
President Gamal Abdul Nasser: “In 1959, President Nasser invited the FIA to hold their
convention in Cairo. The American delegation had the opportunity to meet the president, with the
head of Al-Azhar University, and with several religious authorities in the country, and Nasser
agreed to send four Al-Azhar-trained imams to the Und States to help meet the demand for
Muslim preachers in America. He also agreed to offer ten Cairo University scholarships to
American students and a scholarship for theological training at Al-Azhar University, all to be
arranged and administered by the FIA” (158-159). See Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit:
Rediscovering the Muslim Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also see Abdo A.
Elkholy, The Arab Moslems in the United States: Religion and Assimilation (New Haven CT:
College & University Press, 1966).
96

A fascinating document generated by Hassen, what appears to be a FIA list of
“Muslim Organizations in the New York Area,” furthers our understanding of her
thoughts concerning American Islam, Black Americans, race and the NOI. The list of
nineteen groups includes names of organizations, addresses, point of contact (with phone
numbers) and “nationality” (from “American” to Tartars, Albanian, Pakistani, Russian,
Somali, Afro-Americans, Malaysian, Indonesian, Turkish, Caucasian, African). Only two
groups, under “extra,” receive further explanation; the “Temple of Islam” and a
community of one hundred refugee families from Russia in Paterson, New Jersey. With
the mention of Malcolm X as the primary point of contact and the address of 102 W. 116
Street, NYC, it is clear Hassen was referencing the NOI’s Temple #7 in Harlem.
Most intriguing is Hassen’s description of NOI as “Nominal Muslims,” and her
stated desire to “achieve a form of unity between us.” Hassen, always a complicated
figure, does go on to question the Nation’s Islamic legitimacy when she dismisses its
“very race conscious” imaginary.
119
Hassen’s motive to form some kind of unity between
FIA and NOI takes on a nuanced approach, encouraging an exchange of knowledge and
relationship building between both groups. For “better relationship and understanding” to
manifest, Hassen suggests approaching Temple #7 leaders and the larger NOI community
to attend their jummah prayers on Friday. She also recommends that members of her FIA
community attend some of the NOI’s “important affairs.” What is most interesting about

119
“These people are very race conscious. Being American negroes, they are hypersensitive about
any non-black relationships. This is, I regret to say, part of Mr. Mohammed’s approach and
teachings. They can be nullified only after they receive: A-better Islamic training, B-Better
relationship with all Muslims…particularly Muslims from Asia and Africa, C-Our best approach
is gentleness and patient understanding.”
97

Hassen’s analysis of the NOI is that, unlike many of her male counterparts in FIA, she
classifies NOI members as “Nominal Muslims.” As she explains, “all,” she underlines,
“profess to be Muslims.”
It remains to be seen then if Hassen truly believed NOI to be the “best in
America” or was using this as a gentle diplomatic tactic to build social relations between
NOI and FIA. Because the document is undated, it is hard to identify whether this
analysis emerges after her encounter with Malcolm at the Amsterdam News office in
1959 or on the precipice of it. What is clear is Hassen’s politics of friendship-making in
bridging socio-political divides resulted in Malcolm’s references to Hassen as a
“friend”—from the November 1959 letter to Elijah Muhammad to addressing Hassen as
“My Dearest Friend” in the April 1946 postcard from Mecca.
Lastly, Hassen’s unpublished work The 101 Questions Most Frequently Asked by
Muslims (conflicting dates of 1957 and 1965) demonstrates both an evolving politics on
gender and womanhood in Islamic traditions and the transnational Islamic networks that
developed relational connections between Black American Muslims and Egyptian exiles.
Replete with commentaries on and mentions of Islamic traditions “emancipation of
womanhood,” many of the passages on gender and women appear reproduced in her FIA
series Feminine Participation in Islamic Affairs (or the other way around depending the
date of publication for the latter). Sixteen out of the 101 questions are devoted to
addressing the status of women in Islam and other gender-related queries concerning
polygamy, marriage, religiously-sanctioned sex work, personal and property rights of
women.
98

Throughout her life writing, as with this unpublished manuscript, Hassen
maintains the liberatory power of Islam for women. In response to a question decrying a
disproportionate gendering of Islamic inheritance law, Hassen explains that unjust gender
laws are cultural remnants of Arab pagan practice and that conversely, “Islam is the
liberator, the emancipator of womankind, not its enslaver. Women are not the chattels of
men, to be bought or sold or inherited.”
120
In response to the non-Muslim preoccupation
with the Prophet’s multiple partners, Hassen historically contextualizes the practice
within 7
th
century Arabia, reading the marriages as radical breaks from prevailing
practices of the zeitgeist, leading by example a radical politics on race and gender justice
for the time.
121

In its final form, Hassen covers 158 questions that address issues that continue to
preoccupy the Western non-Muslim mind towards Islamic edicts and traditions; including
questions regarding “Jehad” (jihad) and the allegation that “Islam was spread by the
sword.” To the latter, phrased as, “How can you deny that Islam was spread by the sword
of Muhammad?” Hassen responds (revealing much of her spirited character and love for
historical analysis), “Very easily, since it is not true. Muhamad again is being confused
with leaders of other faiths. In this instance, he is being confused by Charlemagne.
Charlemagne, did forcibly convert the sword and threat of the sword those countries
which are known to us today as England, Spain, France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and

120
Hassen, 101 Questions, 51.
121
Ibid, 53, the marriages took on the life of religious allegory, demonstrating through each one
central values in Islamic ethics like the removal of the “color barrier” and the removing of the
stigma of divorced, widowed or orphaned woman.
99

Germany.”
122
In the last question asking “What other deeds or misdeeds can be deemed
to be sins in Islam?,” we see references to the “sins” of racism, xenophobia and aiding
oppression out of the thirty-fives “acts [that] may be termed to be sins in Islam.”
123

Noted on the title page of the unpublished manuscript to be a part of “Islamic
Information series,” it is likely to be connected to the transnational organization
International Society for the Information (or Dissemination) of Islamic Culture, which
appears to be linked to the FIA. Interestingly, per Hassen’s manuscript, this “Islamic
Information Series” was supported through the Ahmad Jamal Foundation. Readers
become privy to this on the Dedication page. Decontextualized, Hassen’s dedication to
her “brother in Islam,” innovating jazz pianist, bandleader and composer, Ahmad Jamal
appears out place in an introduction to Islam. Hassen’s dedication reads, “Lovingly I
dedicate this book to Ahmad Jamal, my brother in Islam, as part of the Islamic
Information Services offered through the Ahmad Jamal Foundation.” Terms like
“lovingly” and “brother” reflect an affective friendship not only between Jamal and
Hassen (the former who was clearly involved in financially supporting the manuscript)
but also a deep organizational relationship between FIA and Jamal (as will be elaborated
on later in this chapter).
124

Hassen’s iconoclastic position on Islamic gender politics, Arab racial formation
and American racial imaginaries imbued in her life writing makes it possible to

122
Ibid, 101 Questions, 62
123
Ibid, 80-81.
124
Abd al-Rahman Azzam’s, who will be discussed in Chapter 2, pre-publication review of
Hassen’s manuscript on page 5 clues us into FIA’s transnational Islamic network that linked
Jeddah-based Egyptian exile to the North American Muslim organization, a network noded
through what me might term “Muslim metropoles” New York, Jeddah and Cairo that cultivated
relationships between Hassen, Jamal, Shawarbi, Azzam, Malcolm and yes, even President Nasser.
100

understand how she can break from members in her Sunni Orthodox community
regarding the status of the NOI within the fold of Traditional Islam. Friendships and
relationship-building with Malcolm X and Ahmad Jamal reveal a kind of intimacy, an
engaged witnessing, and unique life experiences—which included labor organizing in
predominantly male spaces, poetry-writing and grassroots community organizing—help
us to understand why some of her race and gender politics diverged from other FIA
members who developed friendships with Malcolm and Jamal.
125
I argue, all this most
likely contributed to her nuanced politics on American race, religion and gender;
diverging from dominant discourses in the Arab Muslim diaspora of her time.
The Asiatic Asmar Man: Translation of an Arabic Ethnography on the Nation of
Islam
As with Hassen, another Arab Muslim leader is probably best remembered for
proximity to Malcolm X and assistance with his travels to the mashriq and maghreb
(MM) and as an active member of FIA. Although rarely known outside the scholarly
universes of Malcolm X studies and soil chemistry, Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi’s
precious and complicated archival material on the NOI, Black American Islam, and
Arabic imaginaries of American Blackness emerges from his own delegation work,
producing friendships and generative artifacts that included an Arabic raciolinguistics of
asmar as a language of extended kinship, assistance of delegations, and scholarships

125
During her time in New York City, from the 1950s throughout the 1960s, she was a member
of the Egyptian Arab American Seaman's Society; although she worked as a licensed private
investigator and the Civil Defense Director of Brooklyn's 82nd Precinct (from interview with
Saladin Ahmed, November 21, 2016; Egyptian Arab American Seaman's Society 1959, Box 1,
Aliya Hassen Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; “Aliya’s membership
card in the Egyptian Arab American Seaman’s Society,” 1999.04.11g, Aliya Ogdie Hassan
collection, Arab American National Museum archive.
101

through a practice of engaged witness. Like Hassen’s life writing, Shawarbi’s life writing
and life living deliver readers with a complicated portrait of Arab imaginaries around
American Blackness that at times re-inscribes Arabic Islamic authoritative supremacy
and paternalism on questions of “True Islam” because of an illegibility of American
racial formations. And other times, oscillates to expressions of genuine kinship with the
NOI and other Black Americans.
On February 8, 1954, Egyptian national Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi arrived at
the Port of New York on the Queen Mary from Southampton, England to begin a
Fulbright in the Soil Science Department at the University of Maryland.
126
The Cairo
University Assistant professor of Agricultural Chemistry would eventually extend his
Fulbright to February 1956 and transfer to Fordham University in New York. New York
would become a permanent residence as Shawarbi transitioned from Fulbright scholar to
the president of the Islamic Council of New York and director of its Islamic Center, and
later assuming the directorship of FIA.
127
More frequently, Shawarbi is also remembered
for his friendship with Black American religious and political leader Malcolm X;
facilitating access to mashriqi, maghrebi and Islamic leadership on Malcolm’s 1964

126
New York, New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1909, 1925-1957," database with images,
FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2HW6-3V8 : accessed 7 February 2016),
Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi, 1954; citing Immigration, New York City, New York, United
States, NARA microfilm publication T715 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records
Administration, n.d.).
127
Historian Sally Howell and author of Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim
American Past refers to FIA as Federation of Islamic Associations of the United States and
Canada but the organization’s newsletter reads “Federation of Islamic Associations in the United
States and Canada” (Howell, Old Detroit, 150).
102

travels abroad.
128
Yet little is known about Shawarbi’s own writings on Islam in the
United States, including a report for the International Society for the Dissemination of
Islamic Culture which he completed on the Nation of Islam: his 1960 Arabic study Islam
in America [Islam fi Amrika].
129
This chapter offers context for Shawarbi’s historical
significance to transnational American Islam, Afro-Arab imaginaries, and Arabic studies.
My English translation of the chapter “Al-Amrikan as-Simr wa al-Gameeyah al-
Islamiyyah bi Sheekago” (“Black Americans and the Islamic Organization in Chicago”),
which originally appearing in Comparative American Studies: An International Journal’s
special issue “Transnational American Studies in the Middle East and North Africa, is
republished here in the appendix.
130

128
Shawarbi and his relationship to Malcolm X and sometimes the Nation of Islam is discussed in
Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York: New
York University Press, 1997); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York:
Viking, 2010); Peter Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X (New York: Harper & Row, 1973),
Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of
Authority (New York: New York University Press, 2013), Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of
Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956-1974 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America: From the New
World to the New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Edward E.
Curtis IV, “‘My Heart is in Cairo’: Malcolm X, the Arab Cold War, and the Making of Islamic
Liberation Ethics,” The Journal of American History 102(3), (2015); Michael A. Gomez, Black
Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
129
The English translation of this organization (noted as a United Nations non-governmental
organization) shifts from “International Society for the Introduction of Islamic Culture,” as stated
in articles in The New York Times and the Afro-American in 1959, to “International Society for
Dissemination of Islamic Culture” in FIA’s newsletters in 1964. Hence forward, in relation to
Shawarbi’s curriculum vitae and post-1959 work, I will refer to the organization as the
“International Society for the Dissemination of Islamic Culture.” But for material in 1959, as I am
not certain when the English name change is adopted, I will use “International Society for the
Introduction of Islamic Culture” to refer to this organization.
130
Maytha Alhassen, “Islam in America by Mahmoud Yousef Shawarbi,” Special issue
“Transnational American Studies in the Middle and North Africa, Comparative American
Studies: An International Journal 13(4), (2015): 254-264. I am deeply indebted to my mother
Maha Alhassen for assisting in cross-referencing Arabic to English translations of words and
phrases. I would be remiss not to express my abiding gratitude for Ebony Cotelu and Ira
103

This take on Shawarbi is indebted to a growing field of literature on Afro-Arab
imaginaries including Melani McAlister, Edward Curtis, Moustafa Bayoumi, Greg
Thomas, Hisham Aidi, Alex Lubin, Ira Dworkin, and Keith Feldman, who have studied
Black imaginaries around the MM and Sarah Gualtieri, Michelle Hartmann, and Samir
Meghelli who have engaged the Arab and Arabic imaginary around Black Americans and
Islam in America as it intersects with American Blackness.
131
This short text by an
Egyptian professor and Muslim leader living in the U.S., helps refine our understanding
of Black American Muslim life, as both a scholarly endeavor and site of collaboration for
Shawarbi as a Muslim leader in New York. His chapter on the NOI refines our
understanding of what questions and conceptions American Blackness introduced to an
Arab Muslim and Arabic imaginary during a Civil Rights and Third World moment,

Dworkin’s invitation for me to publish this translation and for exceeding the duties of editors to
assist in “mid-wifing” this article.
131
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East
since 1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Alex Lubin,
Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Robin D.G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers:
Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Edward
E. Curtis IV, “‘My Heart Is in Cairo’: Malcolm X, the Arab Cold War, and the Making of Islamic
Liberation Ethics,” The Journal of American History 102(3), (2015); Moustafa Bayoumi, “East of
the Sun (West of the Moon): Islam, the Ahmadis, and African America,” Journal of Asian
American Studies 4(3), (2001); Greg Thomas, “Blame it on the Sun: George Jackson and Poetry
of Palestinian Resistance,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 13(4),
Transnational American Studies in the Middle East and North Africa (2015); Hisham Aidi, Rebel
Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (New York: Vintage, 2014); Keith
Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Sarah Gualtieri, Strange Fruit?: Syrian Immigrants,
Extralegal Violence and Racial Formation in the Jim Crow South, Arab Studies Quarterly 26(3),
(2004); Michelle Hartman, “The Journey by Radwa Ashour,” Comparative American Studies:
Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 13(4), Transnational American Studies
in the Middle East and North Africa (2015); Samir Meghelli, “From Harlem to Algiers:
Transnational Solidarities Between the African American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962-
1978,” in Black Routes to Islam, ed. Manning Marable and Hisham Aidi (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
104

when the linkages between global post-colonial nationalist and liberation struggles,
signaled revolutionary possibility.
For example, in 1952 the Chairman of the Free Officers Movement Gamal Abdel
Nasser led a coup d’état that unseated the British-backed monarch King Faruq. This event
occurred just two years prior to Shawarbi’s arrival in the United States, and during the
writing of this publication Egypt transformed into a new nation-state, forging a republic
with Syria known as the United Arab Republic (UAR), a project that would dissolve
three years after conception (1958-1961). In the context of racial-state formation, how
does the interface of the liminal Arab Republic, the growth of the NOI, and trenchant
white supremacy in the United States, refract through Shawarbi’s text?
Shawarbi's analysis foreshadows post-1965 tensions between Black American
Muslim communities and newly arrived Arab Muslim immigrants.
132
This tension can be
seen in the avowal of Arab supremacist and paternalistic approaches to interpreting the
Nation's social project that complemented a legalistic understanding of Arab immigrants’
entitlement to whiteness.
133
Shawarbi's failure to read the Nation as a project of what
African American historian Zaheer Ali calls the “social engineering of a new people” is

132
See Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131-169.
133
American studies scholar Sylvia Chan-Malik characterizes this as a “Good (Orthodox)
Muslim-Bad (Black) Muslim paradigm” in which there is embedded a, “stark dividing lines
between the “good” racial universalism of a “global” Sunni Islam and the “bad” racialized,”
parochialisms of the NOI, and of African American Islam more broadly.” Sylvia Chan-Malik,
“Race, orthodoxy and ‘real’ Islam,” The Immanent Frame, May 4, 2011,
https://tif.ssrc.org/2011/05/04/race-orthodoxy-and-real-islam/ . Also see Sarah Gualtieri, Between
Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2009); Amaney Jamal and Nadine Naber, eds., Race and
Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subject (Syracuse NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2008).
105

evident as he strategizes options around "correcting" their belief system to the “right
Islamic beliefs.”
134
Shawarbi's text also reveals his limited understanding of the effects of
chattel slavery on the Black American population, the violence of de jure and de facto
Jim Crow and the aims of the Civil Rights Movement, especially how the Nation’s
project of Black separatism diverged from the civil rights agenda of institutional
integration.
Shawarbi and Malcolm X
Scholarship uniformly points to Shawarbi’s role in facilitating MM relationships
in Malcolm X’s travels in 1964, and especially instrumental in facilitating his hajj trip in
April 1964.
135
What is not clear is Shawarbi’s involvement in organizing his 1959 travel
to the region, which was intended to prepare the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s umrah
trip in his capacity as leader of the Nation of Islam. Because Shawarbi developed ties to
the Nation prior to his meeting with Malcolm X in March 1964, his mediation of these
trips offers insight into organizational as much as interpersonal relationships.
Shawarbi proved instrumental not only in vouching for Malcolm X’s commitment
to traditional Islam (providing a letter of certification and call to the Saudi Arabian

134
Zaheer Ali, “From ‘So-Called American Negro’ to ‘Bilalian’: The Construction of an
Alternative National Identity for African American Muslims,” Annual Meeting of the American
Historical Association, Philadelphia, PA, January 6, 2006.
135
See Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1993 (1964)); Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience
and Legacy of African Muslims in the America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
364; Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in
African-American Islamic Thought (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 92-96; Peter Goldman, The
Death and Life of Malcolm X (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Manning
Marable. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 302, 308, 334, 361, 367,
369; Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York:
New York University Press, 1997), 168, 202-3, 233, 241-42, 249, 251-52, 257.
106

Embassy, required for converts to Islam) but also linking him to a politically prominent
(and elite) Sunni Muslim network in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and possibly Lebanon. The
institutional connections however, were facilitated on the strength of a growing
interpersonal engagement with the faith. Although sparsely sourced, journalist Peter
Goldman’s 1979 biography The Death and Life of Malcolm X carries some of the most
detailed accounts of initial “emotional encounter” between Shawarbi and Malcolm in
March 1964.
136
Leading up to Malcolm’s trip to Mecca for the hajj, Shawarbi and
Malcolm engaged in Islamic tutorials at the Director’s Islamic Center of New York and
FIA’s temporary headquarters office on Riverside Drive.
137
Shawarbi’s appraisal of
Malcolm in Goldman appears more colorful, “’He was,’ the professor said, ‘a thorough
gentleman, full of glamour and humour’---but was dismayed by his cultish visions of God
and the devil.”
138
After reading Malcolm Quranic verses like, “Muslims are all brothers
regardless of their color and race,” according to Shawarbi, Malcolm responded by
“shivering and weeping.”
139
Shawarbi read him scriptures on martyrdom, democracy and
race.
140
In response to the question of racial hierarchies within Islamic communities
versus the status of race in Islam, Shawarbi surprisingly acknowledged and dismissed
Arab supremacy and centrism in Islamic practice, “[s]ometimes Arab Muslims consider
themselves first among equals, since the Prophet Muhammad was an Arab, but that Allah

136
Goldman, The Death and Life, 164.
137
Goldman, The Death and Life, 163; Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography, 326.
138
Goldman, The Death and Life, 164.
139
Ibid.
140
Martyrdom: “One of these said that a scientist was of greater benefit to the world than a
martyr’s blood; Malcolm, who believed in learning and expected martyrdom, seemed powerfully
moved” Goldman, The Death and Life, 164. On democracy: “Shawarbi read him other scriptures
about the democracy of Islam—“you are all,” says the Quran, “the rulers and the ruled”—and
lectured him at length about its colorblindness” (Goldman, The Death and Life, 164).
107

recognized no such distinction—that He would judge men solely by their deeds.”
141

After receiving Islamic instruction from Shawarbi for six weeks, Malcolm X
traveled in April 1964 to the mashriq and Africa to perform hajj and meet with Islamic
scholars, pan-Arabist politicians, pan-African figures, and nonalignment leaders. The
generative outcome of these trips, including friendships made and art exchanged will be
examined in Chapter 2.
Shawarbi and the Nation of Islam
In scholarship on Global Islam, Transnational American Islam, and the Modern
Middle East, Shawarbi’s vast literature on Muslim American life and Islamic thought is
rarely engaged. Author of over 30 books, Shawarbi’s written catalogue is divided
between soil science and Islamic communities in the U.S., reflecting the influence of the
Fulbright experience as a disciplinary and methodological pivot for his intellectual
output.
142
His 1960 Arabic language study, Islam in America (Islam fi Amrika), an
informal ethnography on Muslim communities, organizations and mosques in the United
States, includes a chapter on the Nation of Islam titled “Black Americans and the Islamic
Organization in Chicago.”
The Arabic selection of simr, plural of asmar (dark-complexioned person) to
describe Black Americans intrigued me, especially considering contemporary
controversy over the Arabic use of ‘abeed (slaves) to describe Black diasporic

141
Ibid.
142
These include Soil Chemistry (London, Chapman & Hall, 1952); “The Evolution of Solodi
Soils in the Mediterranean Zone of the Nile Delta” (1959), “Micro-colorimetric determination of
potassium with dipicrylamine” (1951), and on Muslim Life and Islamic thought, Islam Versus
Communism (no publication date), Islam and the Muslims in the Continent of the USA (1963).
108

subjectivities. A 2013 confrontation of Arabic speakers use of ‘abeed (both Arabic script
and the transliteration) by CAIR-MI Executive Director and Detroit Imam Dawud Walid
on social media sites inspired the formation of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative
(MuslimARC).
143
MuslimARC’s inaugural campaign included weeks of Twitter
townhalls, hashtag open forums on anti-Blackness and colorism in the Muslim American
community including #BeingBlackandMuslim, #DroptheAWord (“A” for ‘abeed),
#NotFairAndLovely and others. After discovering this work almost a decade ago, I was
led to question what historical point and in which kind of cultural geography does a term
like ‘abeed begin to be almost exclusively associated with the Black diaspora?
Shawarbi’s use of simr coincides with the popularization of Arabic love songs centered
around asmaranee (my dark-complexioned one). Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez’s
Sawah is testimony to the colloquial Arabic use of simr as a term of endearment,
sometimes translated into English as “beloved”: “Tameinuneel asmaranee, amla eil el
ghorba fee” (“Reassure me: how is my attractive dark-complexioned looking girl doing
so far away”). Here, although using the male form of asmar, asmaranee (the function
suffix “-anee” is the possessive plural “my”) is a referent of the female beloved Hafez
longs to be reunited with. In this sense, Shawarbi’s simr as a signifier of American
Blackness, as it maps affective attachment as much as a detachment from the terms of
enslavement, quite possibly functions as an extension of kinship.
Instead of opting for “dark-complexioned” I translate simr to “Black people.”
Requiring more research, it is unclear whether simr represents Black diasporic subjects or

143
See Dawud Walid, “Fellow humans are not ‘abeed,’” Arab American News, September 9,
2013, http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/news/id_7486/Fellow-humans-are-not-
%22abeed%22.html .
109

specifically Black Americans. Shawarbi only diverges from deploying this term when
describing Howard University, which he calls university for the zanouj (plural for Black
people originating from the Swahili Coast, known as Zanj, land of the Blacks). Zanouj in
this instance is likely referencing a Black population that includes international students
from the Black/African diaspora (Caribbean and Africa).
144
In addition, since other
“dark-complexioned” Arabs are referred to by their nation-state origins, this leads me to
believe that, for Shawarbi, simr possibly signifies Blackness, and possibly an American
brand of Blackness when contrasted to use of zanouj. As these words travel through
temporal and spatial planes, they transmute by virtue of contingencies (consistent with
Said’s traveling theory).
Though this may not be Shawarbi’s intention in the text, it becomes conceptually
important within the work to establish the Nation’s relationship to Blackness. As
visibility of the Nation heightened, mainstream press labeled the movement "Black
Muslims," as described by Mike Wallace in WNTA-TV multi-episode documentary “The
Hate that Hate Produced” (1959) and in C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America
(1961). The Nation's identity was more complicated than this reductionism. Concerned
with constructing a genealogy of American Blackness that predates captivity, the Nation
employs “Asiatic Black man” or “Black Asiatic” to describe members’ connection to the
“Original Man.”
145
Shawarbi’s Arabic does not invoke these terms specifically nor have I

144
Perhaps, this African diaspora is constitutive of the “land of the Blacks” for Shawarbi.
145
See Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience, Second Edition
(Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 151: “[W.D.] Fard declared that the blacks of
North America ‘were not Americans but Asiatics’ whose ancestors had ben taken from the
African-Asiatic world by European slave traders in the name of Christianity four hundred years
earlier…black Americans were the ‘lost-found members of the tribe of Shabazz.’” The references
110

found evidence of his familiarity with the Nation’s cosmogony.
Shawarbi’s overt choices, like using simr, also function alongside obvious
omissions. The chapter on the Nation, never mentions the NOI by name nor does
Shawarbi name the Honorable Elijah Muhammad or the references Muhammad makes to
Nation founder Wallace Fard Muhammad (or W.D. Fard) in the eleven-page analysis,
referring to it instead as the “Islamic Organization of Chicago.” In this case,
organizational mediation of interest in transnational Muslim forms of sociation makes the
chapter especially ethnographic. Shawarbi’s encounter with the Nation begins with the
invitation of a taxi driver in Washington, D.C. who observed his pronounced “Muslim-
ness.” Shawarbi’s narration hints towards an encounter with the NOI but never formally
refers to it organizationally. Speaking of the taxi driver, “he informed me that he was also
a Muslim, belonging to a big Muslim organization that has been expanding in the United
States, and this organization has a lot of chapters in different states, and their organization
has a main president in Chicago, and this organization doesn’t accept anyone but Black
Americans (simr).” Shawarbi portrays a surprisingly emotive interaction with the NOI
community, one he characterizes as embodying “the real spirit of Islam” in D.C. and
Virginia; “In truth the tears flew from my eyes from happiness when I met this group of
people in one of their meetings, where you feel the real spirit of Islam enveloping them,

to the “lost-found nation” and the “Tribe of Shabazz” are absent in Shawarbi’s ethnography of the
NOI. For more on genealogy, cosmology and identity construction of the original Asiatic Black
man and the Nation see Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah
Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 41-73 and Liz Mazucci, “Going Back to Our
Own: Interpreting Malcolm X’s Transition from ‘Black Asiatic’ to ‘Afro-American’,” Souls: A
Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 7(1), (2005): 66-83.
111

and you see the Islamic laws (sharia) being practiced.
146

However, a radical openness to learning from indigenous Muslim American
practices, especially cultivated in Black Muslim spaces, is quickly replaced with Arab-
centric commentary and paternalist recommendations, a “false universalizing of the
particular” (as phrased by Islamic studies scholar Sherman Jackson).
147
Shawarbi’s first
critique of the Nation occurs prior to his visit to NOI headquarters in Chicago:
But what these Black Muslims are missing are the right Islamic beliefs. What is
suspected of them is that they seem to believe wrong theories about Islam. They
seem to be insisting that white people (al-beed) come from the devil, and that they
(white people) have brought misery to humankind and they are the reason that so
many wars have been started
148

After meeting with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation’s Arabic and Islamic studies
instructor, Palestinian Jameel Diab, Shawarbi vowed to “correct” the NOI’s beliefs and,
“inappropriate behavior and antagonism that he preaches…so many of the things that he
preaches has no relation to Islam.”
149
Shawarbi suggested organizing delegations to
correct “Islamic beliefs” and providing seven students scholarships to the University of
Cairo.
150

Although it is not clear if Shawarbi’s recommendations were accepted, there is an
interesting historical correlation. Historian Sally Howell writes about a 1959 delegation
undertaken by the FIA to Cairo, sponsored by Egyptian (at the time United Arab
Republic) president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Demonstrating the transnational links

146
Shawarbi, Islam in America, 128.
147
Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.
148
Ibid, 128.
149
See Clegg, An Original Man, 122-34.
150
Shawarbi, Islam in America, 129.
112

cultivated by FIA, Howell explains, “The American delegation had the opportunity to
meet with the president, with the head of Al-Azhar, and with several religious authorities
in the country, and Nasser agreed to send four Al-Azhar-trained imams to the United
States to help meet the demand for Muslim preachers in America. He also agreed to offer
ten Cairo University scholarships to American students and a scholarship for
technological training at Al-Azhar University, all to be arranged and administered by the
FIA.”
151
Shawarbi’s paternalistic attempt to direct NOI members to “true Islam” through
a sponsored Islamic education in Egypt probably did not materialize.
152
However,
Shawarbi’s vision for Black American Muslim instruction in Azhari Islam might have
instrumentalized the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs’ award of twenty tuition-free
scholarships to the internationally renowned al-Azhar University in Cairo during the
summer of 1964 to Malcolm X’s Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI).
153

Shawarbi, in many instances in this text, adopts a liberal colorblindness analysis
of race. For example, he cites Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) to
demonstrate that Black Americans have successfully achieved equality, or in his words,
“the same treatment as White Americans.”
154
For Shawarbi, this case marks a post-racism
moment. As mentioned, Shawarbi cites the decision on educational desegregation while
ignoring the conditions of Jim Crow, especially the violent resistance to integration.
Referencing back to Brown while neglecting the opposition to Autherine Lucy’s

151
Howell, Old Detroit, 158-9.
152
I deploy the term “paternalistic” because Shawarbi appears to have no formal training or
certification in Islamic studies but assumes he has superior “correct” knowledge of “true Islam”
because of his positionality and connection to the MM.
153
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011).
154
Shawarbi, Islam in America, 133.
113

enrollment at University of Alabama, more peculiar since Nasser responded, speaks to a
liberal reading of American racism.
155
The Nation’s draft-dodging policy, willfully
foregoing to fight as foot soldiers to defend white supremacy, is also illegible to
Shawarbi. He reads the Nation’s refusal to fight for the United States in WWII as a
misunderstanding of Islamic texts. Shawarbi misrecognizes the NOI’s use of Islam within
the project of Black separatism. Islam functions as a means to suture a Black Asiatic
history, genealogy, and subjectivity to a future that transcends American nationalism.
Shawarbi’s recommendations to the Nation around conscription enforce national
obligation in the practical absence of citizenship, “I have suggested to these Black
Americans that they are American citizens and have the obligation as other Americans
citizens to adhere to the laws of the state in accordance to be drafted and forming a good
relationship with its citizens.”
156
Shawarbi’s centering state obligations without
acknowledging the critical praxis of refusal precludes him from engaging complexities of
the Nation and its relationship to American Blackness during a civil rights moment.
More importantly, this misrecognition is not benign but leads Shawarbi to
collaborate with state institutions to criminalize Black Muslim resistance to the draft.
Shawarbi’s sketch of his visit to NOI headquarters and meeting with the Elijah
Muhammad, and ruminations on NOI theology vis-à-vis Sunni Islamic belief concludes
abruptly with an account of his visit from the FBI to his New York office: “During my
stay in New York the FBI contacted me and told me those members committed things

155
See “Greetings to Free Negroes”: Richard H. Nolte, “Pure White Democracy: Egypt Reacts to
the Affair of Autherine Lucy,” American Universities Field Staff Reports, Northeast Africa Series
4(1), (1956): 1-8.
156
Shawarbi, Islam in America, 135.
114

that go against the American law, and explained that their action follows the teaching of
Islam.”
157
With a devoted adherence to rigid legalisms, Shawarbi legitimates the FBI’s
position on arresting NOI draft dodgers, “I also told the agent not to hesitate in pursuing
those who disobey the law of the land. And that you should know that Islam is innocent
from what any wrong claimed in the United States.”
158
What part of Shawarbi’s
imaginary around American Blackness paralyzed a compassionate, takāful reading of
possible grievances against serving U.S. Empire?
159
This question is not necessarily tied
to his interpretation of Islam, but how and why does Shawarbi assume to be an authority
on Islamic interpretation (this is years prior to him assuming the role of director or the
Islamic Associations of North America)? It is not clear in the text or in any of the
documents I encountered written by or about Shawarbi that he obtained classical Islamic
training—or any formal training outside of Soil Chemistry. In all my research of his life
writing and community histories about Shawarbi, never have I seen him referenced as an
Imam (an Islamic scholar). What imbues him with this kind of authority to define the
boundaries of “wrong” “theories” and practices?
What remains most compelling about this text are its contradictions. Beyond
Shawarbi’s Arab supremacist and paternalistic approach to Islam among Black
Americans, and his opposition to the NOI’s draft evasion policy, he is impressed by the
influence, vision, and structure of the NOI in this chapter. Upon meeting Elijah

157
Ibid.
158
Ibid, 136.
159
A possible explanation of Shawarbi’s illegibility of Nation draft-dodging lies in the origin
story of the FIA. In conjunction with a network of Muslim organizers, WWII veteran Abdullah
(Charles) Igram established the Federation in 1951 as a political response to advocating for
Islamic burial rites for fallen soldiers, Howell, Old Detroit, 150.
115

Muhammad, the professor becomes immediately fixated on Muhammad’s indisputable
spiritual aura, one he self-reflexively acknowledges being beguiled by, “this spiritual man
has the extreme spirituality to be followed. He is personally strong, energetic and the
great ability of organizing things.”
160
In fact, despite his rebuke of the Nation’s belief
system and practice edging on declarations of heresy, Shawarbi tasks the NOI with
expanding American da’wah (an “invitation” to Islam) efforts.
At the Afro-Asian Bazaar sponsored by Malcolm X’s Temple No. 7 on November
12, 1960—where Louis Farrakhan (known as Louis X) played “A White Man’s Heaven
is a Black Man’s Hell” on the guitar and Malcolm X narrated a screening of a film of his
trip to the mashriq and Africa in 1959—Shawarbi argued for the incorporation of the
Nation into the global Islamic ummah (community of believers), “We need you here to
help bring great truths of our faith to this country.”
161
Here, Shawarbi adopts a different
discursive strategy to connect with the Nation, “We Africans gave civilization to the
world thousands of years ago…we must see to it that civilization endures.”
162
One
wonders if Hassen’s urging of the FIA to attend Temple No. 7’s “important affairs”
materialized in Shawarbi’s participation in the Afro-Asian Bazaar. The speech was
picked up by Black press like the Pittsburg Courier, Amsterdam News and the Chicago
New Crusader with headlines that read, “Moslem From Cairo Lauds Muslims Here” and
“All Muslims are Brothers.”
163
This reference to pan-Africanism, in a literature largely
dominated by pan-Islamism, invites questions around Shawarbi’s possible thoughts on

160
Shawarbi, Islam in America, 131.
161
DeCaro, On the Side of My People, 68.
162
Brenda Gaye Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization,
1956-1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 44.
163
“All Muslims Are Brothers,” Pittsburg Courier, November 12, 1960, 2.
116

Nasser’s “Three Circles” construction (a philosophical commitment to pan-Arabism, pan-
Africanism, and pan-Islamism that will be examined in Chapter 2).
164

Less than a month before Shawarbi’s speech at the NOI’s Afro-Asian bazaar at
Rockland Palace, Amsterdam News reported that Shawarbi and Maulana Muhammad
Fazl-ur-Rahman Ansari of the World Federation of Islamic Missions “denounced” the
NOI. The article explains that Shawarbi, “declared that he will take the issue of Elijah
Muhammad and Talib Dawud before the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs and have
them both declared non-Moslems.” Although Shawarbi did recognize that Muhammad
and Dawud, “have done the faith some good in creating an interest among U.S. Negroes,”
he goes on public record saying that the tension between the NOI and Dawud’s coterie
was a “good thing” for Sunni Orthodoxy in the U.S. to attract their disaffected followers.
In an extended paternalistic analysis, Shawarbi draws suspicion to Dawud and
Muhammad’s motives for performing pilgrimages to Mecca, stating, “Anyone may take
the trip to Mecca, but their motives are questionable.”
165
In this sense, simr can be seen as
an opportunity to extend Islamic kinship, however complicated by a kinship framed in
terms of Arab paternalism that precludes it from fully grasping the intersection of the
ummic and Black freedom struggle.

164
For further elaboration on this see my article in the Journal of Africana Religions, “The ‘Three
Circles’ Construction: Reading Black Atlantic Islam through Malcolm X's Words and
Friendships” 3(1), Special Issue: The Meaning of Malcolm X for Africana Religions: Fifty Years
On (2015): 1-17.
165
The Amsterdam News, October 22, 1960, 1.
117

Shawarbi and Ahmad Jamal
A picture of Ahmad Jamal, initially a convert to Islam through the Ahmadiyya
faith, and his family standing in front of the Giza pyramids is the only image featured in
Shawarbi’s chapter on the NOI. The caption under the photo reads:
Mr. Ahmad Jamal, the millionaire American Muslim, and his wife Mariam Jamal
and daughter Muimina on their visit to the pyramids during their stay in Cairo
while they are touring the African continent to visit their ancestral homeland.
Ahmad Jamal and his wife undertook this tour to build bridges between American
Muslims and Muslims all over the Islamic world. He is a member of the
International Society for the Dissemination of Islamic Culture.

Figure 5: With the inscription “To: Dr. Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi” still legible on the copy in Islam in America, the
photo of Jamal and his family sits on an unnumbered page between pages 128 and 129 in Chapter 10’s Black People
and the Islamic Organization in Chicago. Author’s collection.
Being the only image in the chapter on the “Islamic Organization of Chicago,” it is
curious that Shawarbi does not address Jamal or his relationship with Jamal in the rest of
118

the text. However, this caption is rich with historical record.
The description of Jamal as a “millionaire” and his work with Shawarbi’s
International Society for the Dissemination of Islamic Culture (earlier known as the
International Society for the Introduction of Islamic Culture) is also noted in newspaper
articles reporting on Jamal’s trip to Cairo. National newspapers and Black press covered
Ahmad Jamal’s November 1959 trip to Egypt with Shawarbi, squarely focusing on his
interest in Islamic faith, investing in African real estate, and his financial status. In New
York Times’ “Pianist-Investor is a Hit in Cairo: Jazz Musician Ahmad Jamal finds
Moslem Faith Aids Him on African Visit,” Shawarbi, who welcomes reporters in Cairo’s
famed Shepheard’s Hotel, is referred to as Jamal’s Egyptian host.
166
Shawarbi explains
the significance of Jamal’s place in American culture to the room of reporters, “[Jamal is
a] really famous American pianist on his way to being a millionaire.” A reporter
remarked that they were stunned that “so much wealth might accrue to a pianist and a
Negro,” and Jamal, in response, ends up producing “a sheaf of new contracts” for
performance engagements in the upcoming winter season.
167

This article makes clear that Jamal is mapping Egypt as part of an African
cartography tied to the “homeland of my ancestors” and to his Islamic faith (even
Shawarbi’s text characterizes this trip as a “visit [to] their ancestral homeland” for
Jamal). Jamal explains that Islam offered “‘peace of mind’ as far as race was concerned”

166
Jay Walz, “Pianist-Investor is a Hit in Cairo: Jazz Musician Ahmad Jamal finds Moslem Faith
Aids Him on African Visit,” New York Times, November 20, 1959, 14.
167
Interesting enough, reproducing much of the text from the Times, the Baltimore Afro-
American depicts this exchange between reporters and Jamal/Shawarbi at the hotel verbatim, only
changing “Negro” to “colored.” See “Jamal needs no piano in Cairo,” The Baltimore Afro-
American, November 28, 1959, 1.
119

and cultivated his “growth in the field of music” which, “has proved very lucrative for
me.” The article gives clues into the formation of ties between Jamal, FIA and Shawarbi.
According to the NY Times reporter, Ahmad Jamal, née Fritz Jones, became interested in
Islam and Muslim culture while in Detroit, which lead to his formal association with the
International Society for the Introduction (or Dissemination) of Islamic Culture, in which
both Shawarbi and Hassen were active members. In fact, the first newsletter in which
Shawarbi is at the directorial helm for the FIA acknowledges and thanks Jamal for his
“generous contribution of One Hundred Dollars.”
168
Shawarbi makes note of this
organizational association in the caption to the photograph of Jamal and his family in
front of the Pyramids in Giza, Egypt in “Black People and the Islamic Organization in
Chicago.” Given the timeline, it appears likely that his photograph was taken during this
“delegation” to the African continent, and might have coincided with one of FIA’s
delegations to Egypt (maybe even the first one that toured Egypt in 1959).
The extent of Jamal’s involvement with the FIA is hard to assess, but what
becomes clear, through multiple primary sources, is the significance of the personal
relationships he built within the organization. As aforementioned, two years prior to
Jamal’s trip to Cairo with Shawarbi, Aliya Ogdie-Hassen completes a manuscript titled
The 101 Questions Most Frequently Asked of Muslims (1957) that she “lovingly”
dedicates to Ahmad Jamal, referring to him as “my brother in Islam.”
169
These overtures

168
Igram Abdullah, Federation of Islamic Associations in United States and Canada Newsletter,
January 7, 1964.
169
“Lovingly I dedicate this book to Ahmad Jamal, my brother in Islam, as part of the Islamic
Information Services offered through the Ahmad Jamal Foundation.” “The 101 Questions Most
Frequently Asked of Muslims 1959” [unpublished manuscript], Articles, Manuscripts, and Poems
1923-1959, box 1, Aliya Hassen Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
120

of kinship, likely fortified through this delegation work, indicate not only extended
contact between both Shawarbi and Hassen with Jamal, but a friendship grounded in a
politics of Transnational Islam.
Chapter 2 will continue this conversation of the complicated relationship between
the ummah, MM and the Black Freedom struggle through Malcolm X’s travels to the
region as a delegate for “22 million” Black Americans, where he generates critical
analyses around a “three circle construction,” an “ummic imperative,” “dollarism,” and
articles on decoloniality through a practice of engaged witness that includes friendship-
making, poetry, and delegation travel.

121

CHAPTER 2:
MALCOLM X IN THE MASHRIQ (AND AFRICA)
“I still remember I told King Faisal, he is an American Muslim, Mr. X, American
Muslim. I still remember that… I still remember his face. I still remember his face---he’s
one of the faces you don’t forget.”
–Nawaf Yassin
170

“When you come, I’ll show you Harlem.”
–Malcolm X to Azizah al-Hibri
171

On July 30, 2010, in Amman Airport, flanked by three of my brothers, my sister
and my mother, awaiting our departing flight to the states after a 3-week trip to Jordan,
Syria and Lebanon for my maternal cousin’s birthday; I received this email:
Hi May,
I met with nawaf yassin and i asked him what he had to do with MALCOLM X?
He said that when MALCOLM X came to Saudi Arabia for hajj, at that time he
was working as a protocol officer in the royal court, so he was asked to be a
witness in malcolm x’s declaration of islam in front of a sheik before he went for
hajj also there was another witness with a guy called Abdul Aziz Al majid who
was my grandfather’s Secretary.

regards
sabah
172

“So that’s why you have that Malcolm X thing,” my mom replied after I hysterically read
the email to her. Sabah Yassin was grand-daughter of Yusuf Yassin (1892-1962), the
Foreign Minister to many Saudi kings, and my maternal grandfather’s uncle. I met her in

170
Nawaf Yassin, interview with author, Beirut, Lebanon, July 2, 2011.
171
Per Azizah al-Hibri in Azizah al-Hibri, interview with author, Washington D.C., May 27,
2014.
172
Sabah Yassin, e-mail message to author, July 30, 2010.
122

Damascus just a couple weeks prior during my cousin’s wedding. Her role as Yassin
family oral historian became quickly apparent as she walked me through the family’s
political legacy—including Yusuf Yassin’s political and religious training as he rose to
regional fame as a lead general in the 1936 “Great War” of Palestinian Liberation and as
a student of Islamic reformist Rashid Rida while growing up in Latakia, Syria. This was
confirmation to a lingering query I had for the two years prior.
In 2008, the Schomburg made parts of its Malcolm X Collection accessible to the
public, including his travel diaries from his two trips to mashriq and Africa in 1964 (and
trips to London and Paris). Without a beat, and without any institutional funding or
support, I booked a roundtrip ticket from Los Angeles to New York, with the intention of
committing all my trip to look at the collection (this is after I graduated from my Masters
program from Columbia, where I worked as a research assistant for the Malcolm X
Project and before I even applied to doctoral programs). Scouring through the microfilm,
I nearly fell out of my chair.
In the early part of his travel diaries, Malcolm X made multiple references to
Nawaf Yassin, including his contact information. As Malcolm tended to do, he accounted
for the minutiae of the day’s pass—the people he would encounter, the movements he
would make, the conversations that emerged and sometimes overall spiritual and political
reflections of the movement. As he told the story of moving around Jeddah to secure
entry into hajj, and after he had been designated “guest of the state” by Saudi Arabia’s
then Crown Prince, Faisal, it was the Minister of Protocol, one of Yusuf Yassin’s
nephews, who was his escort through bureaucratic red tape. At the time, I did not know
123

this detail, his relational positioning in my family. I just saw his last name, albeit a very
common Arabic last name. But I knew the context.
My maternal grandfather’s political career was spent working for the Saudi
government, operating different hats, some decades spent as a Cultural Attaché for Saudi
embassies in Egypt, Spain, Turkey and even Ghana in the 1960s. My khalto (maternal
uncle), keeper of my maternal grandfather’s stories, later informed me that my
grandfather, Abdul-Fattah Yassin, met Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali during his
position as Cultural Attaché at the Saudi embassy in Accra in 1964. As I dashed out of
the basement viewing room in the Schomburg to locate cell phone reception, I called my
mother to confirm or deny the connection. She, “didn’t know of a Nawaf,” she said. My
hopes deflated at the thought of my overzealous rush to find historical connections. But
my intuitive interpretation never left. Sabah’s email confirmed intuition.
Nawaf Yassin, who after almost fifty years, revealed that he “still remember[ed]
his face,” also referred to Malcolm as “not a dark black, part black.” Forty-seven years
later, Yassin recalls logistical details of Malcolm’s trip to Saudi Arabia in April 1964.
The day after his hajj, Yassin took Malcolm to greet Crowned Prince Faisal at his court,
“I still remember I told King Faisal, he is an American Muslim, Mr. X, American
Muslim. I still remember that.”
173
Yassin’s emphasis on Malcolm’s skin color and
American Muslim-ness gives us insight into the different ways race, colorism, religion
and nationality (especially American identity) operated in Arabic-speaking contexts (in
the mashriq and throughout the diaspora); also in some ways drawing upon the

173
Nawaf Yassin, interview with author, July 2, 2011.
124

possibilities of Shawarbi’s languaging of asmar and as-simr to describe the Black
American Muslims he met in Washington, DC and Chicago. This characterization of
Malcolm as “not a dark black, part black,” continues to make me curious Malcolm’s
racial legibility as a light-skin-toned Black American traveling across the mashriq and
maghreb (MM).
As I have covered in the last chapter, Shawarbi’s encounters with the Nation of
Islam (NOI) and subsequent friendship-making and network-building with fellow New
York City Muslim leader Malcolm X, and Aliya Ogdie Hassen’s overtures to the NOI
and jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal; give us insight into how transnational and Arab American
Muslim leaders conceptualized Blackness in the US and ultimately forged friendships
with Black American Muslims. In this chapter, I chart the significance of those
friendships in facilitating access to the network of Arab diasporic Islam during Malcolm
X’s travels to in the Middle East and Africa from both April 15-May 21 to July 10-
November 17 of 1964.
Through these friendships, I will explore the transformation of Malcolm’s post-
hajj political analyses, the generative artifacts that emerge from specific moments of
engaged witness during his tenure in MM as a delegate for “22 million” Black
Americans. First, I will theorize Malcolm’s engagement with the “three circles
construction” and the ways they were mapped onto political frameworks emerging from
his travels. Malcolm’s relationship building with pan-Arab and Islamic political leaders
introduce him to Islamic theories, what some scholars have characterized as Islamic
Liberation Theology or Islamic Liberation Ethics. This introduction to Islamic Liberation
125

Theology influenced Malcolm’s understandings of American race, Blackness, and the
Black freedom struggle.
The story of Malcolm’s 1964 travels involves both his practice of engaged
witness and his work as an emissary of Black America, testifying on behalf of domestic
colonial subjects, a geography of “victims of democracy,” across the “Arab world,”
Africa and Asia. I will investigate this point on the “two-way” exchange of engaged
witness with the story of Lebanese Muslim human rights lawyer and Third World
feminist Azizah al-Hibri and other narratives from Arab Muslims who befriended
Malcolm during his 1964 international travel. Through Malcolm’s travels across MM, we
see a glimpse into post-WWII Arab Cold War politics and the transnational Islamic
network that was connected and sustained through institutions, governments,
organizations and friends.
Lastly, I will use Malcolm’s trip to Gaza in September 1964 as a deep case study
of engaged witness, focusing on the role travel, friendship, and poetry played in
influencing Malcolm’s global racial politics and “ummic imperative;” frameworks
informed by and through the Black Radical Tradition and Islamic humanism. Malcolm’s
life writing, including his 1964 travel diaries, op-Eds and coverage in global press, and
correspondences, will constitute the bulk of the analysis. This archival material is
buttressed with research from the Malcolm X Project, interviews (both semi-structured
and oral history interviews) I conducted through in-person interviews and follow up
email correspondences with Saudi Deputy Protocol Officer Nawaf Yassin, Saudi
photographer Reem Al Faisal and Azizah al-Hibri; and life writing by Arab and Islamic
126

political figures including pan-Arabist and pan-African United Arab Republic President
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Arab League founder and pan-Islamist Abd al-Rahman Azzam,
Sudanese professor Malik Badri, and Sudanese Ahmed Osman.
Almost fifty years after his death, substantial scholarship on Malcolm X has been
surprisingly limited. Relying heavily on Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X
(1965), for decades scholars have and continue to utilize this groundbreaking yet
incomplete book’s Bildungsroman narrative arch as a primary source for Malcolm’s
political and spiritual development.
174
The doors of under-examined areas of his life have
remained shut in the absence of keys to vaults of further knowledge. One such locked
collection was Malcolm’s travel diaries from 1964 documenting his time in the mashriq
and Africa. Although available through the Malcolm X Collection at the New York
Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture since summer of 2008,
much remains for scholars at the intersection of Middle East Studies, Islamic Studies, and
African Diaspora Studies (the three circles!) to further probe and historically
contextualize across geographies and disciplines.
Malcolm’s travel diaries, where he charts not only his travels, meetings with
heads of state, speech outlines but also where he enumerates the mundane inner workings

174
Historian Garrett Felber, a head researcher for Marable’s Malcolm X biographer, shares this
critique of contemporary Malcolm X scholarship’s use of the Autobiography, “If Malcolm's
image had been distorted by 1967, the representations by present-day scholars have largely
magnified and reproduced the flat political understanding and hyperbolized epiphanies of Haley's
conception of Malcolm X in the Autobiography.” Garrett A. Felber, “A Writer Is What I Want,
Not an Interpreter”: Alex Haley and Malcolm X—Conceiving the Autobiographical Self and the
Struggle for Authorship, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, 12(1),
(2010): 33-53.

127

of friendship, like “morning tea at Ahmed’s office” in Cairo almost every day at 9am,
and where he mulls over spiritual counsel from Azzam Pasha over his relationship with
Elijah Muhammad, remain in need of deep political, social, economic and religious
contextualizing. A corrective would be to engage deeper with the archive while being
attentive to global political histories shaping the Global South, namely the context of
African decolonizing movements, the Arab Cold War, nonalignment and Third World
politics. These historical contexts inform us of the political backdrop where Malcolm’s
critical analyses emerges. This is where the nuances of Malcolm’s politics are fomented,
in an engaged witness of friendship making, “seeing” and artistic sharing. Malcolm’s
testifying to the plight of American Blackness in the U.S. during his travels and
witnessing of Islamic ummic praxis, contribute to forming critical analyses around race,
Islam, and coloniality. These testimonies to the horrors of American racism to Arab
Muslims who Malcolm befriends on his travels also serves to transform their analysis of
the Black American experience.
As Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011) attempted to do
by illuminating in detail the mechanics of Malcolm’s post-hajj journey networks across
Africa and the mashriq, I seek to disrupt the Haley-ian narrative with a Historical
Malcolm rooted in the Third World, pan-Arab, pan-African and pan-Islamic politics that
Malcolm travels through.
175
A travel itinerary politically explicated by the Marable

175
As Garrett Felber reminds us, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a collective—if not
cooperative—effort by Malcolm X and Alex Haley” continuing “Haley's influence takes the
politically and socially alien subject, a Muslim, revolutionary black nationalist, and Pan-
Africanist, and transforms him into something domestic and unthreatening through quintessential
American images.” Felber engages Haley’s primary sources (like letters to his editor), to reveal
Haley’s intention of writing the Autobiography as part of a clarion call to Christianity and
128

biography (and to a certain extent Marika Sherwood’s book and Louis DeCaro’s
biography), I seek to dig further, deeply engaging the dynamics of global race politics,
Islamic thought and pan-Arab nationalism. Scholars Edward E. Curtis IV, Hisham Aidi,
Emily O’Dell, Alex Lubin’s work on Malcolm’s Afro-Arab political imaginary and Keith
Feldman’s Afro-Arab diasporic culture have contributed to this trajectory of exploring
the Historical Malcolm within a global Islam and pan-Arab Cold War context by
studying the diaries, Third World/nonalignment press, and traveling to places like Egypt
and Sudan to locate the transmission of oral histories on Malcolm’s travels.
176
Engaged
witness allows for a different set of questions about this context, the central one being:
not just “what” but also “how” did Malcolm learn (what he learned) on his travels and
meetings with Arab, African and Asian heads of state, Islamic leaders and conversations
with civil society? From this situating of Malcolm within the framework of engaged

American democracy to step up their game to quell the rising popularity of the NOI under the
charismatic leadership of Malcolm X. Furthermore, he urged “Christianity and democracy” to
“remove the Negro's honest grievances and thus eliminate the appeal of such a potent racist
cult.” Felber, through a close reading of Haley’s articles on the NOI and Malcolm X, provide
compelling evidence illustrating the invasiveness of Haley’s “voice” (or “narrative
ventriloquism”) in the Autobiography, offering “an insight toward Haley's manipulation of
Malcolm X's autobiographical self.” Aligned with MXP school of thought, Felber sees the
Autobiography as being, “constructed by Malcolm to hyperbolize the depths of Detroit Red's
moral and spiritual depravity in an effort to construct a parable that would give personal evidence
valorizing Muhammad's teachings.” As a convincing example of authorial over-reach, Felber
points to Haley’s titling of Malcolm’s travel abroad as “El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz” as opposed to
“Omowale,” to advance the novel’s resolution of Malcolm as a proponent of Islamic universalism
that emphasized integrationism (as opposed to Malcolm’s work to influence Black Americans
into an African diasporic consciousness through a pan-African nationalist vision). Additionally,
three chapters outlining Malcolm’s plan for pan-African unity were omitted a month after
Malcolm’s assassination (Garrett A. Felber, “A Writer Is What I Want,” 33-53).
176
See Emily O’Dell, “X Marks the Spot: Mapping Malcolm X’s Encounters with Sudan—
students, scholars and religious leaders from Sudan,” Journal of Africana Religions, 3(1), Special
Issue: The Meaning of Malcolm X for Africana Religions: Fifty Years On (2015); Keith
Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis MN,
2015). 90-92, and the more articles in Journal of Africana Religions, 3(1), Special Issue: The
Meaning of Malcolm X for Africana Religions: Fifty Years On (2015).
129

witness, we see multiple Malcolms animated: the delegate of American Islam, the
emissary for Black America and the anthropologist of “Dark World nations.”
The “Three Circles” Construction: Reading Black Atlantic Islam through Malcolm
X’s Words and Friendships

Figure 6: “Welcome!...All the Kings and Heads of African Nations at the Summit Conference” advertisement for
Organization of African Unity Summit. From Egyptian Gazette, July 17, 1964. Newspapers of Africa on Microfilm,
Lehman Library, Columbia University.

130

President Gamal Abdul Nasser was so right when he said that there are three circles: the
Arab, the African and the Islamic.
—Malcolm X
177

The discursive tradition of referring to Arab, African, and Islamic identities as
cohesive, concentric, “circles” had its origins in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt’s
Liberation: The Philosophy of Revolution, a revolutionary handbook published in 1955
that marked the overthrow of the Western-backed monarchy of King Farouk.
178
The
“three circles” construction was also applied to the emerging pan-African, pan-Arab, and
pan-Islamic movements in an effort to reconfigure notions of nation-state boundaries in
the region. Recalling an argument posited in the Introduction, Brent Hayes Edwards
invocation of décalage as “the separation between bones and members” that “allows
movement,” the joint that offers a “strange two-ness,” aligns with the conception of
difference in verse 49:13 of the Qur’an: “We have created you male and females, and we
have made you from nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another.”
179

The verse emphasizes the place of differing positionalities in ummic praxis, that is, in the
context of the global Muslim community, of a “unity in difference” achieved through

177
“Malcolm X on Islam, US, and Africa,” Egyptian Gazette, August 17, 1964.
178
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s Liberation: Philosophy of Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Public
Affairs Press, 1955), 110: “So much for the first circle in which we must turn, and in which we
must act with all our ability—the Arab circle. If we consider next the second circle—the
continent of Africa—I may say without exaggeration that we cannot, under any circumstances,
however much we might desire it, remain aloof from the terrible and sanguinary conflict going on
there today between five million whites and 200 million Africans. We cannot do so for an
important and obvious reason: we are in Africa. There remains the third circle, which
circumscribes continents and oceans, and which is the domain of our brothers in faith, who,
wherever under the sun they may be, turn as we do, in the direction of Mecca, and whose devout
lips speak the same prayers.”
179
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black
Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15.
131

“know[ing] one another.” Nasser’s challenge to Western hegemony, one aimed at
leveraging power from rather than aligning with bipolarity through a politics of
neutrality, won Malcolm’s favor and almost immediately inspired him to think of U.S.
domestic coloniality in terms of overlapping diasporas, a “unity in difference” embodied
in the three circles construction.
180

Despite the importance the three circles trope assumed in Malcolm’s thought,
however, it is not mentioned in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this omission
speaks to a more general neglect of difference in unity in the book.
181
The Autobiography
at times reads as disengaged from sociopolitical contextualizations that situate
phenomena like the three circles and leaders like Nasser. What are the significances of
the silences, the “blue notes,” not played in the Autobiography’s concordant composition
of Malcolm X’s life? What can be ideologically recovered in the movement across these
sociopolitical and historical décalages? To better understand the implications of this
omission, I intend to develop a sociohistorical and political portrait of African (and Black

180
Ibid., 11.
181
Afro-Asiatic is a term originating in NOI hagiography and Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science
Temple, one that Malcolm X constantly invoked in his speeches in the course of describing
collaborations between Asian and African countries, including the historic meeting of twenty-
nine African and Asian nations in Indonesia in 1955 (known as the Bandung conference).
According to historian Richard Brent Turner in Islam in the African-American Experience,
“Noble Drew Ali maintained that a series of peoples were the descendants of Canaan and Ham
and therefore the original Asiatic nations. Among them he numbered the Egyptians, the Arabians,
the Japanese, the Chinese, the Indians, the people of South America and Central America, the
Turks, and the African Americans” (Islam in the African-American Experience [Bloomington IN:
Indiana University Press, 2003]. 93). The Afro- Asian signifies for Malcolm X both the Bandung
“Afro-Asian bloc” and NOI’s “Asiatic Black man,” nations and peoples who resisted Western
hegemony. Vijay Prashad resurrects the memory of this polycultural creation in his 2002 book
Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), as do Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen in their 2008 edited volume Afro
Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian
Americans (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
132

American), Arab, and Islamic leaders befriended by Shabazz. His relationships with Arab
American Muslim community activists, African leaders, Arab Muslim leaders, and the
Cairo expat community of Black American literati and art scene members (discussed in
Chapter 3) not only represent these circles but also reveal their malleability, challenging
the ossification of nation-state boundaries. These transnational friendships developed
through Malcolm’s travels as a delegate of Black America, also demonstrate the ways
Malcolm is theorizing the work of a difference of unity operationalizing through the call
to “know one another,” that of the practice of friendship-making, of “true brohood.”
I hope to contribute to the study of what Moustafa Bayoumi has termed a Black
Atlantic Islam by exploring Shabazz’s relationships with African, Islamic, and Arab
leaders and the Black American expat community.
182
The three circles construction, a
transnational phenomenon like that of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Michael West’s
Black Pacific, and Agustin Lao-Montes’ Afro-Hispanic diaspora, can be seen as part of a
discursive interrogation into Afro-diasporic subalternity that complements the field of
Black studies by providing an additional metropole of inquiry: Cairo, Egypt.
Part of the work in this chapter and Chapter 3 is concerned with a multiplicity of
tasks: to use the sociopolitical and historical elisions in the Autobiography to explore
articulations in the three circles construction, Black radicalism, and the ummic imperative
to demonstrate how these elisions act as silences that speak volumes about shifting from a
U.S.-centrist to a “world historical perspective.” Chapter 3 will flow from this analysis to
argue for an understanding of Cairo as a metropole referent for Black transnational

182
Moustafa Bayoumi, “Moving Beliefs: Migrations and Multiplicities in Black Atlantic Islam,”
unpublished manuscript, Brooklyn College, CUNY.
133

interaction in the 1960s where “South-South dialogue” between Black Americans and
Egyptians emerges through U.S. state apparatuses. To better understand these three
circles in relationship to Malcolm X, I propose that we consider Cairo in the 1960s as a
Black Atlantic Islam metropole. Scholars of Afro-Arab Islamic encounters and of
Malcolm X Studies Edward E. Curtis IV and Hisham Aidi have initiated this exploration
into Malcolm’s relationship with Egypt, Aidi explaining Malcolm’s attraction to Nasser’s
Egypt of “cosmopolitan progressivism” and Curtis writing on Malcolm’s “Islamic ethics
of liberation inspired by Nasser’s example” leading to Shabazz’s “road to Cairo.”
183

Beyond textual excavation, this is also a character study of Malcolm X’s affective
ties, of his friends, who “through multiple-mediated identity commitments” like that
expressed in the three circles trope contributed to and complicated U.S. centrism in the
ways they spoke to and spoke back to Western hegemony. Or, as more coherently
communicated by Stuart Hall’s definition of “different levels of articulation,” they
contributed to and complicated U.S. centrism in the ways they were both “joining up”
and “giving expression to.”
184
His friendships reveal in multifaceted ways a “speaking
back to” or “speaking at” MM through what Earl Lewis calls “a history of overlapping
diasporas.”
185
I investigate the contours of these “overlapping diasporas” articulated in
the three circles construction through Malcolm X’s friendships. The three circles

183
See Hisham Aidi, “The Political Uses of Malcolm X’s Image,” The Nation, July 12, 2016,
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-political-uses-of-malcolm-x-image/; Edward E. Curtis IV,
“‘My Heart is in Cairo’: Malcolm X, the Arab Cold War, and the Making of Islamic Liberation
Ethics,” Journal of American History, 102 (3), (2015): 776.
184
Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of
Communication Inquiry 10 (5), (1986): 10–12.
185
Earl Lewis, “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping
Diasporas,” American Historical Review 100(3), (1995): 765–87.
134

construction begs to be seen in an international context with a constellation of reference
points that not only refer back to Africa, but back to the Arab world, back to the Islamic
world, and so forth. By drawing on Edwards’s reworking of Hall’s vision of articulation,
linking and connecting across gaps, we can begin to hear the blue notes of the text. It is in
these silences that Malcolm X forcefully speaks.
Global Islamic and Arab Diaspora Networks

“This feeling I have right now is in itself worth my entire pilgrimage. I haven’t really felt
like this since ‘my prison years’ when I would spend days upon days in solitude, hrs.
upon hrs. studying and praying. There is no greater serenity of mind than when one can
shut the hectic noise & pace of the materialistic outside world, & seek inner peace within
one’s self.”
–Malcolm X, April 25, 1964
186

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Egyptian-born, New York–based soil chemist and
FIA director Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi established a friendship with Malcolm X after
Shabazz left the Nation of Islam (NOI). This friendship was instrumental not only in
cultivating Arab and Muslim contacts that would help Malcolm carry out the hajj but also
in securing and fortifying a network of contacts with leaders in both communities, the
crème de la crème of the Arab and Arab American worlds. One substantial friendship led
to another substantial friendship, forming a complex web of powerful political contacts.
And in some instances, these overlapping contacts created knots of tension, disrupting the
idealistic unity envisioned by the three circles construction.
After Malcolm’s “shattering” from NOI, he re-connected with Shawarbi, who was

186
Malcolm X Diary, April 15, 1964 (microfilm: reel 9), Malcolm X Collection: Papers, 1948–
1965 (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York).

135

the director of FIA as well as the author of over thirty books, (including the 1960
ethnographic study on Islam in America, Islam fi Amrika) and who he met at the Afro-
Asian Bazaar sponsored by Malcolm X’s Temple No. 7 on November 12, 1960 (as
discussed in Chapter 1).
187
Not only did Malcolm’s friendship with Shawarbi help to
facilitate his hajj trip that year but it also opened the doors to the heavy hitters of the Arab
political and religious world. Shawarbi had ties to Saudi-based Arab political elites and
exiles, including Abd al-Rahman Azzam, honorifically referred to as Azzam Pasha, his
Swiss-trained engineer son Dr. Omar Azzam, Saudi Prince Muhammad Faisal (son of at
the time Crowned Prince Faisal al Saud), and Said Ramadan, the Islamic Center in
Geneva’s director and founder (and the son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder
Hassan al-Banna). Meeting them made for the political and professional version of
striking gold.
Some scholars of Malcolm X studies have written about Malcolm X’s encounters
with political figures form pan-Arab and global Islamic networks, but few have offered
insight into the impact of these travels and friendships had on Malcolm’s post-NOI
spiritual consciousness and the development of his internationalist, Third Worldist and
Black American political projects. Integral to this research is thinking through
friendships, demonstrated through “spirit of brotherhood” and “hospitality,” as part of an
ummic praxis, the practice of cultivating a global community of believers united in
“Oneness” (tawhid) through diversity of “nations” and “tribes;” this “difference in unity.”

187
I employ historian Zaheer Ali’s concept of a “shattering” between Malcolm X and the NOI as
opposed to a clean break. It is a shattering because, as Ali explained to Manning Marable and I in
MXP meetings, because “parts of the Nation were left in Malcolm and parts of Malcolm were left
in the NOI.” Zaheer Ali in discussion with the author, September 2007.
136

Malcolm’s emphasis on “spirit of brotherhood” and “Oneness” of the ummah is precisely
what propels his interventions on American racism, global indigeneity and coloniality.
Egypt: Gamal Abdel Nasser
1964: April 15-17, May 1-5, July 12-September 18

Malcolm X’s admiration for Nasser was unambiguous in its articulations, as can
be seen in his frequent references in his last speeches to his “one hour and half
conversation” with the Egyptian leader and in his references to the nationalization of the
Suez Canal in his early speeches as an example of a “dark-skinned” leader standing up to
the neocolonial and imperialist world. Shabazz’s diary provides further evidence of his
personal fascination with the Egyptian leader. Before heading out to Mecca to embark on
his hajj, Malcolm stopped in Cairo for a couple of days. In Cairo, he visited the
president’s palace (quba). After writing his name in the president’s guestbook, he left this
message for him: “On my way to Hajj, I stop to pay respect and honor to his Excellency,
our pres and leader of Islam, GAN, whom I greatly admire.” He signed the note “MES,
Leader of Islam in USA,” referring to himself by his NOI given last name, “Malcolm El-
Shabazz.”
188
This was quite literally the first gesture of Malcolm’s 1964 travels. His
political reflections of Egypt’s place in a bipolar Cold War world are written in forceful
terms. Concluding from his initial witness of Nasser’s Egypt synthesized by his years of
studying Egyptian nonalignment, “no wonder the industrialization (modernization) by
Nasser of today’s Egypt is so greatly feared by colonial powers,” continuing that
Egyptian industrialization, what he called “true independence” in parenthesis, was the

188
Malcolm X Diary, April 15, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.

137

“greatest threat to the West.” Malcolm applies the three circle construction to his analysis
highlighting what the “Egypt industrialization” example signifies for pan-African, “One
African country that rises from colonialism to true economic independence will serve as a
‘dangerous’ example (incentive) to the others.”
Malcolm X returned to Egypt in the summer of 1964, from July 17-September 18,
to attend the Organization of African Unity’s (OAU) second annual conference in Cairo,
where he called on African and Arab leaders to collaborate with his newly developed
Organization of African American Unity (OAAU), positing a revolutionary strategy of
internationalizing the Black American plight through this linked hegemony shifting
movement. That same summer, Egypt also hosted the second Arab Summit Conference in
Alexandria, which Malcolm X also attended. In both instances, Nasser attempted to
centralize his leadership in pan-Arab and pan-African movements. Malcolm’s fascination
with Nasser continued to grow. An entry in his diary, which appears to be an outline for a
speech, confirms this:
1. Honor to be in Cairo
2. 3rd Time—always at home
3. Your hospitality, warmth friendliness is unequaled—true brohood
1. Your President is my President
2. A Man: fearless, far-seeing (wise)
3. Uncompromising on the side of freedom
4. Supports (always) African Freedom Fighters
5. Supports freedom everywhere
1. Brought freedom to Egypt (Africa)
138

2. returned The Suez to Africans
3. Defeated the foreign invaders
4. Good man, good muslim—may God bless him
189

The three circles construction, the “true brohood” of the Arab, the African, and the
Muslim, is very much in evidence here.
190
Like W. E. B. Du Bois, who saw the
nationalization of the Suez Canal as a symbolic victory for Africa in the face of Western
imperialism and a history deformed by colonial violence, Malcolm too was inspired by
Nasser’s uncompromised commitment to a politics of neutrality and Third Worldism that
successfully defeated European political aggression in 1956 by returning the Suez to
Africans. FBI documents even allege that Malcolm met with Nasser during on July 13,
1959; during his travel to the mashriq and Africa as an emissary for the NOI’s Elijah
Muhammad.
Malcolm paints a euphemistic portrait of Nasser in his diary, overlooking
Nasser’s own hegemonic aspirations, particularly his megalomaniacal desire to become
the leader of the nonalignment movement, to be at the center of pan-Arabism (a desire
that alienated other Arab nations with similar political objectives who were displaced by
Nasser’s aggressive reconfiguring of regional politics), and to be at the center of pan-

189
Ibid, undated, notebook titled “II-2.” The first dated entry in this diary from the travel diaries
is August 22, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
190
In this instance, Malcolm X specifically deploys “brohood,” shorthand for “brotherhood,” as
an Islamic concept. In addition to reaffirming Nasser’s three circles (“President Gamal Abdul
Nasser was so right when he said that there are three circles: the Arab, the African and the
Islamic. Only others are not as far-sighted as he is to see it.”) Malcolm X also referred to Nasser
as his “president” in an interview with Cairo-based, English language daily the Egyptian Gazette.
The interviewer explains the fallout of Malcolm X’s admiration for Nasser: “Malcolm X, himself,
is the personal friend of many African leaders and irritates Americans by talking of ‘my
President’ meaning Gamal Abdul Nasser.” “Malcolm X on Islam, Africa and the US,” Egyptian
Gazette, August 17, 1964, 3.
139

Africanism (a move that produced tension between Nasser and Ghana’s Kwame
Nkrumah). Malcolm X instead focuses on global political implications of a three circle
vision and Nasser’s use of pan-Islamism (which also inspired an Islamic da’wah
(missionizing) competition with Saudi Arabia) as part of a liberation theology. Malcolm
X discussed and praised Nasser’s position on Islam in his speech to the Shuban al-
Muslimin in Egypt: “His concept of Islam forces him to fight for the liberation of all
oppressed people, whether they are Muslims or otherwise, because Islam teaches us that
all of humanity comes from Allah, and all of humanity has the same God-given right to
freedom, justice, equality—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
191

It was this deployment of Islamic rhetoric that inspired the leaders of the Ikhwan
al-Muslimoon, the Muslim Brotherhood, to assist Nasser in dethroning British puppet
King Farouk. However, Nasser, like other Arab nationalist leaders, skillfully played on
the cultural importance of Islam in Arab history to craft a nationalism that was not
entirely secular (in order to distance themselves from Western secularists, a position that
was fundamental to Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athism) and to preempt any appeal that
movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which presented a potentially explicit
challenge to these regimes’ authoritarian rule, might have on their Arab populace. Years
later, sensing a growing threat to his power base, Nasser betrayed his fellow “freedom
fighters” by exiling them out of Egypt. Nasser’s violent suppression of the Muslim
Brotherhood—a consequence of the “built-in-flaw” of the Third World project that Vijay

191
Interesting that Malcolm would marry NOI edicts of “freedom, justice and equality” to the
famous Jeffersonian promises enshrined in the U.S.’s Declaration of Independence of “life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Malcolm X Diary, undated entry, July 10–September 29,
1964 notebook (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
140

Prashad speaks of in The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World—
produced exiles like Azzam Pasha and Said Ramadan and symbolic martyrs like Sayid
Qutb would come back to haunt the Egyptian power structure.
192

Arab authoritarian leaders’ adroit use of Islam as an organizing principle to
sustain and reproduce their nationalist regimes unexpectedly kindled the imagination of
the Black international community—non-Muslim and Muslim—leading it to see itself as
connected to Arab and African nations. “It is significant,” writes Samuel W. Allen, a
poet, writer, essayist, civil servant, translator, and short-time editor for Presence
Africaine (replacing Richard Wright while he filmed Native Son), also known by the pen
name Paul Vesey, “that Malcolm X was a convert to Islam, that Fanon’s revolutionary
message was forged in the fire of the struggle of Moslem Algeria, and farther back, that a
Black West Indian immigrant to Africa in the mid-19
th
century, Edward Blyden, was the
author of an influential volume (Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race) urging the
greater virtue for Black people of Islam over Christianity.”
193

Said Ramadan, probably one of the most famous exiles, established an Islamic
Center in Geneva, Switzerland. Malcolm X met Ramadan likely through Sudanese
Dartmouth undergraduate Ahmed S. Osman (who sent Malcolm literature from the

192
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The
New Press, 2008), xvii-xv. Prashad contends that the Third World was a not a place but a project,
one that “longed for dignity above all else, but also the basic necessities of life (land, peace, and
freedom)” and one that ultimately failed because it favored anticolonial nationalisms to
transformative social revolution. Prashad identifies this as the “built-in-flaw” of the Third World
project: “The fight against the colonial and imperial forces enforced a unity among various
political parties and across social classes…Once in power, the unity that had been preserved at all
costs became a liability.”
193
Samuel Allen, foreword to Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer
Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (Washington, D.C.: Drum and Spear Press, 1970), xiii.
141

Islamic Center in Geneva from as early as 1962) and connected with him months before
his death to solicit support for establishing similar centers in the United States. The last
interview Malcolm X gave before his death was with the Islamic Center’s Al-Muslimoon
magazine. The magazine sent him nine questions to answer in writing. He completed the
last two on the eve of his assassination. One of the two responses articulates a three
circles diasporic consciousness engaged in global vision, a Black globality that
acknowledges the generative gaps in “difference within unity” (and will be further
engaged towards the end of this chapter as part of a case study on Malcolm’s engaged
witness trip to Gaza)
194
:
The colonial vultures have no intention of giving it up with a fight. Their chief
weapon is still “divide and conquer.” In East Africa there is a strong anti-Asian
feeling being nourished among Africans. In West Africa there is a strong anti-
Arab feeling. Where there are Arabs or Asians there is a strong anti-Muslim
feeling. These hostilities are not initiated by the above-mentioned people who are
involved. They have nothing to benefit from fighting among themselves at this
point. Those who benefit most are the former colonial masters who have now
supplanted the hated colonialism and imperialism with Zionism.
195

Poignantly missing in Haley’s inclusion of Said Ramadan and Gamal Abdel Nasser in the
Autobiography is a discussion about the potential “knot of tension” prefigured in
Malcolm X’s burgeoning friendship with Ramadan and admiration for Nasser, the man
who kicked Ramadan out of Egypt. As explored in Curtis’s “My Heart is in Cairo,” these
Saudi-Egypt tensions, referred to as the “Arab Cold War,” grew out of competition for
global da’wah and through proxy support of different factions in Yemen’s civil war in the
1960s. Nasser’s Egypt, at the time UAR, nationalized the oldest Islamic university, Al-

194
Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 11.
195
The interview originally appeared in Al-Muslimoon Magazine in February 1965. See Malcolm-
x.org website, http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/int_almus.htm .
142

Azhar, in 1960 and established of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs
(SCIA) to, “promot[e] what might be called ‘Islamic liberation socialism’ in the
developing world” the following year. A year later, what might have been read as a
response to catch up to Nasser’s global da’wah efforts, Saudi created a pan-Islamist,
transnational Muslim organization called The Muslim World League (MWL).
196

However, for all the disunities produced by Nasser’s aggressive three circle leadership
aspirations, his three circle policies also invited unity along a continuum of a shared
global vision. Miraculously, up until the day of his assassination, Malcolm continued to
publicly lionize his “president” Nasser and his three circles construction while
maintaining friendships with Saudi political elites and exiles; and continued to receive
money, scholarships, scholars and assistance from both SCIA and MWL. In a letter to
Muhammad Taufik Oweida of the SCIA, he even explicitly revealed his relationship to
MWL. Explaining it as a strategy in “cementing good relations”: “I think I can be more
helpful and of more value to these progressive relations forces at Cairo by solidifying
myself also with the more moderate or conservative forces that are headquartered in
Mecca.”
197
It remains a mystery how and why this didn’t produce an Islamic diplomatic
quagmire for Malcolm and his organizing of an American Muslim transnational network
in the United States.

196
Edward E. Curtis IV, “My Heart is in Cairo: Malcolm X, the Arab Cold War and Islamic
Liberation Ethics.” The Journal of American History, (2015): 786.
197
Malcolm X Collection. In the same letter, Malcolm informs Oweida that he met Islamic Center
of Geneva’s Said Ramadan as an example of his strategic work towards “cementing good
relations,” explaining to Oweida, “When I passed through Geneva I even took time to speak with
Said Ramadan so that I could find out what he was thinking without ever letting him know what I
was really thinking” (Malcolm X to Muhammad Taufik Oweida, November 30, 1964 [reel 13],
Malcolm X Collection). For more on the competing “global da’wah efforts” by Saudi Arabia and
Egypt, see Marable, Reinvention and Curtis, “My Heart is in Cairo.”
143

Ummah and “Human Rights”
“The very essence of the Islam religion in teaching the Oneness of God, gives the
Believer genuine, voluntary obligations toward his fellow man (all of whom are One
human family, brothers and sisters to each other)….and because the true believer
recognizes the Oneness of all humanity the suffering of others is as if he himself were
suffering, and the deprivation of the human rights of others is as if his own human rights
(right to be a human being) were being deprived”
-Malcolm X, April 26, 1964
198

The metaphoric connection of tawhid to the ummic body of mankind, of God’s
oneness microcosmically reflected in the brotherhood and sisterhood of man, can be
lucidly observed in the following Quranic verse (5:32): “Unless in retaliation for the
killing of another person or in punishment for spreading evil, whoever kills a person has
killed the whole of humanity; and whoever gives life to a person has done so to the whole
of humanity.”
199
This ontological assertion, echoing the philosophical analysis of this
verse by Islamic scholar Ismail Faruqi, “to be born is to have the right to be,” obligates a
Muslim to recognize the sanctity of human life. This obligation to recognize the sanctity
of human life makes the active practice of preserving a part of the ummic body a moral
imperative.
200
Malcolm underscored this “spirit of brotherhood” in his promotion of
Islam as the antidote for curing the “cancer of racism” in America. In a letter from Mecca
to his post-Nation spiritual confidant, Shawarbi, Malcolm reflects on his engaged witness
experience during the hajj, “Witnessing this Hajj has opened my eyes to the real
brotherhood created by Islam among people of all colors. I am convinced that Islam will

198
Malcolm X Diary, April 26, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
199
Quran 5:32.
200
As further evidence of emphasis on human rights and Azzam’s treatment of “right-doing” in
the Sunnah, it is also stated in the Quran (3:104): “Let there be of you an ummah which calls to
the good, which enjoins the acts of righteousness, prohibits the acts of injustice and evil. Such are
the felicitous.”
144

remove the cancer of racism from the heart of all Americans who accept it.”
201
What
emboldened Malcolm to make such a prescriptive assertion, one originally written in his
diary and later published worldwide from the New York Times to Uganda’s Uganda
Argus (July 24, 1964) as an “Open Letter”?
In one of his earlier entries, as Malcolm commonly did in his diary, he sketched a
conceptual list of terms demonstrating how Islam’s commitment to human rights
distinguished itself from the Christian commitment to civil rights. This move laid the
groundwork for Malcolm’s elevation of Islam above Christianity.
202
Although this
assertion could easily warrant opposition, I am not as concerned with theological
arguments as I am with Malcolm’s critical analysis and assessment of the relationship
between faith and political advocacy. For Malcolm, removing this “cancer” required
“barking up the human rights tree,” as racism was responsible for the greatest crime in
Malcolm’s eyes, judging man based on skin color.
203
Civil right denials were symptoms
of the cancer, and human rights denials were the cancer.
This period of Malcolm’s life not only marked an expansion of his understanding
of Islam, but also an expansion of his application of Islam, putting a primacy on praxis.
Faith solely rooted in principles, in “armchair philosophizing” stood no match to the
actual application of faith. For Malcolm, Islam was not just a religion that spoke of a

201
In the notes section, towards the end of his first travel diary, right next to a transliteration of
the sawjud.
202
Malcolm X Diary, undated (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
203
As Malcolm explains in one of his final speeches, “The yardstick used by another Muslim to
measure is not a man’s color, the man’s deeds, the man’s conscious behavior, the man’s intention,
and when you use that as a standard for measurement or judgment, you never go wrong. But
when you judge a man by the color of his skin you are committing a crime, because that is the
worst kind of judgment” (Malcolm X, February 1965: The Final Speeches, ed. Steve Clark
[Vancouver CA: Pathfinder Press, 1992]).
145

worldwide ummah, but as evidenced in his writings, a religion that must actively practice
and apply a “spirit of brotherhood.” Haley’s emphasis on the transformational power of
Traditional Islam on Malcolm ’s socio-political, cultural and spiritual orientations is
rightly articulated but its representations almost fall into the realm of fantasy and
caricature. Although the Autobiography includes Malcolm’s statements on the hajj that
“The brotherhood! The people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming
together as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God,” and even draws
comments from Malcolm’s diary that people “ate and slept as one,” he neglects to note
his observation that, “birds of the same color stay primarily together.”
204
For as much as
Haley exclusively relies on his trip to hajj as the climatic shift in Malcolm’s move away
from a “racist ideology,” in reality the content of this shift included more experiences of
ummic brotherhood. Malcolm zealously writes about a particularly influential moment in
Egypt during the summer of 1964 that embodied this Islamic tenet and even “impressed”
him more than his trip to Mecca.
In an August 2, 1964 entry, Malcolm writes details surrounding a speaking
engagement given to a group of 800 Muslim youth (representing 73/74 different
countries) at a camp in Alexandria for the “Abu Bedr El Sadiq Conference.” Honored by
the invitation to speak at Shuban Al-Muslimin (Young Man’s Muslim Association) on
Saidina (the Prophet’s birthday), Malcolm describes the experience of the speech and
reception by the youth in detail. Beyond the initial, warm welcome from youth who
shouted “Welcome Malcolm” as he entered, Malcolm was impressed by the diversity of

204
Malcolm X, Autobiography, 345 and Malcolm X Diary, April 19, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X
Collection.
146

camp attendees. He made a side note that three of the youth who spoke represented the
“Arab-African-Asian” formula he later cited often in his speeches. Seeing this multi-
colored sea of believers in hajj was trumped by seeing a smaller group of polycultural
youth interacting together. For Malcolm, this tangible example of an ummah disengaged
from what he believed to be “America’s poison” of racial conflict was a further testament
to the strength of Islam as a platform for championing human rights: “youth from
everywhere, face of every complexion, representing every race and every culture…all
shouting the glory of Islam, filled with a militant, revolutionary spirit and zeal” was the
greatest evidence for Malcolm that Islam was the panacea for many of the world’s ills.
And yet, this moment did not make it into the Autobiography; even though
Malcolm described it as a more transformative and moving experience than his time in
Mecca. Such an omission is likely because it did not fit the neat, linear narrative
construction by Haley: framing the potency of Malcolm’s spiritual awakening in Mecca
as the defining moment that altered his views on race relations. In reality, it was the
Islamic spirit of brotherhood in practice at different times and places that profoundly
shaped Malcolm personally and politically. Though attributed to what he witnessed in
Mecca and Medina while on the hajj by Haley, it appears he was more inspired by his
personal interactions with Muslims who challenged the U.S.-based racial and class caste
system by demonstrating friendships rooted in this “spirit of brotherhood” and nourished
with “sincere hospitality.”
Saudi Arabia: Azzams and Faisals
1964: April 17-28, September 18-24, 1964
“Travel broadens one’s scope. Any time you do any travel, your scope will be broadened.
147

It doesn’t mean you change—you broaden. No religion will ever make me forget the
condition of our people in this country. No religion will ever make me forget the
continued fighting with dogs against our people in this country. No religion will make me
forget the police clubs that come up ‘side our heads. No God, no religion, no nothing will
make me forget it until it stops, until it’s finished, until it’s eliminated. I want to make that
point clear…”
-Malcolm X, May 1964
205

While in a tent on Mount Arafat, Malcolm was asked what impressed him the
most about his hajj experience. He responded, “The brotherhood, people of all races,
colors, from all over the world coming together as one, which proved to me the power of
the One God.” We have heard this refrain about a post-hajj Autobiography Malcolm. But
consistently eliminated from this moment, frequently narrated as one of “Sunni
triumphalism”
206
—a supposed post-race transformation—is what appears to be the next
line in his diary, “This also gave me an opening to preach to them a quick sermon on
American racism & its evils...I could tell its impact upon them, and from then on they
were aware of the yardstick I was using to measure everything. For me the earth’s most
explosive evil is racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in the
West.”
207
The deepening of Malcolm’s training in Traditional Islam of Sunni Orthodoxy
paradoxically deepened Malcolm’s analysis of American racism, white supremacy and
Islam. Racism was the greatest assault to Islam’s governing principle of tawhid, of

205
Malcolm’s answer to a question regarding his “Hajj letter” from Mecca at Militant Labor
Forum of New York’s symposium “What’s Behind the ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare?”, in Malcolm X,
Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove
Press, 1990), 70.
206
Michael Muhammad Knight invokes “Sunni triumphalism” at a Duke “Scholars and Publics
Forum: Malcolm X Now” (minute 48:00) to explain a popular Sunni Orthodox argument that
describes Malcolm’s post-hajj views as his coming to Jesus moment, “Malcolm’s pre-NOI life
gets erased and his post-NOI life gets really oversimplified. And we just look at the hajj and that
is the entirety of his post-NOI story.” https://fsp.trinity.duke.edu/projects/malcolm-x-now .
207
Malcolm X Diary, April 25 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
148

Oneness.
208

Thus, post-hajj Malcolm proposed instrumentalizing Islam in the Black Freedom
Movement not to transcend race but to think of it as methodology of condemning
American racism and dismantling American constructions of whiteness, not Blackness. It
was whiteness that needed to be transcended, and Islam was best suited, in Malcolm’s
estimation, to rid America of the cancer of race. But, again, for Malcolm, it began with
disemboweling white supremacy. In this recently discovered April 25, 1964 letter from
Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Malcolm describes the role he sees Islam (and Islamic concept of
tawhid) playing on the racist cognitive preset of the blondest and bluest of eyes:
I could look into their blue eyes and see that they regarded me as the same
(Brothers), because their faith in One God (Allah) had actually removed “white”
from their mind, which automatically changed their attitude and their behavior
(towards) people of other colors. Their beliefs in the Oneness has made them so
different from American whites that their colors played no part in my mind in my
dealing with them.
209

208
Some other entries of note in Malcolm’s diary entries on “brohood,” Oneness/tawhid, and
“unity in difference”: “I remember when about 20 of us were sitting in the huge tent on Mt.
Arafat & they asked me what about the Hajj thus far had impressed me the most. My answer was
not the one they expected but it drove home the point: ‘The brotherhood, people of all races,
colors, from all over the world coming together as one, which proved to me the power of the One
God.’ This also gave me an opening to preach to them a quick sermon on American racism & its
evils” (Malcolm X Diary, April 25, 1964 [reel 9], Malcolm X Collection). Malcolm reflecting on
the violation of tawhid as “The world’s most explosive evil,”: “I could tell its impact upon them,
and from then on they were aware of the yardstick I was using to measure everything. For me the
earth’s most explosive evil racism, the inability of God’s creatures to live as One, especially in
the West. The Hajj makes one out of everyone, even the king, the rich, the priest loses his identity
(rank) on the Hajj---everyone forgets self & turns to God & out of this submission to the One God
comes a brotherhood in which all are equal,” Malcolm X Diary, April 25, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm
X Collection.
209
Malcolm X, “Mecca, Saudi Arabia” Hajj letter, April 25, 1964. Accessed from “The Most
Remarkable Revelatory Letter Ever Written by Malcolm X,” Moments in Time,
http://momentsintime.com/the-most-remarkable-revelatory-letter-ever-written-by-malcolm-
x/#.WDImTJMrLiw .
149

Malcolm in his “After the Bombing” speech on February 13, 1965 in Detroit, famously
made the distinction between “white” as a term of power deployed by Americans and
“white” used as an adjective by Muslims in Asia, the Arab world, and Africa. Explaining
the American use, Malcolm states, “when he says he’s white, he means he’s the boss.”
210

In the same letter, Malcolm extends his analysis of Islam “erasing” whiteness from the
“minds” white people, more pointedly an erasure of white consciousness, to what this
means for American Blacks:
If white Americans could accept the religion of Islam, if they could accept
Oneness of God (Allah) they too could then sincerely accept the Oneness of Men,
and cease to measure others always in terms of their “difference in color,” And
with racism now plaguing America like an incurable cancer all thinking
Americans should be more receptive to Islam as an already proven solution to the
race problem. The American Negro could never be blamed for this racial
“animosities” because his are only reaction or defense mechanism which is
subconscious intelligence has forced him to react against the conscious racism
practiced (initiated against Negroes in America) by American Whites. But as
America’s insane obsession with racism leads her up the suicidal path, nearer to
the precipice that leads to the bottomless pits below, I do believe that Whites of
the younger generation, in the colleges and universities, through their own young,
less hampered intellects will see the “Handwriting on the Wall” and turn for
spiritual salvation to the religion of Islam, and force the older generation to turn
with them—This is the only way white America can worn off the inevitable
disaster that racism always leads to, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany was best proof of
this.
211

As Malcolm argues, American Blacks and the reproduction of Black consciousness are
not culpable for maintaining racism or racial consciousness. It is white supremacy that
must be uprooted before it leads to the path of mass genocide or omnicide. Curiously, the
Autobiography reprints these observations but eliminates Malcolm’s phrasing of “Hitler’s
Nazi,” adds “Christian” before “American Whites” and uses politically tinged words like

210
Malcolm X, Speaks, 163.
211
Malcolm X, Hajj letter.
150

“color-blindness” to describe Malcolm’s assessment of play and performance of race in
the “Muslim world’s religious society” and the “Muslim world’s human society.”
212

Since it was designed as a collaboration between Malcolm X and Alex Haley, we can
never truly know how much of this is Malcolm and how much of this is Haley.
213
This
letter is a clear generative artifact of being embroiled in a practice of engaged witness, to
Malcolm’s ethnographic testimony of witness anchored in the way of justice. This
“difference of color” is not at the heart of racism, it is the power attached to hierarchies of
difference rooted in racial logic. For, as Malcolm had observed in the ummic praxis of
brotherhood, a “difference in color” could be treated as a “difference in unity,” in the way
of décalage to “know one another.”
What is curious is why and how Malcolm chalks up anti-racism to practice of
Traditional Islam—which he did not necessarily experience with Sunni Orthodox
followers he frequently quarreled with in Harlem and in the rest of the Nation—and why
he did not attribute this to race and colorism constructed differently outside of the West.
Later, Malcolm’s conversations with Arab Muslims did complicate his understanding of

212
Observations in the Autobiography and use of “color-blindness” (author’s emphasis)
(Malcolm X, Autobiography, 345, 347-348). Most of Malcolm’s letters from Jeddah uses the
phrases “all colors,” “people of all colors” and “all colors and races” and explains what he saw as
a divergent relationship to difference than his experience in the U.S. (Malcolm X, Speaks, 58-61).
213
Garrett A. Felber, “A Writer Is What I Want, 33-53: “[T]he tension between the two authors'
conceptions of the autobiographical self differed dramatically—Malcolm's as communal, shifting,
and fluid; Haley's as individual, personal, and departing from a fully conceived point arrived at
through a series of transformative epiphanies.” Malcolm's terse statement to Haley at the project's
beginning, with which Haley ultimately ends: “A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.”
In an August 1963 letter to Oliver Swan, of Paul Reynolds's office, Haley asked that the book be
amended to read “as told to” rather than “co-authored by,” noting that “‘Co-authoring’ with
Malcolm X. [sic] would, to me, imply sharing his views—when mine are almost a complete
antithesis of his.”

151

race and colorism outside of the geography and history of the States, of American racial
logic. As we will observe, he would eventually theorize Western coloniality or “20
th

Century Dollarism” (Western neocolonialism/neoimperialism) to be the culprit of
systemic racism on a global scale.
In addition to testifying on anti-racist ummic practices back to his American
constituents, the other direction of Malcolm’s “two-way” engaged witness involved
“preaching” about the plight of 22 million Black Americans to new friends and casual
acquaintances from the Arab world, Asia and Africa. During this travels across mashriq
and Africa, Malcolm applied his engaged witness of American apartheid/racism as a
feature in conversations; coding this act of testifying as “preaching.” The evening
following the writing of his letter, on April 26
th
, Malcolm dined with Muhammad Abdul
Azziz Maged, the Deputy Chief of Protocol for Prince Faisal.
214
They discussed James
Baldwin, other Black American writers and John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me.
Malcolm noted his reply to Maged in his journal, “If that was a frightening experience to
him, and he was only a pseudo-Negro for 60 days, think what it has been for the real
Negroes for 400 years.’ And again I preach.”
215
Malcolm, as a witness of state-sanctioned

214
Malcolm X, Autobiography, 342.
215
Malcolm X Diary, April 26, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection. Also mentioned in the
Autobiography, “Two American authors, best-sellers in the Holy Land, had helped to spread and
intensify the concern for the American black man. James Baldwin’s books, translated, had made a
tremendous impact, as had the book Black Like Me, by John Griffin. If you’re unfamiliar with
that book, it tells how the white man Griffin blackened his skin and spent two months traveling as
a Negro about America; then Griffin wrote of the experiences that he met. “A frightening
experience!” I heard exclaimed many times by people in the Holy World who had read the
popular book. But I never heard it without opening their thinking further: ‘Well, if it was a
frightening experience for him as nothing but a make-believe Negro for sixty days—then you
think about what real Negroes in America have gone through for four hundred years,” Malcolm
X, Autobiography, 353-354.
152

violence directed towards Black Americans, makes frequent references to his acts of
testimony to Arabs and Africans abroad, usually explained in his diaries as “preaching”:
I have not bitten my tongue once, nor passed a single opportunity in my travels to
tell the truth about the real plight of our people in America. It shocks these
people. They knew it was “bad,” but never dreamt it was as inhuman
(psychologically castrating) as any uncompromising projection of it pictures it to
them.
216

It is worth noting that directly after his “hajj revelation,” Malcolm deploys “our people,”
an affective kinship, to signify Black Americans.
Earlier in the day, he meets two Arabs who had visited the States in the Jeddah
marketplace, explaining that he “really preached” to them about Blackness in the U.S.,
they responded by requesting Malcolm abstain from using the word “Negro.” “If a word
must be used, they preferred ‘black,” Malcolm recounted in his diary.
217
One wonders if
this Arab resistance to the term “Negro” could have also been a complicated analysis of
their Arab-ness in a framework of Afro-Arab diasporic consciousness. As stated,
Malcolm acknowledges this reality by emphasizing the anti-Black racism Saudis would
receive in the U.S., as people who would be segregated from white people in the U.S.
218

Moreover, Malcolm first raises this observation five years prior, when he returned from
his first trip to the region, stating in an article in the Pittsburgh Courier on August 15,
1959, that, “99 per cent” of “the people of Arabia” who he characterized as “regal black
and rich brown,” “would be jim-crowed in the United States of America.” Malcolm
extends this notion of a “color kinship,” by reporting back from his travels to Saudi

216
Malcolm X Diary, April 26, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
217
Ibid.
218
“They were shocked when I told them all of them would be segregated in America” (Malcolm
X Diary, April 23, 1964 [reel 9], Malcolm X Collection).
153

Arabia, Sudan and Egypt that, “In fact, the darkest Arabs I have yet seen are right here on
the Arabian peninsular. Most of these people would be right at home in Harlem. And all
of them refer warmly to our people in America as their brothers of color.”
219

This notion of “brothers of colors” preoccupy Malcolm’s ethnographic
observations and theorizations during his 1964 trip. Malcolm’s understanding of a
brotherhood of color operating within a framework of an ummic praxis that “recognizes
the Oneness of all humanity” accounts for persistent “preaching” as a delegate on behalf
of Black America. After asserting that he has “not bitten my tongue once” at any
“opportunity in my travels to tell the truth about the real plight of our people in
America,” Malcolm explains why he feels heard and seen in terms of an Islamic humanist
ideal of ummah (and also echoes Azzam’s understanding of a kind of takāful within an
ailing body) :
These people have a tender heart for the unforuntates, and very sensitive feelings
for truth & justice. The very essence of the Islam religion in teaching the Oneness
of God gives the believer genuine voluntary obligations towards his fellow men
(all of whom are one family, brothers, sisters to each other)…and because the
True Believer recognizes the Oneness of all humanity, suffering of others is as if
he himself were suffering, & deprivation of the human rights of others is as if his
own human rights (right to be a human being) were being deprived.
220

Malcolm engages in critical conversations on “American discrimination” on his
trips to Saudi Arabia, racializing Saudis within American racial cosmology as Black.
After this exchange, on the “True Believer” being able to acknowledge the “Oneness of
all humanity,” he makes conclusive leaps about the relationship between Black

219
Malcolm X, “Arabs Send Warm Greetings to ‘Our Brothers’ of Color in U.S.A.,” Pittsburgh
Courier, August 15, 1959.

220
Malcolm X Diary, April 26, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
154

Nationalism and Islam to African American liberation: “Our success in America will
involve two circles: Black Nationalism & Islam—it will take BN to make our people
conscious of doing for self & then Islam will provide the spiritual guidance. BN will link
us to Africa & Islam will link up spiritually to Africa, Arabia, and Asia.” This passage
demonstrates that Malcolm, even while lauding the preaching of an “Oneness of all
humanity,” racially coded Islam as part of a “dark world” geography that could link to the
project of inducting Black Americans into an African diasporic consciousness, a Black
globality with spiritual and socio-political dimensions. It also illustrates the persistence of
his NOI training to see “Asiatic Blackman” (linking Africa, Arabia and Asia as part of an
“Original Man” geography) and Islam metaphysically intertwined. Furthermore, it helps
us understand how this retention of the NOI cosmology around Asiatic Blackman could
lead Malcolm’s embrace of Nasser’s “three circle construction.” Malcolm’s testimonies
to a burgeoning friendship network in Saudi Arabia and the two-way cross-cultural
exchange, constitutive parts of engaged witness, continue to be preserved in community
histories and collective memories multiple generations down the line.

155

Reem Al-Faisal:

Figure 7: “Water is Stronger than the Rock” by Reem Al Faisal. From Joobin Bekhrad, “Shiny Happy People,”
Reorient Magazine, March 1, 2016.

“The Birth of a Nation was American Fascism.”
–Reem Al Faisal, October 2016
221

I met Reem Al Faisal at a chain restaurant in Jeddah, five minutes away from her
gallery. A world-renowned photographer who walks with two legacy family names in her
genealogical portfolio. As the daughter of Mohammad bin Faisal Al Saud and Muna bint
Abdul Azzam, she is the granddaughter of the founder of the Arab League, pan-Islamic
thinker Abd al-Rahman Azzam, and also the granddaughter of perhaps one of the most
beloved leaders to “rule” Modern mashriq, Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud. Beyond her
work as an artist and visibility as part of the Al Saud “beit,” Al Faisal, as a writer for
Arab News over the years, has garnered a global reputation for her sharp critiques of U.S.

221
Reem Al Faisal, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, interview with author, October 23, 2016.
156

imperialism in mashriq. Al Faisal’s 2003 Arab News op-ed, “America the Forgiven,”
censuring the invasion of Iraq and a decade of sanctions, was profiled in reactionary
books and blogs like Hating America: A History by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin,
The New Jacksonian Blog, and Amy Chua’s Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to
Global Dominance--and Why They Fall as an example of Anti-Americanism in the
“Islamic Middle East.”
222

Al Faisal originally agreed to meet with me to discuss the current state of women
and gender in Saudi Arabia for one of my impending projects. Being the historian of
modern MM and someone who is also a product of Arab cultural historical
methodologies, I somehow suspected Al Faisal would continue to preserve the oral
history memories of her family legacy. A family name, one’s beit, amounts to old school
genetic ancestry testing. In a Western context, where the erasure of extended family
networks is common, it can be difficult to understand the significance of a “beit analysis”
to historical method. Malcolm’s Saudi crew was essentially composed of Al Faisal’s kin,
her father Prince Muhammad Faisal and his brother-in-law (Reem Al Faisal’s uncle) Dr.
Omar Azzam, who was also close to the Yassins.
223
Malcolm venerated both her
grandfathers for bestowing him the “honor” of being a State Guest and for Azzam’s
hospitality (offering him his room at Jeddah Palace Hotel and counseling him on his

222
Reem Al Faisal, “America the Forgiven,” Arab News, October 3, 2003; Michael Kaplan,
“What the Saudi Royals Really Think of America: The Unkind Musings of Princess Reem Al-
Faisal,” November 15, 2010, http://newjacksonianblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-saudi-royals-
really-think-of.html; Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America: A History (Oxford,
2004); Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They
Fall (New York: Anchor, 2009).
223
Which is how I secured this interview quite easily; relying on the leverage my mother’s family
name/lineage, beit Yassin.
157

relationship with the NOI).
224

Saudi Circle
“My first impression of him was an eye-opener because I didn’t see a fiery, fire-breather.
I saw a very timid almost, shy man.”
-Prince Muhammad Faisal
225

As Malcolm noted in one of his diary entries, Muhammad Faisal, “met” him a
decade prior to their encounter in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in the spring of 1964. Faisal, an
undergraduate student at Menlo College in Atherton, CA, initially “met” this “different
person totally” on TV, through Malcolm’s nationally visible role as spokesperson for the
Nation of Islam.
226

I have just met Prince Muhammad Feisal. A tall, handsome man, educated in
America, Bay area. Humble dignity. Met me on TV. 10 yrs in States, proud of
Arabia’s progress, roads, & housing. Dr. Omar Azzam (young as he is) is
architect of the amazing transformation---high cost to government of
rehabilitation.
227

The circle of Saudi politicos with transnational connections to the States involved Dr.
Shawarbi’s connection to Western educated Dr. Omar Azzam, who was connected to
Muhammad Faisal, son of Crowned Prince Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, through
marriage. Muhammad Faisal married Omar’s sister Muna, and Maged and Nasser Yassin

224
Malcolm, reflecting on Crowned Prince Faisal (“His Excellency Prince Faisal”) and Azzam
Pasha’s gestures of hospitality, even goes on to exclaim, “Who would believe the believe the
blessings that have been heaped upon an American Negro?” (Malcolm X, Autobiography, 348).
225
Prince Muhammad Faisal’s first impressions of Malcolm in Malcolm X: Make It Plain,
directed by Orlando Bagwell (1994; Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)).
226
Malcolm, in his diaries, notes he is educated in America, Bay Area and Reem Al Faisal
confirms that it was Silicon Valley’s Menlo college. Malcolm X Diary, April 18, 1964 (reel 9),
Malcolm X Collection.
227
Malcolm X Diary, April 18, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
158

worked as Faisal’s deputy protocol officers. Because of the warm reception and at the
urging of this Saudi, Malcolm delayed his flight to Lebanon and extended his stay in
Saudi Arabia so he could meet the, “Ruler of the Land that houses the Holy Cities of
Islam & the House of God!!!” Malcolm’s exuberance jumps off the pages of his diaries
as he proclaims, “I would have delayed my departure for one year.”
228

On April 27 at 12:30pm, Malcolm had a twenty-minute audience with Crowned
Prince Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, Muhammad Faisal’s father and Reem Al Faisal’s
grandfather. Explaining, “I never will forget the reflection I had that instant,” Malcolm
comments on that meeting in the Autobiography and in diaries, providing some
interesting assessments about the then Crowned Prince, “As I entered the room, tall,
handsome Prince Faisal came from behind his desk…here was one of the world’s most
important men, and yet with his dignity one saw clearly his sincere humility.”
229
The
younger Faisal, “questioned me about the BM’s [Black Muslims] saying from what he
had been reading, written by Egyptian writers, they had the wrong Islam & that it was a
pity that so large an organization should be lost to Islam—mentioned that there was no
real excuse for ignorance because of the abundance of literature in English about Islam
now.”
230
One wonders if Muhammad Faisal could have been talking about Shawarbi,
Egyptian Islamic theorist Sayyid Qutb or some other writers? Faisal also explained, as
relayed by Malcolm, that “he had no ulterior motive in the excellent hospitality I had
received (for which I thanked him for in my opening words) than the true hospitality

228
Malcolm X Diary, April 26, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
229
Malcolm X, Autobiography, 354.
230
Malcolm X Diary, April, 27 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
159

shown all Muslims by all Muslims.”
231

Upon Malcolm’s third trip to Saudi Arabia, Malcolm regularly met with Prince
Faisal and Dr. Omar Azzam, where Prince Faisal once again bestowed the title of “State
Guest” on Malcolm—entailing that he would be chauffeured around the country by a
driver and the state covered the expenses of his entire trip. They convened on September
19, 1964 at 12:30pm at the lobby of the Kandara Palace hotel. “They are very well-
informed on the ‘picture’ in the States, racial riots, politics, etc.,” Malcolm explained as
he also caught Azzam up to speed on progress with MMI and OAAU. Later that night,
Malcolm gave Dr. Azzam his Zionism article (which will be discussed in the case study).
Considering the timing, it’s likely to have been Malcolm’s September 17, 1964 Egyptian
Gazette op-Ed “Zionist Logic.” Omar Azzam, connected to Malcolm through Shawarbi
became Malcolm’s first line of support when he landed in Jeddah on April 17, when he
was stranded at the airport. Impressed by Omar Azzam’s involvement in “rebuilding in
Mecca,”
232
Malcolm remarked, “[He has] tremendous responsibilities and
accomplishments already credited to him…and still he has time to show sincere concern
over my welfare—surely his thinking and behavior reflect truly the “spirit of Islam” that
I’m reading about in his father’s book.”
233
As Malcolm wondered about Azzam
Pasha’s—father of Omar Azzam—influence on his spiritual character, I continue to
wonder something similar: the elder Azzam’s influence on Malcolm’s spiritual and
political theorizations (which will be discussed later!).
Al Faisal vividly recalls some of the conversations her father had with Malcolm

231
Ibid.
232
Malcolm X Diary, April 18, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
233
Ibid.
160

X, as orally passed down to her. A central one was on “Arab slavery,” dispelling Western
epistemological myths disseminated by Orientalist writers about the system of “Arab
slavery.” She explains that Malcolm came to her father with an emphatic understanding
of an “Arab slave trade” that mirrored the system of the “TransAtlantic slave trade,” that,
“Arabs [specifically] enslaved Blacks.” Al Faisal relayed her father’s response, “it’s not
true. We enslaved everyone and actually Slavs and Turks were the biggest market.” She
attributes these conversations changing Malcolm’s mind on how he understood the
system of slavery in Arabic-speaking Muslim geographies. “Slavery in the Arab world
was not racial,” Al Faisal continues, pulling arguments she made in an op-Ed for Arab
News on this topic, “in fact, there was social mobility. Slaves in Saudi Arabia became
rulers and ministers. The Ottoman Khalifas married off their children to slaves.”
In Cedric Robinson’s germinal masterpiece Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition (1983), he addresses this discontinuity between Islamic
civilizational slave systems and medieval European conceptions of the “slave.”
Reminding us that, “The Islamic ideal concerning slavery was without parallel in
Christian law and dogma” because Islamic jurists codified laws regarding slave rights and
rewarded manumission.
234
Robinson also echoes Al-Faisal’s argument on the radical
social mobility embedded in Islamic slave systems, “Since Muslim slavery was
characteristically associated with unlimited potential for social mobility and much less
racialism, it is not surprising to find whole dynasties in Muslim history founded by slaves
(e.g., the Egyptian Mamelukes) or the emergence to prominence of Africans as soldiers,

234
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 95.
161

poets, philosophers, writers, and statesmen.”
235
Why is it that when we understand all
historical systems of slavery as racially coded with an inherent epistemological wedded-
ness of slavery to Blackness?
Considering the post-Civil Rights rise in popularity of invoking and re-invoking
so-called “Arab slave trade” (or maybe we can say “becomes codified” as category and
“parallel”) by Afrocentrists to Zionists to now Afro-pessimists deployed to mostly
condemn modernist Arab societies, I often wondered Malcolm’s position on this topic.
Speaking to this discourses on histories of Arab and Muslim slavery, Sherman Jackson’s
Islam and the Blackamerican” Looking Toward the Third Resurrection dedicates a
chapter to deracinating this critique, what he terms “Black Orientalism.” Deconstructing
the foundational tenets of Nationalist, Academic and Religious Black Orientalism,
Jackson unravels false equivalences made between anti-Blackness in the West and East,
“Black Orientalism seeks to cast the Arab/Muslim world as a precursor and then imitator
of the West in the latter’s history of anti-blackness.”
236
Jackson also reaffirms Robinson’s
assessment of the different practices of slavery and race in Islam, “The presumption that
blacks under Islam were a slave class in a slave society is a major premise of Black
Orientalists and a primary means by which they are able to impose one and only one
interpretation upon every racially tinged statement or action by an Arab or nonblack

235
Ibid.
236
Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, 99-100. Also: “Black Orientalism was and is
essentially a reaction to the newly developed relationship between Islam, Blackamericans, and the
Muslim world. Its ultimate aim is to challenge, if not undermine, the propriety of the esteem
enjoyed by Islam in the Blackamerican community by projecting onto the Muslim world a set of
imaginings, self-perceptions, resentments, and stereotypes that are far more the product of the
black experience in America than they are any direct relationship with or knowledge of Islam,
especially in the Muslim world,” Jackson, Blackamerican, 102.
162

Muslim.”
237

Consistent with Al Faisal and Robinson’s statements, Jackson explains the
disconnect between American scholars of race and historians of Islam and Islamic
traditions and societies, “every historian of Islam knows it—most slaves in Muslim
society were probably not black but of Turkish, and there is no evidence to the effect that
most blacks were slaves.”
238
Jackson urges readers to understand the distinction,
constructed by Ira Berlin, between “societies with slaves” and places like the U.S. that
understand slavery through race, “slave societies.”
239
Though it is not clear what sources
triggered Malcolm’s understanding of an “Arab slave trade” parallel to the maafa
(“TransAtlantic slave trade” in Kiswahili), we see Malcolm thinking and struggling
through the efficacy of applying American racial logic as a hegemonic fit onto different
geographies and histories. Al Faisal’s chain of oral history is interesting because it adds
more details to the critical knowledge sharing nexus that existed between Malcolm and
the Arab Muslims he befriended throughout his travels. By no means an apology for any
form of slavery (one wonders not what kind of slavery was legally enforced but why
slavery was practiced at all), but a curious inquiry on how and why concepts such as an
Arab slave trade and Muslim slavery become racially coded in the Western imagination
and upheld as a “false equivalent” or “parallel” to American chattel slavery.
Al Faisal’s father grew to develop friendships with other Black American leaders,
“He was sympathetic to Black Americans because he understood the history of America.”
Al Faisal cites the overrepresentation of Black people in the American system of mass

237
Ibid, 105.
238
Ibid, 104
239
Ibid.
163

incarceration to support a point she makes about the enduring continuities of state
violence, “The birth of a nation was American fascism” (and to explain some of the
rationale undergirding her father’s “sympathetic” feelings). She herself traveled to the
United States in 2001—before September—to photograph the NOI as part of a series on
Islam in America. Her father and her both understood the Nation to be within the fold of
the global Islamic ummah. Al Faisal’s testimony speaks volumes about both of her
grandfathers’ relationships with Malcolm X. Furthermore, Al Faisal’s father, Prince
Muhammad Faisal, continued to develop a close friendship with Malcolm. Al Faisal
relayed, “my father was in New York on his way with his pregnant wife, my mother, to
meet Malcolm after his Audubon talk [on February 21, 1965] when he heard the news.
They had also bonded because both their wives were at the same stage of their
pregnancy.”
240
Analyzed through Malcolm’s own life writing and theirs, we behold a
trust that is formed through friendship; one that invited critical dialogue and struggled
through global racial politics. We also continue to add the makings of a community
history on Malcolm X.
Dr. Abdul Azziz Azzam
In an April 17, 1964 entry, Malcolm reflects on his meeting with Dr. Omar
Azzam’s renowned father, Abd al-Rahman Azzam, affectionately referred to as Azzam
Pasha:
Never have I met a more educated, intellectual than Azzam Pasha…., his vast
reservoir of knowledge and its variety, seemed unlimited---racial lineage &
descendants of M family, both black & white (color complexions) differences in

240
Reem Al Faisal, interview with author, October 23, 2016.
164

Muslim world, only to the extent it has been influenced West….Never so
honored.
241

Malcolm not only references his conversations with Azzam as influencing his critical
analysis but drawing from his readings of Azzam’s The Eternal Message of Muhammad,
we can see that even if there is not an explicit reference to the text, the evolution of some
of the precepts of Malcolm’s post-hajj politics can be said to have been influenced by
Malcolm’s reading of Azzam’s book and conversations with the author.
The treatment of seminal pan-Arab figures in the Autobiography exposes another
weakness in the Autobiography’s account of Malcolm X’s life. Although some of these
key figures in Malcolm X’s life are introduced and the role they played in the maturation
of his sociopolitical and spiritual philosophies is outlined, they feel marginal to the reader
because they are not politically and historically situated. The case of Abd al-Rahman
Azzam is testimony to this elision. Unlike other Arab and Arab American figures
Shabazz met and wrote about in his diaries who did not make either the Grove Press
cut—Azzam Pasha does at least appear in the Autobiography, however historically and
politically decontextualized in form.
242
It is hard to understand the significance of the
connection Malcolm X made with this man through Dr. Shawarbi without a proper
understanding of Azzam’s role in the Arab world. Azzam Pasha, who later resettled in
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is best remembered in Arab history as the chief architect and first

241
Malcolm X Diary, April 17, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
242
This list includes Sudanese Malik Badri, who was a professor at the American University of
Beirut; Brooklyn-based Lebanese American Muslim feminist Aliya Ogdie-Hassen, Lebanese-
born college student Azizah al-Hibri, who was a student at the American University of Beirut and
is now a leading Muslim American feminist, human rights lawyer, and founder of Karamah
(Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights). See my entry on Hassen in the Encyclopedia of
Muslim-American History, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV (New York: Facts On File, 2010), s.v.
Hassen, Aliya.
165

secretary-general of the Arab League (1945–1952) and in Islamic social history as the
author of The Eternal Message of Muhammad, a biography on the Prophet and praxical
engagement of his “messages” for a greater social justice good (conceptualized as “right-
doing” rooted in mercy and ummic praxis).
243

Malcolm X’s diaries make it apparent that he held Azzam in high regard— for
his words (the book), his achievements, his intellect (“never have I met a more educated
intellectual”), his hospitality, and his “equal” treatment toward Malcolm X despite his
elite status. A passage from his April 19, 1964, entry illustrates these sentiments:
Azzam Pasha’s vast depth of wisdom, his frank expression of his
convictions and his way of giving fatherly advice never ceases to
impress me. It was he who gave me his own room and bed here at
the Jeddah Palace as soon as he learned that I had not made advance
hotel reservations and that the crowded pilgrimage season made none
available.
244

This generous laudation was one of many written about the Arab statesman by Malcolm
X in his diaries.
245
And, as will be assessed in greater detail later, Malcolm’s critical

243
In the Schomburg’s Malcolm X collection, there is a signed copy of The Eternal Message
addressed to Malcolm in the Malcolm X Collection at the Schomburg: “To our Dear Brother
Malik. Federation of the Students Islamic Societies of United Kingdom & Eire.”
244
Malcolm X Diary, (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection. In the published edition of Malcolm X’s
diaries, this entry reads “Never have I met a more educated, intellectual than Azzam
Pasha____[illegible], his vast reservoir of knowledge and its variety, seemed unlimited—racial
lineage & descendants of M [Prophet Muhammad] family, both black & white (color
complexions) differences in Muslim world, only to the extent it has been influenced by West. He
gave me his room at the Jeddah Palace while he stayed with his son. Such hospitality. Never so
honored” (Malcolm X, The Diary of Malcolm X: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, 1964, ed. Herb Boyd
and Ilyasah al-Shabazz [Chicago: Third World Press, 2013], 6). On April 18, 1964, he similarly
writes, “How could this man be such a busy, world diplomat & find time still to read & replenish
his vast wealth of knowledge on such a variety of subjects” (Malcolm X, The Diary of Malcolm
X, 7).
245
Another example: “I meet one of the most powerful men in the Muslim world, sleeping in his
bed at the Jeddah Palace, surrounded by friends whose sincerity & religious zeal I can
feel….Azzam Pasha spoke of an African empire that was Islamic & non-Arabic speaking, that re-
166

engagement of The Eternal Message becomes apparent in his changing political
philosophies in regards to economic theories and the constancy of his mentions of Islamic
ethics like the “spirit of brotherhood” and “true hospitality.”
Born in Giza, Egypt, in 1893, Abd al-Rahman Azzam was bestowed the title of
pasha by King Farouk in 1945. Azzam moved to London as a youth to pursue a career in
medicine, yet he inadvertently became involved in anticolonial activism, prefiguring his
future as an international spokesman for imperially oppressed peoples. During this time,
he organized with resistance movements vocally opposed to colonial presence in Libya
and Egypt and defended the Turks in the Balkans. Although a doctor by training, this
statesman gained international recognition for his pan-Arabism infrastructure building,
contribution to literature on Islam, and vehement opposition to imperial projects
worldwide. Pasha’s critique of imperial and settler colonialism projects extended to
Zionism, rendering him a controversial figure for American pro-Zionist organizations.
Anti-Semitic accusations ran rampant in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s
(AIPAC) “Anti-Semitism Report.” Andrew Foster and Benjamin Epstein, the authors of
the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) 1952 report on anti-Zionist sentiments, labeled
Azzam a “trouble maker.” According to Foster and Epstein, he had been “chosen by
unanimous consent as the man to establish” a “well-organized” centralized Arab-
American lobby in Washington and had been “appointed to come here to head it in
person”:

conquered Spain for Islam & extended rule over it for 300 years & of the strong Islamic influence
(penetration) into all of Africa ever since the earliest days of the Prophet Muhammad. How could
this man be such a busy, world diplomat & find time still to read & replenish his vast wealth of
knowledge on such a variety of subjects” (Malcolm X Diary, April 18, 1964 [reel 9], Malcolm X
Collection).
167

It would have been difficult to have selected a better person for this
job. Azzam Pasha was a key figure in Middle East diplomacy. His status was
comparable to that of a foreign minister, but he held far more power, for he spoke
in the name of seven nations, not one. He rated a formal welcome from Secretary
of State Acheson and General Marshall when he visited Washington shortly after
his arrival. Moreover, he was familiar with the American scene. He had been in
the United States three years earlier, in 1947, and his behind-the-scenes activities
at Lake Success had led a New York newspaper reporter to characterize him as
“one of the smoothest international operators who ever came to sell a cause to the
United Nations.” Shrewd, suave, personable, no amateur at winning friends and
influencing people, Azzam was the perfect choice.
246

This dubious recognition was based on his perceived “threatening power” to lobby for
pan-Arab issues. Making the specious link between anti-Zionist politics and anti-Semitic
iterations, AIPAC went so far as to claim that “Azzam literally lived, ate, and slept anti-
Semitism.”
247
As we have seen, and we will continue to see, Azzam and his work meant
more to Malcolm than Foster and Epstein’s reductive rendering.
The Eternal Message of Muhammad
Although the Autobiography mentions some books Malcolm read while
incarcerated at Norfolk Prison Colony and Charlestown State Prison, it does not cover his
post-prison reading diet (which included the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay on the
Negritude movement’s poetry “Black Orpheus”
248
). However, fascinatingly enough, it
references Shawarbi’s gifting of Azzam’s The Eternal Message after his “shattering”

246
Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The Trouble-Makers: An Anti-Defamation League
Report (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952), 171–172.
247
Ibid., 179.
248
Other books in his collection include: The Holy Quran translation by A. Yusuf Ali gifted to
him by the Nigerian High Commissioner in Ghana El-Hajj Isa Sulaiman Wali, The Religion of
Islam: A Standard Book by Ahmad A. Galwash, the 500
th
anniversary edition of The Holy Bible,
Al-Siyam by El-Bahay El-Kholi, Key to the Arabic Language and Grammar: Volume One by
Jochanan Kapliwatzky, and Guy Warren’s I Have a Story to Tell… where inscribes a note to
“Brother Malcolm” on December 22, 1964 (“With the best compliments of Brother Frantz of
Ghana”—one wonders if he is referencing postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, who was an
ambassador to Ghana for the provisional Algerian government in 1959).
168

with the Nation. As is relayed, “The author had just sent the copy of the book to be given
to me, Dr. Shawarbi said, and he explained that this author was an Egyptian-born Saudi
citizen, an international statesman, and one of the closest advisors of Prince Faisal, the
ruler of Arabia. ‘He has followed you in the press very closely.” It was hard for me to
believe.”
249

With a close read of The Eternal Message, I hope to offer some insight into this
book’s influence on Malcolm’s post-hajj thinking. In the book, we see themes of
centering spiritual nationality over material ideologies, elevation of the practice of
ummah (or ummic praxis), and diagnosing racism as arising from a failure of “spirit of
brotherhood”—even oft-repeated Malcolm’s rubric of liberation retained from Nation
teachings, that of “freedom, justice and equality” is weaved through these themes.
250

After Malcolm’s completion of hajj, Nawaf Yassin dropped Malcolm off at
Azzam’s house on the night of April 27: “I told him of my experiences & impressions of
Hajj and thanked him for his invaluable assistance. He was very humble as usual and
gave me much good advice emphasizing the importance of unity among Muslims. I told
him also my impressions of his book & and he asked if I had any suggestions that could
be included in the next editions of it.” Azzam was not only someone who’s work he
admired, but counsel he sought. After sharing his reflections on the hajj and The Eternal
Message, they discussed the Nation of Islam, with Malcolm revealing, “the true story of
the crisis that caused the split.” Malcolm then mentions something very interesting,
possibly something another enterprising historian could dig a little deeper into. He

249
Malcolm X, Autobiography, 327.
250
This phrasing is so frequently mentioned by Malcolm in his diaries that he writes it in
shorthand as the acronym “FJE.”
169

explained that he shared this story, “Since he [Azzam] was the only Arab of prominence
who had taken a public (as well as private) stand in defending the BM [Black Muslims], I
felt out of a source of justice that he know the full story.”
251
One wonders in what way
and how (and where is this documented!) did Azzam defend “Black Muslims” in
“public”? In this same entry, Malcolm quotes passages from Azzam’s The Eternal
Message in his diaries:
252

On page 67 of Azzam Pasha’s book in 1913 “Throughout my journeys from north
to south, I was passed on from hand to hand as each person entrusted my care to
the next. It is doubtful that so much care attention would have been lavished on
me had I been among my own kinfolk. This was a tribute to the brotherhood of
Islam in the trying days of the Balkan wars”—I can say this the same spirit and
practice I have experienced thus far on my own travels in Egypt & Arabia, 51
years later.
253

This section on page 67 follows a discussion on right-doing rooted in mercy and
brotherhood and is worth elaborating on. Here, Azzam reflects on his own encounters
with Islamic universal brotherhood while in Albania in 1913. On the next page, Azzam
argues—through observations from his engaged witness travels and solidarity work—that
the universal brotherhood is in “decline” because of the “emergence of racial barriers”
and the, “triumph of materialism over the soul of man.” Both of these are seen as systems
that “damage the bonds of brotherhood.”
254
We see how framing the “emergence of racial

251
Malcolm X Diary, April 27, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
252
How is this book not seriously engaged by scholars in trying to understand Malcolm’s spiritual
and political philosophies in the later years of his life? Curtis outlines some of the themes of The
Eternal Message in his “My Heart is in Cairo” article, but also strangely positions Azzam’s
writing as part of a “political Islam” or “Islamism” genre. I do not have time to delve into the
ludicrousness of the U.S. academic Left’s wholesale adoption of this framing of modern Islamic
practice. It will likely be addressed in future writing on what I have termed “Muslimism.”
253
Malcolm X Diary, April 18, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
254
Azzam, The Eternal Message, 68. Also see: “Undoubtedly, the manifestations of brotherhood
decline in those Muslim lands where the observance of Islamic religious tenets is weak owing to
170

barriers” as a “failure of brotherhood” influenced by materialism (Azzam considered it a
uniquely European practice) could have spoken directly to Malcolm. What does Azzam
mean by materialism? Before answering this question, let me extend this focus on
Azzam’s analysis of racism and its relationship to Europe and Islam. Azzam describes
racism as “a fanatic attachment to tribe, nation, color, language, or culture” and a
convention that is “rejected by the Message as a product of pre-Islamic idolatry.”
255

Reading Azzam’s theorizing of modern European nation statism, it appears he is making
the case that nationalism, produces struggles over race, minorities and borders.
256
In
explaining the role of the Message to deracinate racism, Azzam later applies an
intersectional analysis, “world disturbances based on nationalistic and racist claims and
on demands for material advantage for a nation, class, or race would be minimized if we
adopted the principles of the Message of Muhammad in human relations by assuring the
triumph of the spirit which Islam, with the other revealed religions, preaches.”
257

Azzam’s vision of what submission to this revealed Law produces is a “classless,
benevolent society” that privileged the “beloved expressions” of freedom, equality and
justice which would inform “a new world order” of ethical conduct based on duty.
258

Azzam explains this last point through Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s
responses to a program on “the rights of man” published by Western elites that included

the emergence of racial barriers and particularly to the triumph of materialism over the soul of
man, which greatly damages the bonds of brotherhood” (Azzam, The Eternal Message, 68).
255
Ibid, 241.
256
“This defiant European trouble, with its concomitant struggles over boundaries and race and
minority questions, soon began to spread to the East from the West; when the East became
indoctrinated with Western culture, it adopted Western concepts of fatherland and nationalism”
(Azzam, The Eternal Message, 238-239).
257
Ibid, 242-243.
258
Ibid, xx, 256, 281-2.
171

H.G. Wells. Azzam invoked Gandhi’s critique of the document, which called for a
constitution around human duties instead of “rights,” to craft his understanding of ethical
conduct, “If today, instead of announcing the rights of man, we enunciated his duties and
clothed these duties in robes of honor and sanctity, we might succeed in arriving at a new
order of righteousness.”
259
Back to the question: what does Azzam mean by materialism?
Azzam’s anti-colonial and anti-imperial political history and challenge to Western
epistemologies are firmly established in the opening of The Eternal Message. The
impetus, he states, for writing this book, was to challenge the “materialistic ideologies”
overtaking “European lands.”
260
Azzam states:
Some of our people are being indoctrinated with the philosophies, dogmas, and
rituals of the materialistic faith, but the majority of the Muslims in Africa and in
Asia are still confused and disturbed. They have known for a long time that they
have a faith, a revealed Law, a society, and principles which call for a state that is
neither secular nor theocratic but possibly both, and that is neither autocratic or
demagogic. Muslim society is based on freedom of the individual and the equality
of everyone. Muslim society is in essence a classless society. It is classless not on
a basis of an economic theory but on the basis of its egalitarian laws and its
refusal to recognize distinction and honor except through piety and submission to
revealed Law, whose fundamental principles are universal, humane, and
democratic. Nothing that is preached by the East or West is new to the Muslims
261

Furthermore, he argues that Muslims, “refuse to believe that human destiny and history
are ruled and determined by a class struggle, for a system of wages. They do not believe,
either, that classless society on a material basis will be the fulfillment of history or of
human destiny. The pretension that the eternal universe is planned for such an economic

259
Ibid, 284-285.
260
Ibid, xvii.
261
Ibid, xviii-xix.
172

theory, or for a higher standard of living, is incomprehensible to the Muslim mind.”
262

Azzam continues his critique of Marxism/communism guarding against the ills
that spring from capitalism, “If equality along modern lines fails to curb excessiveness
and materialism and cannot prevent class struggles and racial wars, then it is an illusion
reflecting no truth.”
263
In a chapter on “Class Struggle,” Azzam sees Marxism as, “a by-
product of European civilization. Its disease has spread and its calamities have become
universal.”
264
Azzam even credits capitalism for birthing communism, “The communism
and socialism that have organized workers today are undoubtedly new, and are a direct
result of modern capitalism.”
265
Azzam’s overarching challenge to “materialistic
ideologies” is rooted in the presumption that the “human” is exclusively produced and
reproduced through economic theories, “And why a life whose rituals are based solely on
economics?”
266
Azzam isn’t calling for the whole uprooting of “materialism” but more
so, the “counterbalancing” of material and spiritual life, led by “spiritual forces.”
267
In
explaining his theorization, Azzam asserts, “The spiritual and material forces of life must
achieve an equilibrium in which the former directs the latter toward the general welfare in
accordance with the duty laid upon many by the Almighty.”
268

What frequently is discounted in writing on Malcolm’s relationship to Islam is the
spiritual tug. As I have argued, the complicated nature of Malcolm’s political
transformation and critical analysis on Islam, race and coloniality can be attributed to a

262
Ibid, xix.
263
Ibid, 96.
264
Ibid, 221.
265
Ibid, 223.
266
Ibid, xx.
267
Ibid, 244.
268
Ibid, 249.
173

practice of engaged witness, a Malcolm in travel flow, synthesizing studies, testimonies,
witnessing, and friendship-making. His radical travel flow and witness, I contend, are
related to his embodiment and emphasis on spirituality. His commentary on spirituality,
heightened during his hajj trip, is mixed in with ethnographic side-notes (he even
mentions in his diary that hajj would be an anthropologist’s dream).
269
Describing the
Kaaba, Malcolm states, “It was a sight to witness. Many had waited a lifetime to come &
had spent their life’s savings to pray & to give praise in the House of God.”
270
Malcolm’s
spiritual analysis of hajj is seen through an anthropologist’s eye, “People from every
rank, from king to beggar, are all here eating & sleeping alike---of every color & class---
the Hajj equalizes all.”
271
And he continues the next day, soberly observing about Mecca
that, “Some sections of the city are no different than when the Prophet Abraham was here
over 4000 yrs. Ago—other sections look like a Miami suburb.”
272

Malcolm’s reflections on Medina amp up the spiritual quotient in his diaries from
his Mecca entries, a difference once described to me as “Mecca is jalal and Medina is
jamal”—between the two cities Malcolm clearly picked up on. He describes Medina as,
“very quiet, peaceful, serene…a befitting place to hold the body of the Prophet who
proclaimed the ‘religion of peace and serenity.’”
273
Malcolm even describes feeling “the
power of Allah’s Spirit & Presence” in Medina. He continues to testify to Medina’s
jamal-ness, “There is no city more peaceful, no mosque more beautiful---I felt the power
of Allah’s Spirit & Presence more so here than anywhere else I’ve been.” Concluding,

269
Malcolm X Diary, Malcolm X Collection.
270
Malcolm X Diary, April 18, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
271
Malcolm X Diary, April 21, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
272
Malcolm X Diary, April 22, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
273
Malcolm X Diary, April 25, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
174

“Never have I felt more relaxed, more at peace, or nearer to God than here today at
Medina,” and tying this “feeling” back to his prison years:
This feeling that I have right now is in itself worth my entire pilgrimage. I haven’t
really felt like this since “my prison years” when I would spend days upon days in
solitude, hrs. upon hrs. studying and praying. There is no greater serenity of mind
than when one can shut the hectic noise & pace of the materialistic outside world,
& seek inner peace within one’s self.
274

What is in this book that could have influenced or impacted Malcolm’s post-hajj
spiritual and political transformations? After this initial meeting with Azzam and reading
of his book, most of Malcolm’s political analysis about what he understands as the
efficacy of nation-states is evaluated on a spectrum of the materialism and spirituality of
society. His Medina reflections on “seek[ing] inner peace within one’s self” by isolating
one’s self from “the materialistic outside world” typify this Azzamian
“spiritual/materialism” construction. A little over two weeks later, on May 5, 1964, after
traveling across Lebanon and Egypt, Malcolm, appears to draw from Azzam’s analysis
on the binary of spiritualism and materialism as he assesses modernization projects in the
Arab world: “The moral strength or weakness of any country is quickly measured by the
attire and attitude of its women, especially the young: Lebanon is a good example and so
is UAR (compared to Arabia). Material progress seems to destroy spiritual values. If
these two (material and spiritual) could be properly balanced, paradise would then exist.”
Although this note appears in his travel diaries, this analysis of Lebanon’s westernization,
is reproduced in the Autobiography, but without context or understanding how this act of

274
Ibid.
175

engaged witness, witnessing and testimony, emerges.
275
More succinctly (and with
underscored emphasis), in an undated entry in his diaries, Malcolm concludes “Must
blend material + spiritual to build a better world.”
276

Moreover, on Malcolm’s September 1964 trip to Saudi Arabia, where he once
again sits with Azzam Pasha, we witness in Malcolm’s ethnographic observations the
gelling of concepts on spirituality/materialism and Western economic theories (or in
Azzam’s parlance “materialistic ideologies”) covered in The Eternal Message: “When we
learn to think as human beings instead of as capitalists, communists & socialists this will
then be a world for all human beings.”
277
And just a day prior, Malcolm applies this
concept of “moralistic rule” in attempting to grapple with capitalistic modernization in
Saudi Arabia and in the States. Writing about his observations on a visit to an ARAMCO
compound in Dhahran:
The Americans have a paradise here. Everything imaginable is provided for them
by Aramco. America has the wealth and the technical know-how & equipment to
turn the world into a paradise, if ever the people in the power structure becomes
moralists and humanists (i.e. morally obligated to help humanity). With world
power goes world responsibility & obligation.
278

Here we not only see Malcolm reproducing Azzam’s focus on “human duty” but also a
rebuking of modernization under the watch of capitalism. A framing Azzam also made in
his chapter on “Class Struggle”:
In the modern world, with the advent of steam and electricity, fortunes expanded,
and so did the influence of the wealthy, whose numbers increased. Machines

275
Malcolm X, Autobiography, 355.
276
Malcolm X Diary, undated (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
277
Malcolm X Diary, September 24, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
278
Malcolm X Diary, September 23, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
176

replaced manual labor, communications advanced and speed increased, trade
expanded; the gap between poverty and wealth widened. The world smiled on
landowners, traders, and those who controlled the means of transportation. And so
the new capitalistic order thrived with all of its accompanying lack of human
relations; consequently, people drifted farther and farther apart in their thinking
and their ways of life, and grew to be antagonistic toward one another.
279

In an interview with the Young Socialist (published posthumously), the
interviewer asks Malcolm’s opinion about the “world-wide struggle…between capitalism
and socialism.” Malcolm responds,
It is impossible for capitalism to survive primarily because the system of
capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now
it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s
blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly like
the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the
world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it
becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it
will collapse completely.
280

Most socialists, communists and radical leftists understood this extended quote and
Malcolm’s interview with the Militant Labor Forum on January 7, 1965 to be an
indication of his espousal of socialism—although it does not necessarily follow that a
condemnation of capitalism equals an endorsement of socialism (which is missing in all
these addresses to socialist organizations). Malcolm clearly had friendships across the
political, religious, gender and racial spectrum that included American communist
George Breitman, Tanzanian Marxist and revolutionary nationalist Abdulrahman
Mohamed Babu, pan-African Black radical Vicki Garvin and Garveyite and Black

279
Azzam, The Eternal Message, 223.
280
Malcolm X, “Young Socialist, March-April 1965,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches
and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 199.
177

Nationalist Queen Mother Moore. I am not suggesting that Malcolm eschewed Marxism,
socialism or pan-Africanism for Islamic spiritualism; or even that any of these things are
incompatible. I merely suggest adding multiple dimensions, a polyuniverse of
understanding to Malcolm’s epistemic commitments.
Could Malcolm have been upholding a decolonial project composed of Islamic
spirituality and pan-Africanism, that so enmeshed in its decolonizing of Western
traditions, it rebuffed structuring Black social, political and economic life around
“Western materialistic ideologies” or economic theories? Right after Malcolm advocates
centering human beings versus economic theories in organizing social life, he attempts to
reconcile this formulation with continental nationalist movements. As a demonstration of
dialectical thinking, likely grappling with commitments to Western formations like
nationalisms and economic theories within Islamic liberation ethics, Malcolm asserts, “It
takes some of the same poison to counteract (same as antidote) poison. Europeanism has
been such a strong poison for centuries it now becomes essential to emphasize
Africanism to counteract it & Arabism to counteract Zionism, socialist to counteract
capitalism etc. Orientalism or Darkism to counterbalance Occidentalism or
whitism…thus the present escalating world struggle (cold war).”
281
It becomes clear that
Malcolm sees Europeanism in the same way that Azzam writes, composed with
materialistic ideologies to address what is believed to be the uniquely European issue of
class struggle. This would explain why the lasting memory of Malcolm, under dispute
because of seemingly incongruous political projects, would continue to vex scholars. But

281
Malcolm X Diary, September 24, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
178

then again, his lasting institutions were a reflection of this thinking. Guided by the
precepts of Azzam’s The Eternal Message on Islamic liberation theology, The Muslim
Mosque Inc. (MMI) sought to incubate Black Muslim life and expand Islamic da’wah to
Black America. The Organization of African American Unity (OAAU), instead, strove to
link up a revolutionary Black nationalism with pan-Africanism.
282
Above all, all these
epistemologies, for Malcolm, mattered if they served the greater good of eradicating the
cancer of racism. In the same September 24
th
entry, as he flowed from Dhahran in Saudi
Arabia, to Bahrain and eventually to Kuwait, Malcolm drives his commitment to anti-
racism and anti-oppression work home, “I’m anti-racism whether it’s practiced by
capitalist, communist or socialist. China ambassador to Ghana: Don’t be a racist. It’s a
struggle between oppressed people of all colors against oppressors of all colors.”
283

Azzam’s theorizing of an Islamic liberation theology rooted in Muhammad’s
Sunnah, standing outside of the Western “materialistic ideologies” of communism and
capitalism, is a fascinating contribution to how we understand Malcolm’s thinking to

282
This OAAU political platform is articulated in Malcolm’s July 17 memorandum to African
Heads of State at the OAU Summit in Cairo. Here, he makes connection between Black America
and Africa—“our problems are your problems”—as he conceptualizes a new formation of global
racial capitalist order, neoimperialism and “American dollarism” as its “modern 20
th
century
weapon”: “We pray that our African brothers have not freed themselves of European colonialism
only to overcome and held in check by American dollarism. Don’t let American racism be
‘legalized’ by American dollarism” (Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 75). And in his closing he
reiterates, “Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by
deceitful, ‘friendly’ American dollarism” (Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 77). Decades before
“non-profit industrial complex” and the “charitable industrial complex” become mainstream
phrases and concepts, Malcolm explains that American dollarism, adopting a “benevolent
approach” to mask its neocolonialism, does so through “philanthropic colonialism”: “They
switched from the old openly colonial imperial approach to the benevolent approach. They came
up with some benevolent colonialism, philanthropic colonialism, humanitarianism, or dollarism.
Immediately everything was Peace Corps, Operation Crossroads, ‘We’ve got to help our African
brothers’” (Malcolm X, “After the Bombing” speech on February 13, 1965, in Malcolm X Speaks,
170-171.).
283
Malcolm X Diary, September 24, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
179

evolve in the last year of his life. So much writing on Malcolm—from biographies to
academic articles—has been preoccupied “where” politically Malcolm might have
journeyed had he lived past February 21, 1965. For writers, followers and admirers alike,
the stake of that question is rooted in how we see ourselves. This is precisely why
Marable not only subtitles his biography on Malcolm “A Life of Reinvention” to
document the many different Malcolm’s at variant stages of his life; but to also explain
the ways Malcolm has been historically “reinvented” by multifarious communities and
different historical points.
In the closing chapter in Reinvention, Marable explore the political and cultural
afterlife of Malcolm’s legacy. Covering saxophonist John Coltrane and Archie Shepp’s
work, Marable explains that, “The initial remaking of Malcolm’s posthumous image
began, interestingly enough, with jazz musicians.”
284
Marable contends that the
Autobiography, reads more “in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography” than
“manifesto for black insurrection.” Released nine months after Malcolm’s assassination,
this is how we understand the transformation of Malcolm from a revolutionary defender
of “Field Negroes” to a “black bourgeoisie” liberal integrationist. In a time of Civil
Rights Triumphalism, Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin and Alex Haley,
“misinterpreted Malcolm’s last frenetic year as an effort to gain respectability as an
integrationist and liberal reformer,” according to Marable, “which was not an accurate or
complete reading of him.”
285
Marable closes by covering the ways Malcolm was
“reinvented” by the hip hop generation, Muslims across the geographies of global Islam,

284
Marable, Reinvention, 465.
285
Ibid.
180

by Iran’s Ayatollah Komeini, Spike Lee, Al-Qaeda, and by a post-Obama election Black
America.
286

Our WWMD (What Would Malcolm Do?) preoccupation not only does not
consider the possible transformations Malcolm would have continued to make (as was
typical of his trajectory of marrying travels, friendship conversations, art and studies), it
also does not take into account how we have changed socially, economically and
politically. Does this dialectical of a capitalist/socialist “world-wide struggle” still apply
in a post-neocolonial age of neoliberalism and anarchism? Would Malcolm participate in
a Movement for Black Lives by stepping off the podium and organizing around centering
Queer and Trans Black women’s voices? Would Malcolm endorse American Muslim
multicultural liberalism or anti-Western guerrilla groups in the mashriq and Central Asia?
How would Malcolm’s affinity for Nasserism, Arabism, and Africanism hold up to the
socializing and nationalizing of state institutions that led to militarized authoritarian
regimes bottoming out their poorest (partly at the behest of IMF through loans, structural
adjustment programs and corporatism’s neoliberal austerity policies)?
Clearly looking at material dated five months prior to his assassination is not an
exact science on where Malcolm intellectually ended up on February 21, 1965. Five
months is a good amount of time to change and transform critical analysis—this is
especially true for Malcolm. What is apparent is that this book and its ideas continued to
travel with Malcolm throughout the rest of his travels and meetings with students,
scholars and heads of state from Lebanon to Guinea. On this September visit to Saudi

286
Ibid, 486-487.
181

Arabia, Malcolm was gifted 6 copies of The Eternal Message of Muhammad, copies he
paid forward to Lebanese Muslim American University of Beirut student leader Azizah
al-Hibri and to then President of Guinea Sekou Toure. Reflections in Malcolm’s diaries
and interviews, mulling over the political future of Black freedom in the context of
Darkism, Islamic anti-racist liberation theology, and economic bipolarity, suggest
Malcolm was synthesizing some of the prominent arguments in Azzam’s book.
Lebanon and Sudan
Malcolm arrived into Beirut, Lebanon from Saudi Arabia at 3am on April 29,
1964, joining Syrian Muslims who invited him to travel with them after learning they had
the same trip itinerary. In response to this gesture, Malcolm remarked, “Everyone is very
warm and brotherly everywhere.”
287
His cab driver chose the Palm Beach hotel,
overlooking Beirut’s famed corniche for Malcolm’s stay, where he had his first hot
shower since leaving the states.
288
If Cairo can be considered a Black Atlantic Islamic
metropole, Beirut can be understood as a cosmopolitan capital for the Arab intellectual
diaspora. And for Malcolm, Sudan can be seen as the epitome of Afro-Arab Islam, and by
virtue the Sudanese peoples as its keepers. We can also see how these metropoles root
and de-territorialize Islam, and some ways do the same for the ways Malcolm is thinking
through Blackness and the Afro-Arab diaspora.

287
Malcolm X Diary, April 28, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
288
Initially the cab driver tried to rip Malcolm off, but “…after the cab driver learned I was a
Muslim his attitude was 100 percent.” He then chose the hotel for Malcolm, which was the Palm
Beach hotel at 4:30am. Malcolm X Diary, April 29, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
182

Sudan: Malik Badri, Ahmed Osman, Yahya Hayari
1959 and 1964
Malcolm first encounters Sudan in 1959, visiting Khartoum and Omdurman, and
forging friendships he would maintain through correspondence and through travels to
MM in 1964. Malcolm mentions this 1959 trip in a September 1, 1962 letter to Sudanese
Muslim Yahya Hayari, addressing Hayari’s Pittsburgh Courier letter to the editor casting
suspicion on Elijah Muhammad’s visit to Mecca. Malcolm critiques the University of
Pennsylvania college student’s “Hate Muhammad” comments—wherein Hayari alleges
that Elijah Muhammad did not perform pilgrimage—published in the Pittsburgh
Courier.
289
This critique which was later re-formatted and printed in Pittsburgh Courier
on October 6, 1962, “What Courier Readers Think: Muslim v. Moslem,” interestingly,
exposes the long-standing deep affection Malcolm harbored for Sudan and its people:
In 1959, I was in Sudan, in Khartoum and Omdurman. I also visited the Muslims
in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and Arabia, but none of the people anywhere impressed
me like the people of the Sudan. They seemed very pi[o]us, very hospitable. I
really felt at home there.
290

This 1962 letter reformatted as a “Letter to the Editor” also reveals the intellectual
forerunners to Malcolm’s theorizing, or generative artifacts, from his 1964 travels.
Malcolm quotes a verse from the Quran arguing that Hayari violated the equivalent of
“Muslim bro(hood) code” by publicly rebuking a Muslim with what he labeled a kind of
“Westernized thinking” typical of “being in Christian America too long.”
291
He explains

289
Yahya Hayari, “Hate Muhammad” comments, Pittsburgh Courier, August 25, 1962.
290
Malcolm X, “What Courier Readers Think: Muslim v. Moslem,” Pittsburgh Courier, October
6, 1962.
291
While he quotes one verse in the Letter to the Editor, he quotes to ayat in his September letter
to Hayari. Malcolm X, “What Courier Readers Think: Muslim v. Moslem,” Pittsburgh Courier,
183

that Hayari’s writing is part of a Western colonial practice of “divide and conquer” that
Malcolm had studied taking place in the Congo and Algeria. As a forerunner to his
theorizing of “20
th
Century Dollarism,” Malcolm attempts to appeal to Hayari’s African
consciousness by linking the treatment of Black Americans as “Second Class Citizens,”
that of Jim Crow, to colonialism in Africa and the Arab world. Malcolm and Hayari
continue to address each other through the Courier’s pages. In an October 27, 1962
article, “What Courier Readers Think: A Blast at Muhammad,” Hayari replied to
Malcolm’s comments by threatening to bar him and Elijah Muhammad from entering
Sudan. Hayari had most likely incited Malcolm’s derision by intervening in a years long
verbal scrimmage between the Nation and Talib Dawud and Dakota Staton (addressed in
Chapter 1).
That same year, Malcolm would meet another Sudanese Muslim college student,
Ahmed Osman, who also expressed critiques of the Nation’s racial cosmology within his
understanding of Sunni Orthodoxy. However, Malcolm was more receptive to Osman’s
challenges, possibly because Osman attended lectures at Temple No. 7 in Harlem.
Malcolm even describes his affection for Osman in his letter to Hayari: “I know Bro.
Osman who lives on Warmuth street. He impresses me as a very pi[o]us Muslim, a true
Sudanese brother. I love him just like I love my own brother and the wonderful people
who are in the Sudan.”
292
Osman’s eulogy for Malcolm in Dartmouth College’s
newspaper, The Dartmouth, also upholding a Sunni Triumphalism narrative that centers
on an Arab paternalistic understanding of “True Islam” is reminiscent of Shawarbi’s

October 6, 1962. This Pittsburgh Courier exchange was covered by Marable in Reinvention (223-
224) but not the private letter correspondence.
292
Malcolm X to Yahya Hayari, September 1, 1962 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
184

framing.
293
He also takes credit for introducing Malcolm to Shawarbi, which Shawarbi’s
featured speech at Temple No. 7’s Afro-Asian Bazaar in November 1960—two years
prior to Osman meeting Malcolm—would suggest otherwise (covered in Chapter 1).
Osman’s eulogy, though, did the important work of intercepting the American
mainstream press clamor framing Malcolm exclusively in terms of intractable, divisive
Black militancy. Osman explains, “Malcolm as I had known him intimately for three
years is a completely different person and character from the one you have been exposed
to by the commercial press.”
Malcolm’s love for Sudanese Afro-Arab Islam bounces off the pages of his travel
diaries and correspondences. He even requested that Saudi’s MWL, determined to assist
him on his da’wah to Black American communities, send his newly established MMI a
sheikh from Sudan. This Sudanese sheikh, Ahmed Hassoun, eventually served as the
organization’s spiritual advisor. And in turn, MMI would become a legal branch of the
MWL. Another Sudanese friend who held a special place in Malcolm’s heart was former
American University of Beirut professor Malik Badri. In his reflections, graciously
shared to me by Alex Lubin, Badri described “Brother Malcolm X” as Mawdudi in his
da’wah-ic stoicism, noting that he had, “not seen an orator who moulds the feeling of his
listeners as though they were a piece of plasticine in his professional hands.”
Badri first met Malcolm on his 1959 tour of the region, showing him Omdurman
and Khartoum, which Malcolm filmed and later showed at NOI meetings and the Afro-
Asian Bazaar the following year. In his testimony, Badri goes out of his way to make his

293
Ahmed S. Osman, “Malcolm X, ‘A Brother,’” The Dartmouth, March 5, 1965, 5.
185

disavowal of Malcolm’s NOI beliefs clear to the reader, describing them as “deviant.”
Adhering to a Sunni Orthodoxy framework, Badri explains, “I did not attack his deviant
beliefs but I simply spoke to him about Islam in its pure tawhidic nature.” For Badri, this
“tawhidic nature” signified almost a scientific determinist position on the genetic coding
of Islamic practice “transcending race consciousness” by design. Badri employs a Sunni
Triumphalist narrative of Malcolm’s spiritual evolution when he speaks of Malcolm’s
post-NOI shift towards Sunni Orthodoxy as one to “true Islam.”
Badri does provide an interesting revelation about the April 1964 trip’s impact—
including the embrace of him by his circle of Sudanese friends—on Malcolm’s
perceptions of Beirut. Malcolm’s reaction to reconnecting with Badri in Beirut from
April 29 to May 1 (and meeting his Sudanese friends), add more complexity to this
narration. Malcolm appreciated Badri, his friend Ibrahim Shiab and other Sudanese
friends’ queries on race in the U.S., “[They] were well informed on the BM & asked
many questions on it & the American race problem in general.”
294
Badri explains, “The
warm and enthusiastic manner by which he had been received in Beirut, changed his
attitude towards the city.” He is referring to Malcolm’s disdain laced with critiques of
Western colonialism of Lebanese modernization. This critique is so poignant it made its
way as one of the few political reflections of his Middle East travels into Haley’s
mediated the Autobiography. His moral conservative comments contrasting the
Europeanizing of Lebanese women versus the “very modest, very feminine Arabian
women” he observed in the “Holy Land” are included.

294
Malcolm X Diary, April 29, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
186

This page in the Autobiography on Beirut (appears Haley might have collapsed
Malcolm’s April 30, 1964 and September 29, 1964 speeches), wherein it is noted that
Malcolm spoke to the AUB community on “the truth of the American black man’s
condition.”
295
But this, based on his diary entries and Azizah al-Hibri’s oral history,
sounds more like his Sudanese Cultural Center talk: “As I spoke, I felt the subjective and
defensive reactions of the American white students present—but gradually their
hostilities lessened as I continued to present unassailable facts. But the students of
African heritage—well, I’ll never get over how the African displays his emotions.”
296

It’s interesting contrasting the subtle narrative differences in this account and Malcolm’s
diaries: “It was packed. The White Americans were subjective & defensive, but later
became submissive. The African students were strongly pro. Two Sudanese sisters were
present (one was Dr. Malik’s wife). One American Negro girl stood & attacked me, said I
didn’t speak for her. Professor Hope’s wife made nice remarks. Afterward I signed many
autographs.”
297
Trying to understand Haley’s narration and Osman’s re-draft, it’s
interesting what memory will do when confronted with loose ends or possible political
agendas. Badri credits the “historic” success lecture for paving the way for the AUB
administration to reconsider their position on allowing Malcolm to speak on campus. We
will see, in the section on Malcolm’s friendship with Lebanese feminist philosopher,
religious scholar, lawyer and at the time AUB student leader, Azizah al-Hibri’s deep
campus organizing made Malcolm’s even more historic follow-up speech at AUB
possible.

295
Malcolm X, Autobiography, 355.
296
Ibid.
297
Malcolm X Diary, April 30, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
187

Lebanon: Azizah Al-Hibri
April 29-May 1, September 29, 1964
“We really hit it off. It was a real friendship to where he would write me as he was
traveling and I loved receiving his letters.”
–Azizah al-Hibri on Malcolm X
“Greetings from your brothers and sisters here in Harlem, New York.”
-Malcolm X postcard to Azizah al-Hibri, January 25, 1965

“…the fame we get fighting for freedom for others creates a prison for us.”
-Malcolm X letter to Azizah Al-Hibri, September 29, 1964

After Malcolm delivered a speech at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in
Fall of 1964, he gifted AUB student leader and event organizer Azizah al-Hibri Azzam’s
The Eternal Message of Muhammad, inscribing it with the dedication “To the leader of
Muslim women.” At the time, al-Hibri, president of AUB’s Debate team, was a self-
described Marxist with a dedication to secular nationalism (Malcolm even referred to her
as a nationalist in his diaries). “He saw in me a young, upcoming woman leader which I
never saw in myself,” al-Hibri relayed to me in an interview. She elaborated, “I was not
doing Muslim women at that time. I was not thinking myself as a leader other than of the
AUB campus.”
298
Malcolm’s prophesizing of al-Hibri as a Muslim leader, and
specifically around women’s rights, was profoundly intuitive. As during his visit, she
showed very little interest in Islamic traditions.
After migrating to the states to start a doctoral program in Philosophy, Al-Hibri
would go on to become a prominent figure within the international women’s movement
and a leader in the Muslim American community. It was during her doctoral program that
she abandoned Marxism; citing letters she encountered written by Marx’s wife to Engels

298
Azizah al-Hibri, interview with author, May 27, 2014.
188

imploring him for money to feed her starving, malnourished babies. This proved to be
anathema to her emerging political consciousness on women’s rights and involvement in
the Feminist movement. “I found out that Marxism does not appeal to me,” al-Hibri
explained, “because I ultimately studied the life of Marx on women.”
299

As a founding editor, she helped launch the first Feminist Philosophy journal
Hypatia in early 1980s, and was heavily involved in Third World and Women of Color
Feminism projects in the U.S. and globally. Turning to research on human rights and
Islamic jurisprudence, Al-Hibri pursued a law degree and became the first Muslim law
professor in the United States (1992). The following year she founded Karamah, an
organization of Muslim women lawyers, “committed to promoting human rights globally,
especially gender equity, religious freedom and civil rights in the United States.”
300
Post-
colonial and Third World feminism scholar Chela Sandoval, acknowledging Azizah Al-
Hibri’s contribution to this period (with other luminaries like Toni Morrison, Maxine
Hong Kingston, and Barbara Smith), named this 1960s and 1970s movement “U.S. third
world feminism.”
301
Most intriguing, as al-Hibri revealed to me, the conversations that
Malcolm and her had influenced her work in the U.S. Third World Feminist’s movement.

299
Ibid.
300
“Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights.” website: http://karamah.org/
301
Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism,” in The Oxford Companion to Women’s
Writing in the United States, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Martin-Wagner (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 880-881. Also see Michael Suleiman’s book Arabs in
America: Building a New Future features Therese Saliba’s contribution “Resisting Invisibility:
Arab Americans in Academia and Activism” which addressed “Debates in Feminist
Scholarship”—brings up Carol Haddad and Azizah al-Hibri’s participation in National Women
Studies Association (NWSA) conference “U.S. Third World Feminists.” Haddad spoke in 1982
on a panel titled “Arab Americans: The Forgotten Minority in Feminist Circles” and Al-Hibri at a
1983 conference “condemning the racism in the middle class white women’s movement and
Orientalizing approach to Arab women” (Saliba, Third World Feminism, 313).
189

“When I got involved in the women’s movement, I formed the Third World Alliance
among women,” she dreamed, “I was really hoping that we would bring all women of
color to work on the principles of that Malcolm X and I believed that we could all work
together.
302
What was the substance of this friendship that shaped al-Hibri’s social justice
trajectory?
Although Malcolm and al-Hibri met on Malcolm’s first trip to Beirut in April and
spent one day together on his September visit, they developed a fast friendship, “we
really hit it off,” according to al-Hibri, and continued to correspond through letters. I
could definitely understand the quick bonding between Malcolm and al-Hibri given my
experience meeting al-Hibri once and corresponding thereafter via email. During the
closing of my interview with al-Hibri, after encouraging me to think about augmenting
my doctoral degree with a law degree, she offered me a report Karamah contributed to
with the Constitutional Project’s Taskforce on the Treatment of Detainees constitutional
rights violations of prisoners in GITMO. Al-Hibri has also connected me with journalists
writing stories on Malcolm. In my own analysis of friendship-making, I have become
pleasantly surprised by the relationship-building between interlocutors that this project
has made possible. What follows is a recounting of Malcolm’s second trip to Beirut, in
September 1964, as told through a synthesis of Malcolm’s diary entries, the oral history
interview I conducted with al-Hibri, correspondence between Malcolm and al-Hibri and
al-Hibri’s written commentary in reaction to some of Malcolm’s Beirut reflections (in the
diaries) I shared with her. What Malcolm maybe could not have known was al-Hibri’s

302
Azizah al-Hibri, interview with author, May 27, 2014.
190

leveraging of relationships and activist networks, a practice of deep campus organizing,
that made his speech possible.
On August 7, 2016, after having conducted an initial oral history interview with
al-Hibri in her Karamah office in DC two years prior, I emailed her a passage from
Malcolm’s diary reflecting on his September day in Beirut. Since she was mentioned, I
thought she would appreciate reading Malcolm’s impressions of the day:
Azizah the Lebanese student (nationalist leader) met me at the airport with about
10 other girl students, all white & American. We went to Prof. Hope’s home and
had 7UP. Azizah went out, while the rest of us talked & came back informing us
that the Dean had agreed to let me lecture on campus in just two hrs., from 12 to
1pm. Azizah and I had dinner at the American Embassy cafeteria and then walked
to the lecture hall. I had an overflow crowd with just two hours notice. The
students were receptive, their questions objective. There was a cross section
represented. Azizah had driven me to the airport; we sat and had ice cream and
talked while waiting for my plane. She wants to do some political writing for an
American magazine to explain the Palestine Question, doesn’t want to marry until
she has developed her own personality, thinks marriage would hamper it.
303

After I showed al-Hibri the September 29, 1964 diary entry, this inspired her to revisit
memories of Malcolm’s April talk and return to Beirut five months later. She emailed me
a thorough commentary that dovetailed with the interview I conducted in 2014—adding
narrative flair and crucial detail fetishized by data-obsessed historians like myself.
Marable’s Reinvention, colored travel diary entries with white American AUB
student Marian Faye Novak’s recollection of Malcolm’s visit that Fall (which I located
for MXP while a research assistant). Novak’s polemical writing, “Meeting Mr. X,” for
American Heritage in 1995 alters history. Novak’s narration, as a historian, strikes me as
suspect. Repeatedly, Novak misrecognizes some of the historical data around this trip, in

303
Malcolm X Diary, September 29, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
191

which she rails against (and I would also argue misrecognizes) Malcolm’s politics on
race in America. Novak confronted Malcolm with an objection laced in the napalm of
white fragility, “I’m sorry what happened to you, Mr. X, but Sara [another AUB student]
doesn’t speak for me. I really do not think I am any more responsible for your troubles as
a black man than you’re at fault for mine as a white woman…I didn’t choose this skin.”
Al-Hibri even included Novak’s article in our email correspondence about the diary
entry, remarking (as I did when I first read it for MXP), “I thought it is revealing how she
viewed the whole experience.”
304

Dating the talk in October, and confirmed by both Malcolm and al-Hibri that it
took place on the 29
th
of September, Novak gives a different historical account,
describing the Beirut residence belonging to a Black American expatriate, Mrs. Brown.
Actually, as both Malcolm and al-Hibri attested to, it was Hope’s home (a couple
Malcolm met on his April visit) where Malcolm and 10 AUB students conversed over
7UP. The distortion of this detail, leaves out a fascinating piece of Black American
internationalism and AUB/Beirut history; that of Howard University Civil Engineering
Professor Edward Hope’s involvement in this story.
Hope was recruited by AUB to build out the school’s engineering department. In
fact, the 1954 career move was regarded as such a celebratory milestone that the
February issue of Jet magazine featured the announcement in its “Education” section.
This recognition of Hope’s recruit was positioned directly below the “Topeka Board of
Education vote to end racial segregation in 12 more elementary schools in September,”

304
Azizah al-Hibri, e-mail to author, September 16, 2016.
192

revealing the gravity of the achievement.
305
Why is it important to highlight the
distortion? Hope’s appointment at AUB, and as I spoke to earlier, the population of
Sudanese intellectuals like Badri at AUB during this time frame, poses interesting
questions around what kind of metropole Beirut was beyond a cosmopolitan capital for
Arab intellectual diaspora. Was it also a capital for Third World intellectualism—
something rarely addressed let alone analyzed?
Cross-referencing multiple accounts (Malcolm’s, al-Hibri’s, Badri’s, and
Haley’s), also helps to craft a clearer and more sophisticated understanding of Malcolm’s
day in Beirut. Al-Hibri’s memory corresponds to Malcolm’s narration in his diary entries.
Though they only met in person twice, their friendship, nourished through letter-writing,
continued to develop up until Malcolm’s assassination. As a testament to this burgeoning
friendship, Malcolm, in addition to gifting al-Hibri The Eternal Message, invited her to
Harlem to meet her “brothers and sisters” (who he would consistently reference in letters
to al-Hibri).
Al-Hibri initially encountered Malcolm on his April trip to Beirut. She attended
the lecture orchestrated by Badri that he gave at the Sudanese Cultural Center. They
connected and chatted at a faculty member’s residence on campus, where a group of
AUB students and faculty where invited to after the talk. Malcolm wrote to al-Hibri in
June of 1964, inquiring about the veracity of U.S. press reports that his April speech in
Beirut incited riots. He also mentioned, “I’m coming to Beirut.”
306
As soon as al-Hibri

305
“Edward Hope Appointed to University Professor” and “Integrate 12 More Schools in Topeka,
Kansas,” Education, Jet Magazine, February 1954, 25.
306
From al-Hibri’s commentary: “After he [Malcolm] completed his Hajj and returned to the US,
he wrote me on June 1
st
, 1964,

from 97
th
street, East Elmhurst 69, N.Y., to inquire about the truth
193

read this she approached the Dean of Students, Dean Arnold, who she had an amicable
relationship with. She asserted, “ok, I want Malcolm X to speak on campus.” According
to al-Hibri, Arnold was not won over. He accused Malcolm of “hanging America’s dirty
wash,” which, for an Arab student attending an American university, sounded more like
an excuse than a valid argument. “I don’t understand what the problem of that is if we
have free speech,” al-Hibri explained and added that even in her culture it was common
to “hang dirty washes.” She scheduled the talk and booked the room anyway—
disregarding the fact that she did not have university approval at that point. Al-Hibri,
remembering that Malcolm was set to arrive at 11am to the airport, scheduled the lecture
for 12pm at Mary Dodge Hall. Signage and leaflets advertising the speech at Dodge Hall
were prepared—while still waiting for administrative authorization. “At 11 o’clock the
Dean said yes, thinking it was too late,” al-Hibri continues to narrate, “So I sent my team
out and they plastered it [signage] all over the university. At 12 o’clock, Malcolm was
there and he made a fantastic speech.” A feat of student activism, Al-Hibri had half the
time Malcolm narrates in his diaries to attract an “overflow crowd” to his talk.
Malcolm’s historic speech at AUB, a culmination of traveling across the MM for
the entirety of the summer, observing modernization projects—both secular nationalist
regimes and theocratic monarchies powered by petro-economies—called for the region to

of the news reported in the American press. He said: “To my amazement the American press
here in this country reported that my speech in Beirut caused a riot among the students there.
This must have taken place after I left because I certainly don’t know anything about it. Would
you please write to me and give me your opinion of the students [sic] reactions to my lecture
there, and what kind of an impact it had?’” Confirming his suspicions about media fabrication,
she assured him that there were no riots and This corresponds with Malcolm’s comments in
Haley’s work, where both trips are collapsed into one” (Malcolm X, The Autobiography, 355).

194

weaponize oil in an effort to de-circuit Western imperialism. During my interview with
al-Hibri, we both paused to reflect on Malcolm’s foresight, referencing the oil boycott a
decade later led by Prince Muhammad Faisal’s father, King Faisal Al-Saud in 1973. “The
speech was amazing,” al-Hibri elaborates, “Speaking without notes for a whole hour, he
covered topics ranging from civil rights in America, to the significance of oil to Arab
countries in garnering political power. Malcolm was clearly a world leader. This was a
relatively new topic at that time, and his analysis was quite thorough and thoughtful.
When he was done, the room was on fire, and everyone wanted to talk to Malcolm, or
touch him.”
307

One wonders where precisely Malcolm generated this political analysis and if he
was in conversation with Arab Muslim leaders about the political feasibility of an oil
boycott. Could it have been discussed with his Saudi friends, like Azzam and Faisal, who
he had just left to visit Beirut? This is quite an interesting intellectual gem that emerged
from my conversation from al-Hibri, as this analysis appears no where in the
Autobiography, in Malcolm’s travel diaries or any of his writings stored in the Malcolm
X Collection at the Schomburg. The recording of this speech is also layered with
historical mystery.
Following the talk, al-Hibri quickly ushered Malcolm out of the Hall to grab
lunch at the cafeteria in the U.S. Embassy (which, at the time was close to AUB’s
campus). During lunch, Malcolm spoke about the loss of his privacy. Malcolm relayed
some interesting points on his political positioning within the Civil Rights movement,

307
Azizah al-Hibri email correspondence commentary, September 16, 2016.
195

material scholars have long and continue to debate: “He began telling me about his
political life. He told me about his recent meeting with Martin Luther King, with other
meetings scheduled to come. Their visions, Malcolm said, were converging, but that each
one of them had his own role in the movement.”
308
In our interview, as we discussed this
exchange in length. Al-Hibri added that Malcolm, fully mindful of his political tactics
and the polarizing way he was positioned in the media and in the movement, explained
that he would, “have to push in one direction the pendulum so that Martin Luther King
would come and push it the other way so it would stop in the middle.” Al-Hibri
continued, “He understood that. He said, ‘We need each other’.” She follows up opining,
“But it would be unfair that Malcolm X would be dropped from this equation. You know,
he has his rightful place. And not only was he defending Muslims, he was defending
African Americans as a whole, as a group. He was very conscious of coalitions among
people of color.”
309

Al-Hibri, at Malcolm’s side during the entire visit, rushed Malcolm to airport so
he could catch his flight to Khartoum. They did, however, have time to indulge in some
ice cream before his departure. According to al-Hibri, “[He] thanked me for organizing
the speech in record time and invited me to visit my brothers in Harlem when I arrive in
the US.” That same day, al-Hibri received a letter from Malcolm, still exhausted from the
whole experience in Beirut, stating:
I was real tired intellectually from the lecture, all tensed up too over the
excitement of it, and yet while speaking with you over the ice cream at the airport
I felt so happy and relaxed that I could have sat there for hours more.

308
Ibid.
309
Azizah al-Hibri, interview with author, May 27, 2014.
196

People in my position seldom relax, as I said, seldom ever relax. We live in a
fishbowl which creates much tenseness and inner tensions and though we are
constantly surrounded by crowds and people of all sorts, there is still that extreme
loneliness – created by the “shell” in which we are forced to place ourselves at all
times. For fear that what we say or do as human beings [emphasis his] (who are as
normal and natural and down to earth as any one [sic] else is) may be
misinterpreted, misunderstood, or even deliberately misused. Thus, like the fish in
the fishbowl, though surrounded by spectators, the bowl or shell that we erect
around ourselves becomes a “bowl” or world of loneliness… the fame we get
fighting for freedom for others creates a prison for us.
310

Al-Hibri, when she finally touched down in the States, a year after Malcolm’s
assassination, was determined to meet her “brothers and sisters in Harlem.” The analysis
on American racial apartheid al-Hibri learned from her conversations and friendship with
Malcolm helped her to contextualize and make sense of an urban insurrection that took
place in Detroit a year after she started graduate study at Wayne State University:
I was in the whole scene, understand what was happening and was indebted to
Malcolm for putting me in the picture ahead of time. Otherwise, as an immigrant
Lebanese, I would have thought, “What is happening this country?” Being afraid,
not knowing what to do, doing the wrong thing. And you know what I found out?
A lot of people who came with me [from Lebanon] didn’t really understand.
This insurrection and the foreign student reaction to it, inspired al-Hibri to study the
history of the United States; along with the histories of Black American, Muslim
American, and American Indian communities. She participated in the anti-war
movement, studied Marxism, obtained Ph.D. in Philosophy and later a J.D., became a key
organizer in Third World women’s movement, and moved from “nationalist leader” to
internationally recognized, “leader of Muslim women”—as Malcolm had prophesized.
As I’ve stated earlier (and hope has been adequately illustrated), movement building is

310
Malcolm X letter to Azizah al-Hibri, September 29, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
197

about relationship building, an engaged witness that included Malcolm’s exchange of
testimony and development of transnational friendships.
Malcolm X in Gaza
“We must return
No boundaries should exist
No obstacles can stop us
Cry out refugees: “We shall return”
Tell the Mts: “We shall return”
Tell the alley: “We shall return”
We are going back to our youth
Palestine calls us to arm ourselves
And we are armed and are going to fight
We must return”
-Harun Hashim Rashid
311

The poetic verse opening this paper was extracted from Malcolm X’s travel
diaries to the MM in 1964 written by a Palestinian refugee, Harun Hashim Rashid, who
fled Gaza in 1956.
312
Why would Malcolm include this verse in his diary entries with no
other such poetry? How did he encounter Palestinian poetry? What is the significance of
this notation? Although forty-five pages of the Autobiography are devoted to a conflation
of both his hajj and his attendance of the OAU summit (mashriq/African trips) and one
paragraph to his 1959 trip to the region, much has been omitted, ahistoricized, or
overlooked.
313
Thus, travel diary entries and contemporaneous op-ed pieces in mashriqi

311
Malcolm X Diary, undated 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
312
Occupied during Malcolm’s 1964 visit by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.
313
“Anyway, national publicity was in the offing for the Nation of Islam when Mr. Muhammad
sent me on a three-week trip to Africa. Even as small as we then were, some of the African and
Asian personages had sent Mr. Muhammad private word that they liked his efforts to awaken and
lift up the American black people. Sometimes, the messages had been sent through me. As Mr.
Muhammad’s emissary, I went to Egypt, Arabia, to the Sudan, to Nigeria, and Ghana” (Malcolm
X, The Autobiography, 242).
198

and maghrebi newspapers help contextualize Malcolm X’s relationships with Arab and
Islamic leaders, and from this emerges a more complex Malcolm who offers theoretic
testimony of his engaged witness of Zionist settler colonialist violence throughout the
mashriq and Africa.
As the Rashid entry and other revealing observations in his diaries suggest, a great
deal remains unknown about Malcolm X, particularly the development of his politics and
faith towards the end of his life. In order to explore the political and spiritual relevance of
his experience with the Arab world, I examine one of Malcolm’s post-hajj political
passions: a pointed condemnation of Zionism and his concomitant support for Palestinian
liberation. Marable’s Malcolm X biography was one of the few scholarly books to
appraise Malcolm’s trip to Gaza and anti-Zionist politics.
314
Although I contributed to the
assemblage on the archive of Malcolm X’s trips to the Middle East and North Africa and
Malcolm’s relationship with Arab, Islamic and African leaders for MXP; we diverged on
our interpretation of Malcolm’s reasons for supporting Palestinian liberation and disdain
for Israeli occupation.
In addition to Marable’s intervention, other scholars, journalists and writers who

314
Manning Marable’s Reinvention and Louis DeCaro’s On the Side of the People also cover
Malcolm’s trip to Gaza but provides very little historical insight into the impact of that visit on
Malcolm’s political and spiritual maturation, beyond noting that after the Gaza trip Malcolm X
dropped from his speeches and writings an analogy that described African Americans’
relationship to Pan-Africanism as synonymous to American Jews relationship to the “World
Jewry,” (DeCaro, On the Side of the People, 225). Malcolm explicitly made this diasporic
consciousness analogy in a May 11, 1964 MMI press release from Accra, Ghana: “Just as the
American Jew is in harmony (politically, economically and culturally) with World Jewry, it is
time for all African-Americans to become an integral part of the world’s Pan-Africanists, and
even though we might remain in America physically while fighting for the benefits the
constitution guarantees us—we must “return” to Africa philosophically and culturally and
develop a working unity in the framework of Pan-Africanism” (The Muslim Mosque Inc “Text of
Letter from Malcolm X,” May 11, 1964 [reel 13], Malcolm X Collection).
199

have written about or mentioned the Gaza trip include: Louis DeCaro, Illyasah Shabazz
and Herb Boyd, Keith Feldman, Robin D.G. Kelley, Hisham Aidi, and Alex Lubin.
Lubin’s Geographies of Liberation: The Making an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary
features as its cover a photo of Malcolm X shaking PLO Chairman Ahmed Shukairy’s,
hand at a press conference for Shukairy that coincided with Nasser’s hosting of the
second Arab Summit meeting in Alexandria (a couple weeks later Egypt was also host to
the second Conference of Non-Aligned States). What is not mentioned are the other two
men in that photo and the making of that September 15, 1964 moment. Kelley and
Feldman, in their work, make necessary connections between the Gaza trip and
Malcolm’s writing of the September 17, 1964 Egyptian Gazette op-Ed “Zionist Logic”
(which will be intellectually assessed with a long-view of Malcolm’s politics and practice
of engaged witness). In The Nation’s “The Political Uses of Malcolm X,” Hisham Aidi
points to a precursor moment, of Malcolm “meeting” Palestinian refugee poet Harun
Hashim Rashid (who I will also contextualize later) to explain some of the omissions in
Shabazz and Boyd’s reproduction of the travel diaries. However, Aidi does not
historically contextualize the contours of a meeting. Besides the reproduction of the
stanza from Rashid’s poetry, Aidi’s work does not mention the other scribblings about
coloniality and indigeneity that I argue also contributed to Malcolm’s condemnation of
Zionism.
315
This meeting and Malcolm’s anti-Zionist analysis rooted in a critique of what
we might call today forms of racial capitalism and settler capitalism (what he considered
to be American dollarism and neocolonialism), I argue was a long time in the making,

315
Hisham, Aidi, “The Political Uses of Malcolm X’s Image,” The Nation, July 12, 2016.
200

through delegation and relationship building work, otherwise known here as friendship-
making (movementships). These works do not address “how” it is Malcolm comes to
develop a Zionist critique, and in many cases, years before thinkers and cultural workers
in the Black radical tradition do so. Robin Kelley, in “Yes, I Said ‘National Liberation’,”
points out that Pittsburgh Courier columnist George Schulyer was one of the earliest
Black intellectuals to critique “Zionist imperialism” and the Nakbah. As Kelley reveals,
Schulyer, “‘dismissed characterizations of Arabs as ‘‘backward,’ ignorant, illiterate and
incapable of properly developing the land’ as thinly veiled justifications for a Jewish
state, reminding his readers that this was the same argument used by the Nazis to invade
Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, and to justify European colonialism.”
316

Additionally, sharp reliance on the Autobiography and historical renderings on the
former NOI figure continue to repackage and sell the myth to the general public that
Malcolm X was anti-Semitic. In countering this, I argue that it was not anti-Jewish
sentiment but Malcolm's advocacy of human rights through the lens of Islam, and more
specifically his post-NOI spiritual education (inspired in part by the generative artifacts
that arose from his friendship and encounters with Azzam), that fundamentally shaped
and formulated his anti-Zionist politics. Malcolm, it appears, did not just want to
internationalize the Black American plight and link it up to the “Darkskinism (or the dark
world’s struggle).” He was also keen to internationalize Islamic humanist principles.
Although Malcolm, it can be argued, was fully committed to, and primarily concerned
with, Black American liberation, he did so guided by a spiritual compass that valued

316
Republished in CounterPunch, February, 24, 2016 and originally appearing in Robin D.G.
Kelley, “Yes, I Said ‘National Liberation,’” Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and
Occupation, ed. Vijay Prashad (London: Verso, 2015).
201

principles of universal brotherhood, human rights (defined as Freedom, Justice and
Equality—aka NOI ethos), and tawhid (the Oneness of God). Malcolm, as discussed
earlier, not only prescribed Islam as an antidote to America’s “cancer of racism,” but as a
spiritual commitment that pushed his advocacy of human rights for “22 million African
Americans,” his support for Third World “dark-skinned” anti-imperialist liberation
movements worldwide and his political and ethical concerns over Zionist practices and
policies.
Palestine
Malcolm’s two-day trip to Gaza started early on a Saturday morning on the 5
th
of
September in 1964 from the Arab Summit Conference opening in Alexandria, Egypt. At
this time, Gaza, was still under the control of Egypt. Malcolm was thus able to freely
move in and out of the territory and its refugee camps. After visiting the Aswan, he and
an unnamed Egyptian friend, entered “no man’s land” to see “Arab Refugee Camps” and
a hospital. At lunch that day, he dined with Colonel Mustafa Khafaqa, the assistant to the
governor of Aswan province and “Arab Palestine’s” religious leaders. He, along with his
entourage, left Gaza the next day at noon. Other than noting that “the spirit of Allah was
strong” that evening, little is written about his time in Gaza or immediate revelations.
317

However, one man’s story of a harrowing escape from Israel bleeds through the pages of
Malcolm’s diary and becomes part of the lifeblood Malcolm later used to produce
vigorously argued opposition papers on his anti-Zionist politics.
Based on Malcolm’s diary entries, one person’s story in relation to the Palestine

317
Malcolm X Diary, September 5, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
202

issue stands out, that of Gazan poet Harun Hashim Rashid. On the evening of September
5
th
, he listened to Rashid’s account of his harrowing escape from Israel in 1956, a time
historically remembered as the “Khan Yunis Massacre.” On November 3, 1956, the
Israeli military killed 275 civilians.
318
After this narrative encounter, Malcolm begins to
make more mentions and references to Palestine in his political comparisons to the plight
of Black Americans and the plight of the dark-skinned world. Prior to this encounter,
many Black nationalists before him, praised Israel as a model for a homeland for Black
Americans.
319

The famed Palestinian activist poet, whose words influenced Malcolm’s framing
and understanding of the 48/67, goes unmentioned by both Haley in the Autobiography
and Marable in Reinvention. Rashid, born in British controlled Gaza, witnessed colonial
destruction first hand as a child. British soldiers demolished his family’s home and his
neighbors’ homes as retaliation for Palestinian rebellions. Two years before his escape
out of Israel, he released a poetry book titled “With Strangers.”
320
In one of his poems
“Raise your Arms” Rashid documents a common scrimmage between Israeli soldiers and
Gazans. During the house raids, men and women were forced to stand outside of their
homes with their “hands raised” at gunpoint. Rashid also draws from an experience in his

318
The details on Khan Yunis Massacre (according to freepali.com).
319
In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), Robin DG
Kelley highlights the role Zionism played Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. According
to Kelley, Garvey identified with the modern Zionist movement, naming his movement, “Black
Zionism comparing the struggle for an African homeland with the Jewish movement for a
homeland in Palestine” (Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 24). Additionally, Melani McAlister
demonstrates in Epic Encounters that W.E.B. Du Bois abandoned his longtime support of Israel
when the nation invaded Egypt at Suez in 1956 (McAlister, Epic Encounters, 85).
320
Harun Hashim Rashid, “Poem to Jerusalem, Raise your arms,” Anthology of Modern
Palestinian Literature, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
203

life in which an Israeli soldier held him and his family at gunpoint and demanded that
they “Raise your Arms.” Later in the diary, Malcolm constructs a list of details for the
“Khan Yunis Massacre,” details very possibly relayed to him by Rashid and perhaps
combined with additional research.
321
Malcolm reproduces a verse from one of Rashid’s
poems, which appeared in his 1957 collection of poetry Gaza in the Line of Fire off to the
side on a page of notes:
322

321
On the same page with notes, a scribble of “Khan Yunnis” 1. Nov 3
rd
’56-50002. Shelter:
woman children3. “Rafah border crossing Col Mustafa Khafaqa” (Malcolm X Diary, September
5, 1964 [reel 9], Malcolm X Collection).
322
This poem is most likely Rashid’s 1960 “hatta ya'ud sha'buna” (“Until Our People Return”).
Interestingly, this poem is almost exclusively searchable online through Zionist fear-mongering
translations, reproduced for “reports” on the radicalizing of Palestinian youth in UNRWA
schools:
“We are Returning”
"Returning, returning, we are returning.
The borders shall be no more,
Nor fortresses nor fortifications.
So cry out, o displaced persons, 'We are returning.'
Returning to the homes, to the planes and the mountains,
Under the banners of glory,
jihad and struggle.
With our blood and self-sacrifice, brotherhood and loyalty,
We are returning.
Returning, o hills, returning, o planes,
Returning to our childhood and youth.
To wage jihad with a drawn sword and to reap in our land.
We are returning"
“Palestinian Authority (PA) schoolbooks used by UNRWA in its schools in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip promote the goal of a violent struggle for the liberation of Palestine. That struggle,
which is never restricted to the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip alone, is made
more compelling in the books with the help of the traditional Islamic ideals of Jihad and
martyrdom (Shahadah) aided by the description of the violent return of the refugees. Thus, the
Palestinian child in UNRWA schools is exposed to an atmosphere of violence and is mentally
prepared for his or her participation in that armed struggle in the future.” Arnon Goiss,
“Encouraging Children to Engage in Acts of War: Struggle, Jihad, and Martyrdom in
Schoolbooks Taught in UNRWA Schools in the West Bank and Gaza,” The Center for Near East
Policy, April 2014. And in Y. Yehoshua’s “The Narrative of Return in Palestinian Textbooks,”
Inquiry & Analysis Series 950, for the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), March
20, 2013. Beloved Lebanese songstress Fairuz’s (nee Nouhad Haddad) 1972 “Sanarjiou” (“We
204

“We must return
No boundaries should exist
No obstacles can stop us
Cry out refugees: “We shall return”

Will Return”), strikingly similar lyrics, is allegedly written by Harun Hashem Rashid. A New
York Times profile on Fairouz, (Neil Macfarquhar, “This Pop Diva Wow’Em in Arabic,” New
York Times, May 18, 1999) characterizes “Sanarjiou” as, “the unofficial anthem of Palestinian
refugees.” The lyrics are (“liberal” translation from “Fairouz Context” Blog,
http://fairouzincontext.blogspot.com/p/jerusalem-in-my-heart.html ):

The flocks of swallows have returned to the old windows
The shepherds of hills have returned to the peaceful houses
And the doves went back to their mountain nests
Will we ever return, like the swallows?
Like a mountain shepherd, like a returning sail?
Will we ever return?

We shall return to our home, one day
To drown in the warmth of hope.
We shall return
Though time passes us by
And distances grow only greater
Between us.
Therefore, O Heart, slow down,
And do not throw yourself
On the road of return, in exhaustion
For it pains us that tomorrow,
The flocks of birds will return
While we remain here
There are hills
That sleep and wake on our pledge
And there are lovely people,
Whose days are a silent anticipation
That's melancholic in its songs
Places where willows fill the eye
They grew tired, and over the water have bent
And in their shadows, noontime quaffs the aroma of calmness,
And the essence of happiness,
We shall return, the nightingale told me,
When upon a hill we met,
That nightingales still live there in our dreams
And that among the yearning hills, and the yearning people
There is a place for us still
O heart then, how long has the wind scattered us!
Come, we shall return
Let us return.

205

Tell the Mts: “We shall return”
Tell the alley: “We shall return
We are going back to our youth
Palestine calls us to arm ourselves
And we are armed and are going to fight
We must return”
323

This message of “returning to the homeland” struck a chord with Malcolm, who
repeatedly throughout his diary entries began to see the importance of linking African
Americans to Africa and, inspired by Nkrumah’s “Africanism,” started to anchor Black
Nationalism in a return to an Afrocentric mentality, or as he put it “[Migrate to] Africa
culturally, philosophically, psychologically.”
324
Dismantling the Zionist homeland served
as an instructive paradigmatic pedestal for Black Americans to model a similar struggle
with their own domestic oppressors.
Based on the sequence of events recorded and apparent emotive reaction to the
story and his intellectual investment in Rashid’s narrative, it would be fair to suggest that
Malcolm’s hands-on education on Palestinian occupation added to his expanding
indictment of Western neocolonialism; part of a generative artifact of an engaged witness
of settler colonial violence in Gaza. Another diary entry supports this claim. On the page
following his Khan Yunis list Malcolm outlines struggles of current nations/peoples:
Spain-Morrocans [sic]
America-Indians
Negroes-Africa

323
Directly following a November 17
,
1964 entry, couched between a November 17
th
entry and
the remaining few pages of his travel diaries.
324
Malcolm X Diary, May 17, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
206

Arabs-indigenous to Palestine
Israelis-from Europe
325

He concludes the thought with the following formulaic construction based on the above
examples:
Colonialism, imperialism, Zionism =Racism.

Above each system of domination, Malcolm gives a country example oppressed
by the corresponding system: Colonialism-South Africa, imperialism-Congo, Zionism-
Palestine, and Racism-United States. Interestingly, these “original peoples” comparisons
and systems analysis serve as a basis in his sharp refutation of the Zionist claim to
“homeland.” In an Op-ed he would later write for the Cairo-based English language daily
Egyptian Gazette, Malcolm facetiously asked if the Moors were the original inhabitants
of Spain, the Indians in the US, and the African Americans from Africa, then, could these
displaced peoples not go back to their original homelands and uproot the existing
population, as was the basis of what he called “Zionist Logic”?
326
Even following his

325
One wonders if conversations with Azzam also influenced Malcolm’s construction of
“Moroccan” as the indigenous people of Spain? “Azzam spoke of an African empire that was
Islamic and non-Arabic speaking, that re-conquered Spain for Islam & extended rule over it for
300 years & of the strong Islamic influence (penetration) into all of Africa ever since the earliest
days of the Prophet Muhammad. How could this man be such a busy, world diplomat & find time
still to read & replenish his vast wealth of knowledge on such a variety of subjects” (Malcolm X
Diary, April 18, 1964 [reel 9], Malcolm X Collection).
326
And still later on, Malcolm epistemologically constructs a list of what Edward Said calls
“adversarial internationalizations” that expands on the above construction: “It takes some of the
same poison to counteract (as antidote) poison. Europeanism has been such a strong poison for
centuries it now becomes essential to emphasize Africanism to counteract it and Arabism to
counteract Zionism, socialist to counteract capitalism, etc. Orientalism or Darkism to
counterbalance Occidentalism or whiteism” (Malcolm X Diary September 24, 1964 [reel 9],
Malcolm X Collection).
207

return home Malcolm spent his day talking about Zionism and other topics, including
Goldwater and “Afro-Arab relations” with Dr. Asa Davis.
327

Ten days following his return from Gaza, Malcolm, accompanied by Shawarbi’s
son Muhammad and a friend named Shawky, attended PLO Chairman Ahmed Shukairy’s
press conference at the Shephard’s Hotel and posed for pictures. The Associated Press
(AP) snapped a picture of Malcolm and Shukairy greeting. More questions arise from this
picture than answers documented by history. What little is known is provided by
Malcolm himself. In his diary, he does not include additional reflections about the
speech, but he explicitly discusses his “posing for pictures”: “I attended HE Shukairy’s
press conference and afterward met him and posed for pictures with him. Shawarbi and
Shawky were with me.”
328
Did Malcolm X have a conversation with the PLO Chairman
about the Palestinian people’s experience with Zionism? Nowhere in the diaries does
Malcolm elaborate further about this meeting, so Shukairy’s influence on Malcolm’s
socio-political understanding of Zionism is unknown. However, two days after this diary
entry, on September 17, 1964, Malcolm publishes an editorial in the Egyptian Gazette
titled “Zionist Logic.”
In the constant pursuit of deepening his knowledge of Islam, Malcolm drew
inspiration from Arab, African and Muslim mentors, and after seeing the realities of
occupation first-hand in Gaza, Malcolm puts his socio-political education (and
philosophical commitment to Islamic humanist ideals) into action. In two articles that
appear in The Egyptian Gazette, Malcolm declared his solidarity with Palestinians, calls

327
Malcolm X Diary, September 6, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
328
Malcolm X Diary, September 15, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
208

for Arab unity in the face of the neo-colonial force of Zionism, and incisively
deconstructs its flaws in “Zionist Logic.” On September 6, 1964, in “Arabs Must Unite to
Face Zionism,” Malcolm, interviewed at the opening of the Arab Summit Conference in
Alexandria, Egypt, “proclaimed his support for the right of the Palestinian people to
return to their homeland, and said that Arab unity is a necessity in the face of Zionism.”
He further professed that, “Imperialism, Zionism, and racial discrimination were not
different things; they were all incompatible with the simplest principles of humanity.”
329

Eleven days later in “Zionist Logic,” he explains that this new “camouflaged”
colonialism, described as a subtler form of European colonialism, differs only in “form
and method, and not motive or objective” as it still wears the garments of a similar
oppressor. Throughout the article, he exposes the historical, legal, and religious
irrationality of “Zionist Logic” that tries to legitimize what they “have done to our Arab
brothers and sisters in Palestine:”
If the Israeli Zionists believe their present occupation of Arab Palestine is the
fulfillment of predictions made by Jewish prophets, then they also religiously
believe that Israel must fulfill its “Divine” mission to “rule all other nations with a
rod of iron” which only means a different form of iron-like rule more firmly
entrenched even, than that of the former European Colonial Powers.
According to Malcolm, “Zionist-Dollarism,” is entrenched because it uses “20
th
Century
imperialism’s number weapon” to not only skillfully divide the Arab world, but to also
“sow the seeds of dissension among African leaders, and also divide the Africans against
the Asians” while blinding them to their own experience of subjugation as colonial

329
“Arabs must unite to face Zionism” by MENA, Egyptian Gazette, September 6, 1964, 3.
209

subjects.
330

Other notable points in the article parallel his diary entries. “They cripple the
bird’s wing” discusses the ways Zionism treats Arabs and was originally sketched out in
his diary and later appeared in an article as, “They cripple the bird’s wing and then
condemn it for not flying as fast as they!” His harsh rebuke of African American
diplomat Ralph Bunche appears within the context of his support of Zionism. He
rhetorically jokes: “Is Ralph Bunche the messiah of Zionism?” Later, he connects the
“Zionist logic” rationalizing the occupation of Arab Palestine to an outline in his diary on
Moorish Spain, the African continent and North America – asking if the “original
inhabitants” of thousands to hundreds of years ago came back “reclaimed” land they had
a “right” to, how would that be received? One sees the early musing of this in his diary as
he constructs a table comparing the various colonization projects imposed on indigenous
populations. In comparison to European colonialism, this “Zionist colonialism differs
only in form and method, but never in motive or objective.” They both are united by a
guiding philosophy of “dollarism.” He uses “European Zionist,” being sure to connect it
to the European colonial project, and “our Arab brothers and sisters” to convey a strong
sense of takāful and recognition of loyalty. Every mention of the word “Palestinians” in
the article is accompanied by the words “brother and sister.” This ummic sentiment is
also coded as part of a “joint responsibility” to a “dark world” besieged by Americo-

330
Malcolm X, “Zionist Logic,” Egyptian Gazette, September 17, 1964. “And the one of the
main bases for this weapon is Zionist Israel. The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely
placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of
dissension among African leaders and also divide Africans against the Asians.”
210

European imperialism, one that effuses through his words.
331

In Malcolm’s commentary on Palestine, no religious right to the land or religious
claim is made; he even debunks the religious claim to the land by what he consistently
referred to as “Israeli Zionists.” Instead, in all his writings and speeches, Malcolm favors
viewing the situation through a political lens, as “20
th
century colonialism.” The classic
metanarrative interpretation of this and many other statements made by Malcolm about
Zionism was read and tagged as “anti-Semitic.” Perceived to be a threat to Black-Jewish
relations in the US. Even Martin Luther King Jr. blamed Malcolm for contributing to the
“deteriorating of Negro-Jewish relations” because of his position on Zionism. To counter
and overcome an alleged divisiveness put into place by Malcolm, King actively reached
out to the Jewish community by giving two speeches written by his draft speechwriter
Clarence Jones to New York based Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish
Committee, scheduled for the spring of 1965.
332
Malcolm’s position on Zionism during
the time period that preceded the ‘67 war ran dramatically counter-current to mainstream
political stances. His rebuke of the state of Israel was viewed not only as unorthodox, but
also dangerous to the domestic and international balance of power.
Last Interview: Al-Muslimoon
The Islamic Center of Geneva’s magazine Al-Muslimoon, a center established by
Egyptian exile, son-in-law to Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan Al-Banna and father of
Tariq Ramadan, Said Ramadan, conducted an interview with Malcolm X towards the end

331
Malcolm X, “Zionist Logic.”
332
Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, Communist Influence In Racial
Matters Internal Security (File 100-442529), February 16, 1965.
211

of his life. Al-Muslimoon sent him questions to answer in writing. Malcolm responded to
the last two questions of the list while staying at the Manhattan Hotel on February 20,
1965, the night before his assassination. The last two responses touch on his position on
Zionism, and linked the subversive tactics of Zionism to the American imperial project
and its ties to a larger “international power structure”:
333

The colonial vultures have no intention of giving it up with a fight. Their chief
weapon is still “divide and conquer.” In East Africa there is a strong anti-Asian
feeling being nourished among Africans. In West Africa there is a strong anti-
Arab feeling. Where there are Arabs or Asians there is a strong anti-Muslim
feeling. These hostilities are not initiated by the above-mentioned people who are
involved. They have nothing to benefit from fighting among themselves at this
point. Those who benefit most are the former colonial masters who have now
supplanted the hated colonialism and imperialism with Zionism.
As a defender of the “plight of African Americans,” his condemnation of Zionism drew
from his assessment of America as contributing to a “20
th
century colonialism” that might
“differ in method” from injustices of the past but not in “objective.” In both responses,
Malcolm invokes a repudiation of the colonial powers’ violation of indigenous
populations’ “human rights,” including those of the Black American and the Palestinian.
Furthermore, Malcolm’s proclamation that, “Zionism is even more dangerous than
communism because it is made more acceptable and is thus more destructively effective,”
is most like influenced by his reading of Azzam Pasha’s critique of communism in The
Eternal Message of Muhammad.
These last written entries clearly illustrate his unequivocal position and testimony
on Zionism, assembled through engaged witness travel to Gaza and movementship work.
However, given the fact that these two pieces were published in Arab and Muslim media

333
Malcolm X, “After the bombing speech,” on February 13, 1965, in Malcolm X Speaks, 163.
212

outlets, the Egyptian Gazette and Al-Muslimoon magazine, can this be read more as a
case of Malcolm marketing himself to Arab and Muslim audience; an act of political
expediency as historian Manning Marable appears to suggest in A Life of Reinvention?
Marable, after a content analysis of “Zionist Logic” and a brief outline of Malcolm’s trip
to Gaza, concludes that, “Malcolm’s anti-Israeli thesis reflected the political interest of
both these allies,” Egypt’s Nasser and Ghana’s Nkrumah.
334
By using familiar political
stances, rhetoric, and tropes was he attempting to appeal and gain access to the
international community? Did Arab media sources attempt to do the same, tokenizing
Malcolm as a dissident of American hegemony in nonalignment movement circles? Did
Malcolm simply echo pan-Arab political postures on Zionism to ingratiate himself with
Arab and Islamic leaders like Nasser, Azzam Pasha, and Said Ramadan (as the rhetoric in
Muslim circles during the time was unambiguously pro-Palestinian) and Pan-African
figure Nkrumah? Was his attempt to possibly lever a bargaining chip to gain support
from nonaligned nation-states for his human rights visions for Black Americans at the
UN? Or, perhaps, to strengthen a network of contacts from which he could request
financial assistance and institutional help to actualize his American Islamic da’wah
dream?
335
Were Malcolm’s words sincere in his political and spiritual commitment to
truth and social justice, or in his (and the NOI’s) words, “Freedom, Justice and
Equality”? Or is the explanation a more complex, multi-causal one?
Based on my research and reading of Malcolm, I would argue that it is hard to
determine the intentionality behind the emblematic Black radical’s private and public

334
Marable, Reinvention, 367-368.
335
As this was clearly articulated in his last interview with Ramadan’s Al-Muslimoon publication
213

words.
336
However, it must be remembered that Malcolm was not inhibited while
critiquing Arabs in their own media publications and in his conversations with Arab
friends he consistently mentions “preaching” to in his diary entries. As further example,
in Al-Muslimoon, he took immigrant Arab Muslims to task for failing to “live up to” to
their brand association with Islam by missing the opportunity to successfully perform
da’wah in the US to the “most fertile area for Islam in the West,” that being Black
America. He also discussed the history of Arab and African involvement in the slave
trade to Saudi publication Bilad.
337
This was not a man to “hold his tongue” or
obsequiously cajole affluent and high-ranking world leaders.
Conclusion
For Malcolm, an opposition to oppression in the form of “imperialism, Zionism, and
racial discrimination” was not motivated by hate, but a profound love for humankind,
especially those robbed of a rightfully due humane and dignified existence. In an onto-
epistemological universe refusing to privilege zero-sum corporeality, his pro-Palestinian
and anti-Zionist political articulations did not entail a negation of Jewishness, but an
affirmation of a duty to Palestinian justice. It was these spiritual sentiments that informed
and drove his politics on Black American issues, “darkskinned” brothers starting with the
Mau Mau movement in Kenya to mourning Lumumba’s overthrow and the suffering
under Tsombe’s American-backed dictatorship, to the plight of the Palestinian people.

336
Additionally Marable fails to include Harun Hashim Rashid’s passage in his analysis,
furthermore, that entry in Malcolm’s diary and the aforementioned poets receive no mention in
Marable’s Reinvention.
337
The Al-Muslimoon piece Originally appeared in Al-Muslimoon Magazine in February 1965.
Reappeared on Malcolm-x.org website, http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/int_almus.htm. The
Bilad comment appeared in Malcolm X Diary, April 24, 1964 (reel 9), Malcolm X Collection.
214

This was the directive of a faith worn on his finger, winged on words fired on a podium,
wrapped around his dead corpse in white and sura al-Fatiha, and resurrected in the
memory of his legacy. Support of the Palestinian cause was a derivative of Malcolm's
commitment to Islamic social justice and liberation ethics and the residual testimony to a
continually evolving maturation in global politics; critical analyses that emerged from a
politics of engaged witness. While, indisputably, his primary commitment was to the
plight of Black Americans, his overt support for Palestinian liberation and self-
determination is informative for understanding the basic tenets of his human rights
philosophy derived from his commitment to faith. For Malcolm this was Islam – actions
and thoughts performed for and directed towards the goal of Oneness, Oneness expressed
as tawhid. And tawhid, a tenet of aqedah (articles of belief), this essential breath in the
Islamic faith's body (of worship), called for a body of believers united through difference
conceived of as an ummic imperative.
Although what I have demonstrated in this chapter aligns with Marable’s
contention (that Edward E. Curtis IV emphasizes) that “Islam became, ‘the spiritual
platform from which he constructed a politics of Third World revolution,’” I do want to
underscore the centrality of Black freedom to Malcolm’s global politics influenced by
Islamic humanist principles of an ummic imperative.
338
On his last answer in the Al-
Muslimoon interview, Malcolm, with supreme lucidity, states, “I regard Africa as my
Fatherland.”
The generative conversations friendships offered like access to Third World press

338
Curtis quoting Manning Marable’s Reinvention in “‘My Heart is in Cairo’,” 3.
215

and publications, engagement with local artists and art scenes and moments of mindful
serenity in places like Medina; were all part of his organic intellectual shahādah
education received while traveling and living internationally. My humble hope with
focusing on Malcolm X’s engaged witness—travel writing, relationship-building
throughout his 1964 travels in MM—is that it would contribute to conversations on
Malcolm’s evolving political analysis. By offering a synthesis of oral history interviews
with Reem Al Faisal and Azizah al-Hibri, testimonies by Malik Badri and Ahmed
Osman, historical context of Arab political and artistic figures, a close reading of Azzam
Pasha’s The Eternal Message of Muhammad, archival work that included a deep study of
Malcolm’s diary entries, correspondences and op-Eds; my aim is to inspire us to see how
analytics like Afro-Arab diasporic imaginary hinging on a three circle construction to an
ummic imperative informed Malcolm’s writings on race, coloniality and Islam.
Malcolm X’s diaries provide a blueprint of the Black American and Black
American Muslim geography in Cairo; as does work by David Graham Du Bois, James
V. Hatch, Camille Billops and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail. Returning to the Egypt-Black
American connection, this relationship will be explored with more depth through a close
study of another Fulbright program scholar, an American in Egypt during the 1960s; and
the texts and cultural productions created by Black American Cairo expat community.
Here I will continue the exploration around an Afro-Arab diasporic consciousness and
Cairo as a metropole for Black Atlantic Islam, while also thinking through the concept of
a South-South dialogue that operates both within the confines of the U.S. state apparatus
216

and transnationally—and the radical projects, or generative artifacts, it produces.

217

CHAPTER 3:
DIALECTICS OF AMERICAN BLACKNESS IN CAIRO

“It just did not behoove Western education to talk about Egypt being Africa. But I have—
I’ve got a kind of thing about that point; that Egypt is Africa. I live there and I see these
evidences all around me every day.”
-Shirley Graham Du Bois, UCLA, November 13, 1970
339

"Cairo forever changed you…art was the adhesive.”
-Camille Billops
340

“Home (al-watan) is not where you were born. Home is where all your attempts to
escape cease.”
-Naguib Mahfouz

In its August 17, 1964 issue, the “Afro-America” section of Egyptian bi-weekly
English language magazine Arab Observer featured a picture of Black Americans
holding signs as they protested the police killing of 15-year-old teenager James Powell, in
Harlem. One of these signs echoed the words of Claude McKay, “If we must die…we
will die with weapons in our hand,” and another invoked a lexical intervention made by
the Civil Rights Congress’ (CRC) “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government
Against the Negro People” campaign of 1951
341
with a similar plea, “THE CRIME

339
Shirley Graham Du Bois, University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA Communication
Studies Archive, November 13, 1970,
https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video;_ylt=A0SO8xRvaI1WcQ8AUZdXNyoA;_ylu=X3oD
MTEydmluZGpyBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjExNzhfMQRzZWMDc2M-
?p=David+Graham+Du+Bois+Archive&fr=aaplw#id=1&vid=d203202f30ca90228df72e816a0
9b278&action=view .
340
Camille Billops, interview with author, June 18, 2012.
341
This document was signed by such notable Black radical internationalists as W.E.B. Du Bois,
Claudia Jones, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., and Communist Party USA leader and head of the
International Labor Defense William Patterson. As part of a common tactic used by the U.S. state
in the mid-century to thwart the work of Black radical internationalists, the emissary of the
petition to the United Nations assembly in Paris in December 1951, Patterson, had his passport
revoked by the State Department after presenting the document (he was ordered to surrender his
passport at the U.S. Embassy in Paris). Because of similar international travel harassment by the
218

GENOCIDE/THE CRIMINAL NY USA/THE VICTIM BLACK AMERICANS/UN-
ACT NOW.” The killing, justified by NYPD as they alleged that Powell drew a knife on
one of their officers, elicited a three-night insurrection in Harlem.
342

From Afro-America to South Africa, the globality of African diasporic
consciousness and much of the rest of the Third World, was routinely on full display in
every issue of the Arab Observer. It’s subtitle “The Non-aligned Weekly” embodies these
politics, suggesting that “Afro-America” maps Blackness onto cartographies of
nonalignment. Not only were reports from the geography of “Afro-America” and its
people like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and future African Studies scholar Akbar
Muhammad (also Elijah Muhammad’s son) featured content, but so were “Afro-
Americans” at the authorial and editorial helm of this content—in an Egyptian
publication no less.

State Department, Paul Robeson (his passport was cancelled under the orders of J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI in July 1950) and Du Bois (his passport was confiscated in 1951 and not regained
till 1958) were confined to representing CRC and delivering “We Charge Genocide” petition to
the UN office in New York City.
342
“Afro-America,” Oases in the City, Arab Observer: The Non-Aligned Weekly, No. 217,
August 17, 1964, 31.
219

Figure 8: "Afro-America" section in Arab Observer "Oases in the City" issue, August 17, 1964. Arab Observer, Von
Kleinsmid Library of World Affairs, USC.
As I have discussed its position as a “Black Atlantic Islamic metropole,” a node in
the transnational Islamic network, Cairo also became a cartographic capital for Black
Globality in the mid-century; as a place that attracted Black American migration from
radical internationalists, Muslims, artists, and state department personnel to African
freedom fighters. Making parallels to Algiers, Afro-Arab diaspora scholar Keith Feldman
220

calls “Cairo” a “crucial node to which to relate to Black and Palestinian anti-colonial
visions.”
343
Part of my work seeks to diverge from contemporary scholarship on Afro-
Arab encounters that centralize the “Palestine Question” as a historically central axis to
organize transnational connections between Black internationalism and the Arab
diaspora. While Palestine has been fundamentally important, is it not wholly constitutive
of the history of Afro-Arab connections. This impulse is possibly tied to a current
iteration of Afro-Arab solidarity circuited through “Fergaza,” one that centralizes the
imaginary of Palestine in a history of transnational organizing work. Cairo was important
because it was the Cairo of Nasserism, the Cairo of Islamic study, the Cairo at the heart
of Arab cinema and music, the Cairo of the pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism, pan-Islamism
(“three circle construction”), the Cairo of Third World knowledge and political
production—not just because it hosted dreams of a liberated “Palestine” in its anticolonial
nonalignment politics. Feldman later, in a section on “Resituating Afro-Arab Diaspora,”
re-frames Cairo’s place in the Black radical internationalist imaginary as a “crucial
transfer point for articulating forms of third world internationalism and Black liberation”
pointing to Cairo’s hosting of the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in 1961, the OAU
Summit in 1964, and as the professional home for Graham Du Bois’s journalistic
interventions.
344

I’m interested in how Black Americans read Egypt as a central node in African
diaspora, and how Cairo transformed into this Black Atlantic Islamic metropole. Cairo
attracted Black American Muslims who studied at the Islamic university Al Azhar and

343
Keith Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine, 86
344
Ibid, 89-91.
221

the American University of Cairo (AUC). Complicating the characterization of the NOI
as proto-Islamic and Islamic heterodoxy, Elijah Muhammad sent his son Akbar
Muhammad to study classical Islamic sciences at Al Azhar, overlapping with Malcolm’s
months of residency in Cairo during the summer and fall of 1964. Malcolm X’s diaries,
coupled with journalist David Graham Du Bois’ 1975 novel…And Bid Him Sing, and
African American theater scholar James V. Hatch and Black American artist Camille
Billops’ Cairo: Nine Lives, provide a blueprint of this Black American Muslim
community and the larger Black American diaspora as it interacts within Cairo. Cairo
housed Black American diplomats who “broke” foreign service barriers to rise to the
ranks of the U.S. embassy in Cairo. It also attracted Black American radicals who like
Maya Angelou, Vicki Garvin, Shirley Du Bois and her son David Graham Du Bois
actively traveled between Third World geographies. This 1960s community of Black
radical internationalists that circuited through Ghana, Egypt and China was composed of
Black arts movement cultural workers and radical Black thinkers like Garvin and Shirley
Du Bois (both of who resided in all three Third World geographies). Kevin K. Gaines’
American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (2006) and
Robeson Taj Frazier’s The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical
Imagination (2014) help in constructing this narrative of Black radical internationalism in
Third World nodes and metropoles. What is perhaps missing is studies of Black cultural
traffic between these nodes, especially the vibrant African diasporic connections between
Nasserist Egypt and Nkrumah’s Ghana.
A facile kindred connection, which at times involved spirited rivalry for pan-
222

African leadership, there was much Black cultural traffic between Accra and Cairo
during the era of what scholar Vijay Prashad calls the Third World Project. According to
Gamal Nkrumah, named by his father (Kwame Nkrumah) after Gamal Abdel Nasser,
“Nasser was the first Egyptian leader to put Egypt firmly within its African context.
Successive Egyptian and other North African regimes followed that trend.”
345
In this
same 2002 article for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram weekly online, Nkrumah
evaluates Nasser’s historic contributions to the pan-African anticolonial movement. He
draws special attention to the importance of Nasser’s stress on the “three circles” in
establishing strong bonds with African leaders. Additionally, Nkrumah expresses great
appreciation for Nasser’s efforts to rescue him and his family during the February 24,
1966, coup that overthrew his father—which also resulted in the temporary transfer of
Black American Nkrumah loyalists to Cairo. Gamel Nkrumah had the opportunity “to
watch Nasser’s Pan-contribution at close quarters” and personally witnessed the forging
of a relationship between Nasser and African leaders under a banner of African
liberation, which, according to Nkrumah, was “a historic duty.” Nkrumah concludes by
observing that “the solidarity between Arab and non-Arab Africans is not a historic
accident. It is rooted in a common vision, drawn from a common cause. It all started in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Africa’s leaders-to-be were still freedom fighters,
and Nasser was their closest ally.”
346

Although W. E. B. Du Bois died before crossing paths with and shaking “the

345
Gamal Nkrumah Gamal, “Nasser through African Eyes: On the Anniversary of Nasser’s
Death, Gamal Nkrumah Considers Nasserism’s Pan-African Legacy,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online,
October 3–9, 2002.
346
Ibid.
223

black hand” lionized in his poem “Suez,” his widow, Shirley Du Bois, had the
opportunity to meet Nasser at an Afro-Asian women’s conference convened in Cairo.
Shirley, sometimes described as the leader of the Black American expat colony in Ghana,
“ironically, . . . was representing Ghana, not America” at the conference, notes Gamel
Nkrumah.
347
She relocated to Egypt after the overthrow of the Nkrumah government. In a
July 1970 letter to her friend Kwame Nkrumah, then living in exile in Conakry, she
beamed about her apartment in the Farid al-Atrash building, spoke highly of the Egyptian
government, and closed by declaring that “Egypt, too, is Africa.”
348
She eventually left,
while her son David Graham Du Bois continued to live in Egypt as professional
journalist, contributing to the production of much of Egyptian press coverage of Black
American social, cultural and political life—coverage I will engage in this chapter. In
addition to revolutionary Black kin who took up residency during the 1960s and 1970s
like the Graham Du Bois’, Gamal Nkrumah and his Egyptian mother; Black American
Muslims like Akbar Muhammad, studied Traditional Islam and Arabic at Al Azhar in the
1960s, overlapping with Malcolm’s stay in Cairo.
This Black American affinity for Third World refuge as a strategy for escaping
American racial apartheid, and especially to places with degrees of Blackness, was not
without its dissonances. Not unlike tensions that arise between African and Black
American legibility in places like Accra or Harlem, there is, at times, an incorporeality of
American Blackness in Egyptian cultural imaginaries—even if “Egypt is Africa” as
Shirley Du Bois asserted. The legibility of Blackness in Egypt rests on a plurality of

347
Ibid.
348
Ibid. “Egypt has been renewing my residence permit and work visa here for nothing merely
because they know who I am and appreciate what I am doing.”
224

positionalities and translations, especially taking particular note of how American
Blackness travels within Third World Cairo. What emerges is a dialectics of American
Blackness in Cairo. The dialectics of American Blackness in Cairo describes the
productive practices that arise from this joining up (this décalage) of Black American
incorporeality and American privilege in Egyptian cultural imaginaries. This privilege is
one of walking around Africa and mashriq with an American passport. The American
passport and ties to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo facilitated relationships to institutions in
Cairo not easily accessible to Egyptians. Although, as we will see, this privilege of
unrestricted mobility does get revoked at the onset of the 1967 war. Ties to the U.S.
embassy and its Cairine network enabled a South-South dialogue to emerge between
Black Americans and Egyptians—where some of these tensions of Black American
incorporeality were addressed and theorized through. They also produced generative
artifacts, like decades long friendships and highly valued art.
Generative artifacts that will be explored in this chapter include Black American
artist Camille Billops, her partner African American theater scholar Jim Hatch and Black
American Muslim Ibrahim Ibn Ismail’s Cairo-published poetry collection Poems for
Niggers and Crackers, The Black Panther newspaper editor-in-chief (1972-1975) David
Du Bois’ (also W.E.B. Du Bois’s stepson) novel …And Bid Him Sing, his editorial
relationships with Arab Observer and Cairo-based English daily Egyptian Gazette, and
Jim Hatch’s recently released assemblage of vignettes based on that storied time in Cairo
titled Cairo: Nine Lives. The story of these friendships that emerged are told through
poems between Egyptians and Black Americans in the poetry collection and in Cairo:
225

Nine Lives, through articles written in the Egyptian Gazette and Arab Observer, through
friendship networks that stitched a tapestry of Afro-Arab connections that included
Fulbright scholars, U.S. Embassy employees, Egyptian locals and subversive anti-
imperialist artists. Camille Billops and Jim Hatch’s work, David Du Bois’s …And Bid
Him Sing and Ibrahim Ismail’s poetry speak to this multi-faceted experience of American
Blackness in 1960s Cairo.
This chapter is going to be approached unique to all others by the way it will be
structured around generative artifacts of engaged witness; publications/primary texts that
include: Arab Observer and Egyptian Gazette (Middle East News Agency), …And Bid
Him Sing, Poems for Niggers and Crackers, and Cairo: Nine Lives. Other material for
this chapter comes from two in-person oral history interviews I conducted with Camille
Billops (including numerous phone calls in which my calls spurred by a nagging question
or two extended to one hour long conversations), archival work on Egyptian press,
Malcolm X Project (MXP) research, and conversations with Egyptian art historians.
Critical theories that materialized from a practice of engaged witness in 1960s
Cairo include the inescapable “'over there,” messiness of American racial logic abroad
(“Exit-US” & “Mr. Ex-American X” in Poems for Niggers and Crackers, Cairo: Nine
Lives, and …And Bid Him Sing), and at times, complicated American privilege
overseas.
349
This scholarship hopes to contribute theories and research in Black Atlantic
Studies, Afro-Arab diasporic history, and to Diplomatic history. This chapter will also
investigate the South-South dialogue that develops through apparatuses of the state like

349
This will be evidenced through comments made in Billops’ oral history interview, the
depiction of 1967 war in …And Bid Him Sing and the facility of local access afforded by
connections to diplomatic U.S. state offices and employees.
226

Fulbright and American embassies. As we shall see, collaborations like Poems for
Niggers and Crackers and Cairo: Nine Lives and Camille Billops’ artistic training were
made possible through a U.S. State Department Fulbright fellowship that sponsored
James V. Hatch three-year long residency in Cairo.
Penny Von Eschen’s work on the Eisenhower administration’s jazz diplomacy
tours in Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004)—
that included Black American jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis
Armstrong—bring to light the critical analysis developed from these cultural diplomacy
programs tied to global agendas.”
350
A part of what Von Eschen calls a “self-conscious
campaign against worldwide criticism of U.S. racism,” emerging from newly
independent, non-aligned states in Africa and Asia, “the U.S. promoted black artists as
goodwill ambassadors—symbols of the triumph of American democracy—when America
was still a Jim Crow nation.”
351
Jazz tours centered Blackness as part of a soft diplomacy
strategy to project a “color-blind American democracy” into the imaginations of
overwhelmingly Brown and Black Third world geographies.
352
This was a self-conscious
campaign because the U.S. understood that internationally its “Achilles heel,” as Von
Eschen posits, was racism.
353
Although sponsored through Eisenhower’s President’s
Emergency Fund, the jazz ambassador tours were the brainchild of longtime Harlem
Congressman Adam Clayton, who had attended the 1955 Asian-African Conference of
Nonaligned Nations in Bandung, Indonesia; where he observed that the Cold War battle

350
Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4.
351
Ibid.
352
Ibid.
353
Ibid, 17.
227

between the U.S. and Soviet Union “would be played out in the nonaligned and newly
independent emerging nations of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.”
354
But this didn’t
mean that the jazz musicians agency was circumscribed.
Cultural presentation or “People to People” programs that are sometimes
criticized as converting Black American musicians into stooges for empire, provided
Black American musicians a potentially subversive transnational avenue for solidarity
building with local populations in Africa and the Middle East.
355
“If policymakers
grasped the possibility of appealing to emerging nations and the Eastern bloc through
jazz,” as Von Eschen explains, “they never dreamed that the musicians would bring their
own agendas”—and not to mention their own experience growing up in U.S. Jim Crow
life and under American racial apartheid.
356
Von Eschen continues to emphasize this
point, “Nor did they anticipate that artists and audiences would interact, generating
multiple meanings and effects unanticipated by the State Department.”
357
In other words,
it was not imagined that Black jazz musicians would be engaged witnesses on these
delegations, testifying to their experience with America’s Achilles heel and developing
affective ties with Third World populations they encountered and “witnessed.” In a

354
Ibid, 7.
355
See Robeson Taj Frazier’s work on Adam Clayton Powell’s Bandung trip and Carl Rowan’s
US State department funded 3 month Leaders Program in India (Robeson Taj P. Frazier,
“Diplomacy as Black Cultural Traffic: Debates over Race in the Asian Travels of Adam Clayton
Powell and Carl Rowan, The Journal of History and Cultures 3 [2013]).; and Hisham Aidi’s
critique of U.S. State Department sponsorship of Black American Muslim “hip hop envoys” in
“The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard: Race, Rap and Raison d’État,” the Middle East Report 260
(2011). Inversely, my own research on Black American Muslim hip hop collaborations with post-
“revolution” Tunisian rappers looks at the South-South dialogue possibilities in these diplomatic
trips, “Remixing Public Diplomacy: American “Hip Hop Jam Sessions” in Post-Revolution
Tunisia,” Huffington Post, November 29, 2011.
356
Von Eschen, Satchmo, 24.
357
Ibid., 24.
228

similar way, as Von Eschen’s work has done, I want to complicate this use of State
Department programs by artists and academics by demonstrating the radical potentiality
available to participants: that of forging transnational Third World ties, or more simply, a
“South-South dialogue.”
Black Muslim American Geography in Cairo: Middle East News Agency (Egyptian
Gazette and Arab Observer)

Figure 9: Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah gracing the front cover of Arab Observer’s issue dedicated to
forthcoming African Summit in Cairo, July 13, 1964. Arab Observer, Von Kleinsmid Library of World Affairs, USC.

In 1964 interview with journalist Milton Henry about his participation in the OAU
conference, Malcolm X made the following observations about the city:
229

Cairo is probably one of the best examples for the American Negro. More so than
any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like the
American Negroes in the sense that we have all complexions, we range in
America from the darkest black to the lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the
same thing; throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are
blended together here in a truly harmonious society. You know, if ever there was
a people who should know how to practice brotherhood, it is the American Negro
and it is the people of Egypt.
358

This high praise might explain why notable Black American intellectuals, artists, and
activists from the United States and even African nations like Ghana relocated to Egypt
during the 1960s. Nasser self-consciously fashioned Cairo as the epicenter of pan-African
politics. A full-page advertisement for an upcoming Organization of African Union
(OAU) summit in the summer of 1964 in the Egyptian Gazette features an image of a
Black man breaking through chains within an outline of the African continent. An
explanation of the forthcoming conference accompanies the image: “The Black Continent
can at last shake the dust from itself, unshackle the slavery chains, secure a place in the
procession of industrialization and rebuild the way of its life.” The Egyptian General
Organization for Food Industries, the purchaser of the ad, also makes a plug for their
home city: “Cairo has extended a hospitality to the African peoples and has enabled them
to hold meetings and discuss their difficult affairs.”
359
Another ad for the OAU Summit,
featuring a Black woman’s head in the cutout of the African Continent, anatomically
maps Cairo as “the vibrant heart of Africa.”
I still remember the excitement that bubbled up in me, ten years ago, as I was
scanning microfiche after microfiche of Egyptian Gazette pages leading up to the OAU
Summit in July 1964. My enthusiasm amplified when I started to notice coverage of U.S.

358
Malcolm X, “Malcolm X Speaks,” 83.
359
Egyptian Gazette, July 17, 1964.
230

race relations and Black American politics coinciding and corresponding with this ramp
up to the OAU Summit. That same summer, Malcolm and his words appears no less than
10 times in Egyptian Gazette from July 5
th
till September 17
th
, from the announcement of
police guard ordered around Malcolm after the attack on his life near his home in Queens
to one of Malcolm’s most popular op-Eds, “Zionist Logic.” Throughout this coverage,
Malcolm insists on puncturing the international dimensions of the U.S. propaganda in
African and Arab press that has caused African nations, “to consider the Negroes fight an
internal problem of the U.S. in which they have no right to interfere.” In a July 11, 1964,
article reporting Malcolm’s impending travel to Cairo for the OAU Summit, Malcolm
portends an imminent “bloodbath” as a result of U.S. state’s “organized campaign of
violence” against Black people, including NYPD beating “two diplomats from Uganda”
and prior “two Kenyan students” who were all “mistaken as American negroes.” His
critiques and impressions of the Civil Rights organizers and cultural workers revolve
around their failure to assess the revolutionary moment he prophesized: “Asked for his
views on James Baldwin’s contribution to the struggle be replied that he was a ‘pseudo
revolt.’ Malcolm X wanted a ‘real revolution’.” Throughout this summer, Malcolm
continues to remind Egyptian Gazette readers that “Violence Will Grow in the U.S.”
360

Although urban rebellions in response to cases of police brutality unfolded that summer
in Harlem and Philadelphia; Malcolm did foresee the conditions that inspired anti-racism
insurrections from Watts to Detroit from 1965 to 1968.

360
“Violence Will Grow in the U.S.,” Egyptian Gazette, July 17, 1964.
231

Figure 10: “Cairo…the Vibrant Heart of Africa” advertisement for Organization of African Unity Summit. From
Egyptian Gazette, July 17, 1964. Newspapers of Africa on Microfilm, Lehman Library, Columbia University.

In the August 17
,
1964, article, “Malcolm on Islam, Africa and U.S.,” Malcolm’s
232

relationship to Islam after the split with NOI and his hajj trip several months prior is
probed. Because he “never felt any loyalty to America” and with “the discovery of Islam
and Africa,” Malcolm suggests that Islam provided membership to a spiritual nationalism
beyond the confines of American borders: “I found a society I thought I could join.”
“Islam opened the door to him intellectually by making him investigate the culture of
African and the Arab world,” which led to Malcolm declaring that “President Gamal
Abdul Nasser was so right when he said that there are three circles: the Arab, the African
and the Islamic.” Although weeks later, U.S. Attorney General Katzenbach requested
CIA director Hoover look into if Malcolm violated the Logan Act with this stay in Cairo,
Malcolm was well aware of the U.S. government’s possible reception of his meeting with
African heads of state. In this same profile, Malcolm acknowledged that they would be
irritated that he considered Nasser his president.
These engaged witness testimonies to African and Arab populations on U.S.
racism were frequently analyzed through the global reaches of the American imperial
project; connecting U.S. domestic colonialism of Black Americans to U.S. neocolonialist
action in Africa and the rest of the Third World. Malcolm clarifies his controversial
“chickens coming home to roost” response to U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s
assassination by connecting it to U.S. activity in Congo: “Patrice Lumumba—this young
head of State gave himself up and was handed over to his most bitter enemies to be
murdered. The United States must have known that this would happen. Look at the other
regimes it supported the Diems in Vietnam, for instance. If the United States can support
233

this sort of thing abroad, how can it complain when it starts to happen in America.”
361
In
the August 25, 1964, “The Negro’s Fight,” Malcolm continues to draw parallels to the
Third World geography by describing Harlem’s Blood Brothers to the Egyptian press as a
“Mau-Mau type organization,” akin to the Kenyan revolutionary movement that
contributed to overthrowing British colonial rule.
These notions of a capacious African diaspora that included American Blackness
splashed across the pages of Egyptian Gazette and other Cairo-based English-language
Egyptian press. In addition to the metaphorical impact Egypt has had on the pan-African
imagination, Cairo physically became, much like Paris and London before it, a metropole
for Black internationalism. In an attempt to elevate his position in the pan-African and
nonalignment movement, Nasser offered political asylum to African freedom fighters,
and so Black artists and writers also congregated and resettled in Cairo before and after
the fall of Kwame Nkrumah’s government. This African diaspora, attracted to Nasser’s
Egypt, included a community of Black Americans from a cross section of professions—
artists, poets, diplomats, singers, journalists and students of Islamic studies. Black
American Muslims interested in studying Sunni Orthodox Traditional Islam traveled to
Cairo to study at one of the oldest Islamic educational institutions, Al-Azhar University.
And activists like Vicki Garvin and Shirley Graham Du Bois participated in the OAU
summits (Malcolm X being the most famous Black American participant).
As previously mentioned, publications like the Egyptian Gazette and Arab
Observer featured stories on Black Americans like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and

361
“Malcolm on Islam, Africa and U.S.,” Egyptian Gazette, August 17, 1964.

234

covered anti-racism organizing around voter suppression and protests to police brutality.
The designation of an “Afro-America” geography in nonalignment-themed Arab
Observer suggests that Black Americans were included in the Third World imaginary.
Perhaps, judging by the stories featured in the “Afro-America” section, Black America
was positioned as a colony within the U.S. and within the global constellation of colonies
like Angola and South African on the precipice of liberation through organized protests
and urban insurrections.
In a “Special Report” on violent reaction to Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee’s (SNCC) “anti-segregationist” registering of voters in Selma, Alabama; an
unnamed author prefaces the report by alluding to the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s
reaction to anti-Black state violence and white terror in Selma and its rhetorical concern
for Congo: “But that won’t end the war against racism, it will spread, and the reason is
made plain in this SPECIAL REPORT on Selma from the SNCC which shows up the
place as only one spot in a ‘Black Belt,’ of white bigotry, and reads oddly, coming as it
does, from a country which was recently so concerned about ‘humanitarianism in the
Congo’.”
362
As living testimony, the report enumerates the harassment SNCC endured in
the South from an 11-month stretch between the spring of 1963 to 1964, captioning a
picture of Black man forcibly dragged across concrete by two policemen as, “Treatment
one can get from the Law’s executives if your skin is black and you respect yourself.”
This coverage was likely tied to a network of Black Americans writing for such
English-language publications as the Egyptian Gazette (which in addition to the Malcolm

362
“Selma, Alabama: Special Report,” Arab Observer 244, February 22, 1965, 34-37.
235

X coverage ran a multitude of stories on the U.S. urban rebellions of 1964) and the Arab
Observer. The latter carried a detailed three-page story on Malcolm X’s summer of 1964
visit to Cairo along with excerpts from Malcolm’s hajj letter and his memorandum to
African Heads of State and Government at the OAU Summit titled “Mister X” as well as
a touching eulogy that included stanzas of poetry written by “Afro-American Moslem
poet” Ibrahim ibn Ismail (we will delve into his story and generative artifacts later).
363

Reading the treatments on Malcolm and other Black Americans, it becomes clear that a
Black American is at the authorial helm of these pieces—especially in the manner that
some of these articles address the intricacies of Black American political relationships
that would likely be lost on the average Egyptian reader.
The insert in “Mister X,” that of a “breaking report” on Akbar Muhammad’s
possible split from NOI leader father, engages the intricacies of NOI power politics.
Akbar, 25 years of age at the time, had been studying in Cairo at Al-Azhar for the past
three years and served as “African correspondent” for the NOI’s bi-monthly publication
Muhammad Speaks. The article attributes Akbar’s trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
covering the African Summit in May (that led to the forming of the OAU), for
influencing his philosophical departures from the social, political and religious tenets of
the Nation and not so much Malcolm’s moral interventions on his father’s impropriety.

363
Adeoye Akinsanya, “The Afro-Arab Alliance: Dream or Reality,” African Affairs 75 (301),
(1976): 513–14. As a result, Cairo attracted an unlikely American literary hero. After marrying
South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make Guy, Maya Angelou moved with him to Cairo,
where, against her husband’s wishes, she took a job as associate editor of the Arab Observer.
After Angelou’s second marriage dissolved in 1963, she moved to Accra, Ghana, to join her
fellow African American artists and activists like Julian Mayfield, Alice Windom, Victoria
Garvin, Leslie Lacy, Julia Wright, and Shirley Du Bois in what Malcolm X described as
“Ghana’s little colony of Afro-American expatriates” (Malcolm X, Autobiography, 359).
236

Malcolm had regular contact—and at times tense conversations—with Akbar, having
reestablished contact with him on July 14, 1964. He started to meet with him regularly to
assess where Akbar stood on the accusations of his father’s affairs with young secretaries.
According to Malcolm X, Akbar, after years of training in Islamic studies, acknowledged
that he was an “orthodox Muslim, knew his father was wrong, but faced a great decision
& tug of war going on in his mind.”
364
Malcolm and Akbar would continue this
conversation during Malcolm’s visits to Cairo and through letter correspondence. Akbar
even revealed to Malcolm that his former spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad, declared
that “death was too good” for him.
365

This feature on Malcolm and his Memorandum to the African Heads of State and
Government at the OAU Summit in Cairo and the update on Al-Azhar student Akbar
Muhammad’s relationship to his father Elijah Muhammad’s NOI appearing on the same
page, was likely written by one Black American expat: long-time Cairo resident and
journalist David Graham Du Bois. Graham Du Bois partially outs himself as the
chronicler of Black American life in Cairo and of Malcolm X’s work on behalf of 22
million “Afro-Americans” specifically in his eulogy to Malcolm in the March 1965 Arab
Observer feature “Viva Big Red”:
What was the surprise of this writer to see Malcolm when he came to Cairo.
Instead of the pistol-packing nut wearing some sort of Wizard of Oz garb who
was ready and willing to deliver a public oration even to an audience of one, a
quietly dressed, quiet voiced man answered the door, ushered his guest in to sit
and drink tea, and quietly answered questions about his appeal to the Organization
of African Unity for help in presenting the Afro-American case before the UN.

364
Ibid, 94.
365
Ibid, 110.
237

The article opens up with a poetic re-telling of the moment Malcolm’s flesh-bound body
passed and the worldwide reaction to his ascension:
A tall, gangling, ruddy-skinned man with woolly auburn hair got to his feet on a
rostrum, his large hands outstretched to his audience. “Brothers and sisters,” he
began. But a sound like tropic hail on a tin roof cut him short. Blood spurted from
his face. He fell. People ran. Teleprinters round the world stuttered out the story:
news which meant to one sad man on a Cairo balcony:
“Big Red!
You’re dead
And we are sad and blue.
Big Red,
You’re dead.
You’ve left us with a lot to do.”
366

The words by this “sad man” were written by Black American Muslim poet Ibrahim Ibn
Ismail, who befriended Malcolm X during this summer of 1964 stay in Cairo. Ismail
responded to Malcolm’s untimely death from his “Cairo balcony,” with an “Epitaph for
Malcolm X.” We learn more of the friendship between Malcolm and Ismail that
developed in the summer of 1964 through Malcolm’s diary entries. He describes Ismail
as a poet formerly involved with the Black Muslim Movement (BMM) whom he had first
met in Riverside, California. Ismail, presumably in search of a Black Atlantic Islam,
traveled to Cairo in May 1964 to study at Al-Azhar, as he had,ß “suffered mistreatment at
the hands of officials, became disillusioned with the BMM.”
367

The “Afro-America” article in the Egyptian press also mentions the call for a
boycott on shopping during the grieving of Malcolm X’s death. The boycott requested
Harlem shop owners close their stores and shoppers to abstain from shopping during the

366
“Viva Big Red,” Arab Observer: The Non-Aligned Weekly, March 1, 1965, 34–35.
367
Malcolm X, The Diary of Malcolm X, 73.
238

identified hours of grieving. Potential boycott breakers were characterized as traitors.
And the Congo analogy was invoked to relay to African readers the gravity of this loss,
“The latter may well find that in cutting down Malcolm they have made at least as much
trouble for themselves as Tshombe made for himself in murdering Lumumba.” The Arab
Observer article closes its eulogy with speculations of the forces at play in Malcolm’s
murder:
Only the zombie which stalks the globe to silence men who stand for freedom and
good-will could benefit: the same who imprisons Luthuli of South Africa, Nkomo
and Sithole of Rhodesia, who robbed of life Count Bernadotte in Palestine,
Hammarskjoeld and Lumumba in the Congo, Kennedy in Dallas. In different
guises—the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Councils, the John Birch Society,
the Afrikaner Bruderbond, the Zionists—the ghoul is the same: World Fascism
368

And then reprints more lines of Ismail’s “Cairo balcony” recitation as the coda:
Big Red
You’re Dead
But your voice will still heard
Your battles won.
369

Ismail’s poetry (along with a profile) first appeared in the Arab Observer six months
prior, in its “Special Issue for the African Summit,” with an artistic portrait by famed
Egyptian cartoonist Mustafa Hussein of Kwame Nkrumah gracing the cover.
370
No author
is credited for the profile, but considering the mention in …And Bid Him Sing and
Graham Du Bois’s professional relationship to the magazine, it can be deduced he

368
“Viva Big Red,” Arab Observer: The Non-Aligned Weekly, March 1, 1965, 34–35.
369
Ibid. The following year, Ibrahim Ismail, along with fellow Cairo expat David Du Bois and
African American Black theater scholar James Vernon Hatch, released a poetry book titled Poems
for Niggers and Crackers, in which the full text of Ismail’s poem appears.
370
The issue also re-visited the “Afro-Asian solidarity” conference in April 1955 at Bandung,
Indonesia; it’s purposes and its achievements towards a continued “Afro-Asian movement,” 42-
43.
239

facilitated (or even wrote) this feature.
371
Graham Du Bois explains that the 30 year-old
poet hailing from Elizabeth, New Jersey, contracted tuberculosis in his left hip at age six
which left him disabled. He relied on crutches or a cane for most of the rest of his life and
was frequently hospitalized throughout his childhood up until young adulthood. In the
profile, he credits this “sterile white confinement” of hospitalization for contributing to
his, “depressions, lonelinesses, happinesses, [and], thoughtfulnesses.” After this period,
Ismail converted (or reverted) to Islam, inspiring travel to Cairo to study Islamic law and
the Arabic language at Al-Azhar University. Ismail’s maroon-like voyage throughout the
African diaspora as a Black American in “Exit-Us” is published in this Arab Observer
issue, along with Ghanaian poet John Okai’s “Freedom Symphony.”
372
But it is …And
Bid Him Sing that develops an entire narrative of the paradox of American Blackness in
1960s Cairo around the character of Ismail. For being the central figure in Du Bois’s
novel, failing to identify and locate Ismail’s historicity is a strange oversight by scholars
of the Afro-Arab diaspora.
The Arab Observer’s “Afro-America” section covered anti-police brutality
protests in New York City, voter registration campaigns met with state violence in Selma,
Alabama, Ismail’s poetry, and Malcolm’s radical visions of a liberated Black America as
part of a global geography of Third World struggle against coloniality and Americo-
European white supremacy, or in (likely), Graham Du Bois’s words “World Fascism.”
Like Feldman’s conclusions about Graham Du Bois’s work connecting the Afro-Arab
diaspora from Oakland to Cairo, I too recognize Graham Du Bois’s centrality in featuring

371
“Poetry.” Arab Observer, 212, July 14, 1964, 51.
372
Ibid, 52-53.
240

Malcolm and Ismail’s words and coverage of Black American protest in the pages of the
Egyptian Gazette and the Arab Observer. Graham Du Bois became a close friend of
Malcolm X’s during and after the Black American Muslim spokesman’s visits to the
region.
373
Graham Du Bois’s articles, novel and other writings stand as testimony, as a
generative artifact of an Afro-Arab diasporic Cairo that both problematized and
formulated the dialectics of American Blackness.
David Graham Du Bois and …And Bid Him Sing
“’I fell in love with Egypt,’ he later recalled. ‘I got here and discovered that everybody
looked like me, and I looked like everybody else. I was accepted as a human being
without any reference to the color of my skin. It was an overwhelming experience. I found
myself invisible.’"
-David Graham Du Bois
374

Residing in Cairo from 1960 to 1972—after spending a year at Peking University
in China—Graham Du Bois had an illustrious career as a journalist and editor working
for the Middle East News and Features Agency (MEN), Arab Observer, the Egyptian
Gazette, Arab News, as an announcer and producer at Radio Cairo, and a lecturer at Cairo
University. Shortly after his stepfather W.E.B. Du Bois’ death, Graham Du Bois, who
was a naturalized citizen of Ghana, developed a professional relationship with the

373
I also wonder, if there were any other Black American exiles involved in the production of
critical knowledge concerning Black American “colony” for Egyptian readers.
374
Feldman, with good reason, quotes the same passage from The Boston Globe eulogy on
Graham Du Bois in his A Shadow Over Palestine, “David Du Bois, Professor, Stepson of
Renowned Writer,” The Boston Globe, February 4, 2005, pg. A21. Other notable quotes from the
Globe article: "Egyptians are known all over the Arab world as the `Dum A' Hafif.” Also see
Elaine Woo, “David Graham Du Bois, 79; Professor, Journalist and Stepson of Famed Scholar,”
LA Times, February 10, 2005.And on Malcolm X—almost verbatim of what Graham Du Bois
wrote in …And Bid Him Sing, “Some of us need blinders to keep us on the straight and narrow
and that is what Islam has been for me,’ he recalled the American militant's telling him.”
241

government of Ghana. He became a public relations consultant for Nkrumah’s
government and was also tasked to complete the Encyclopaedia Africana, which was
initially assigned to W.E.B. Du Bois, who died before he could complete work on it.
Graham returned to the states in the 1970s to teach at the University of California,
Berkeley, and to take a post as an editor-in-chief of the Black Panther Party’s weekly
newspaper The Black Panther.
375
However, before his death in 2005, he had only
completed three of the proposed twenty-one volumes in the Encyclopaedia Africana
collection.
Malcolm X urged Graham Du Bois to draw on his extensive connections in
Ghana and Egypt to establish a branch of the Organization of African American Unity
(OAAU) in Cairo. In a December 15, 1964, letter, Shabazz encouraged Graham Du Bois
to continue to take the lead in forming the chapter, despite the Black American diasporic
community’s formation of the American Muslim Student Association (AMSA). Malcolm
advised Du Bois to see the OAAU and AMSA in conversation and not in competition
with each other. Comparing the religious and secular separation to his New York–based
OAAU and Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), Malcolm noted that AMSA served more of a
religious constituency while the OAAU secularly fought for Black American human
rights. In a letter addressed to Malcolm X on November 24, 1964, Du Bois acknowledged
the global implications of the organization’s diasporic commitment, stating that “our
objectives will be limited to furthering the cause of Afro-American Freedom and the

375
Manthia Diawara, We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World (New York: Civitas Books,
2004).
242

unity of the Afro-American struggle with the Freedom struggle of Mother Africa.”
376

David Graham Du Bois would commemorate encounters such as these in …And Bid Him
Sing, his memoir-like novel about Black Americans in Egypt.
If Malcolm is the lens to Black American life in Cairo, Du Bois was the frame
that connected all the parts. The interconnectedness of the Afro-Arab diasporic network
is best evinced in the story of David Graham Du Bois’s relationship to the metropole of
Cairo. Du Bois’s relationships to Egyptian and mashriqi press helps us understand how
and why Malcolm X and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail receive ample coverage in the Arab
Observer and the Egyptian Gazette, along with stories on anti-police brutality protests,
reports on urban rebellions in the summer of 1964, Black American artwork and other
stories from the nonalignment cartography of “Afro-America.” Not only were Malcolm’s
and Ismail’s political and artistic work covered, they were also given agency to write op-
eds and have their words printed in English language mashriqi press (Du Bois details this
process for both Ismail and Malcolm in …And Bid Him Sing). As yet another example,
Camille Billops’ artwork for Poems for Niggers and Crackers is featured in an ad for the
poetry collection in an issue of the Arab Observer. Graham Du Bois’s journalistic
engaged witness of Black American exilic life in 1960s Cairo becomes crucial to
conceptualizing the multi-dimensionalities of an Afro-Arab diaspora. These testimonies
are weaved together in the generative artifact of Graham Du Bois’s 1974 novel …And Bid
Him Sing—a tour de force treatment of the dialectics of American Blackness in Cairo.

376
David Graham Du Bois–Malcolm X correspondence, November 24, 1964 (reel 13), Malcolm
X Collection.
243

…And Bid Him Sing

Figure 11 Front cover of David Graham Du Bois’ 1974 …And Bid Him Sing novel. Author’s collection.

Less fiction and more historical memoir; we are positioned up-close, in front-row
seats, as we watch how history-making unfolds in Graham Du Bois’s exploration of the
collision between Nasserist “three circle construction” Egypt with Black American exilic
244

life in 1960s Cairo. The jacket of the book describes Graham Du Bois’s book as a,
“complex odyssey through the third world—the level of consciousness as well as in its
actual physical setting.” This novel, told through the eyes of Cairo-based Black American
journalist Bob Jones (likely Graham Du Bois), is of particular interest to Malcolm X
Studies scholars because Graham Du Bois does detail Malcolm X’s summer 1964 trip to
Cairo for the OAU Summit, including Graham Du Bois and his crew of Black American
friends (mostly Black American Muslims) nightly meetings with Malcolm at his suite in
the Shepheard hotel, their assistance in helping Malcolm print his Memorandum to
African Heads of State, and also the power struggles over starting an OAAU chapter in
Cairo (and also sorting out the politics of the NOI split that even played itself out in
Cairo).
Read alongside the travel diaries, we get a more comprehensive understanding of
the intersections of Malcolm’s political and spiritual worlds during his final flesh-bound
stretch. Graham Du Bois’ Malcolm speaks on the allure of Islam’s “harness” and
“guidelines” that also provided “something bigger” in life that “angel that Allah put in
each of us…pushing outward to…be.” He also reveals that the Egyptian Government
issued an air travel ticket that enabled Malcolm to visit several African countries,
mentions Malcolm’s suspicions of being poisoned by the “powers-that-be” in Alexandria
(also in the diaries and Autobiography). Graham Du Bois even offers a detailed
breakdown of the reactions to Malcolm’s assassination when it was reported to Cairine
nightclub goers between sets of live jazz music.
377
Although Graham Du Bois’s Jones

377
Graham Du Bois, And Bid Him, 151-154, 171-177.
245

explains that, “Malcolm’s murder was front-paged for six days in the Egyptian Gazette.
The Arabic newspapers carried long features about Malcolm, as well as extensive news
stories,” Graham Du Bois never attributes this publicity to himself.
378

Both Keith Feldman and Herb Boyd and Ilyasah Shabazz’s engagement with
…And Bid Him Sing acknowledges Graham Du Bois’s use of historical material to tie the
multi-character narrative through Cairine jazz halls, Islamic institutions and publishing
houses. In The Diary of Malcolm X: El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, 1964, Boyd and Shabazz
characterize …And Bid Him Sing as a, “fictionalized account of African Americans in
Cairo in the sixties” that somehow is punctured by real history or “given verisimilitude
when Malcolm arrives on the scene.” Boyd and Shabazz even goes as far to assert that
Malcolm is the “only recognizable person, though Du Bois is clearly the reporter Bob
Jones.”
379
However, I would argue that his novel is, as I mentioned, less fiction and more
historical memoir.
The lead character, Suliman, through my research combing Malcolm’s diaries,
Egyptian print media, James V. Hatch’s and Camille Billops’ Cairo: Nine Lives, and joint
poetry book Poems for Niggers and Crackers; is very much the poet and Al-Azhar
student Malcolm met in Riverside, California and re-connected with in Cairo: Ibrahim
Ibn Ismail. Ismail’s name as Suliman is the first word opening Graham Du Bois’s
exploration of race, religion, gender, and nationalism in 1960s Black American Cairo.
There are other historical figures on display. Feldman identified jazz musician and NOI
member Malik Osman Karim Yaqoub (referred to as Osman Karriem by Ismail in Poems

378
Ibid, 179.
379
Ibid, 82.
246

for Niggers and Crackers) as Mohammed X3, but does not mention the obvious parallels
between Suliman and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail. Historicizing Suliman’s narrative, reveals to
the reader how much more memoir-ish Graham Du Bois’s novel is than originally
suspected. This could also mean that historians consider using this book as historical text
to chart Black American internationalism and Afro-Arab diaspora in 1960s Cairo. Also
reading the character of Suliman and his poetic interventions side by side Ismail’s own
poetry and other writing about him (in Malcolm X diaries, Arab Observer, Cairo: Nine
Lives) sharpens our analysis of Suliman’s aggravations with the “nontransferability of
Pan-Africanism,” as Feldman succinctly characterizes it.
380

As historical document and through the narrative of Suliman’s artistic work, we
once again see Graham Du Bois conceal the role he played in making Ismail, “something
of a minor celebrity in Cairo.”:
381

Suliman was interviewed by a popular Arabic weekly. He spoke in the name of
the Cairo unit of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and Afro-American
Promotions, Inc., to give what he said more authority rather than reflecting any
reality. A poem he wrote on Malcolm’s death was printed in the official English-
language weekly news magazine distributed free by UAR mission around the
world.
Here Graham Du Bois is referencing the “Viva Big Red” eulogy in the Arab Observer
and no doubt his editorial role at the Egyptian Gazette in facilitating the consistent week-
long coverage of Malcolm. Graham Du Bois explains Suliman was formally invited to
African and Arab embassy functions and to events organized by “younger Egyptian
intellectuals who were growing conscious of their debt to those blacks in America who

380
Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine, 86.
381
Graham Du Bois, And Bid Him, 178.
247

were beginning to cause havoc for the U.S. power structure.”
382

Keith Feldman’s writing on …And Bid Him engages articulations and translations
of Afro-Arab diasporic culture to probe how, “African American notions of Blackness
just do not translate in Cairo.”
383
I would disagree slightly. Yes, the punctured fantasy of
a united African continent under the banner of Blackness becomes part of a sorrowful
elegy in one of Ismail’s poems. But, Graham Du Bois’ narration of Ismail’s frustrations
with the performance of Blackness in Cairo rests on Ismail’s monochromatic definition of
Blackness within a matrix of American Blackness. In contradistinction to Ismail’s
frustration with Egyptian colorism, Graham Du Bois’ narrative perspective as journalist
Bob Jones, provides another part of the multiplicity of experiences that constitute Black
American cosmopolitan life in Cairo: the “uncontestedness” (or in Graham Du Bois’s
words “invisibility”) of walking around Black in Cairo—while stumbling over cobbled-
stoned streets of difference across the African diaspora (and especially the African
continent). Suliman to Bob, “Man, Egypt ain’t black; don’t you know yet, after all the
time here?” Their exchange continues with Bob countering, “It’s in Africa and a whole
lot of its people are black.” Suliman retorts, “Try a’tell them that. They think they’re
white man.” Bob challenges Suliman’s flattening out of global Blackness exclusively
defined through a U.S. racial binary:
A lot of folks on the continent still only think of themselves as, say, Fanti or Ibo
or Ewe, or Zulu or Kikuyu. They don’t even think of themselves as Ghanaian or
Nigerian or Congolese or Kenyan. That’s a long time coming for them, brother.

382
Ibid, 179-180.
383
Keith Feldman. “Towards an Afro-Arab Diasporic Culture: The Transnational Practices of
David Graham Du Bois,” Alif 31, 2011 and A Shadow Over Palestine, 86-98.
248

At least, Egyptians know they’re Egyptians. They did create the lie that Egypt’s
not Africa. The white man did.
384

Set to the soundtrack of Shirley Graham Du Bois’ contention that “Egypt is Africa,”
Feldman underscores David Graham Du Bois’ insistence that, “this same formulation” is
“problematic for African American exiles.”
385

One can truly never know Graham Du Bois’s intention for centralizing Suliman in
his memoir of Black American life in Cairo, but we see Humanities-framed analyses
relying on thematic overreaching to explain Suliman’s disabled condition. In the absence
of historical archaeology, Suliman’s bone tuberculosis is read as an articulation of racial
belonging, of African diaspora, in the way Brent Hayes Edwards likens the instability of
translating diaspora to a table with uneven legs: “How fitting, then, that Suliman is
perpetually hobbled by bone tuberculosis, leaving one leg significantly shorter than the
other, ‘forcing a slight bobbing up and down of his body that his erect posture seemed to
be trying to conceal.’”
386
But, what then changes or could change about this analysis
when we learn that the man behind this nom de plume was actually “hobbled” as a result
of contracting bone tuberculosis in his early childhood and had relied on crutches since
the age of six? So emblematic to the character of the “Afro-American Moslem poet,” this
condition and Ismail’s hallmark “anger” shows up again in a later work on 1960s
American exilic life in Cairo.
Suliman would begrudgingly be forced to evacuate Egypt by the country he
continued to disavow his allegiance to, the U.S. The book ends with Ismail’s migration to

384
Graham Du Bois, And Bid Him, 47-48.
385
Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine, 87.
386
Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine, 88 quoting from And Bid Him Sing, 39.
249

Turkey, and suggests he remains abroad indefinitely. Little more is known about Ismail’s
life trajectory. Although someone in the same Black American expat orbit confirmed to
me that he was indeed in Turkey—Los Angeles-born, New York-residing Black
American artist and archivist Camille Billops. She disclosed to me that her and
husband—African American Theater scholar James V. Hatch—were sent a request from
Ismail for “more books” to sell while he was in Turkey.
387
This book Ismail referred to
was an independently published poetry collaboration between Ismail, Hatch (a white
male), and Billops, Poems for Niggers and Crackers. A generative artifact of Ismail,
Hatch and Billops’ stay in Cairo, this collection is a forceful cultural production
engendered from engaged witness.

387
Camille Billops, interview with author, March 15, 2016.
250

Poems for Niggers and Crackers

Figure 12: Front cover of Poems for Niggers and Crackers, by Ibrahim Ibn Ismail, James V. Hatch and illustrations by
Camille Billops, May 1965. Author’s collection.
In May of 1965, a group of Black Americans and a white American Fulbright
recipient collaborated on poetry collection Poems for Niggers and Crackers. This
collection, a conversation between Black American Muslim poet Ibrahim Ibn Ismail and
African American theater scholar James V. Hatch, who met in Cairo, strove to capture
251

the racial dynamics of American expat life in Cairo. This conversation is interrupted
several times throughout the volume with illustrations by Hatch’s lover at the time: Los
Angeles born Black American artist Camille Billops. As a testimony to tightness of this
Black American network in Cairo, the collection is dedicated to David Graham Du
Bois—who also scribes the introduction. Graham Du Bois explains the origins of this
project, “In Cairo a year ago two poets met, 9,000 miles from home. One was white and
one was black, but both carried United States passports. Also, both carried deep within,
the memory of “‘over there’.” As a generative artifact of engaged witness, a
documentation of what the eye beheld in Cairo and as testimony of American racial
injustice, “what then arose out of this uncontrollable hatred and despair of the black poet,
Ibrahim Ibn Ismail and the unwanted guilt and disgust of the white poet, James V. Hatch
and the attempts of each to purge himself of those negative emotions through joint poetic
experience.” Witnessing the “hate, angry and despair,” this white poet “feared for the
soul of his black brother” while, “the black poet suffered pangs of compassion and pity”
for the white brother.
Graham Du Bois closes his introduction addressing the global dimensions of
American racial logic, even reproducing some of Von Eschen’s framing, “Here then is
America’s black and white phenomenon, the Achilles Heel belying the eagerly projected
U.S. image throughout the world. Here is the universal quest for brotherhood, corrupted,
defiled, distorted, soured, almost abandoned—and yet, ever present, fighting to burst
forth and flower.” Was the destabilizing of prevailing American racial logic in the
African diaspora’s new “Mecca” (as Graham Du Bois termed it), perhaps the perfect
252

geography for honestly probing a history of chattel slavery and state violence that
produced American anti-Blackness in all its ugliness and messiness—even 9,000 miles
away?
Because of the rarity of this book and limited space in this dissertation chapter
format, I will try to convey the preciousness of this generative artifact produced through a
practice of engaged witness of Cairo in the 1960s by reproducing much of the poetry in
this collection with brief interludes of reflections, context-setting and analysis. My
intention is to move through the work so that the reader can piece together how American
racial dynamics play out in and are refracted through the prism of Cairo incubating pan-
Arab, pan-African and pan-Islamic fantasies of refuge.

Figure 13: Write up for Poems for Niggers in Crackers (Camille Billops’ illustration) in the “Afro-America” section of
the Arab Observer. Arab Observer, Von Kleinsmid Library of World Affairs, USC.
253

Reinforcing the connectedness of this network of Black American exiles, Poems for
Niggers and Crackers was advertised in the Arab Observer, featuring one of Camille
Billops’ illustrations that opens the collection. It is likely that Graham Du Bois’ editorial
relationship with Arab Observer made this publicity possible, as it likely did months
before for Ismail. As Graham Du Bois mentions, a number of the poems in the collection
were written prior to and separate from the collaborative process. For Ismail, this
included his ode to Malcolm X—partially reprinted in the Arab Observer eulogy “Viva
Big Red” (but in its entirety in the collection). As some of Ismail’s tensions with
Blackness in Cairo and vexed relationship to the U.S. show up in …And Bid Him Sing,
this dialectic of American Blackness in Cairo is in full force in the poetry volume. But
others are clearly in conversation with, like Ismail’s “Some Black-American Faces”:
Children of pseudo-freedom
Who’s mothers fled the
Southland’s dread and whip and
bled to drop you, a baby,
In the promised—land…
Stand!
Face the hand that smothers
Your yearning
To be free
Lock back, see,
The fallacies, and turn
To face the fight that
Breaks the chain.
Be a pessimist,
An optimist
Black nationalist,
A communist,
A rightist.
A leftist,
A racist.
Be aware and fight back.

254

Hatch follows this volley with “Black American Faces in Cairo” with the first section of
his poem titled “Mr. Ex-American X” after the preface stanza:
Like water filtered,
the Exiles
come dribbling
into Egypt
Hatch intimates a rise in Black American migration to Cairo tied to the death of the
Negritude dream, of Paris as a Black cosmopolitan metropole that was difficult to
reconcile with France’s protracted colonial aggression in Algeria. Announcing the Black
“Mecca” relocation from Paris to Cairo and a “Turn to Africa”:
Paris, though still Paris
was no longer Mecca;
Too many Frenchmen
dead in Algeria

I turn to Africa,
and to you, Egypt,
to see work done
only with normal
contempt for man.

Here I’ll do the best I can.
Egypt’s a good post.
Rose scented winters
are most agreeable.
A dip in the pool—
Scotch at the bar—
A trip to Alex
by American car—
it’s agreeable.

I work in a special milieu;
There’s no contretemps
about your view on race
I’m invited for golf,
a round before brunch:
255

I agree to agree
to speak at lunch.
…
You see this attaché case
and the turban it contains?
When I return to L.S.U.
(It’s in Louisiana too)
I’ll flash an ancient scarib
And tell them I’m an Arab.
They’ll welcome me
in Mohamed Ali’s name.
…
Hey Cairo,
you sure get to me
with your “malish”
One day, I wish…

Hey Cairo,
pay me no mind.
If I didn’t dig you
I’d leave you far behind.

Complicating this “Turn to Africa,” Ismail expands the geography of Black exile from
Egypt to all of Africa in “Exit-Us,” a poem also published a year prior in the Arab
Observer’s “Special Issue for the African Summit”:
388

Dis heah place,
‘tain’t fit for me
My feets, dey wants ta
Wander.
Dey tells me I got a
Motherland,
‘way ‘cross yonder
If I go dere
Dis place dey say

388
“Poetry,” Arab Observer: The Non-Aligned Weekly 212, July 13, 1964, 51-52. Accompanying
the poem is a profile of Ismail, a biographical sketch that draws attention to the tuberculosis in his
left hip that permanently left him the disabled in his leg and defined him as “Pity Sticks” and the
“bobbing” Suliman Ibn Rashid.
256

Dere ain’t no
Ropes ta scare ya.
I wonders if dey
God some space
In dat dere placed called
‘geria.
He also tries on “dis heah place” of “exit-us” to represent a Black diasporic geography
free of Jim crow racial terror; an “exit-us” potentially located in Somali-land, Cameroon,
Chad, “dem streets in Ghana,” Congo, and” “at home in Sudan.” Ismail traverses the
Afro-Arab diaspora, wandering for a home, to “retour” to where “Black is Black”:
So, I gwine back,
where’s Black is Black.
An’ a man’s looked at as
A man.
I gwine o’ver where
I come from,
My home in dear
Africa-land.
“Africa-land” signifies this geography free of “no mo’ lynchin’s” or “beggin and a
cringing chopping cotton,” no “mo’ work” while calling “da niggahs lazy,’ and without
empty promises of “ain’t got no mule/No acre.” Africa-land is also masculinized and an
incubator of a capital “B” “Black,” the genealogy of original Blackness. Ismail
complicates this Black gaze by adding the lens of Islam to his witness. Mentioning the
“tourist with the blue-eyes” equipped with a camera to fossilize vibrant spiritual life, the
testimony of a Black Atlantic Islam in “Al Azhar Mosque” explores spiritual practice in
an African city still overcast with the shadow of white supremacy. In the poem, Ismail
speaks of “The silent prostrate soul,” that, like the most disciplined of shahids, engaged
in “bearing witness/Of the One and the only One” aiming to “submit” like the birds:
257

The silent prostrate soul
On your soft carpet floor,
The tourist with the blue-eyes
And the camera at your door
The robed scholar in the corner,
Memorizing writ. And,
The birds in the rafters that
Submit…

The Mueizzen in your Minaret
Aiming toward the heavens,
Calling the faithful—
“Come to pray!”
The believers bearing witness
Of the One and the only One,
Striving like the birds, to
Submit…

The collection also includes several tribute poems to Egyptian friends made during this
time of engaged witness in Cairo, friendships that influenced the development of
analytics around Egypt, Africa and Blackness.

Figure 14: “With My Black Egyptian Brother Said,” by Camille Billops in Poems for Niggers and Crackers. Author’s
collection.
258

Portrayed in …And Bid Him Sing, Said, known as Egyptian Nubian drummer
Sayyid, is one of the few names Du Bois does not conceal with a pseudonym. Beyond
this poem, the intricacies of Ismail and Said’s friendship—one that tested the overlapping
analytical boundaries of Blackness, Egyptian-ness and African-ness—is revealed in
Graham Du Bois’s memoir:
Suliman [Ibrahim Ismail] thought of Sayyid as his closet Egyptian friend. Except
Suliman told himself, Sayyid wasn’t really Egyptian. He was, in fact, an Egyptian
Nubian, with the color and thick features of the south, in marked contrast to his
head of thick, coarse, straight black hair. Of course, Suliman knew that there were
Egyptian Nubians as well as Sudanese Nubians. But he chose to think of Nubians
as mostly Sudanese. For him that made them African, and thus homefolk.
389

Graham Du Bois continues by extending an elaborative description of Said’s features that
contributed to Ismail considering him “homefolk”—someone who Ismail presumably
shared a round of shisha smoking with:
Together we sit
On the floor
Of my room,
Our pipe and
Our food before us,
(no gloom).
He bids me--
To eat, and
I bid him--
To smoke,
In my bid to be
Free.
390

The poem in the collection on Said is visually reconstructed in Billops’ illustration of an
empty room decorated solely with a hookah. So much “bid[ing]” in this poem, clearly

389
Graham Du Bois, And Bid Him Sing, 13.
390
Ismail, Poems for Niggers and Crackers, 39.
259

read by the author of the Introduction to this collection, I wonder if it inspired Graham
Du Bois’s to revisit Count Cullen’s “Yet do I marvel.” The last couplet of Cullen’s poem
is reproduced preceding the start of Graham Du Bois’ novel: “Yet do I marvel at this
curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” After “Al Azhar” and before
Ismail’s “Brother Soul” poem on Black American Muslim jazz musician Osman Karriem,
another friendship with an Egyptian is highlighted in the poetry collection.
Tahia
Egypt has the pyramids
As high as can be;
Egypt has Tahia
And Tahia has me.
Egypt has the sun
The desert and the Nile
But Egypt is only lovely
When it makes Tahia smile
I know I must leave Egypt
And this may make me cry.
But I’ll not forget Tahia;
I’ll never say goodbye

Who is this Tahia, who’s smile is what made Egypt lovely for Hatch and Billops? As I re-
read Hatch’s poem about Tahia to Billops over one of our last phone calls, she expressed
joy after each couplet, reinforcing at the end of the poem, “We really loved her.”
391

391
Camille Billops, interview with author, October 11, 2016.
260

Camille Billops’ Cairo

“Cairo was an experience as an artist."
-Camille Billops
392

To extend my half-baked metaphor further, if Malcolm was the lens, Graham Du
Bois the frame, then Camille Billops was the narrator of Afro-Arab diaspora community
in Cairo fashioning the glasses.
393
I conducted two in person semi-structured oral history
interviews with Camille Billops at her personal home and collection home in SoHo, New
York City (in June 2012 and March 2016).
394
I also interviewed her on the phone several
times. Some of those calls, initially intended as logistical fact-checking, extended and
transformed into informal interviews. Prior to my first interview with Billops, I had done
very little background research on Billops’ time in Cairo—outside of a preliminary phone
call to set up a time to visit the collection. I did however discover Poems for Niggers and
Crackers online while furiously scouring the Internet for material by David Graham Du
Bois and Camille Billops. One late night, my cyber detective work, fueled by ample
supplies of pressing intuition (or in light of academic context “a structure of feeling”) and
unwavering nerdom, I located what might be one of the most tantalizing treasures as part
of this scholarship: Poems for Niggers and Crackers. Because this self-published book

392
Ibid.
393
Once again, I’m in deep gratitude to Robin Kelley for early on suggesting I reach out to
Billops for my project. Just like the Ahmad Jamal identification, I could not have known at the
time how central both Jamal and Billops were not only to my project by to understanding Afro-
Arab Islamic imaginaries in the 1950s and 1960s that sang dreams in harmony with Third World
and global Islamic geographies; geographies that grafted connections outside of U.S. empire.
394
Formerly the Hatch-Billops Collection which has begun the process of moving its collection to
the newly inaugurated The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Collection at the Stuart A. Rose
Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library at Emory University.
261

had two limited runs in 1965 (published in Cairo and in NYC), the cost significantly
exceeded anything in the way of a doctoral student’s budget.
395

Sold online at anywhere between 900 dollars and 750 pounds, this book is a true
generative artifact find. Even Billops was astounded to hear that I found it online for
much less —probably sold by a seller unaware of its value. When I visited her the second
time, with my personal copy of Poems for Niggers and Crackers, I was much better
equipped to direct more pointed and probing questions about Billops time in Cairo and
the forging of her and Hatch’s friendship with Tahia Halim. Along this journey, I came to
know Billops beyond the artwork, as a dedicated archivist of Black and Third World art,
an award-winning filmmaker who took the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for her 1991
documentary Finding Christa, and lastly an abiding “interlocutor” who generously gave
of her time, access to her home and even mailed me a copy of Hatch’s recent publication
Cairo: Nine Lives gratis.
396
Conversations over the past four years with Billops were
crucial in helping me understand the lay of the Black American cultural geography in
Cairo; and additionally, for introducing me to a modern Egyptian art movement I had
previously not been privy to. Billops was kind enough to allow me to memorialize parts
of her collection on modern Egyptian art with my smartphone camera. She even shared
the letters Tahia Halim mailed her, some in Arabic and others in a struggling non-native

395
Anyone who mildly knows me is well aware of the special place first edition books hold in my
heart—and also how much I have paid out of my own pocket for books of the like (so another
shout out to Robin for continuing to let me borrow his Quaderni Del Carcere)
396
Other films by Billops and Hatch include Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) and The KKK Boutique
Ain’t Just for Rednecks (1994). They are currently working on a documentary about their life and
times.
262

English—those were the only items I was prohibited from visually capturing.

Figure 15: Tahia Halim in front of her "Nubia Period" work. ArtTalks private archive, courtesy of Fatenn Mostafa.
Billops and Hatch’s deep affection for Egyptian painter Halim, a woman who
both never forgot or said goodbye to after their sojourn in Cairo during the 1960s, is
clearly preserved in the poem dedicated to her in Poems for Niggers and Crackers. But,
even more palpable is the Billops’ enduring memories of her friendship with Halim. In an
article for Women’s Studies, Billops recalls her initial encounter with Halim, regarded as
one of the pioneers in the Modern Expressive Art Movement in 1960s Egypt: “I first met
Tahia in the Temple of Queen Nefertiti in Upper Egypt. I have been renewing that
friendship during the past twelve years by frequent visits to Cairo. Her endless
graciousness has provided a place of rest for me, and she helped me have an exhibition of
263

my work at her gallery in Cairo.”
397

Billops underscored the depths of Halim’s support of her artistry and generosity in
our phone and in-person interviews. “Her friendship and generosity is what made Egypt
possible for me,” Billops explained to me in one of typical hour-plus long phone calls.
Halim assisted Billops exhibit her work in Egypt, because, “She was concerned with my
success [as an artist].”
398
Halim even helped Billops smuggle some of her prints and a
painting titled “Upper Nubia” from Egypt to the States. Over the years, Billops has sold
(and continues to consider selling) some of the work in her collection—from renowned
Harlem Renaissance artists (like Palmer Hayden) to the Black arts movement. But with
the pieces Halim gifted her, Billops emphasized multiple times over our phone
conversation, “I cherish these pieces. I would never sell them.” A painting from Halim’s
famed “Nubia” period “The Happiness of Nubia” (farhet el-nuba), where she depicted
the effects of High Dam construction on the Nubian population, recently sold for a
$700,000 at an auction in Dubai. Billops graciously shared with me her archive on
Halim—from a decades-long Transatlantic correspondence to newspaper profiles on
Halim, pamphlets for Halim’s exhibitions, and the article she wrote on Halim for
Women’s Studies in 1978. Halim’s work sits within a collective of Egyptian painting
community known as the “Institute of Pedagogy.” Billops and partner Hatch socialized
with this circle that included Halim’s former teacher and ex-husband Hamed Abdallah
and Gazbia Sirry.
Halim contemporary Gazbia Sirry even painted a portrait of Billops that she owns

397
Camille Billops, “Tahia Halim.” Women’s Studies 6, (1978): 107-111. Billops recounts the
first time she met Tahia Halim in Cairo in her profile of the artist.
398
Camille Billops, interview with author, October 11, 2016.
264

to this day. Billops explained to me the rivalry that existed between these two highly
profiled Egyptian women artists, “Gazbia and Tahia we’re very jealous of each other. I
thought Tahia was the better painter. They were in competition.”

Figure 16: Gazbia Sirry, ArtTalks private archive, courtesy of Fatenn Mostafa

Fatenn Mostafa, founder of Cairo-based art-space Art Talks, a modern and contemporary
art gallery, relayed to me the significance of Halim and Sirry’s work in the cultural
legacy of Egypt art and history: “Both female artists hold an unparalleled legacy – though
for different reasons. Tahia documented important moments in our history while Gazbia
deliberately made statements about these important moments.”
399
Mostafa elaborates on
Sirry’s intentional commitment to political witness, “hers was a constant testimony of
protest and the nagging voice of the people” that extended to documenting Black

399
Fatenn Mostafa, email communication with author October 16, 2016.
265

American suffering. Several pieces like “American Black” (1965), her “Racial
Discrimination” painting of 1963, and her portrait of Camille Billops; speak to Sirry’s
artistic testimony of Black American suffering under the conditions of racial terror
accessed through Sirry’s residency in the States and her friendship with Billops. “Gazbia
went to the States to study,” Mostafa explains, “during that time, she was shocked to
witness firsthand what she saw as racial racism.” What do we make of Mostafa’s
contention about the Sirry’s witness of “racial racism”?
e
Figure 17: "Racial Discrimination," Gazbia Sirry, 1963. ArtTalks private archive, courtesy of Fatenn Mostafa.
266

Billops, who explained to me that she, “didn’t understand what she [Halim] meant
in the world of internationalism while I was in Egypt. When I got out of Egypt, I
understood her place,” still recalls with vivid detail the contours of Halim’s Cairine
apartment. From how the light entered the shutters to the “soft gray walls,” Billops had
familiarized herself with an apartment she even slept over some nights.
400
Memories like
these are included in Billops 1978 profile of Halim for Women’s Studies journal, “She did
have wonderful moments when she was child-like. The child, the creative energy in any
artist, is very much apparent in Tahia. The child in her strung the Christmas lights across
the balcony; the child in her put on the lovely peasant dress from Sewa when guest come
to visit.”
401
It is remarkable that more than three decades after the publishing of this
article, an eighty-three-year-old Billops can still summon lucid details about Halim and
the friendship they forged in Cairo and enriched transnationally until Halim’s passing in
May 2003. Billops continued to elaborate on the extent of her friendship with the two
painters, “Tahia was my dear, dear friend. Gazbia was a good friend. She didn’t hold the
same place in my heart like Tahia.” Separated by multiple geographies and languages,
perhaps the most interesting dimension of Halim and Billops’ friendship is the way they
maintained transnational communication for decades—and in an era without email, text
messaging and easily accessible international calling.

400
Camille Billops, interview with author, October 11, 2016.
401
Billops, “Tahia Halim,” 107-111.
267

Cairo: Nine Lives

Figure 18: Illustration of “Pity Sticks” (Ibrahim Ibn Ismail) in James Hatch’s Cairo: Nine Lives. Illustration by
Camille Billops. Author’s collection.
If Poems for Niggers and Crackers was a “tantalizing treasure,” the 2014 Hatch
and Billops collaboration Cairo: Nine Lives can be considered an invaluable map
detailing the road to that literary pot of gold. Both generative artifacts require a close
reading to fully comprehend the historical work they do. I define close reading in this
particular case as amounting to putting multiple works in conversation with each other,
conducting oral history interviews, and drawing from a reservoir of knowledge on Black
268

American, mashriqi/maghrebi and Islamic studies histories. I have been combing through
Poems for years now and Nine Lives for nearly a year and still feel in need of more time
with them. However, I continue to be stunned by how vivid Cairo social life shows up in
all the generative artifacts of this time—accented by Arabic words, detailed in their
description of Cairine districts and neighborhoods, and consistent with the profiling of
some of its central characters; like, once again, Black American Muslim poet Ibrahim Ibn
Ismail.
Ismail is memorialized once more, this time in James V. Hatch’s memoir-ish
account of the Black American experience in 1960s Cairo in the thinly veiled “crippled
Black poet” Pity Sticks, also by “government” and Muslim names “aka Alfonso, aka
Amir El-Shazli.” Ismail and his Armenian-American lover and U.S. embassy employee
included by Graham Du Bois in …And Bid Him Sing, Alice Hagopian, are two of the
“nine lives” profiled in the series of vignettes. Once again, Billops artwork connects and
punctures pages of text and a photo of her and her mother in Cairo graces the cover of the
hardcover version of Cairo: Nine Lives. Nine Lives, published by the Hatch-Billops’
collection in New York, includes in its list of characters Fulbright scholars, Black
American artists and singers, Egyptian Ministers and U.S. Embassy officers, Egyptian
“feminists from the 1920s” Hoda Shaarawi and Siza Nabrawi (the only characters in the
collection of vignettes that aren’t disguised by a nom de plume) and even King Farouk’s
daughter “Madame Azizza.” Exploding with historical texture, this book proves too rich
to be relegated to a general overview in a chapter sub-section.
The foreword, written by Shafik Benjamin, who signed his closing “An Egyptian
269

Brother,” mentions the poetic collaboration between “Dr. StuBird” (Hatch) and “Pity
Sticks” (Ismail) and other notable characters in Nine Lives. Benjamin even affectionately
notes that after 60 years of friendship, he calls Jim “My Soul Brother.” How do we begin
to unpack an Egyptian who migrated to Toronto deploying Black vernacular phraseology
to describe his long-standing friendship with a white American scholar and playwright?
Obscured in this foreword is the contours of the friendship between Benjamin and
Billops. For decades, Benjamin served an intermediary role as translator in the South-
South dialogue between Billops and Tahia, Arabic and English letters circulating
TransAtlantically and through three countries. Benjamin’s Montreal residence became a
node of travel for the step migration of letters between Halim and Billops. This decades-
long correspondence that circuited through Cairo, Montreal, Manhattan and sometimes
Brooklyn, involved Halim and Billops writing letters to each other in Arabic and English
and seeking translation assistance from Benjamin and a Sudanese friend who lived in
Brooklyn. This communication once again underscored the unexpected South-South
dialogues that are mediated through state programs like Fulbright.
Hatch’s Fulbright in Egypt secured access to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, which in
turn facilitated Billops entry into the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Leonardo Da Vinci Art
School; where she studied drawing upon arriving to the city in 1962. Billops and Hatch
developed a friendship with the Assistant Cultural Attaché at the U.S. Embassy, African
American Brooklyn native Walter Simon. This friendship would even take them across
continents and through sticky diplomatic terrain. As an accomplished “prize winning” oil
and watercolor painter raising a family of artists, Simon clearly sympathized with Billops
270

ambitions of training her craft while overseas. During his tenure with the United States
Information Agency (USIA), Simon was one of 64 Black Foreign Service officers. His
first assignment was in Cairo, arriving in 1961 when it was still the United Arab
Republic.
402
As demonstrated by the anecdotes in Nine Lives, the Hatch-Billops and the
Simons formed a friendship that eventually catalyzed more cultural diplomatic tours and
productions.
In 1968, U.S.I.S. organized (most likely by Simon) a traveling showing of Hatch-
Billops theatrical collaboration “American Hurrah” throughout South Asia (Calcutta,
Bombay, and Bangalore). Billops recounts the government’s reaction to seeing content
critical of the state that they endorsed, “When the U.S.I.S. people finally saw it, they
freaked out that the American government had sponsored an anti-Johnson play with all
those Bengali Communists.”
403
In addition to showing me art produced and gifted by the
Simons to her, Billops showed me pictures from her collection of her, Hatch and the
Simons in Colombo, Sri Lanka—a trip the couples took during this USIS tour of South
Asia. Hatch and Billops continued to convert eristic artistic cultural production abroad
into leveraged wins with the state. On a lecture tour in Thailand and Malaysia
We met a Chinese-Malaysian playwright, Lee Jou For, who “leaked” to the press
that Jim was going to do his play on Broadway. Well, now, how was Jim going to

402
“Diplomat with an Artistic Touch,” Ebony, November 1964, 88, 92, 96. The Ebony profile of
Walter Simon makes 50 years ago feel like another plane of human existence. Replete with
pictures of his life in Cairo with wife Virginia, and children Michael and Deborah; the profile
closes with an image of Walter and Virginia on their apartment balcony overlooking the Nile,
“looking forward to Kabul, Afghanistan, because it is picturesque and Walter will have time to
paint there. As for his wife, she merely wants to shop,” 96. Walter Augustus Simon and Virginia
Spottswood Simon’s family papers live at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript,
Archives, and Rare Books Library.
403
Ameena Meer, “Camille Billops,” Bomb Magazine, 40, Summer 1992.
271

get this Buddhist play on Broadway? But it made the performance; it made the
United States government give him a travel grant. He really worked that one. So
when we came back to New York, we did his play, Son of Zen. All the Buddhists
we knew came to our loft on East 11
th
Street.
404

Cairo was the vector for collaborative generative artifacts that witnessed Hatch and
Billops continue to travel throughout the Third World in the mid and late 1960s,
producing plays critical of U.S. imperialism like “American Hurrah” during a State
department sponsored five-month residency in Calcutta, India in 1968. The friendship
forged in Cairo with the Simons facilitated these travels and yielded these generative
artifacts. It is no wonder that the Simons were also featured in Nine Lives as James and
Ethel Riggs. The Simons/Riggs, Hatch reveals at the end of the collection in his
acknowledgements, were also responsible for introducing Hatch and Billops to Egyptian
artists, presumably Halim and Sirry, who Hatch also thanks for “enriching our
appreciation for Egyptian art.”
405

Perhaps the most interesting character concealment in Nine Lives was that of
Maya Angelou. Maya Make, at the time, took up a post as an editor at the Arab Observer,
to follow her partner, South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make. Although they
divorced shortly after (married from 1960-1963), Angelou remained in Africa, moving to
join the vibrant community of Black American intellectuals, artists and literary figures in
Accra, Ghana. Benjamin, in his foreword to Nine Lives, explains that the Nasserist policy
of opening Egypt’s doors to global freedom fighters and supporting them with allowances
attracted Make and his contemporaries. Make, along with other members of the African

404
Ibid.
405
James V. Hatch, Cairo: Nine Lives (New York: The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
Collection, 2014), 209.
272

National Congress, organized the Evaton bus boycotts of 1955-56. While in exile in
Cairo, Make became the South African representative in the Pan Africanist Congress and
assumed the role of assistant head of the South African United Front. Accounting for two
of the nine lives, Make and Angelou’s Cairine encounters are extensively featured in
Hatch’s work. Make shows up as “commander in exile of the African Revolution”
Mfundisi, or nickname Disi, while Maya’s son Guy Johnson is artistically christened
Ameo.
The inclusion of stories centering Black American artist and an African freedom
fighter speak to this intersection of Black internationalism, African diaspora and Third
World politics that the metropole of Cairo contained—a metropole that was still
navigating through these politics of difference. Egyptian society’s colorism, class
politics, and treatment of gender hits an apex with the confrontation between Drucilla and
Egyptian schoolgirls and a bicycle-rider with a bread-filled bamboo crate on his head. As
revealed to me in an anecdote by Billops, Drucilla, described as a Black American singer,
is a stand in for Maya Angelou. As Dru exited her residence in red pants, she encountered
squealing schoolgirls and a bicycle-rider who pointed and laughed at the Black American
woman they referred to as “Lumumba!” In response to the mounting laughter, Dru grabs
the handlebars of the bike, while the man was still seated, and flipped the bike frame
over. A nearby tobacco store owner jetted out and pleaded with Dru to desist, “You will
Kill him!” Dru retorts, “That’s exactly what I intend to do!”
406

406
Ibid, 62.
273

Figure 19: Illustration of Drucilla (Maya Angelou) flipping over the bike of an Egyptian who called her “Lumumba.”
Illustration by Camille Billops in Cairo: Nine Lives. Author’s collection.
Billops did confirm that this incident happened to Angelou while she was living
in Cairo; attributing it the Egyptians’ reaction to Angelou’s dark-complexioned skin. But
Hatch’s characters present a more complicated analysis that engages the politics of
nationalism, pan-Africanism, class and gender in Egypt—along with a perplexing
colorism that appears to sever African-ness from Arab-ness:
“What’s the matter with them? Why do they do that?”
“They don’t see many Black women,” suggested Elizabeth. “They see English,
German. They laugh at them too, especially when I first came to Cairo, but now in
Dokki and Zamlek they know me a little.”
“But that man was the same color as me! The same color!”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Peter. “They’re Arabs. They say to Africans, ‘My
father bought your mother for a cup of sugar!’”
“I’ll Kill them!”
274

“Now, Drucilla…”
“I will! Lumumba! Why do they say that?”
“Nasser made a great stir about Lumumba’s assassination. He’s the only name
they know for a Black African. Don’t let it bother you. Ma’lish.”
“And don’t wear your slacks on the street,” added Elizabeth.
“They’re not tight.”
“Slacks are considered men’s clothing.”
“But they—those men—they wear those damn dresses.”
“I’m just telling you. We’ve all tried it. And for God’s sake, don’t wear a short
skirt!”
“They’re ignorant!” Hissed Drucilla. “Ignorant! Savage!”
“Many women here wore veils until Nasser became president. Some things you
just can’t wear on the street.”
“But I’ve seen women in slacks.”
“A few white women maybe. They’re used to that in Zamalek.”
“Then let them get used to me.”
“You can’t fight all Egypt.”
407

Immediately following this dialogue, the tobacco store owner re-emerges with roses for
Drucilla as a salve to likely apologize on behalf of his Egyptian co-patriots. Hatch uses
this encounter to explore Dru’s rising consciousness about the deep havoc wrecked on the
African man’s mind by white supremacist, patriarchal colonial violence: “Cairo was a
trip. She knew that the colonials had worked their nasties, penetrating the heart of
darkness with Bible and bullet, but she did not realize how much of the White European
sexual/racial paradigm had conquered Africa, had permeated every African leader
educated in London until some dreamed of fucking the bloody queen in the proxy of his
own white wife.”
408

Dru and Disi continue to show up throughout the book, at times in conversation
about mashriqi politics like Nasser and Dulles’s showdown at the Suez Canal with
StuBird and his lover Althea (Camille Billops), and other times attempting to navigate the

407
Ibid, 64.
408
Ibid, 65.
275

American racial paradigm outside of the U.S. As an example of this, StuBird tests out the
waters with “your momma” jokes to Dru and Amir (or Pity Sticks). American politics in
what Hatch called “black, blacker than thou sixties,” re-calibrated through the
positionality of an Arab city and Third World capital like Cairo, produce interesting quips
of the engaged witness variety.
409
Dru, continually preoccupied with ways to bring her
U.S. based son to Cairo, remarks at one point, “How stupid to trust her son to a country
that invented the Bay of Pigs.”
410
Earlier, in “Royalty Does Not Cry in the Streets,” Disi
attempts to communicate to Dru the place Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba held in the
hearts of liberated and decolonizing Africans. Disi describes Tshombe as NATO’s “hired
gangster” to explain to Dru the global dynamics at play in Lumumba’s assassination.
Hatch, through writing this relationship, suggests that Make opened Angelou’s eyes, “to
see the Struggle in broader, international terms, not as her father had, but an international
struggle of Black peoples against white.”
411

The circumstances that allow Black American artists like Maya Angelou, Camille
Billops (who visited Ghana during his trips to Egypt) and Shirley Du Bois to relocate to
Ghana and then to Egypt, in the vein of “homeboy cosmopolitanism” such as described
by Manthia Diawara in his autobiography We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the
World or as engaged witnesses, is constitutive of movement not engaged by Haley in
Malcolm X’s Autobiography or comprehensively treated in works that isolate study of
Black American exilic life to their metropoles like London, Paris, Accra and Beijing.
Perhaps this scholarship can inspire not only a monograph on Black American diaspora

409
Ibid, 207.
410
Ibid, 57.
411
Ibid, 61.
276

in Cairo during Third World times, but maybe to think more transnationally and “tri-
continentally”—a framing historian Robin D.G. Kelley urges us to analytically adopt—
about how these metropoles were connected through Black travel and cultural traffic like
that of Vicki Garvin, Maya Angelou, Shirley Du Bois and yes…Malcolm X.
Conclusion
Malcolm X did not start a Black globality conversation that spoke of linking
Black American freedom struggles to Third World and nonalignment movements in an
effort to undermine Americo-European centrism but rather entered one of many.
Productive alliances around a three circles diasporic consciousness generated a world-
historical perspective that served to shift subjecthoods. Diaspora is not simply where
people hail from; it is also what they refer back to, and not in a singular way, but in a way
that speaks to, as David Graham Du Bois’s migrations from Ghana to China to Egypt and
back to Ghana and then back to the United States signal, a multiplicity of
spatiotemporalities. As do Ibrahim Ibn Ismail’s travels across the U.S. to Cairo, time in
Turkey, mysterious journeys around Europe and retour to the States, and finally Camille
Billops return visits to Cairo for decades to see her dear friend Tahia Halim. Because
what diasporic peoples “refer back to” is constantly changing and in flux, they do not
have access to categorical fixities and stable identities. Concerned less with a singular,
imagined movement back home or with recovering lost memories in the process and
condition of dispersal, these diasporic peoples engage in projects of articulation that
disrupt a U.S.-centric chokehold on subjecthood formation and demand a world-historical
perspective through commitments to difference. Black Atlantic Islam doesn’t construct a
277

new homeland “for a people without a land,” but with its geo-racio-religious imaginary
(three circles of association), it reconfigures understandings of a “home” delinked from
the necessary referent of “a land.” Attempting to conceptualize Cairo-based Afro-Arab
diasporic culture in an era governed by Third World imaginaries, I recall Ismail’s
articulation of Karriem as, “a brother from ‘overthere’ over here.” Perhaps, outside of all
these frameworks of with contested definitions like diaspora and cosmopolitanism, this
notion of being from “overthere over here” best communicates the complications and
fluidity of dialectics of American Blackness in Cairo.
This chapter explored Black American life in Cairo up until the 1967 war; which
would prove to have an impact not just on a Black poet exile from Jersey, but more
broadly to Black American radicals and their relationship to 48/67. The tremors of Arab
lands inundated by Israeli military bombardments would be felt by grassroots organizers
in the Black Freedom Movement—tremors that would trouble the Black-Jewish
organizing paradigm. Previously, I’ve written about Afro-Arab engaged witness through
the paradigm of singular delegates, in some cases U.S. state sanctioned like Hatch/Billops
and Shawarbi, and in other cases self-appointed emissaries as is the example with
Malcolm and Ismail. But in the next chapter, I interrogate the engaged witnesses of Black
delegations to Palestine, one a historical undertaking, and the other an anthropological
one.

278

CHAPTER 4:
DREAM DEFENDING IN PALESTINE

Figure 20: Post-solidarity demonstration in downtown Nazareth. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

This chapter hones in on the concepts outlined in the Introduction— shahādah/
takāful, friendship, travel, Afro-Arab solidarity—and uses the practice of diary-writing as
a textual way to express my engaged witness during the Dream Defenders delegation to
279

Palestine in 2015. In this chapter, employing direct participatory action research (PAR)
methods, we see the praxis of engaged witness primarily through my account as the
engaged witness. I actively applied my historical and archival research on delegations,
Afro-Arab solidarity, and Black delegations, in addition to more than a decade of
journalism on Palestine to co-organizing this delegation. Furthermore, this inspiration of
Malcolm X’s engaged witness travel writing extends to the structure of this chapter.
Breaking from the standard historical narrative of this dissertation, I offer self-reflective,
ethnographic diary entries for each day of the 10-day delegation as also part of a practice
of assembling an archive of Black American travel to Palestine. I conclude by examining
the generative artifacts of the delegation to explore the salience of Afro-Arab visions of
freedom and justice.
This trip, known as DDPalestine, is sourced from footage taken during the trip by
a videographer working for Harry Belafonte’s documentarian, Susanne Rostock, my own
PAR (field research in Ferguson, organizing the delegation, participating in the 10-day
delegation and post-delegation events/experiences), a qualitative analysis of delegates
social media postings of the trip, delegates “Top 5” lists, post-trip writings, speeches, and
conversations. I began by appraising the current upsurge in Black-Palestinian solidarity
work. This upsurge will be contextualized within a history of Black delegations and
delegates travel to Palestine from 1967 till 2014, including an assessment of the critical
political analyses they produced. Sourced from my field notes, delegate social media
postings/commentary, and footage from the trip, I offer a breakdown of the trip day by
day. Second, I address takeaways from the DDPalestine delegation and the practice of
280

delegation-making; which include: appraising the moment in a history of Black-
Palestinian solidarity, theorizing a politics of Black radical transnationalism in a social
media era (initiated by Fergaza), exploring the practice of organizing a delegation,
Blackness in 48/67, probing the centrality of the arts and friendships in organizing work
(and especially on this trip), and lastly, the generative outcomes from the trip. The
appendix includes excerpts from documents relevant to delegation-organizing: our
proposal to funders and a letter to delegates that laid out the historical continuity of Black
radical transnationalism Ahmad Abuznaid and I imagined the DDPalestine exemplified.
“From Ferguson to Palestine”
Winter could not get colder. Huddled together in Ottoman-style seating, brushing
up against each other for supplemental warmth, bellies full of makloubeh and hands
warmed by piping hot mint tea glasses, Hands Up United activist Tara Thompson
silenced a room of Black American and Palestinian youth by asserting, “I feel mad
liberated right now.” Tara was responding to an extended series of queries made by me
concerning freedom, concluding with, “How do we define liberation? Freedom from
what and freedom for what? Are we missing the ‘for’ because we are not here now? What
are we embodying?”
As an expression of consensus, the room fell silent. In a refugee camp around
Bethlehem, in the dead of winter, on the eve of Orthodox Christmas, we all felt mad
liberated. This moment continues to preoccupy my mind: why did we feel liberated? We
had just listened to a nine-member female teenage hip hop group deliver rap bars and
even younger youth teach us the debkeh (traditional Palestinian folkloric dance). Did
281

these previous encounters perhaps open us up to a prolific presence at Campus in Camps?
Could it be that this segment of the Dheisheh refugee camp, for a few fleeting moments,
was a site of freedom-making not just for residents in the camp, but also its Black
American visitors?
It had already been a couple days into our 10-day delegation, and delegates
surprised their social media followers by tweeting pictures from Jerusalem, Ramallah and
now Dheisheh refugee camp with the hashtag #FreePalestine. As one of two resident
scholar activists on the trip, I was concerned with our collective rush to tweet “free” and
“Palestine” without prior conversations probing what we meant by a “free Palestine”? Is
it an end to occupation? Were we operating under a one state post-Westphalian nation-
state framing? Would a secular, democratic one-state end what the UN declared a racist
ideology on November 10, 1975—Zionism? Umi Selah (formerly Philip Agnew), co-
founder of Dream Defenders, cited Martin Luther King’s characterization of integrating
into a violent racial capitalist America, “I have integrated my people into a burning
build” to dispute claims that an integrated “one-state” could lead to “freedom.” Did
Campus in Camps’ framing of the camp as the center of social, economic and political
life, as reconfigured commons, and reconstituting of Palestinians as “Mediterranean
people” shift delegates understanding of freedom for Palestine? This conversation would
continue throughout the trip.
The discussions on Palestinian liberation sparked for delegates an invitation to
think through the contours of Black freedom; with some centering the concept of
nationhood as a fundamental stage towards liberation. “We had to go to Palestine to see
282

__________ about our own struggle at home,” was a frequent refrain on the trip. Amid
debates, “falasteen hurra, hurra, ikhtalal burra burra” (“free, free Palestine, kick
occupation out”) became our collective rallying cry as we danced and debkeh-ed during
our Palestinian solidarity demonstration in downtown Nazareth.
This is but a snapshot of conversations that emerged during the January 2015
Dream Defenders delegation I co-organized with Dream Defenders’ Ahmad Abuznaid
(currently director of National Network for Arab American Communities). Delegates
included Umi Selah, Ciara Taylor, Steven Pargett, Sherika Shaw from Dream Defenders,
Black Lives Matter and Dignity & Power Now co-founder Patrisse Cullors-Khan, Tara
Thompson and Tef Poe from St. Louis’ Hands Up United, Women’s March co-founder
and The Gathering for Justice executive director Carmen Perez, poet Aja Monet Bacquie,
Temple professor and journalist Marc Lamont Hill, community engagement director at
the African American Policy Forum Cherrell Brown, and Black Youth Project national
director Charlene Carruthers.
This chapter will explore the ethnographic dimensions of the Dream Defenders’—
a Miami-based human rights organization—January 2015 delegation to 48/67, the
process of co-organizing the delegation, and the generative outcomes of a 10-day
engaged witnessing of material conditions of occupation. For almost a year, I worked
closely with (at the time) Dream Defender’s legal director Ahmad Abuznaid, a
Palestinian American who identifies with Blackness, in organizing a group of young
leaders to travel to Palestine in hopes of forging transnational connections and to deepen
283

questions of liberation.
412
From curating delegates, securing funding, teaming up with a
48/67-based organization and finally to design an itinerary for the group; our preliminary
meager vision of locating community funding for a grassroots trip for a hand full of
Dream Defenders transformed into a fully funded fourteen-person delegation with a
videographer and composed of leadership from the Dream Defenders, Black Lives
Matter, Ferguson/St. Louis’s Hands Up United, Chicago’s Black Youth Project and New
York City’s Justice League. The delegation underwent many transformations, including
an indefinite postponement during the height of the 2014 invasion of Gaza. The initially
scheduled travel date for the 10-day trip was August 10, 2014. Little did we know, a
couple weeks prior when agreeing to put the trip on hold, the significance of such a
move. On August 9, 2014, a “Ferguson Uprising” erupted when locals and surrounding
St. Louis took to the streets to protest the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown,
whose body was left in a pool of blood for four and a half hours. Some called this a
public execution, a modern-day lynching, an attempt to send an explicit message of state
terror to community members on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri. Most of the
delegates, who had planned to travel to Palestine with us, were thus able to travel to
Ferguson to join local community organizing against police brutality, tying the murder to
a larger conversation around anti-Blackness and state violence. As American grassroots
organizers descended upon Ferguson, international communities expressed solidarity on
social media. Palestinians tweeted in tips to Ferguson protesters on methods for avoiding

412
Interesting enough, he pledged a Black fraternity in college, the Alphas. This is how precisely
how he first some of the future leadership of Dream Defender. Acquainted through the Florida
college network of Alphas who worked in student government, years later they organized a call-
in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin. That is how Dream Defenders was born.
284

and treating tear gas stings.
After three weeks of daily direct actions, I traveled to St. Louis to stand in a
takāful-kind of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride weekend of action
in Ferguson, organized by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell Moore. During the visit, I met
community activists who participated in daily actions and went on to profile Black
women on the frontlines of the insurrection in series on Huffington Post titled “Faces
from Ferguson.” A month later, from October 10-13, I joined Muslims for Ferguson and
the Palestine Solidarity Committee contingents for the locally organized “Weekend of
Resistance: Ferguson October.” That weekend, Ahmad and I connected with local
activists and nation-wide organizers on Black-Palestinian solidarity. Long considered a
third rail in American politics, solidarity with Palestinians became a material and
metaphoric feature of a Black Lives Matter movement that swelled in response to
Michael Brown’s murder. Tanks plowing up and down Ferguson’s West Florissant
Avenue and the use of tear gas on protesters and revelation of Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) training St. Louis police department, fueled the metaphoric resonance of military
occupation. The parallels drawn to militarized war zone birthed the popular imaginary
geography of “Fergaza.”
The imagery of a largely youthful population surviving military occupation, of
Twitter testimonies and YouTube documentation challenging mainstream media punditry
framing and top-down analysis, of reporting live from active war zones; makes it easy to
understand this lexical development. Fergaza captured revelations of overlapping systems
of oppression that began forcefully surfacing on social media networks as Israel’s
285

military invasion of Gaza and Ferguson’s uprising against the police killing of teenager
Michael Brown played out and intersected in real time. A popular meme circulating
social media platforms exposed a common through line across social justice movements
in Egypt, Palestine and Ferguson, Missouri: snapshots of tear gas canisters from all these
locations read “Combined Systems Inc.” Highlighting the Pennsylvania-based
manufacturing and supply company, with a self-described mission of “supporting
military forces and law enforcement agencies worldwide,” served as yet another impetus
for social justice activists and organizers from the Midwest to the Middle East to see
themselves in each other’s struggles. Prior to this meme, Palestinian netizens tweeted
instructional tips on protecting against the sting of tear gas to activists in Ferguson.
Ferguson activists responded, “Thanks 4 the advice Palestine.” The overlapping of the
invasion of Gaza and killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner inspired Cornel West to
conclude, “There is a relationship between the ghetto of Gaza and the ghettos of
America.”
413

This chapter intends to demonstrate the organic emergence of a Black-Palestinian
solidarity movement in a post-Operation Protective Edge/Mike Brown murder moment
through a deep qualitative analysis of the Dream Defenders’ Delegation to Palestine at
the beginning of 2015. I argue that DDPalestine stands in the tradition of Black radical
transnationalism, thinking through Cedric Robinson’s theoretical framework of a Black
radical tradition (BRT) on a scale of transnational grassroots organizing. The question of
the role of engaged witness—of travel and witness in transforming politics—will be

413
Cornel West, “There is a relationship between the ghetto of #Gaza and the ghettos of
#America. #Hannity, Twitter, August 13, 2014, 2:17pm.
286

theorized as well the centrality of arts in structuring “freedom dreams” and illuminating
relational connections. What does liberation look like for Black Americans and
Palestinians? Why are their struggles intersecting in this moment? What questions around
liberation and occupation are perceived as “common” or more so, related struggles and
what are divergent? On what grounds is solidarity articulated? Why now, after historical
peaks in the 60s and 70s of Black American mobilizing against Zionism, has a Black-
Palestinian solidarity been revisited? In what ways does this most recent call for
solidarity diverge from its historical precedents?
Brief History of Black Delegations to Palestine
“Our Committee came into existence early in July 1970 as a result of the full page ad in
support of Israel signed by 41 Negroes that appeared in the June 28, N.Y. Times. It was
formed by seven Black Americans that had been meeting semi-regularly for a few months
to discuss a trip to the Middle East that took place in August.
Six of us including myself were guests of the General Union of Palestine Students
and the major Palestine Commando groups for a month. We toured Lebanon, Syria and
Jordan visiting many refugee and commando camps.”
414

In a December 22, 1970, letter to Committee of Black Americans for Truth about
the Middle East (COBATAME), chairman Paul Boutelle explains that after the
delegation, “It took many meetings, letters, phone calls, appeals” over a period of four
months before they were ready to place their full-page November 1
st
ad, “An Appeal by
Black American Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel” in

414
The Black Power Movement, Part 2: The Papers of Robert F. Williams, reel 4, Bentley
Library, University of Michigan (University Publications of America, Bethesda, Maryland). A
massive thank you to brilliant Historian and Carter Center delegate Robyn Spencer for offering to
share this material with me after her incredibly engaging American Studies Association (ASA)
presentation in October, 2015.
287

the New York Times.
415
This statement carried signatures from fifty-six organizers,
activists, poets and cultural workers that included James and Grace Lee Boggs, Malcolm
X’s step sister Ella Collins, Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Harlem’s National Memorial
Bookstore owner Lewis H. Michaux, and president of the NAACP’s Monroe, North
Carolina chapter in the 1950s and 60 Robert F. Williams. It represented a clear dividing
between the politics on the mashriq between the Black Radical Left and liberal, moderate
Black elected politicians and leaders. Boutelle’s COBATAME members exposes the
reaction the ad received from NY Times readers and laid out future plans for deepening
the commitment of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians.
COBATAME regarded “Palestinian Revolution” as the “vanguard of the Arab
Revolution,” one that is “part of the anti-colonial revolution which is going on in places
such as Vietnam, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, Laos, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.”
This statement makes overtures to Malcolm X and SNCC’s analysis on Zionist
participation in “dollarism,” that, like other imperialist projects, “opposes that anti-
colonial revolution [Arab Revolution] and especially revolutionary change in the Middle
East.”
The organization received 300 letters and the “response was about half and half,”
in terms of supportive and oppositional words. Boutelle relayed some of the heavy-
handed racism readers included in their condemnations; in particular, those wishing the
“bubonic plague or sickle cell anemia” on the signatories who were called “black

415
Boutelle, who changed his name to Kwawme Somburu by 1979 and ran for State Senate in
Harlem under the Freedom Now banner in 1964 (and four years later for U.S. Vice President
under the Socialist Workers Party ticket), factored prominently in Black radical and Socialist
organizing spaces.
288

bastards, peanut brained nigger coons savage dupes of slave-trading Arabs and many
other things too lengthy and filthy to waste additional space or time right now to inform
you about.” Unfazed by the vitriolic words, Boutelle continued by outlining
COBATAME’s future plans, including a full-size poster of the November 1
st
ad, a book
“tentatively titled Black Americans and Zionism and Third World Liberation,” and on
teach-ins to Black communities on the Middle East, starting with New York.
416

Scholars such as Anthropologist Nadine Nader and Ethnic Studies scholar Keith
Feldman have written about this statement as part of an inspection of the genealogy of
Black-Arab or Afro-Arab solidarity; specifically, as they assess the current Movement for
Black Lives’ invocation of the 1970’s appeal underscoring a historic relationship between
the Black freedom struggle and Palestinian liberation. On August 18, 2015, a statement of
solidarity with Palestinians written by Black American Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) activists Kristian Davis Bailey and Khury Petersen-Smith, signed by
1,000 plus Black activists, artists and scholars (including Angela Davis, Mumia Abu
Jamal, Boots Riley, Cornel West, dream Hampton, Patrisse Cullors, Emory Douglas, and
Talib Kweli) was published on Ebony magazine’s website. National publications
including Salon, Colorlines, Al Jazeera America and Democracy Now quickly picked up
the story as headline news. The stories featured images from Dream Defender’s January
2015 delegation to Palestine—Bailey even cited this delegation as part of the inspiration
for the statement.
417

The chief architects of the letter, Bailey and Petersen-Smith, drew attention to

416
Committee of Black Americans for Truth about the Middle East letter by Paul Boutelle, reel 4,
Robert F. Williams papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
417
Kristian Davis Bailey, interview with author, phone, November 29, 2015.
289

intersecting systems of oppression that connected Black American and Palestinian
struggles. Bailey and Petersen-Smith timed the release of the statement to coincide with
the one-year anniversary of the Gaza invasion and the police murder of Michael Brown;
events that galvanized transnational connections between Black Americans and
Palestinians. The circumstances precipitating these two watershed moments could not
have been more divergent, but yet, transnational connections between Black Americans
and Palestinians emerged. From the militarization of law enforcement, police brutality,
imprisonment of political activists, mass incarceration, criminalization of subjugated
populations and anti-Blackness; the eerily familiar soundtrack of domination reverberated
across the Atlantic.
What is not so explicitly articulated in the solidarity statement is, of the prominent
Black Americans listed and involved in spread-heading the statement, many, like the
COBATAME signatories and Malcolm X, traveled either to 48/67 or “Palestine
geographies” on delegations and returned with an ardent commitment to call for an end to
the occupation of Palestine. From as early as Malcolm X’s visit to Gaza in 1964 to
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) trips to Lebanon to meet with Palestinian Liberation
Organization leadership in the 1970s to recent delegations featuring scholars, artists,
organizers, politicians and former Black Radical Congress members, Black American
radicals and liberals have traveled on delegations to Palestine geographies to bear witness
to the Palestinian struggle for liberation. This included Angela Davis, Kwame Ture,
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) president Joseph E. Lowery, former
Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy, Civil Rights Movement and labor organizer Jack
290

O’Dell, Reverend Jesse Jackson, labor activist Bill Fletcher Jr., writer Alice Walker,
historian Barbara Ransby, filmmaker dream hampton, rapper Jasiri X, poet and activist
Bryonn Bain. Delegates and delegations have catalyzed a shifting paradigm on justice for
Palestinians. DDPalestine, inspired by a legacy of “Black radical
transnationalism,” remixed an anthem of decades of Black-Palestinian solidarity
generated from cross-cultural exchange through travel.
418

In recording the history of Black-Palestine solidarity, I conceive of two periods at
work here. Firstly, that of a post-1967 Arab-Israeli war period till the end of the first
Intifada in 1993 (which began in 1987) and the second period accounting for a post-Oslo
Agreement (1993) and post-Second Intifada (2001-2005) moment. During this first
period, we see a consistent theme of analogically linking the Black American freedom
struggle to South African liberation from apartheid and Palestinian/Arab resistance to
Zionism. At its fever-pitch in the 1960s and 70s, inspired by a post-Bandung Conference
and post-67 war moment anchored in the non-aligned movement, anti-apartheid and anti-
Zionism organizing became a prominent feature of the Black Freedom movement, from
the Black radical tradition to liberal democracy advocates. This second period, primarily
analyzes opposition to Zionism as one that sides with a Palestinian liberation against
“settler colonialism.” It supplants the framework of an Arab struggle against Zionism
with that of Palestinian (and at times “Gazan”) fight against Occupation. It is preoccupied
with appraising Palestinian liberation through one or two state solutions. Most intriguing
are the analytics that tie Black solidarity with Palestine.

418
Politically distinct from Black internationalism or Black radical internationalism.
291

As covered in Chapter 2, prior the first period, we see Malcolm X, after meeting
with a poet and leaders in Gaza, condemned Zionist oppression of Palestinians and
exposed the effects Zionist neocolonial “dollarism” on “independent African nations” in
an op-ed he penned for the Egyptian Gazette in the Fall of 1964. However, as mentioned
earlier, Malcolm and journalist George Schuyler, were lone critiques of Zionism. It was
not until 1967, after the “June-July 1967 war,” when an organized oppositional response
from Black radical organizations to Zionism and Israeli Occupation emerges. There is an
interesting connective tissue linking Malcolm’s anti-Zionist politics with SNCC’s bold
1967 political intervention. Ethel Minor, a former NOI member who followed Malcolm
to build the OAAU as the organization’s secretary after the “shattering” with the NOI,
joined SNCC following Malcolm’s assassination.
419
Former SNCC member and
chairman, Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael) remembers the influence of Minor’s
anti-Zionist consciousness on this political intervention.
420
A couple of months after the
controversial SNCC statement, Carmichael embarked on a trip to the mashriq and Africa
that included a visit to Algeria, a meeting with Algerian socialist party Front de
Libération Nationale (FLN). In Cairo, he was hosted by Afro-Asian solidarity group, was
interviewed by the Egyptian Gazette, and met with Shirley and David Graham DuBois.

419
Garrett Felber, “Women’s Leadership in the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” African
American Intellectual History, October 27, 2016,
http://www.aaihs.org/womens-leadership-in-the-organization-of-afro-american-unity/ .
420
After Malcolm’s assassination, Minor organized a politically radical reading group for
SNCC members (Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine, 74). Ture mentions Minor’s influence on
SNCC’s anti-Zionism politics by vague reference and not by name in his 1989 lecture on Zionism
at the University of Chicago. “This female member of SNCC happened to have come in contact
working in South America with Palestinian forces…every month, we read one book on Zionism.”
He also attended “anti-Zionism symposiums” in Baghdad and Tripoli (Ture, “Dr Kwame Ture
Zionism Debate Lecture,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQrDBZfDjZA ).
292

He then traveled to Damascus, where he was also hosted by the Syrian Committee for
Afro-Asian solidarity and met with Prime Minister Yusuf Zuayyin.
421
In his talk “The
Black American and Palestinian Revolutions” delivered to the Organization of Arab
Students Convention in Ann, Arbor, Michigan in the summer of 1968, Carmichael
concluded by sharing his two dreams, “I dream, number one, of having coffee with my
wife (Mariam Makeba at the time); and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine.”
422

Eleven years later, at the Black Theology Project’s Third National Convention on
August 4, 1979, resolutions concerning Palestinian rights and Middle East Peace were
adopted. The Black Theology Project issued an explanatory statement establishing a link
between apartheid and Zionism as “twin regimes of racism and imperialism,” declaring
the group’s opposition to United States financial aid to South Africa and Israel and
condemnation of the Israeli-South African military and economic cooperation and
alliance. The statement opens, “As Black Christians committed to the fight for liberation
of the oppressed whether they be in South Africa, Israel, the occupied Arab territories,
Palestinian people as the same as the struggle for freedom of our Black Brothers and
Sisters in Southern Africa.”
423
These condemnations of Zionism and critical analytic
frames drawing links between Israeli Occupation and South African apartheid became the
generative artifacts of engaged witnessing that emerged from two SCLC sponsored

421
The interview with the Egyptian Gazette (likely conducted by eminent Cairine interlocutor
David Graham Du Bois), focuses on Carmichael’s and SNCC’s pro-Palestinian proclamations
(“Carmichael: Negros’ Side of Arabs”). Egypt’s Gaza Strip and Syria’s Golan Heights were
captured by Israel in the June-July 1967 war. See Peniel E. Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York:
BasicCivitas, 2014), 213-218.
422
Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism, (Chicago:
Chicago Review Press, 2007 (1971)), 143.
423
“The Black Theology Project,” in Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace, ed. James
Zogby and Jack O’Dell (Washington D.C.: Palestine Human Rights Campaign, 1980), 25.
293

delegations to Palestine geographies in 1979 (that included members of the CBC).
Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace, published in 1980 by the
Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC) as another one of the generative artifacts of
the SCLC delegations, “records the emergence of Afro-American leadership at the
forefront of the struggle to defend Palestinian rights and reshape U.S. Middle East
foreign policy.”
424
Delegates contributed engaged witness accounts of their trip.
Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy’s “Report to the Congress” on October 11, 1979 (in the
collection) even included props—American-made shrapnel from a refugee camp in
Southern Lebanon, recounting in his address to congress, “To our outrage, we saw
unmistakable evidence of the use of American weapons on non-military targets. I have
returned with shrapnel, parts of exploded shells and cluster bombs, which I lifted from
the ruins of bombed-out Palestinian and Lebanese villages in Lebanon.”
425

Other members of the two delegations that SCLC and PHRC organized included
Reverend Joseph Lowery (who’s engaged witness account “All Children of Abraham” is
featured in the collection), Reverend Jesse Jackson (who recruited Zogby after working
with him through PHRC to be his Deputy Campaign manager for his Presidential
campaigns in the 80s), Jack O’Dell, and more members from SCLC, CBC and from
Jackson’s People United to Save Humanity (PUSH).
426
Besides PHRC’s logistical work
organizing these trips, Arab American Institute founder and President James Zogby,
relayed to me the significance of Dr. Hatem Hussaini, head of the “Palestine Information
Office” in Washington D.C., forging of friendships with Black American politicians and

424
Ibid, ix.
425
Ibid, 8
426
Zogby considers Jackson and Jack O’Dell to be mentors.
294

civil rights leaders as laying part of the groundwork for these trips and nourishing Black-
Palestine solidarity. Zogby explained, “I would run into people, in the Black community,
and they would speak about ‘Brother Hatem’.”
427

One of the interesting interventions that this collection makes is challenging
conventional scripts around the “Andy Young Affair” and Black-Palestine solidarity.
Sometimes narrated as a part of a cause-and-effect history, scholars who write about this
period’s Black-Palestine solidarity read the forced resignation of the first Black American
to hold the position of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. for meeting with the PLO’s U.N.
observer Zehdi Labib Terzi during a ‘no-talk’ policy period in 1976 as the sole catalyst.
This collection insists that Afro-Arab solidarity and insurgent convergences around
Palestine preceded the “Andy Young Affair”: “Contrary to the simplistic explanations
given by the media, this development is not new nor is it merely a response to the forced
resignation of Andrew Young or developing ties between Arab and Afro-Americans.”
428

James Zogby, one of the co-editors of this collection and the director of the
PHRC, sketches this history from the decade that preceded the publication of that book
that included Malcolm X and SNCC’s public statements on Palestine in the 60s to
coordination between Black American and Arab American organizers on labor strikes in
the 1970s (the wildcat sit-down strike at Chrysler Jefferson plant in 1970 and U.A.W.
mass demonstrations against the purchase of Israeli bonds in 1973)—while also

427
James Zogby, interview with author, January 1, 2016. “Brother Hatem” is also acknowledged
in Palestinian poetry collection published by Black press Drum and Spear Press, Enemy of the
Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance for translating five of the poems in the collection edited by
Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb.
428
Zogby, Middle East Peace, ix.
295

acknowledging the work done to “develop these relationships continues.”
429
Zogby
makes the case that Black political and religious leadership moved on the Palestine
Question for moral and political reasons that transcended the Andy Young Affair.
Instead, he credits the forging of Afro-Arab American organizing ties for cultivating
critical analysis around Israel’s relationship to South African apartheid:
As African and Arab relations grew in response to the ties between Israel and
South Africa, a reflection of this link grew in the U.S. In 1972 and again in 1976
the National Black Political Assembly, a political gathering of thousands of Black
community activists and leaders, issued powerful statements in support of
Palestinian rights and condemnation of Israel’s activity in Africa.
430

All these statements preceded the Andy Young Affair, which Zogby maintained to this
day as a “proximate cause,” putting more stake in a history of transnational takāful with
Third world, national liberation, anti-imperialism movements:
Which you see a lot of in Jack O’Dell’s stuff. Because I mean it comes from his
Leftist background but that Leftist worldview, that sense of these nationalist
liberation movements, these movements against imperialism are not separate from
our struggle against the dominant culture of America that has been defining us as
second-class citizens. So that all comes together around that event (the Andy
Young affair).
431

What is most striking is CBC’s endorsement of this delegation, that organized for
Black politicians and former Civil Rights Movement leaders from SCLC to travel to
Palestine geographies, without insisting on “balancing” the trip with visits to 48 and
meetings with Israeli officials. Just four years prior, SCLC’s former board member
Bayard Rustin along with A. Philip Randolph, architects of the 1963 March on

429
Ibid, ix.
430
Ibid.
431
James Zogby, interview with author, January 1, 2016.
296

Washington, vociferously supported Zionism, even co-founding Black American to
Support Israel Committee (BASIC).
432
In 1975, BASIC placed an ad in the NY Times
with seven points countering the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379 which
“determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" and passed on
November 10, 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35. The statement sees support for Israel as a zero-
sum game that necessitates demonizing Arabs as anti-democratic, exploitative capitalists
and some-time terrorists. One of the more ludicrous points involves conflating Persian
Gulf Arab states oil boycott with Palestinians and other Arab nations, claiming that the
1973 OPEC boycott was: “The chief cause of Black Africa’s disastrous economic
situation is the price that the Arabs are exacting for oil.” I would consider this an attempt
to appeal to pan-Africanism and African diasporic belonging an effort to “Black-wash”
Zionism.
433
Ironically, Andrew Young, a congressman from Georgia at the time, was one
of the signatories on the 1975 BASIC ad in the NY Times. While SCLC did cultivate the
organizing work of Andrew Young, it also cultivated Dorothy Cotton, who’s institute,
decades later, sponsored a delegation to 67 in 2012 that included Martin Luther King Jr.’s
speechwriter Vincent Harding, historian Clayborne Carson, and St. Louis Reverend
Osagyefo Sekou.
Accounting for further historical divergence, these organizations at different
periods supported Zionism or embraced the Zionist victimhood narrative. Labor
organizing giant Jack O’Dell, Zogby’s co-editor for this collection, contextualizes these

432
BASIC ad, New York Times Sunday, November 23, 1975 http://www.ibsi-
now.org/assets/basic-reproduction-copy.pdf
433
More interesting is that they accuse the “Arab oil-producing states” of the kind of neoliberal
and neocolonial intervention into Africa done on a much grander scale by the U.S. and Israel.

297

trips and Black linkages with Palestine as consistent with a Black American working
class tradition of internationalism rooted in a historical experience with chattel slavery:
“We—who as a population in this hemisphere of the Americas have our ‘roots’ in the
foreign policy of war which the Western world declared against the African continent
through the institution of chattel slavery—are now, in the contemporary world, a moral
and political force for peace and civilized relations between the people of the U.S. and
the international community.”
434
In his own collection of essays, co-edited by Nikhil
Singh, O’Dell poignantly explains how his and Jesse Jackson’s politics on Palestine
transformed after their engaged witness delegations to Palestine geographies:
Those of us who were present at the birth of Israel, and who went to rallies
supporting it, knew nothing of the Palestinians. WE thought that, given the great
human rights traditions of the Jewish people, an answer to the Holocaust that took
the form of a state in the Middle East would certainly play a positive role in the
region. When we found that, wait a minute, there’s folks here called Palestinians,
who are people of color and Arab, some of us felt that we needed to be better
acquainted with that….So we went, and not only visited Lebanon, but Egypt,
Syria, Israel, and Jordan. I remember being in that refugee camp outside Beirut
and seeing the open sewage---it was Jesse and I---and Jesse turned to me and said,
“Jack, you know, I know this place. I’ve been here. This is South Carolina, where
I grew up.”
435

The Afro-Americans Stand Up for Middle East Peace collection also includes Jesse
Jackson’s keynote speech at the PHRC’s first convention “The Challenge to Live in One
World,” delivered on the eve of his first trip to Palestine geographies. Jackson traveled to
Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and 67 with PUSH (the trip O’Dell narrated) and another time in
the 1980s, meeting with and taking a photo with a young Ahmad Abuznaid (whose father

434
O’Dell, Middle East Peace, 6.
435
Jack O’Dell, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack
O’Dell. (Berkeley, 2010), 44-45.
298

worked for “Brother Hatem” at the Palestine Information Office years prior).
436
Abuznaid
posted this photo on Instagram, a reminder of this Black-Palestine solidarity work of the
1970s and 1980s, after he re-connected with Jackson during the Dream Defenders
Florida’s State Old Capitol building sit-in during the summer of 2013 to protest the
state’s “Stand Your Ground” provision.
437

Figure 21: Ahmad’s picture with Jesse Jackson at the Dream Defenders Sit-In Against ‘Stand Your Ground’ at
Florida’s capitol building. Ahmad Abuznaid, Instagram post, summer of 2013.

436
Zogby, Middle East Peace, x.
437
Lizette Alvarez, “Florida Sit-In Against ‘Stand Your Ground’,” New York Times, August 11,
2013. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, in discussion with author, credits this direct political action ushering
in the Movement for Black Lives, Brooklyn NY, May 2017.
299

Recently, in a post-Oslo and post-Intifada moment that catalyzed a two-state and
one-state discursive debate around Palestinian liberation; Afro-Arab solidarity on
Palestine moved to the political subterranean—away from this liberal democratic
framework back to a Black radical grassroots and university campus organizing arena. As
some older conceptual frames re-surface like the “South African apartheid” analogy to
endorse a BDS movement on college campuses, it is tied to prison abolition work; Black-
Palestine solidarity is being challenged by Afro-Pessimism scholars and activists
organizing against anti-Blackness. Anti-blackness as a framework of studying global
contours of Black negation, or “social death” of Black people, emerges as a popular
discourse within Black freedom movement, social media and organizing spaces. It
challenges the language and necessity around “Black-Palestinian solidarity.” It is from
this history, and not just the interlocking of the invasion of Gaza and Ferguson uprising
of 2014, that the DDPalestine delegation of 2015 emerges.
Brief overview of the trip
On January 3, 2015, a delegation of 12 Movement for Black Lives organizers
(including a Latina working on issues at the forefront of Black liberation), landed in Ben
Gurion airport, circumnavigating security posts and impromptu interrogations. The
delegates included Black Lives Matter co-founder and Los Angeles native Patrisse
Cullors-Khan, Dream Defenders founding members Umi Selah, Ciara Taylor and Ahmad
Abuznaid, Dream Defender members Sherika Shaw and Steven Pargett, poet and
Brooklyn bred Aja Monet Bacquie, community organizer Cherrell Brown, scholar and
journalsist Marc Lamont Hill, Women’s March co-director Carmen Perez, Hands Up
300

United members and Ferguson organizers Tara Thompson and rapper Tef Poe,
videographer Thorstein (“Thor”) Thielow and I. Our coordinators/tour guides included 48
residents Najwan Berekdar (a BDS activist) and Diana Buttu (a prominent lawyer and
activist), and Bethlehem-based Vivien Sansour (founder of the Palestinian Seed Library).
Ahmad and I arrived a couple hours earlier, after traversing a circuitous series of
checkpoints and interrogations (I was held by Israeli security at the border up until
minutes before the closing of the crossing—that story is told in brief later), making our
way through Jericho and eventually to Jerusalem. Our 10-day journey included visits to
Jerusalem/al-Quds, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Dheisheh refugee camp, Haifa, Nazareth/as-
Nasira, Akkah, Ayn Hawd, Hebron/Khalil, and back to Bethlehem. We met with BDS
activists, visual artists, mural artists, theater artists, actors, poets, liberal Zionists, youth,
refugees, rappers, LGBTQ activists, civil rights and human rights groups, members of the
Afro-Palestinian community, filmmakers, keffiyeh textile workers, former ministers,
lawyers, intellectuals, and everyday survivors. Dream Defender leadership diligently
documented every visit and exchange on all their social media accounts, including with
educational explanations, quotes, and references. The daily breakdown is a fusion of my
ethnographic direct PAR field notes and notes from the footage taken by Thor of our trip.
Day ½ : January 2
I arrived into Amman’s Queen Alia airport (luggage-less) at 3:30pm from Male,
Maldives via Dubai. At the airport, I met up with Ahmad and his family. They graciously
offered to let me stay in their apartment in Amman the night before Ahmad and I
attempted to cross the Jordanian border into 67 from the Allenby bridge. Ahmad’s father,
301

who I would later interview on the history of Black delegations to Palestine, was in the
region because he had taken a delegation of European students to Palestine. Ahmad’s
father Nabil Ahmad served as Palestine Authority Ambassador to the Netherlands and
had worked as “Brother Hatem” Hussaini’s deputy at the PLO’s office in DC. As Zogby
mentioned to me, the PLO office in the late 1970s and early 80s were constantly
organizing delegations of Americans to the region. Not until I explicitly asked Ahmad
recently, did it occur to me to inquire if his father’s history of organizing delegations
influenced his interest in the work (and why he imposed a pronounced emphasis on
certain elements of the organizing process, like delegate curation). Ahmad revealed to me
that his interest in delegations started when his father took a couple of Florida State
University students to Palestine while he was a student there. “They would always talk to
me about the immense impact and how they identified with the struggle,” he recalled.
However indelible the impact, he did observe that, “only a couple of the people stayed
involved in any kind of way.” This is precisely why he emphasized the curation of
delegates, he “wanted to be more intentional about who would go.” Essentially describing
an engaged witness delegate, he explained that organizers, activists and cultural workers
selected were based “around their passion and action towards justice here in the US.”
Adding, “I didn't have a criteria of like—they need to be socialist Marxist Leninist or
[that] they be the typical AIPAC future democratic superstars type.”
438

As with most ummos and tantes, I immediately found myself in heated debates,
deep history lesson sessions, and authentic-self-revealing moments with Nabil and

438
Ahmad Abuznaid, text message exchange with author, January 3, 2017.
302

Nabil’s friend. At some point in the middle of one of those casual history lessons, Nabil
shared his memories of organizing with Stokely Carmichael when he was in D.C.
completing undergraduate and graduate study (James Madison University and Howard
University). Ahmad was stunned. He had never heard this story from his father.
Stokely/Kwame was to him like Malcolm was to me. “Search the African Liberation Day
Parade in DC, I think it happened every May,” the elder Abuznaid insisted to me after
learning about my research interests.
439
We bonded over stories from the trenches of
doctoral work; him giving me the baba advice of “you’re still doing it? just write it.” Me,
a seasoned intersectionalista, defensively retorting, “Do you know how difficult it is to be
a woman of color in the academia?”
440

My involvement with organizing DDPalestine began with an informal skype-
interview with Ahmad for one of the earliest iterations of my dissertation. I originally met
him and Umi at a gathering for “under 35-year-old” social innovators. Being, as per
usual, the only two Arabs in the room with over 100 participants, we naturally gravitated
towards each other. We had met previously, though, on Twitter. Dream Defenders’ public
visibility rose through social media platforms and campaigns in response to Trayvon
Martin’s murder and also as a result of celebrations around the 50
th
anniversary of the

439
A celebration that started in May 27, 1972 and was conceived by members from a 1971 Black
activist delegation to Mozambique. This celebration also called for a boycott of Portuguese
products and Gulf oil that operated in Angola.
440
After I asked “Why are there so many Palestinians from his generation with PhDs?” Nabil
Abuznaid explained that education was perceived as their way out of occupation. I also wondered
why the tactic of plane hijackings and violent interventions had become popular during his time.
“Golda Meir said we didn’t exist.” This was their forceful way of proving that they did exist. Full
quote: "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed” (Israeli Prime Minister
Golda Meir quoted in Sunday Times, June 15, 1969).

303

March on Washington. I was intrigued that this group that formed in response to anti-
Black vigilante violence explicitly included “free Palestine” into their overall messaging.
What was the reason for this? Who was behind this? Ahmad. It turned out Ahmad
Abuznaid, the then legal and policy director, one of the co-founders of Dream Defenders,
carried the dream of a free Palestine in all his political organizing spaces. Even in this
social innovator space dominated by Zionist-sympathizers, Ahmad was unapologetic in
his introduction: “I was born in Jerusalem and because of that fact, I am legally not
allowed to enter Jerusalem.” My intrigue metastasized.
The Institute we worked with to plan the itinerary and manage the-on-the-ground-
logistics held a conference call prior to travel to explain what to expect at the airport and
border. The most repeated advice, “Whatever you do, don’t lie. What they are trying to
do is catch you in a lie.”
Day 1: January 3
Amman, Allenby, Jericho, and Jerusalem
“You couldn’t even get into Bahrain. You think the Israelis will let you in?”
I have a vexed relationship with borders, checkpoints, TSA, gate-keepers of
security apparatuses…really any top-down authority or hierarchical structure. My father’s
words looped incessantly as I was in the interlude between the fourth—or maybe it was
the fifth or sixth—visit from my blond-haired, blue-eyed interrogator. Baba was right.
I’m not getting in. My mind raced, leap frogging from one event to another playing out
potential problem-solving scenarios—what I usually do when plans rapidly disintegrate
or crisis befalls. I received a text message from Ahmad alerting me to the impending
304

closing of Allenby bridge—in ten minutes per his sources. Volleying between Ahmad
and Diana, I tried to figure out what to do next. At this point, I was 90% sure I wasn’t,
like my father anticipated, getting in.
Young, edging on hip-ish; this interrogator could have been plucked from a
Brooklyn neighborhood or a student majoring in some kind of Business degree from one
of the General Education courses I taught—but with authoritative control over my
movement in that moment. I was “casually interrogated” for what might have been five
or six hours. Not an outrageous story at the Allenby bridge in the least—but this was the
Sabbath, so the border crossing facility closed early, thereby limiting the potentiality of
an even longer, protracted interrogation.
My first encounter with “extra” Israeli security involved a bubbly Reese-
Witherspoon-“Legally Blond”-type with a high ponytail and outfitted in denim. She
looked at my American passport—which had been my privileged armor walking around
almost anywhere in the world—looked up and asked what I did for a living. Journalist
and doctoral student seemed like the least desirable answers in that moment. “Yoga
teacher”—a less suspect answer that was corroborated by the yoga mat strapped to my
back (which also seems to pacify security personnel). “Will you be teaching any classes
in Israel?” “I hadn’t planned on it,” I said, restraining every impulse I had to challenge
geographies of occupation. I had to consistently remind myself to refrain from being
myself. It was a familiar feeling and pep-talk—one that was part of every visit to Ba'ath
controlled Syria. Getting through was more important in this moment than honoring self-
righteous politics.
305

Ahmad had successfully cleared the multi-station and multi-layered security
process. Just days prior, his father secured a “work permit” for him, enabling him to
travel between 48/67—which wouldn’t have been a possibility without the work permit.
I thought this benign exchange revolving around my loveable yoga mat and practice was
enough to usher me through so I could join Ahmad on the other side of luggage pick up.
However, I was instead instructed to take a seat on row of chairs hugging the wall of the
post-passport control waiting area. It turns out that the yoga mat didn’t have its usual
magical neutralizing effect on Israeli security.
My previously mentioned blond-haired, flannel-sporting interrogator approached
me with his even younger apprentice—taking notes on casual mind game questioning.
Because of all the prep calls I engaged in prior to the trip with Palestinian American and
Arab American friends, I was well aware of what they were looking to extract from me.
My goal was to prove to them: 1) That I was not a threat to security in 48 so I could get
into 48 and thus this meant, 2) I had to demonstrate that I had no connections to 67 and
would not be visiting. In sum, I had to prove the non-political nature of my visit.
Likely due to my last name, my beit connection, the interrogator insisted I show
him my hawiyah (Palestinian identity card). After it was established that I was not in fact
a Palestinian American concealing her connection to 67, he dropped it and upgraded from
checkers questioning to chess.
“They haven’t called me yet. So you’re fine,” said one of the coordinators, Diana,
who had given me her number to provide to security should they inquire about my 48
activities. She was right. But I couldn’t see that kind of clarity in the fog of mind games I
306

was currently enmeshed in. I still had my phone to communicate with her and Ahmad
over the free, open wifi at the crossing. Strangely they hadn’t confiscated it or demanded
to look at it. Prior to the trip, I converted my social media accounts from public to private
or deactivated them, deleted any public post with the words “Israel,” “Zionism” or
“Palestine,” and created a new email address brimming with newsletters and shopping
sale notifications. I was prepared for this possibility. I was trying to heed Diana’s advice,
trying to avoid any answers that could implicate me, but also being mindful of my two
goals. Besides, I was a horrifically bad liar.
“Why do you have a new passport?” I hoped he wouldn’t notice. I carried that
passport from South Arabia to South Asia with the intent of populating the barren pages
with stamps—even exiting the Dubai airport on a short layover to do so. But it was hard
to ignore the dates. It was a two-year passport. This type of passport can be requested as a
“second passport” from the U.S. government if the citizen can demonstrate to the Federal
Passport agency that certain countries you have stamps from and plan to travel to could
jeopardize your entrance. “Because I have Lebanese stamps in my other one.” Yup, that’s
why I requested the passport. I knew I didn’t want this to be revealed. “Oh? So, you’re
Lebanese?” “No I’m Syrian.” Another piece of information I didn’t want disclosed to the
Israeli state. “Where is your family living?” “In the U.S.” “But your uncles, aunts, and
cousins?” “Syria and Lebanon.” It was like I was feeding them the perfect lines to plumb
my story further. “Ok, write down all the names of all your family members living in
Lebanon and Syria along with their phone numbers. And your parents number in the
U.S.” I obliged and texted my parents warning them at 3am Los Angeles time, “If you get
307

a call from Israeli security it’s because they are interrogating me. Don’t worry, I’m fine,
for now.”
“Do you work in journalism?” That’s it. They googled me and found me out.
“Yes.” They pressed me to explain my media affiliation. “I sometimes work as a host on
a social media themed current events show.” “What topics does your program cover?”
“Oh you know, we’ve done shows on children of Filipino and U.S. military parents,
Saudi hip hop artists, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and the rise in suicide rates in South
Korea.”
“Oh, so cultural, not political?” “Sure if they are divorced for you like that,” I
thought, but beamed instead, “Yes!”—excited to be given an out from a conversation that
could have turned into him discovering that we did an episode on Palestinian refugees in
Levantine countries and the right of return. I continued to be preoccupied with this
distinction he made, “cultural not political?” Was he too young to understand the political
power of culture and how prominently it featured in settler colonialism and especially of
the Zionist variety? I mean, how many more arguments do I have to get into around
“Israeli couscous” or “Israeli hummus”? I mentally re-visited passages from Edward
Said’s Culture and Imperialism I employed for a graduate paper I wrote for Bryonn
Bain’s Lyrics on Lockdown class at Institute for Research in African American Studies
(IRAAS) exploring Palestinian narratives as resistance to “historical imperialism” (and
later I would learn about Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s historicity intervention): “Planting
Olive Trees, Zaatar Seeds, and Hip Hop Beats: The Reclamation of History, National
Consciousness, and Humanity Through Narratives As Cultural Art Forms” (who else
308

assuages her anxiety by revisiting passages of Said, Robinson and Du Bois committed to
memory?).
There really is no way to explain the logic behind Israeli security interrogation
questioning. My friend Remi Kenazi, a Palestinian-American poet, prepped me with a
useful framework: the logic is illogical—which keeps you guessing and empowers them.
My mind time-traveled back to an Intro to International Relations Theory class I had as
an undergrad at UCLA. This is like the IR “game of chicken” wherein the person
perceived as “irrational” or illogical has the directorial upper hand in the situation. I felt
completely powerless. My children of the corn interrogator would occasionally pass by
me, so close he was almost brushing up against me. Still seated, perched at the edge of
my casual interrogation chair, looking up to catch his attention with eye
contact…nothing. This seemed to be a part of the training. My father was right, I told
myself again with begrudging acceptance of my fate this time.
Ahmad’s alarming text message came in. When I looked up from my phone, the
Muslim travel group, twenty-plus people deep, was permitted entry. Every seat in the
waiting area was empty. Security personnel had clocked out. Only me and the lone
Jordanian janitorial staff member remain. Piercing the silence, a disembodied voice
inquired: “Is there a meaaaythaiiii?” Too jolted to compute, and too unfamiliar with this
novel mispronunciation of my name (I thought I heard them all!), I sat frozen. My Arab
compatriot—the only person on staff at the crossing who looked me in the eye—caught
my attention and told me in Arabic that the disembodied voice was calling me hither.
When the body with the disembodied voice emerged, she double checked my passport:
309

“Did he call you by another name? Is this really you? Is there a meeeaythaaaiii?” she
repeated, surveying the empty waiting area. I was the only person there. What was the
point of this protracted aggravation? There seemed no end to the fanciful suspicions. “It’s
me. There is no one else here,” I think pointing out an indisputable fact would do
something. She returns my passport with an entry to the “State of Israel” issued by border
control that designated me a “B2 Stay Permit until 03/04/15.”
Clenching my passport, I rushed to my luggage, frantically texting Ahmad and
Diana to relay my release. I disembarked, saw no bus and hadn’t heard back from
Ahmad. As my mind started its leap frog crisis management thinking, Ahmad appeared
out of breath, motioning for my luggage. He explained that he had held the bus for some
time to wait for me. I felt embarrassed ascending the bus, knowing I added more
unnecessary drama to the already entangled life of being Palestinian in 67. Instead,
people offered to assist me with multiple pieces of luggage. Empathy filled the air: we all
knew what it felt like to have your mind stretched and punctured by Israeli security mind
games and we all knew what it felt like to be humiliated for our proximity to Arabness. I
broke down in tears, the unbearable weight of paranoia slowly vaporizing.
Stepping off the bus and onto Jericho, 850 feet above sea level, felt like a subdued
state of stillness; eerily something akin to peace. I tagged along with Ahmad as he visited
old family friends and some relatives. I broke from my years of vege-sometimes-pesca-
tarianism to indulge in chicken rotisserie, French fries and toum (garlic spread). There
was something in the air in Jericho that makes you fall in love with life. And too soon it
was time to leave this occupied land of prophets, only traversable through securitized
310

border crossings and checkpoints, this place that symbolized an unexpected bliss that
could only arise with the cessation of mental torture.
Ahmad’s cousin met us in his car to drive us to the Ein Gedi checkpoint,
explaining during the car ride that he had long dreamed of traveling into Jerusalem. He
stopped some yards short of the checkpoint (one of ninety-six in the West Bank as of
April 2015). As we stepped out of the facility, mounted on an expansive hill, I froze.
Jerusalem was a marvel to behold. Transfixing, a bewitching jalal that robbed me of
words and mobility. “May” Ahmad’s signal for me to move and get into the taxi pressed
me to return to a hegemonic conception of the time-space continuum. “That view,” I
thought to myself—and Ahmad’s cousin would not get to see it, unless he collaborated
with the Israeli state. An offer he had refused multiple times.
Ahmad and I were the first to arrive at the hotel. We waited for the rest of the
delegates who were scheduled to land soon. In the greatest irony of all. Ahmad and I—
the only two Arab Muslims on the delegation, the delegation organizers, had to endure
the circuitous journey of various security screenings that accompanied border crossing as
an Arab to get into 48/67; while Muslim Leadership Institute (MLI) “fellows” deplaned
from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport smoothly and without any noted fanfare. We would
only learn of this after the fact. The rest of our delegation was routed through the airport
in staggered arrivals. Only Patrisse and Carmen, the West Coast travelers, remained, as
they were scheduled to arrive the following morning.
On the bus ride from the airport, delegates shared stories of unexpected security
harassment and/or interference. “This is some crazy shit,” Dream Defender leader Ciara
311

remarked. St. Louis Rapper and Hands Up United member Tef Poe explained that he was
stopped and questioned because his first name is “Kareem.” My friend Aja, a poet from
Brooklyn I met from over a decade ago at Abiodun’s (of the Last Poets) apartment in
Harlem when I lived in New York, sat in the middle of Dream Defenders and Hands Up
United family revisiting Ferguson urban rebellion memories and tales from transnational
social movement work (like trips to United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human
Rights’ Committee Against Torture in Geneva, Switzerland).
At the introductory dinner in our hotel’s dining facility, I explained my role as
delegation co-organizer and dissertation ethnographer. After some of the delegates
realized there wasn’t easy access to viewing “the game” (whatever game that was that I
was entirely clueless about), we collectively embarked on what would be our nightly
ritual in Jerusalem: a trip to a bar in “East Jeru” that included reveling in Arabic and
American music mash-ups, much imbibing of Castillo de Diablo, and deeply vulnerable
conversations about building in this social movement moment; that kind only a little too
much imbibing of wine allows.
Day 2: January 4
Old City, Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem
Jet lag and a late night translated into delegates trailing into the tour bus on AT
(Arab Time). Our tour guide for 48, Najwan, also saddled with the unenviable
responsibility of keeping time, welcomed us with irritated yalla’s (“come on, let’s go” in
Arabic). These bus rides would prove to our mobile sanctuary. Chasing the sleep lost
from protracted, jam-packed days and grappling with the exhaustion of being collective
312

witnesses to incessant occupation, we found a strange joy in play—from group sing-
alongs, top five lists, Obama impersonations, and to documentarians of the
#Blacksleepmatters movement. This sharing in public joy by Americans walking with the
privilege of passports and documentation later compelled Aja to wonder in her poetry
“The Giving Tree” did we too “come in violently?”
441

We met our Old City guide, Afro-Palestinian community member Yasser Qous, at
the foot of the stairs descending into Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. We encountered one of
the elders of the Afro-Palestinian community in what is known as the “Muslim Quarter”
(one of the main streets leading up to Al-Aqsa Mosque), Ali Jeddah. Jeddah, a former
member of the Popular Front for Palestinian Liberation (PFPL), served seventeen years in
prison. Seated in front of one of the shops in the Old City, facing human traffic that
meanders across storied stones, he offers a reflection during a brief but indelible meeting
with the delegation, “I think it’s very important for you to be here in Palestine as a
personal experience. Second, you give a good impression to Palestinians because
unfortunately, this coconut Obama,” shaking his head in disapproval Jeddah re-
emphasizes, “[has] a very bad impression among Palestinians. He’s more Catholic than
the Pope, more Zionist than Netanyahu. Unfortunately, so for that I call him a
coconut.”
442
That day, delegates would experience this burden of walking around as
representatives of American foreign policy. The abbreviated encounter closed with
Jeddah sending delegates with an, “Ahlan wa Sahlan, so you can go back and say you

441
Aja Monet, My Mother was a Freedom Fighter (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 80.
442
Trip footage courtesy of Suzanne Rostock (filmed by Thorstein Thielow).
313

saw the Denzel Washington of Jerusalem.”
443

For as brief as this encounter was, lasting no longer than a couple of minutes,
delegates stitched Jeddah’s words into the quilt of their testimony. Days later, in a poem
penned for our “flash mob” demonstration in downtown Nazareth, Aja powerfully
captured this moment by writing, “God is in the holy water lining the lower lids of Ali’s
eyes. A tear, a river against a check, waiting in Old Jerusalem, sitting on a leaning chair
in the market, the lonely storyteller.”
444

443
Rostock, Trip footage. Jeddah’s Jerusalem has received wide international reception: Stephen
Graham, “Jerusalem Conflict: The Ali Jiddah Story,” YouTube, December 17, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9nxKssGSxs ; Joharah Baker, “The African-Palestinians:
Muslim pilgrims who never went home,” Al-Araby (“The New Arab”), December 26, 2014;
Ronen Medzini, “My Jerusalem: Personal tales of capital,” Ynet News, December 5, 2010;
Isma’il Kushkush, “‘Afro-Palestinians’ forge a unique identity in Israel,” Associated Press,
January 12, 2017.
444
“Solidarity demonstration in Nazareth: Ferguson to Palestine,” filmed and edited by Thorstein
Thielow, Vimeo, January 13, 2015.
314

Figure 22: Charlene, Aja, Ahmad, Ciara and Tara actively listening to Jeddah's storytelling in the Old City. Courtesy
of Chris Hazou.

Shortly after, my unconquerable precocity got the best of me. I raced up to Yasser
to inquire about the origins of Afro-Palestinian community. Qous’s father, Mohammed
Mousa Qous, I would come to find out later, is considered to be one of the patriarchs of a
community that found itself trapped in multiple waves of changing geographies. Qous
explained that many Africans from Chad Sudan, Nigeria and Senegal came to Jerusalem
as Muslim pilgrims. A practice that started in 636 AD—after Jerusalem was wrestled
away from by the Byzantine Empire by Omar Ibn Khattab—Muslims on the hajj would
typically end visits to Mecca and Medina with a trip to the Islamic tradition’s third holiest
site, Jerusalem (which was the first qibla (direction for prayer) in Islamic practice).
Qous’s father was himself a Muslim pilgrim from Chad, who along with other pilgrims
arriving into Jerusalem before 1947, found themselves confined by new nation-state
borders. They also, in response, took up arms alongside Palestinians in several liberation
struggles and confrontations with the Israeli state (as the example of Jeddah and
Carmichael’s invoking of Bernawi are testament to). Jeddah, in a recent interview with
journalist Sudanese Isma’il Kushkush for the Associated Press, re-deployed the adage
“more Catholic than the Pope” to speak to this history: “The respect we get from
Palestinians is because of our role in the national struggle…More Catholic than the Pope?
We are more Palestinian than the Palestinians.”
445

445
Isma’il Kushkush, “'Afro-Palestinians' forge a unique identity in Israel,” Associated Press,
January 12, 2017.

315

After hours of touring temples and holy sites, a collective smudging session
aimed at initiating our delegation’s intention, and evading child vendors with over-priced
“chicklets,” we settled at a coffee shop for some mid-morning Turkish coffee and mint
tea. The option came up for the Muslim delegates to enter Temple Mount (or Haram esh-
Sharif in Arabic). I showed my passport to the Druze IDF guard while Marc was asked to
recite al-Fatiha (the first chapter of the Quran called “The Opening”) because of his
Anglicized name. Prior to Israeli occupation, the Temple Mount was open to Muslims
and non-Muslims. We prayed at Dome of the Rock but were stopped short of al-Aqsa
Mosque by a securitized fence of guards. Overlooking the expanse of Jerusalem from
Temple Mount, Diana remarked, “I always say, this is the best real estate in the world.”
While Diana, Marc and I toured the Temple Mount, delegates conversed with
Yasser. He narrated a recent exchange he had with youth in Jerusalem. “When is the time
when you feel that you were free?” they asked him. “I told them when I am in prison
because now I’m living in a big prison. This is a prison but it’s an illusion. For me as a
Jerusalemite, you can’t access Gaza.” Yasser continued,
We have to create a coalition to defend ourselves…The problem is not the
Palestinian and the Israeli because yanni (you know), occupation is different faces
and different places and we have to think all together how to face this. It’s a
global struggle. It isn’t a national struggle. If we have success in one, it means we
are getting success in other areas.”
Tara responded, “Rules for oppression are the same everywhere.
446
Diana, Marc and I
later re-joined the team with the latest arrivals—Patrisse and Carmen—at a lunch to close
out our tour of the Old City.

446
Rostock, trip footage.
316

At the beginning of our visit to Just Vision, a Jerusalem, New York and
Washington based organization composed of Palestinian and Israeli human rights
advocates, journalists, and filmmakers, we hear Israeli team members narrate their
personal journey into the political work of ending the occupation. The delegates later
expressed reservation about the liberal Zionism narrative they listened to before a
screening of a short the group produced. Directed by Julia Bacha, My Neighborhood
featured Sheikh Jarrah resident Mohammed El Kurdi. Mohammed, a teenage Palestinian
poet, participated in organized movements and protests against the expansion of
settlements in his Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The film explored the relationships
between Palestinian residents and Israeli liberals key to opposing settlement expansion
and the young Mohammed’s path to politicization.
Years later, standing in Sheikh Jarrah as rain unexpectedly poured from the sky,
the post-film reality took a dystopic turn. We exited our bus, walked through the yard,
past the front house and to the back fixture where sheets hung in place of doors. Sixteen-
year-old Mohammed emerged from what was now his home that housed three
generations of his family. In front of his home “Freedom” is graffiti-ed on the entrance to
what remains of his family residence. Late teen and early twenty-year-old settlers from a
Western nation seized and now occupy the much larger front house. Every day that
Mohammed and his family walk out of their house, they walk past their occupiers.
Tef was one of the first to break the air of immense despair, “It’s hard for me to
get off the bus, but you live in this,” attempting empathy for Mohammed and his family.
Mohammed responded, “I don’t think anyone is calm about what is happening in
317

Jerusalem. It’s actually outrageous what is happening.” Mohammed mentions the burning
of thirteen-year-old Palestinian East Jerusalemite Mohammed Abu Khdeir, which
occurred six months prior, as an example of the bubbling rage.
447

Figure 23: Patrisse listening to Mohammed El Kurdi begin to narrate his story in front of what remains of his family's
home. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.
The rain picks up, so we return to the bus, where Mohammed shares some of his poetry
with us. The first poem is about the Gazan baby that died during “Operation Protective
Edge” after being rescued from the “rubble” and his mother’s womb. He follows with an
Arabic poem “Oh God.” And ends with a tragic ode to Jerusalem (some excerpts from his
poem):

447
Rostock, trip footage.
318

“I breathe in this city and I pretend it doesn’t hurt me.
Each lie treated like a truth and each truth treated like a lie.”

“Jerusalem is a divine crime scene
crime committed with the lands of the old…a lynching of those who speak just.”

“If only Jerusalem spoke
if only the soil spoke
if only the wrinkles on my grandmother’s forehead spoke
If only the walls of the city spoke
They would say the truth.”

“Jerusalem is a woman giving birth to a new life that we might never ever see
Jerusalem is a rebirth of this very life we live.”

“Jerusalem is once again, home
where the windows are shattered but still there won’t be any air for us to breathe.”

“Jerusalem: Tear gas as heavy as perfume
a woman holding a stone
Throwing it in a sky they filled with F-16s.”
448

From his first admittance, “I breathe in this city and I pretend it doesn’t hurt me,” our
inflamed lacrimal glands resembled the cumulonimbus clouds we had escaped. Touched
by his work, Aja gives him a copy of her The Black Unicorn Sings poetry chapbook. We
leave Sheikh Jarrah and our visit with Mohammed distraught. Brooding occupation is
exhausting.
Our “East Jeru” cheers bar became a temporary escape from this exhaustion. We
tempered this exhaustion with renditions of Blackstreet’s “No Diggity,” chants of “viva
viva Palestina” and the confessional sharing of movement struggles occupation will tend
to trigger –just one day in. Aja confided, “When I look at you guys, it overwhelms me
with joy. The struggle is so lonely. I’ve never been so grateful in my life till right now.”

448
Rostock, trip footage.
319

Tara reflected about the bizarre relationship building that comes with organizing around
death and trauma, “I didn’t expect to be in Palestine with family you met a month ago or
on August 10
th
.” By August 10
th
, Tara was referring to the “Ferguson rebellion” Tara
continued reflecting on the impact of just a day’s worth of engaged witness:
449

…Surrounded by brilliance that is about it—brilliance that is going to get in the
streets than come back to Cheers in East Jerusalem…to walk into a space where I
can drop my shoulders a little bit…The connections I’ve made with these people
trumps all of that, meeting Yasser, meeting Denzel and seeing his face when he
saw our faces. That moves stuff inside of you, pushes the reset button as Tef said.
It re-energizes you…We have mad work to do but I got so much energy now.
450

When it was Ciara’s opportunity to share, she turned to Ahmad, “Being able to witness
the things you talk about—your hopes, your dreams. Even if we eliminate the PIC (Prison
Industrial Complex) and stop killing all the Mike Browns and Troy Davis’, I wouldn’t
truly be at ease until Palestine is free.”
451

Day 3: January 5
Jerusalem, Ramallah, Jerusalem
“The Road leads to Area “A” Under the Palestinian Authority. The Entrance for
Israeli Citizens is Forbidden. Dangerous To Your Lives And Against The Israeli Law,”
read the English translation on the stop-sign-red warning situated in front of the
checkpoint crossing into Ramallah. We traveled to Ramallah for the day to meet with
political prisoner advocacy organization Addameer, lunch with BDS co-founder Omar
Barghouti and BDS youth activists, visit the Mahmoud Darwish museum and close the

449
Tara calls it “Ferguson Rebellion” (mentioned in a what’s app #DDPalestine group chat and
re-confirmed on August 16, 2017).
450
Rostock, trip footage.
451
Ibid.
320

day with a trip to a famed Palestinian artist’s studio before traversing the Qalandia
checkpoint to return to Jerusalem for the night.

Figure 24: DDPalestine delegates Cherrell, Ciara, Carmen, Sherika, Aja, Charlene, Tara and I and Diana poise in
front of the graffiti on the "West Bank separation wall.” Courtesy of Chris Hazou.
At Addameer Prisoner Support & Human Rights Association, Marc, consistently
perplexed by egregious and explicit transgressions of international human rights law and
global justice paradigms, repeatedly pressed, “isn’t this against international law? Isn’t
this a violation of the Geneva Conventions?” As we exited the conference room, I noticed
a large collective letter addressed to “Palestinian Prisoners” signed by what appeared to
be a delegation of activists from Chicago—notes proclaiming that “Freedom is
imminent,” “Chicago admires your steadfastness,” “Palestina libre,” “None are free until
321

you are freed,” “Fasting in solidarity with You TODAY!” and signed “love, Chicago.”
At Darna Restaurant for lunch, as we sipped on shami libation specialty
lemonadah ma nana (lemonade with mint). Omar Barghouti opened his presentation by
admitting, “It’s always intimidating to speak to African Americans and Latino Americans
because I know how much injustice you have to suffer from in your own country. So the
question that comes to mind: why should we care? Is it a sense of progressive
internationalism? Is it mutual interests? Mutual struggle? I think it’s both. There’s a
principled part and there’s also this pragmatic part.”
452
Barghouti parlayed the global
social justice continuum the Palestinian liberation movements sees itself a part of, “In the
80s, it was the anti-apartheid movement that was the litmus test for human rights.
Working on South Africa empowered me to work on Palestine.” The demands of BDS
established in 2005, he explained, included firstly, ending occupation of 67, secondly,
ending the system of racial discrimination in Israel, lastly the right of return.

452
Rostock, trip footage.
322

Figure 25 Aja Monet and author, at Darna Restaurant, in Ramallah listening to Omar Barghouti speak. Courtesy of
Chris Hazou.
When Barghouti exited, a group of BDS youth activists and Palestine Youth
Movement (PYM) members (some of who have traveled to the US to connect with
Ferguson activists) replaced him. It was then that we engaged in an analytic-shifting
conversation concerning violence (as the Fanonians would put it). Cherrell asked the
youth activists how they handled the non-violence/violence binary imposed by systems of
domination and oppression. One activist responded that they do not subscribe to what
they considered this false and forced binary, “violence and non-violence—all of it we
consider a part of resistance.” They punctured the cultural hegemonic narratives around
violence and the enduring fetishization of nonviolent protest by refusing to divide
resistance on those terms. Although very much an analytic that lived in segments of the
Black Freedom Movement’s history—from SNCC’s position on responding to white
323

terror when they politically mobilized Black residents in the South, to the Black Panthers
naming themselves “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense”—it was refreshing to be
reminded that this insistence on a binary, and especially a pristine, non-violent resistance
was part of a settler colonial strategy.

Figure 26: At the Mahmoud Darwish museum in Ramallah. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

At the Mahmoud Darwish museum, we met with Ahmad’s father (who was in 67
for the day) and toured the museum’s collection. Most of us bought sweaters with Arabic
quotes from Darwish’s poetry. Aja and I jeopardized precious luggage space by splurging
on translations of his work. We ended our day in Ramallah continuing our engagement of
Palestinian art and cultural production with a visit to visual artist Khaled Horani’s studio.
324

I bonded with Horani over a recent trip he took to Syria as part of delegation of artists. In
Palestinian press, he wrote an article about this visit, focusing on his conversations with
barbers in Aleppo. We shared in despair, a despair that was submerged in silent comfort.
Since the start of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, many self-proclaimed anti-imperial
Leftists in general, and Palestinian solidarity activists in particular, sided with the Assad
regime’s repression of a popular resistance movement. Even Palestinian Syrians
expressed extreme disappointment in the international Palestinian liberation movement’s
position on Syria. But in Horani’s eyes, in his story-telling, in words unspoken between
us; I knew he understood the pain of this bad blood between Palestinians in 48/67 and
anti-regime Syrian activists—for he was a witness to the regime’s war on Syria’s poor,
displaced, imprisoned, enclosed and disenfranchised. He indulged me with a picture of
us, me wide-tooth smiling as I held his sculpture of Gazan Arab Idol winner Mohammad
Assaf. The Syrian in me was gleeful to have our struggle for freedom recognized by a
politically outspoken Palestinian artist; and the artist in me dreaming of returning to
Ramallah to be one of his apprentices.
We rushed our falafel dinner so we could ensure that Ahmad pass the checkpoint
back into Jerusalem before his work permit’s stated 10pm curfew. Owing to his particular
Palestinian background, Ahmad had to the descend from the bus and walk through the
checkpoint while we could remain on the bus to pass. In solidarity, we all joined
Ahmad’s walk through the Qalandia checkpoint; some of the delegation shouting “free
Bobby Shmurda! Free all political prisoners!” and others marveling at the acrobatics
required of a mother passing through securitized exits while coddling her infant. Back on
325

the bus, Tef reflected, “An entire city behind these walls. It’s unimaginable. People
locked in like cattle heralded in.”
453
Aja, in her poem during our solidarity demonstration,
testified to the resilience of motherhood under occupation, “God, God is a woman
holding a crying baby in her arms at a checkpoint in Ramallah.”
454

Figure 27: At the Qalandia checkpoint, entering 48 from 67. Courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Day 4: January 6
Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem
We departed East Jeru for Bethlehem at 9am. Before our tour of Dheisheh
Refugee Camp, we meet our other tour guide, Vivien, a life style writer, producer,
photographer and food justice activist, along with local contemporary artist and educator

453
Rostock, trip footage.
454
Thielow, “Solidarity demonstration.”
326

Ayed Arafah at multi-story community center in Bethlehem (who’s artwork covered the
walls of the center).
Almost immediately, tea still too hot to sip, we launched into a two-state/one-
state/no-state solution debate. Members from the Institute team—who also served as our
professional photographer for the trip—extolled the virtues of a one-state solution,
anticipating a twinned birth of equal rights and justice within a framework of
“democracy” (especially since this would mean a Palestinian demographic majority—
why those committed to preserving an ethno-nationalist religious Zionist state so strongly
oppose a one state solution). I forcefully countered this presumption, reminding the
Palestinian North Americans at the table that the U.S. never needed a demographic
Anglo-Saxon majority to maintain domination. The U.S. racial capitalist system was
more sophisticated about how white supremacy operated in a “democracy.” Being the
unwavering iconoclast I can tend to be, I also urged us to problematize what we know of
this phantom life of democracy and how it manifested itself socially, politically,
culturally and economically in our everyday lives. Historically, whiteness transmuted, I
argued. Zionism can just as easily absorb Palestinians within its matrix of domination. It
was less about constituting a new national or nation-state identity (which still survives on
the bloodletting of hegemonic monoculturalism) and more so about deracinating regimes
of settler colonialism like Zionism.
Some delegates challenged one-state thinking by referencing Civil Rights work on
integration. Umi reminded us of Martin Luther King Jr.’s sorrowful apology, “I feel I
may have integrated my people into a burning building” (however forgetting King’s
327

extended thought included a call for Black people to become the firemen of this house,
to, “Let us not stand by and let the house burn.”). "I feel like this is the first time [as a
Black America], I can issue a warning [to another] people,” Umi continuing, this time
with his own words. Ahmad sensing this comparative tug-of-war that fought to
understand the overlaps, that middle point of intersection where the Black American and
Palestinians of 48/67 met, interjected, “If I liken it to anything it would be Native
American and reservations...slow genocide.” "They are so many—,” Tara paused, trying
to locate a more precise word than “similarities,” settling upon, “parallels.” Umi also
transitioned from a comparative analysis to a relational one, observing, “So interesting to
seeing this at the ground level. We take a lot of their security stuff but we are still the
master and the teacher."
455

Somehow we transitioned into a conversation about imagination and dreaming
during neoliberal times. A Palestinian at the table brought to our attention Rawabi.
Rawabi is a privately financed planned city, the first in 67, and with a $1 billion price-
tag. The Palestinian at table who explained the insidious intent behind the Rawabi
project’s desire to “change the dream of a people” asked to have their quotes be
anonymously attributed. As they insisted, “I could die for speaking on this."
456
The

455
Selah referred to national conversations around the militarization of the police (equipment and
tactics) after Ferguson/St. Louis activists discovered that the St. Louis police chief traveled to
Israel and was trained by the IDF on the use of military tactics and chemical weapons on non-
violent citizen protesters.
456
Stories on Rawabi: “Press Release: Qatari Diar and Massar International Partner to Build the
New Palestinian Planned City of Rawabi,” May 21, 2008,
http://www.rawabi.ps/mobile/press_show.php?id=6 ; Harriet Sherwood, “Story of cities #49: the
long road to Rawabi, Palestine's first planned city,” The Guardian, May 24, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/24/story-cities-rawabi-planned-city-palestine ;
Nick Ames, “Plans revealed for $1bn city in Palestine,” Construction Week Online, September
328

discussion turned to the power of imagination to liberation struggles, a Palestinian citing
the assassination of artists like Ghassan Khafani to re-fashioning of dreams, "You
switched imaginations to Rawabi.” Vivien closed this still morning debate decathlon out
with a critique of the centrality of patriarchy to these layers of neoliberal and settler
colonial oppression: “There are two camps: One, no we'll deal with this issue later...And
second, what I believe, we cannot ask for liberation if we don't liberate ourselves. We
have different layers of oppression...and it is always represented by a male soldier."
At Dheisheh Refugee camp, we walked through hillsides populated with one-
room dwellings, playing with children along the way before arriving at Shoruq
Organization’s office. Founded in 2012, the Shoruq organization, committed to defending
the “inalienable rights of indigenous Palestinian refugees,” operates a community center
with arts and media-based programming for youth in the camp.
457
A Shoruq staff
member attests to the paradox of occupation, “It gives you something to fight for,
motivation. But occupation stops you. An old man said: It's a big sea for writing
struggle." One of the hip-hop coaches, Soud, aka don clique, explained to us why hip hop
appealed to a youth raised in a refugee camp, "First thing, it is making me much more
brave…As a young kid living in the refugee camp during the Second Intifada, hip hop
was the way I could protest.” Citing our current bus ride obsession, a delegate asked
Soud to list his “Top 5” favorite artists. “Bob Marley is my life, but for hip hop its

25, 2014, http://www.constructionweekonline.com/article-30343-plans-revealed-for-1bn-city-in-
palenstine/ ; Ali Abunimah,“Boycott committee: Palestinian ‘Rawabi’ tycoon Bashar Masri
“must end all normalization activities with Israel,” Electronic Intifada, September 10, 2012,
http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/7966 http://jcpa.org/article/luxury-alongside-poverty-in-the-
palestinian-authority/ https://electronicintifada.net/tags/rawabi .
457
Shoruq English/Arabic pamphlet.
329

Tupac.” Charlene asks the staff at large, “Would you identify as a feminist?” Shoruq staff
member Suha responds, “50% women participants. When we have a project, we invite
women first. For example, the hip hop group is for women... ‘good discrimination’."
Like a massive earthquake, without foreshocks and other prescient tremors,
unprovoked, in the middle of Shoruq staff explaining something as emotionally neutral as
bureaucratic operations of Shoruq, tears rise. It becomes overwhelming. I can’t seem to
stop the outpouring. I attempt to leave the circle of chairs, casually and unnoticed. As I
exit the building, take a seat on concrete blocks overlooking the rest of the camp,
thinking to myself, “Why are we a refugee people?” “Is this just the destiny of all Arab
people?” Again, to myself, with weighted dismay, thinking about Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, Iraqis retreating to Syria after the 2003 invasion, and the
displacement of 11 million Syrians since 2011 (half the population of Syria), less a
question this time and more a forensic analysis, “Are we a refugee people?” Almost
exactly a year prior, I was again negotiating unseasonably cold Middle East temperatures,
with another group of refugee/displaced youth. On the Turkish-Syrian border, in the city
of Reyhanli, I participated in a week of arts and culture programming for Syrian youth.
The nagging disappointment of both those experiences was that they could give
me so much, and I had so little to offer them. As we walked from our bus to Shoruq, we
passed by children in the camp and families that ventured outside their one-room homes
to encounter the new visitors. One family asked where I was from. In Arabic, I told them
the U.S. but acknowledged my family ancestry in Syria. They opened their home to me
and invited me to eat with them. This is what I would come to know about my encounters
330

with refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Greece and now here in Palestine. At the Salam
School for displaced Syrian youth in Reyhanli, a fourth grader refused to exit the
classroom to join her classmates for recess until I took some chips from her bag of Lay’s
potato chips. At Skaramagas camp, maximum security facility 45-minutes outside of
Athens, a refugee resident insisted on buying me a falafel sandwiche at one of the camp’s
many make-shift business “start-ups” so we could eat and watch the sunset together.
When we returned to his “caravan,” his sister fed me sunflower seeds, tea and cookies
from their daily rations.
You simply can’t enter a refugee camp without someone insisting on feeding you;
even being offended if you don’t eat the food they have that is incredibly scarce. I always
feel guilty partaking but it is never outweighed by the guilt I feel denying new friends the
dignity of giving. After wiping away the tears that streamed down my cheeks and
meditating on displacement and dignity, I make my way back to Shoruq’s facility.
The center’s nine-member female rap group, composed exclusively of teenagers,
showed us their recording studio, played their latest jam, a six-minute joint titled “Ana
Bidee Ahlam” (I want to dream). Listening and re-listening to this song, I am reminded
that any contemporary introduction to the Arabic language requires learning a vocabulary
of displacement and oppression: catastrophe, refugee, camp, prisons, occupation,
uprisings, and liberation. It also reminds me of W.E.B. Du Bois’s reflection in Black
Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (1935) about diverging meanings of freedom for
Black workers, white workers, planters, the wealthy, and Northern business people: “[T]o
the Negro ‘Freedom’ was God; to the poor white ‘Freedom’ was nothing—he had more
331

than he had use for; to the planter ‘Freedom’ for the poor was laziness and for the rich,
control of the poor worker; for the Northern business man ‘Freedom’ was opportunity to
get rich.”
458
Is Freedom perhaps this unknowable but omnipresent, unthinkable but
perceptively tangible (always capitalized) God for other oppressed peoples?

Figure 28: DDPalestine and Vivien with the Shoruq rap group in their studio. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.
We descend to Shoruq’s bottom floor, where a mixed group of youth practice a
debkeh routine. Motioning for our hands, they pull us into their circle, teaching the
delegates the basic foot work for a collective debkeh. Sharpened by years of attending
shami (Levantine) weddings and participation in Arab student group cultural events, I
implored the youth to teach me more complicated moves—so I could dance on their

458
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (New York, 1992 (1935)). 347.
332

level.
We hop back into the bus, frigid weather already interfering with the trip
itinerary. Instead of dining at Ayed’s family home in Dheisheh, we make an unplanned
change of venue to educational center Campus in Camps. Ayed brought pots of his
mother’s home-made makloubeh to Campus in Camps. Established in 2012, Campus in
Camps was conceived as an experimental educational and project-oriented program with
a radical pedagogy. Engaging participants from refugee camps in 67, “in an attempt to
explore and produce new forms of representation of camps and refugees beyond the static
and traditional symbols of victimization, passivity and poverty,” the program also “aims
at transgressing, without eliminating, the distinction between camp and city, refugee and
citizen, center and periphery, theory and practice, teacher and student.”
459
Starting with
15 participants, Campus in Camps created an open space for young people from the
refugee camps to sit and talk: a place for assembly with no structure or no hierarchy,
where everyone is equal. Architecture After Revolution (2014) writers Alessandro Petti,
Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman, who explore a concept at the center of Campus in Camps
philosophical underpinnings, that of “The return to the common” or in Arabic al-Masha,
are affiliated with the program as directors, collaborators (not the state informant kind),
and mentors (Vivien is also a mentor to the project participants). Campus in Camps, as

459
Mohammed Abu Alia, Naba’ Al-Assi, Isshaq Al-Barbary, Brave New Alps, Nedaa Hamouz,
and Murad Odeh, “Common 1 (al-Masha),” Campus in Camps: Collective Dictionary
(Bethlehem PA: Al Feneiq Cultural Center, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2013); Aysar Al-Saifi and
Isshaq Al-Barbary,“Well-Being (al-‘Afiyah),” Campus in Camps: Collective Dictionary
(Bethlehem PA: Al Feneiq Cultural Center, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, 2013); Saleh Khannah,
Matteo Guidi, Ibrahim Jawabreh, Giuliana Racco, and Diego Segatto, “Relation (al-‘Alaqah),”
Campus in Camps: Collective Dictionary (Bethlehem PA: Al Feneiq Cultural Center, Dheisheh
Refugee Camp, 2013).
333

part of its knowledge production commitment, publishes a book series called The
Collective Dictionary. With titles like Common (al-Masha), Well-Being (al-‘Afiyah), and
Relation (al-‘Alaqah); each book is dedicated to exploring the conceptual definitions for
a term. We meet, Isshaq al-Barbary, one of the contributors to this series, during our visit.
With bellies pleasantly full of makloubeh, and circled up in Ottoman style-
seating, we focus all attention on Isshaq, who begins his presentation with a Campus in
Campus fundamental driving question: “What is a camp?” Isshaq continues, “People
perceive refugee camps as poor, passive. We internalized it and become poor passive
subjects.” However, we can instead look at camps as radical sites for socio-political
transformation. “Camps are political exceptions,” Isshaq explains (likely pivoting off of
Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception”), “We don't own the land but we
have a right to the land.”
460
Since the camp and the refugee are the political exceptions,
building political, economic and social life around them could mean imagining a new
world. For, the camp is where knowledge about and practices of freedom are produced.
Isshaq elaborates, “They made these camps for two reasons: One, protection and two,
control. They never imagined they would engage in politics. They created a new culture
and a new vision. If Dheisheh camp built its own city, it's time for people to look at the
camp.”
461

460
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevil Attell (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2005.
461
Rostock, trip footage.
334

Figure 29: Isshaq of Campus in Camps explaining the project's conceptual frameworks. Ahmad is to the right of Isshaq
and Thor filming him on the other side. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.
Isshaq continues to lay out the project’s theoretical framework, “What is private
and what is public?”:
There is no such division of private or public on a social or political level. What is
the alternative? I looked to our past. "Our present is part of past." Collectively
owned land. You only own it if you use it. This reflects so much what it exists in
the camp. The camp is the common, extra territorial.
462

This dismantling of a the private-public dichotomy serves to redefine the terms of “right
of return” and even what it means to be Palestinian:
I was struggling with the normal. Do we want to have a nation state? The
experience of having a strong political community? This is also my vision for the
return. What sort of return do we want? Do we want to return to "the village" and
own private property? Young generation lived their grandparents dream. Parents
would refuse to leave the camp but would imagine the right of return as returning
to the village as their parents imagined it. I'm not a farmer, my grandfather was.

462
Ibid.
335

This is a very imperialist, Zionist discourse. Where is the public land? Refugee
camps are big spaces for possibilities not just for refugees but all of the
world. The key—what does it represent? It represents private property. We cannot
speak that the struggle is only refugees. The Mediterranean is what we all
share.
463

Isshaq attributes an intensification of this kind of neoliberalization of the camps to a post-
Oslo world. He rhetorically asked, “After Oslo, what happened?” Without a beat, he
answered, “The banks came to the camps. It fucked us up. It has made us individualistic.”
Related to this discussion of banks, Isshaq identifies three things that must be eliminated
to “re-organize the Palestinian house”:
1) the PA—why did Israel allow the rebels, people with weapons, why did they
bring these people to Palestine. Because they want more control, the people
wanted to become the oppressors.
2) the NGOS
3) the bank
When it came time for Q&A, I decided to intervene with a provocative question.
Although I am no stranger to sharing iconoclastic thought, I read Isshaq’s challenge of a
right of return linked to bourgeoisie property relations and invitation to re-imagine
Palestinian refugees as “Mediterranean peoples” as a perfect moment to problematize
another popular axiom. What do we mean when we say and hashtag #FreePalestine?
What is our collective vision for a liberated Palestine?:
I sometimes wonder if we use liberation like we accuse religious people of using
heaven…liberation is almost our distraction for being in the present. How do we
define liberation? Freedom from what and freedom for what? Are we missing the
“for” because we are not here now? What are we embodying?
464

463
Ibid.
464
Ibid.
336

Before Isshaq could interject, a chain of comments commenced. Tara’s verbal alchemy
froze time, “I’m gonna tell y’all I feel mad liberated now. I feel mad fucking liberated
right now.” After a communal deep breath, an acknowledgement of concurrence,
Charlene offered, “For me, liberation is not an endpoint…liberation is an ebb and a
flow—like a heart monitor.” And Isshaq closed out with, “I don't believe God was a real
estate agent,” once again lambasting capitalist relations to land.
He continued to encourage us to think about these questions outside of
convention: “We believe every person is a source of knowledge. We believe that
knowledge is also practice.” For example, a week in Palestinian village Bati is composed
of eight days because there are 8 families that work agriculturally in Bati. Vivien testified
to revolutionary re-imagining work she experienced moving from the States to the camp,
“People ask me why I left America for Palestine: I'm in love here. I'm in love with myself
and in love with my community. The land allows me to give and receive."
465
Aja
characterized this interaction as “a pivotal decolonizing moment” for her. Echoing the
words of radical Black singer Nina Simone, Aja described the texture of freedom in that
moment, “It was no fear.” She continued to explain the significance of collective feeling
of free as a, “complete new way of seeing the world and our role in it. It was listening to
Palestinian voices and finding our own, together.”
466

465
Ibid.
466
Aja Monet Bacquie, Top 5 list, June 6, 2015.
337

Figure 30: Steven and Tef in front of a mural at Campus in Camps. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.
In route to the hotel, Vivien and Ayed gave us a “graffiti tour” of his murals and
some of U.K.-based graffiti artist Banksy’s work, including Ayed’s mural that
memorialized the 264 children killed during “Operation Protective Edge,” or in Ayed’s
words the, “Israeli Massacre in Palestine, July 2014.”
Somehow, even after an emotionally and intellectually taxing day, we found
energy to join the Orthodox Christmas festivities in Nativity Square—conveniently
walking distance from our hotel. The square was teaming with East African celebrators.
Aja considered this one of favorite moments on the trip, explaining:
Seeing so many Black Palestinians in the square on the night of Orthodox
Christmas. Till this day it gives me chills. I can still feel the energy I felt walking
on that ground, among so many people who looked like us, in the Holy Land. We
338

all walked into the square as if we had returned home together. As if we had just
been away too long and returned to some ancient feeling within us.
467

After some minutes of meandering through crowds and parade commotion, realizing it
was far too easy to lose each other, we decided to wind down and reflect on our trip at a
nearby café. A café in any country outside the U.S. usually connotes “free Wi-Fi.”
Resisting the urge to zone out of the moment and into our hyper-pixelated tiny screen, we
agree to play a game of phone stack. I oscillated between a conversation with Charlene
about her desire to pursue a doctoral degree and intervening into Aja and Umi’s heated
debate on patriarchy, toxic masculinity, and the destructive results of the “urge to
ejaculate.” Cherrell disappeared for some time and returned with new East African
friends.
In the barren roads of Bethlehem, a stone’s throw from Nativity Square, we
spontaneously chanted protest songs as we sauntered back to the hotel in pre-dawn
darkness. As Christmas Eve transitioned into Christmas, Dream Defenders delegates
chanted, “I believe that we will win” and the Assata Shakur line heard from Ferguson to
Baltimore, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love
each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” This was a
reminder of the role of the artist and art in “freedom making” and “freedom imagining”
especially when thinking about the sensatory experience of liberation: what does it feel
like to “win”?

467
Ibid.
339

Day 5: January 7
Bethlehem’s Old City
Ahmad and I awoke to news delivered by our coordinators that a predicted
snowstorm had in fact hit the region, resulting in the closure of a key artery of roads. We
were stuck in Bethlehem. This one snow day, and the shutdown of most of the country’s
roads, forced us to shift and re-arrange scheduled visits to cities in 67, cancelling a trip to
Nabi Salih (the famed village of resistance that holds weekly demonstrations opposing
Israeli settlements and occupation of their water supply), and resulting in the extension of
our time in Bethlehem and Nazareth. We were also forced to eliminate a planned “break”
between Ramallah checkpoints and the aggressive apartheid in Hebron; a trip to the Dead
Sea (which was a recommendation we heard from delegates on previous trips to
Palestine). This “snowed in” day in Bethlehem spontaneously transformed into a “rest
day” and turned out to be a crucial for contextualizing the political significance of
Bethlehem and also for nourishing and deepening friendship bonds.
That afternoon Fadi Kattan, the proud owner of the first state identification card to
list the “religious affiliation” as “Atheist,” guided us on a walking tour of Bethlehem’s
Old City.
468
Marc and I stayed close to Kattan, hanging on every word of his outline of
the political history of the city. At one point, Kattan called our attention to multiple alley-
ways, “look, it’s completely empty here. This is Bethlehem on Christmas Day, the
birthplace of Jesus, and it’s empty.” How many Christmas productions in the states re-

468
Israeli ID cards, which are also color-coded based on a hierarchal stratification of ethnicity and
geographies, used to list “religious identity” on ID cards and limited them to three choices:
Jewish, Muslim and Christian. Scholars and journalists have compared the Israeli ID card regime
to South African apartheid’s infamous pass laws.
340

created this moment? Re-created this place on school and church stages? Bethlehem,
after all, was in 67, behind a wall, enclosed by a militarized security apparatus that
included checkpoints. As we later witnessed, it didn’t come close to the busloads of
tourists descending onto Nazareth’s Church of the Annunciation. Of course, a man who
had worked for the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Tourism would point out a
problem he was likely tasked to navigate. Yet, Kattan’s intervention was laced with a
political poignancy that even found its way into Aja’s poetry. The Dream Defenders’
Instagram account expounded on this phenomenon to its followers on a capture of a
scenic expanse of Bethlehem’s countryside interrupted by barbed wire and decrepit
foliage, “Barbed wire & Israeli settlements: Probably not the ‘little town of Bethlehem’
that you imagined… Although today is Christmas Day in Bethlehem, the streets were
eerily bare and most of the shops in this historic town were boarded up due to the Israeli
government severely limiting tourism under the oppressive Apartheid in Palestine.”
Cherrell corroborated this account with a series of engaged witness tweets
469
:
Walked through Bethlehem today. A lot of people don't know Bham is Palestine
Palestinians in Bethlehem get running water every 3 months, while Israelis in
surrounding (illegal) settlements get it everyday.
Israelis in the illegal settlements surrounding Bethlehem have lush green yards
and pools while water is scarce for Palestinians.

Beyond the emptiness, absence and silence, we saw a man outside of his store
roasting chestnuts on an open fire. He offered us his fire and food. And here we were, in

469
Cherrell Brown (“FKA A. Duck,” @Cherrell_Brown), Twitter, January 7, 2015.
341

Bethlehem, on Christmas, eating chestnuts and warming our hands over the fire (and later
eating falafel and shawarma sandwiches—a little less first century of us).

Figure 31: Tara, Carmen and I literally warming our hands over chestnuts burning on an open fire in downtown
Bethlehem on Christmas. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

When we eventually returned to the hotel, dusk was approaching. Some of
Ahmad’s friends from Project Chaos, described on their Facebook page as a “movement
presenting the Palestinian hip hop culture,” came to our hotel to chill with delegates.
Steven Pargett, who listed this as one of his favorite moments on the trip, narrated this
encounter, “For about an hour, Tef was playing his videos, they played theirs, and then
played music from a bunch of different countries. Some of their favorite songs were by
people that we knew, or songs that we loved too. Talib Kweli, Killer Mike, etc. It became
342

clear that we all speak the same language, hip-hop.” Pargett continued, “a huge part of
the trip in my experience was seeing the way that hip-hop culture influenced and
resonated and flourished in Palestine.”
470

At some point later that night, all of us converged onto Tef and Umi’s hotel
room—most of us in our pajamas. It’s unclear what inspired us to share our “Top 5” lists
on one of our earlier bus rides, but for whatever reason we re-visited the conversation that
night. “Top 5,” usually refers to the curation of a personalized list of “top” MCs (master
of ceremonies) or rappers. Marc shared his, which was only memorable for its singular
omission. Delegates curiously inquired, “What about Tupac?” Marc replied resolutely,
“Top 5? He wouldn’t even make my Top 20!” A clamorous wave of collective shock
overtook the room. For many of the folks in the room who harbored deep affection for
the slain rapper, this was akin to hip-hop treason. In protest, Patrisse started singing and
playing Pac’s music out of the laptop she was working on in the room (she included this
debate as one of her favorite moments of the delegation).
Marc’s unpopular dismissal of Tupac’s rapping skills became the most referenced
running joke (coming close to #Blacksleepmatters though) throughout the rest of the trip,
and during almost all post-trip group communication. Aja explained the significance of
this moment, “[It was when] we all realized Marc was a rare kind of black man who
would dare not put Tupac in his Top 5. What a heated debate that was!”
471

After a couple of hours of tomfoolery, our six-foot-plus white German
videographer Thor removed his camera from his shoulder and cradled it on his lap. His

470
Steven Pargett, Top 5 list.
471
Bacquie, Top 5 list.
343

voice emerged, prompting us with a thematic question—a rare occurrence, “This
delegation is called the Dream Defenders delegation. What does a ‘dream’ mean to you?”
In conversations with Belafonte’s filmmaker Susanne Rostock (who, as aforementioned,
dispatched Thor to capture footage for her Another Night in the Free World documentary
project), directed Thor to ask us pointed questions that would likely capture the reasons
underpinning our participation in this delegation and commitment to our transnational
grassroots movement work.

Figure 32: Snowed in on Christmas in Bethlehem, DDPalestine delegates answer Thor's first and only confessional
question: "What to you is a dream?" Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

344

Day 6: January 8
Bethlehem, Haifa, Nazareth
That morning, we checked out of our hotel in Bethlehem, hopped back on our
mini-van-sized commuter bus for an afternoon in Haifa to meet with Palestinian-run legal
center Adalah (“Justice” in Arabic) on our way to Nazareth. Marc had a smile on his face.
Waiting for all delegates to arrive and for the drive to begin, he announced that he had
composed a playlist of 25 songs by 25 emcees to “prove” his thesis on Tupac’s rapping
prowess. Throughout the journey to Haifa, we listened to every song on Marc’s list and
his dogged defense of ranking each one higher than Pac. Unswayed, not one delegate
abandoned the Tupac camp. These are the moments rarely shared in movement histories
and biographies. Beyond a #Blackjoy hashtag, these moments contributed to “knowing
one another,” to developing a sacred love and mercy that engendered durable trust while
living in the radical flow of travel. And for Ahmad, Najwan and I, the lone Arabs on trip,
these moments provided opportunities to deepen friendship bonds and affective ties with
Black American organizers and cultural workers that I continue to firmly argue is the
basis for salient Afro-Arab solidarity work.
As we entered Adalah’s office, a poster of Martin Luther King, Jr. hanging over a
conference table immediately caught my attention. The organization, which defends and
advocates “Arab minority rights,” explained the limits of litigating and representing cases
through civil rights law (or through the Israeli state). In our limited time with the center,
they covered some of the successful campaigns they organized to prevent the
displacement of Arab Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev)—canceling demolition orders.
345

Figure 33: Saleh of Adalah in front of the organization's Martin Luther King Jr. poster, in Haifa. Photo courtesy of
Chris Hazou.

We arrived at the hotel in Nazareth around time for the buffet dinner. Our step
migration there included a stop at an off-the road terrace of sorts in Haifa that over-
looked the lusciously verdant Baha’i Gardens. In preparation for tomorrow’s field trip,
our guides arranged for us to collectively view a documentary about the Israeli erasure of
the Arab and Islamic cultural history of Ayn Hawd, a village in 48. Five years after
Israeli forces expelled Palestinians from Ayn Hawd in 1948, Romanian-Jewish
immigrant Marcel Janco re-branded the village as an artists’ colony—designating it as a
site for historical preservation (now called “Ein Hod”). The story of this village stands in
for hundreds of villages in 48 that were “disappeared” and occupied through not only the
violent up-rooting of indigenous peoples but also the cultural imperialism work central to
maintaining settler colonialist imaginaries and systems.
346

Later that night, Patrisse revisited an off-hand comment she made earlier in the
day. Patrisse explained that one of our guides, a BDS organizer in 48, approached her and
suggested we think about performing a solidarity demonstration during one of the
remaining days of our delegation. Patrisse, in addition to a decades long history of
organizing in Southern California, was also an experienced performance artist who
conceived and directed politically radical, story-driven theater productions across the
U.S. Patrisse gathered us into one of the empty conference rooms in the hotel. Within
minutes, the veteran artivist produced, directed and choreographed the entirety of what
would be known as our solidarity demonstration in downtown Nazareth: “Tef, can you
write 16 bars? Aja, what’s the equivalent in poetry? A stanza? Can you do that? Marc,
can you write an opening, like you’re reporting from the scene? Who are my singers?
Umi and Charlene?”
Umi and Charlene were instructed to select a verse from the catalogue of classic
protest songs. They quickly settled on “Ella’s Song,” a song written by one of SNCC’s
founding “Freedom Singers” Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon. The rest of us were assigned
the debkeh steps we were taught by Shoruq youth in Dheisheh. And Tara was instructed
to close out the demonstration by leading us in protest chant standards. As rehearsal
wrapped, Tef, Aja and Marc spent the remainder of the night penning their parts.
Day 7: January 9
Nazareth, Ayn Hawd, Haifa, Nazareth
We had a traditional hummus breakfast in the city before traveling to Ayn Hawd.
The thesis of the film was animated by the juxtaposition of centuries old cobble-stoned
347

steps and modern art galleries. We had lunch on a hill-top restaurant, run by one of the
few remaining Palestinians in town. On our descent from Ayn Hawd, our driver and
guide treated us to a surprise stop at a beach in Haifa. Managing winter lows of 40-50
degrees Fahrenheit and pebbled shores (and me managing walking on those pebbles in
stiletto boots), we took in the ocean breeze and stunning view of the sea. Propped on a
rock in the sea to capture some pictures, Charlene, Carmen and Tara narrowly escaped
being swallowed up by a forceful wave. Charlene characterized, “almost drowning in the
Mediterranean near Haifa but getting the best photo ever” as one of her favorite trip
moments.
472

Figure 34: Tara, Charlene and Carmen misjudging the force and size of waves at a beach in Haifa. Photo courtesy of
Chris Hazou.

472
Charlene Carruthers, Top 5 list, September 7, 2015.
348

Moved by the repeated experiences of enclosure, delegates collected shells and rocks
from Haifa’s pebbled beach with the intent of taking a part of the Mediterranean Sea back
to some of our new friends in 67. “#MediterraneanSea I threw a rock into this water” Tef
Poe relayed on an Instagram post, “for the brothers and sisters throwing rocks at the tanks
in the #WestBank but won’t ever see this body of water because of the apartheid.”
Sherika expressed a commensurate unease we all felt witnessing the “breathtaking”
beauty of Haifa while being fully cognizant of Palestinian captivity:
Being there was especially important because that’s where Ahmad’s family is
from. I can go to Jamaica and visit places where my family lived for generations.
That’s been stolen from him. The beach was breathtaking and was one of my best
memories of the group. So many Palestinian people have never seen the beach
and some will die before the occupation ends, never seeing the ocean. Reminding
me of how they are captives on their own land.
473

I recorded similar reflections concerning captivity and mobility. Most West Bankers will
never be able to walk on the beach’s shore, let alone smell the sea salt hanging on air
vapors—-and yet, they continue to dream of seeing azure waters crashing onto their
ancestral homeland. Meditating by the most jalal embodiment of the freedom of
movement, radical flow, I was reminded of a Mahmoud Darwish verse from that poem
“We fear for a dream”: “We go on dreaming. Oh, desired dream. We steal our days from
those extolled by our myth.”
We began our evening with a dinner featuring Nazareth filmmaker Nizar Hassan,
who bonded with the Carter Center delegation (we were told). Almost immediately, the
small talk niceties evaporate. Our collective conversation sharply pivots towards Marxist
illegibility of race (and ergo, racial capitalism). Nizar, a self-avowed Marxist, replicated

473
Sherika Shaw, Top 5 list, June 6, 2015.
349

the racial myopia of old school white communists by insisting that capitalism was the
singular root of global oppression. He reduced Black Lives Matter and anti-racism
organizing to a false consciousness, an opium of the people, dividing people from
unifying around class. What preceded was a heated discussion with delegates—including
me—that even resulted in Nizar requesting our designated trip videographer, Thor, desist
from filming. Marc countered Nizar’s claims by pointing to the historical example of 18
th

century slavery, explaining that “white supremacy operates against the logic of
capitalism,” and concluding that, “we can’t reduce everything to relations to capital.”
474

Some delegates joined the filmmaker, Diana and her partner for a post-debate
reconciliatory shisha outing. I, instead, retreated to my room for much need regeneration
via sleep.

474
Rostock, trip footage.
350

Day 8: January 10
Nazareth Old City, Akka, Nazareth
“Holding Philip’s (Umi) hand in Old Nazareth, prayer beads between them, listening to
the call to prayer in Arabic. I was free.”
-Aja Monet Bacquie
475

Figure 35: The surprisingly low-key and quotidian church in Nazareth where Jesus was said to have delivered his early
sermons. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

We started our day in Nazareth’s old city, visiting acclaimed churches, gift shops,
spice markets, mini-souqs and partaking in a pre-solidarity demonstration shisha in
downtown Nazareth to celebrate Thor’s birthday. Steven’s Palestinian friend Hamoudi
connected with our group right before the demonstration. He brought along some of his
friends who volunteered to collaborate with us in drumming and debkeh-ing. It was a

475
Bacquie, Top 5 list.
351

special connection for Steven who explained that he first met Hamoudi in Colorado year
and a half prior and that, “joining us for the flash mob was amazing. I felt like it was
meant for us to be friends and it was powerful to have a few people from the city be with
us.”
476
Because of Hamoudi’s participation, we opened with a drumming prelude before
Marc took center stage, explaining to the camera and our crowd of not more than 10
people the reason for this gathering. I will save some of my engaged witness analysis of
the demonstration for the generative artifacts section of this chapter. Here are some of the
delegates responses:
Ahmad: “The flash mob in Nazareth was beautiful, although we didn’t have the
crowd and weather we wanted, we joined together, Palestinian, black, women,
men, queer, hetero, etc. all in one sending a message of resistance, power, love
and liberation.”
477

Umi: “Seeing our group come together so harmoniously (literally and
metaphorically) and powerfully will always be so important to my personal and
our collective evolution.”
478

Tara: “The energy, the looks on the faces of passersby, the little boy whose family
wanted to leave, but he would not budge. Being with the kind of people that go
from afternoon shisha to amazing acts of solidarity.”
479

Cherrell: “It felt like a cleansing, and a reclamation. It was a reminder that we
must make connections, and affirm that this is a global struggle.”
480

Thor filmed the entire demonstration in one single shot—which was elongated by the
shifts from “Ferguson to Palestine” and “Black Lives Matter” chants to Arabic calls to
end the occupation. On a spiritual high after the culmination of our collective creative co-

476
Steven Pargett, Top 5 list, June 6, 2015.
477
Ahmad Abuznaid, Top 5 list, May 28, 2015.
478
Umi Selah, Top 5 list, September 29, 2015.
479
Tara Thompson, Top 5 list, May 31, 2015.
480
Cherrell Brown, Top 5 list, August 23, 2015.
352

conspiring, we were practically skipping through the streets of Nazareth. Ciara,
consistently proving to have an eye for art direction and cinematography, pointed out a
set of vibrantly graffiti-ed stairs and requested to a group photo to capture the moment.
This is the shot, laced up with peace fingers and staggered on bright colored steps, that
circulated through and has been featured in articles and statements concerning Black-
Palestinian solidarity (the photograph opening this chapter).

Figure 36: In the midst of chanting during our "flash mob" in downtown Nazareth. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.
Our next stop was to the port city of Akka to meet with the representative of Al-
Qaws, a Palestinian LGBTQ group. Sherika not only appreciated hearing the
representative’s candid speech on reconciling her queerness in Palestinian cultural spaces
but also her personalized account of how “pink-washing” (a strategy of erasing or
353

derailing claims of settler colonialism through queer advocacy propaganda campaigns
and overtures) operated in 48, “The woman telling her story and resisting Tel Aviv and
moving back home, her having to choose between being Palestinian and her sexuality,
her living under soooo much fear (even asking us not to mention her name), yet doing
such revolutionary work. Her and her son were a great source of inspiration for me.”
481

Cherrell echoed Sherika’s enthusiasm for meeting the Al-Qaws representative and was
also moved by, “learning about the work being done to liberate all people.”
482

Figure 37: DDPalestine, Najwan and Diana watching Thor's capture of our solidarity demonstration at the lobby of
our hotel in Nazareth. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

481
Shaw, Top 5 list.
482
Brown, Top 5 list.
354

Day 9: January 11
Nazareth, Hebron Old City, Bethlehem

“You will be the ambassadors. You will be Herbonite eyes.”
-Walid, our Hebron/Khalil tour guide

As prepared we were for Hebron (Khalil in Arabic), rehearsed through
conversations with guides and past delegates, we still were not prepared. Hebron is one of
the most visibly violent battlegrounds between settlers and Palestinian residents in 67.
Ahmad and I intentionally organized the delegation to culminate in the trip to Hebron
(although the “snow day” in Bethlehem forced us to shift around the schedule). Hebron is
unique in that the settlements mushroomed inside the city’s historic center, as opposed to
encircling the outer edges of a city. The first settlements in Khalil were established in
1968 (qurat raba). Our guide, Hebron native, Walid, explains the different administrative
districts or “zones” that came out of the Oslo II Accords in 1995; areas A, B, C. Since
Hebron remains a special case because of the geography of settlement, a different zoning
code applies and divides it into the designations of H1 and H2 (which came out of the
Hebron Protocol signed in 1997). The area Palestinians are sequestered in is labeled
“H1/area A” to reflect this division and Palestinian Authority control. Ergo, the Old City
is quite literally divided—the temple alleged to house Abraham’s (Ibrahim) remains
divided into mosque (masjid) and synagogue, and al-Shuhada street is divided into an
“apartheid street” for certain ID and passport holders (where settlers—and not
Palestinians—can move freely).
The experience in Hebron, the couple of hours we spent walking through the
355

marketplace under mesh wiring covered in disposed trash (including diapers) by settlers,
spiraling through a checkpoint into the Ibrahimi mosque, lunch at um Yassin’s (who
shared stories about the violent struggle to keep her house and resist illegal eviction that
resulted in a miscarriage), and a walk down Shuhadah street, made every delegate’s “Top
5 most memorable moments” list. Here are some of their reflections;
Sherika: “Hebron is another memory that is vivid and has altered my perspective
on the world forever. Being inside of the Ibrahimi Mosque, understanding the
lives that were taken there, status of the mosque now and being able to comfort
one another was transformational… Then of course there was Leila who opened
her home to us and fed us all that amazing food, including the olives she had to
steal from her own olive tree. I appreciated her sharing so much with us,
especially her story. Walking down the street, interacting with the soldiers (who
didn’t understand their role and why they had it) and the graveyard. These are
Palestinian people living in Hebron who cannot visit the burial site of loved ones
due to the check points and the apartheid.”
483

Tef Poe: “Hebron is a special place and the people that live there are a special
type of people. This is the city that left the strongest emotional imprint on my soul
during this trip. I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of Haifa but this
didn’t move me the way the disparities of Hebron did. The sight of soldiers on
foot jogging with machine guns as they casually work out is mind-boggling. The
heart and empathy of the people we met is truth fully what resistance is all about.
No one on the planet does resistance the way the Palestinians do it. Even though
Hebron is a terribly depressing and overwhelmed with struggle the pulse of this
city is rich with heart, soul and dignity.”
484

Aja: “Hebron was intense as we were warned it would be. Always in the midst of
such turmoil—even then—beauty and love prevails. I was in the spell of the little
boy no more than 3 years old. Reaching out to him to take my hand, he turned it
over and kissed it as if he was an elder welcoming me into his home.”
485

Ahmad: “The old city in Hebron with the sprawling settlement expansion and the
outright apartheid with roads for Jews only, the occupation of the Ibrahimi

483
Shaw, Top 5 list.
484
Tef Poe, Top 5 list, June 12, 2015.
485
Bacquie, Top 5 list.
356

mosque and the litter laying around from the when settlers would throw it at
Palestinians.”
486

Umi: “Being in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron: It was powerful and the energy
in that place was palpable.”
487

Cherrell: “Eating a family meal in Hebron. This city was the heaviest and to have
someone open up their home to us meant a lot to my spirit. We could hardly
communicate, but the universality of love through breaking bread was so real, and
genuine.”
488

Tara: “The heaviness that came over me (all of us in the mosque), challenging the
‘soldiers’ who have no idea why they are where they are, the views, the door that
Palestinians were supposed to use to get inside, the meal prepared for us,
checking the looms at the keffiyeh factory that has been around for 40 years.”
489

Marc: “The whole experience—from seeing the Ibrahimi mosque to arguing with
the Israeli soldier to seeing our guide unable to walk where we went to talking to
the kids at the checkpoint. All of it. The trip really changed my life…it’s shifted
my politics, my academic work, everything.”
490

486
Abuznaid, Top 5 list.
487
Selah, Top 5 list.
488
Brown, Top 5 list.
489
Thompson, Top 5 list.
490
Marc Lamont Hill, Top 5 list, December 31, 2016.
357

Figure 38: Overcome with trenchant grief at Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron; Tef, Charlene, Tara and Cherrell seek
solace in each other's arms. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.
Hebron, because of this explicit manifestation of apartheid that Ahmad mentioned, makes
it a key node in Palestine solidarity delegations. In Hebron, the Carter Center delegation
of 2014 met with a variety of activists including a Palestinian who worked to reclaim
homes that settlers had illegally taken (had almost 10,000 victories), and they linked with
one of the founders of Breaking the Silence, Yehuda Shaul. Dream hampton described
touring the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron and seeing the “plaques that misrepresent history”
with no mention of the massacre of 29 Muslims in prayer by Baruch Goldstein in 1994 as
“wild.”
491
Their guide showed them the bullet holes in the mosque. She recalls the mesh
ceilings in the market meant to catch all the garbage “including dirty diapers” that these,

491
dream akeem, hampton, interview with author, Santa Monica, CA, September 29, 2016.
358

“settlers—which is another euphemism—these violent occupiers from Brooklyn and San
Francisco were throwing down into the market.”
492
In this same market, with visible
marks of oppression and settler colonialism, hampton experienced anti-Blackness. Three
Palestinian women, “giggling to themselves,” used the word ‘abeed. “It was the multiple
levels of stuff that was traumatizing and triggering,” remembers hampton, who was
familiar with the English translation of ‘abd to “slave” (and frequently ascribed to Black
Americans) growing up in Detroit and hearing it “at the gas stations.” “You’re the most
oppressed Palestinians we’ve seen and you’re calling us ‘abeed?” Hampton expressed
with continued bafflement.
493

Figure 39: Aja and Tara critiquing IDF logic on Hebron's Shuhada Street. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou>

492
Ibid.
493
Ibid.
359

Decorated with Ayed’s portraits of international freedom fighters, we said our
goodbyes to our new Palestinian family at Singer Café in “the Beth” (another neologism
popularized by Tara). Collectively, we watched the final edit of our solidarity
demonstration. Other Palestinian café diners overheard some of the commotion from the
video. They asked what we were watching. I explained the flash mob within the context
of our delegation to the patrons. I still vividly recall the joy that overtook their faces.
They thanked me profusely. Declarations of political solidarity are powerful, but in that I
moment I understood the difference between solidarity and engaged witness with a
profound clarity. It’s easier to “feel” who stands with you if they “see” you, and see you
in a spiritual depth attuned to testifying for the sake of securing justice.
Ciara later relayed the conversation she had with Ayed that was so indelible that
she narrated it to me two years later:
Having sold all of the paintings my comrades, he [Ayed] finally sat down at the
bar to have a drink. Having the boldness of some red wine or another, I decided to
inquire about why he no longer participates in international galleries. Although I
expected to hear stories detailing the injustice of the visa system, he instead
informed me that it was actually his choice, “I was tired of going to art shows and
performances and being asked how I could possibly exist under such an
oppressive system,” he said. “Honestly I am grateful for where I live. Everyone in
the world lives in an illusion. Palestinians and other indigenous people are the
ones who live in reality. We see our oppressor for who they really are.” His point
hit home for me then and continues to do so today.
494

494
Ciara Taylor, Top 5 list, December 29, 2016.
360

Ciara elevated my heart when she attributed this moment to the preciousness of
delegation work and engaged witnessing

Figure 40: Charlene, Cherrell, Tara and Charlene with their purchases of Ayed's artwork at Singer Cafe in Bethlehem.
Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

Ahmad and I exited in haste, attempting to catch the last bus at Jericho leaving for
the Allenby border crossing. Delegates spent day 10 of the delegation in Bethlehem,
while Ahmad and I re-connected with his family in Amman. Delegates sent us pictures of
them posing with their original Arafahs. I was secretly jealous that Charlene procured the
Malcolm X one (I didn’t realize he was selling them!). Once again, we go through cage-
like metal detectors and take off our jackets in the cold of night. As someone who is a
little too easily riled by security facilities, I sing to myself "we who believe in freedom
cannot rest until we've won" attempting to dually ease and revive my spirit with the
361

refrain from “Ella’s song.”
In preparation for a 48/67 entry-style interrogation, I initiated self-policing mode.
The terror is intentional. Merely entering the "foreigner" side of the Israeli border control
into Jordan triggered trembling fingers and racing circuits of thoughts. Even before that,
being instructed to wait for "the manager" "over there" imbued the order to "wait" with a
new structure of feeling. The only question, after paying 181 shekels, I was asked: “what
is your name?” Remarkable the degree to which the fear programming is executed with
maximal precision.
On the fourth bus on the way back to Amman, I think to myself, “What an
involved process to cross a border. It's not just a border, it's another series of checkpoints.
Checkpoints are an inescapable pillar of Palestinian life.” Still shell-shocked that I was
permitted to enter by Israeli security on January 3
rd
, every moment inside 48/67 felt like a
stolen breath. I still couldn’t believe we pulled it off. “This is what dreaming out loud
looks like,” I thought to myself.
GENERATIVE ARTIFACTS

“For each of us we lived it. Palestine was not theoretical for us anymore.”
–Aja Monet
1) The moment: Fergaza & DDPalestine
Why in this moment Black American activists, who I would argue are part of the
legacy of BRT, resonate with the Palestinian plight? Why are Palestinians and Palestinian
diasporic youth subjects participating in Black freedom struggle actions like Weekend of
Resistance in Ferguson? What motivated Palestinian American poet Remi Kenazi and
Black American activists Mari Morales-Williams and Kristian Davis Bailey to produce a
362

“Black-Palestinian Solidarity” video? The DDPalestine emerged from a particular
moment in the genealogy of Black-Palestinian solidarity, a moment of transformative
rupture. A moment defined by a relational analysis that linked state violence,
militarization, occupation and intersecting calls for divestment to globally intertwine the
movement for Black freedom with Palestinian liberation.
For much of the delegates on this trip, Palestine strangely served as a welcome
“break” from non-stop organizing work to engage in larger theoretical conversations
about the movement. “It took us coming to Palestine to have this conversation,” Patrisse
commented about a discussion over dinner in Bethlehem about people of color in Black
spaces. Tara’s rejoinder exemplified the reality of living in a Fergaza moment, one with
of state of war-like conditions, "It took us coming to Palestine because the only time I get
to see Patrisse is when we're running from tear gas or rubber bullets.” This led Tara to
reflect on the importance of delegations, because of them, “we don't get time like this to
build together."
2) Rode to transnational v. internationalism activism: tradition of Black radical
transnationalism
The trip was conceived by its organizers (Ahmad Abuznaid and myself) in line
with a historical tradition of Black radical transnationalism concerned with Palestine, a
practice of engaged witness, and an opportunity to build coalitions beyond borders and
nation-state institutions. Interestingly, most of the organizations and leadership in the
organizations that participated in DDPalestine previously engaged in a practice of
internationalism, appealing to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in an effort
363

to globally expose U.S. racist violence. Prior to the January 2015 trip, some delegates
presented cases at United Nations special sessions in Geneva, demonstrating U.S.
violations of international law. In November 2014, DDPalestine delegates and Hands Up
United organizers Tara Thompson and Tef Poe traveled with Michael Brown’s family
and attorneys to Geneva to address the 53
rd
session of the United Nation’s Committee
Against Torture (sponsored by U.S. Human Rights Network). Earlier in the year, Ahmad
obtained a scholarship from the Center for Constitutional Rights to present Dream
Defenders’ report on Stand Your Ground laws as part of the UN’s review of U.S.
commitment to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. How does
radical transnationalism work differ? What comes from internationally appealing to the
UN or other heads of state? If not representing or in conversation with state
actors/entities, what does transnational work appeal to? What is its end? Would BDS be
positioned within the framework of a radical transnationalism? Is the travel to see the
other as beyond another this end?
3) The practice of organizing a delegation:
How does one put a delegation together? What thought goes behind curating the
experience, selecting participants, programming, and what work is involved in the on-the-
ground managing of a trip when complications arise?
This delegation was originally conceived as an informal invitation for Umi to join
Ahmad in Palestine for the summer while Ahmad’s father, an ambassador for the
Palestinian in Netherlands, planned to bring over a delegation of Dutch students to
Palestine for a cross-cultural exchange. I learned about this trip when I skype interviewed
364

Ahmad for my dissertation, interested as I was in his appeal to the UN against Stand
Your Ground laws and his leadership in Dream Defenders. He invited me to join and
agreed to allow me to document the experience for this dissertation. Somehow I involved
myself in the organizing of a delegation when Ahmad asked me if it would be interested
in opening the trip to other organizers and activists. A crucial question arose: would we
require invited folks to pay their way if we could get room, board and transportation
within 48/67 fees covered? Knowing full well the financial capital of some Palestinian
American entrepreneurs, I suggested we informally explore tapping into that network. In
the process, we found some leads that offered to sponsor an entire delegation if we could
secure someone with “celebrity” status to join us. We did in fact come close to
convincing some “big names” to participate. But when the reality of taking a Palestine
solidarity trip sunk in—the political and financial toxicity tied to affiliations with
Palestine—interest evaporated.
However, through our friendship network with dream hampton, we connected to
an institute with ties to a private family foundation that historically funded delegations to
Palestine. Hampton put us in touch with an institute that was at the helm of co-organizing
the Carter Center delegation she attended in January 2014. I learned of the Carter Center
trip and hampton’s involvement in two ways. Firstly, Bryonn Bain, a mentor around
prison abolition work and education, forwarded me his invite to the delegation from
dream, seeking my feedback on the proposed itinerary. Later, I watched the trip unfold on
dream’s Instagram account, posting the English translation of a famed W.E.B. Du Bois
graffiti-ed in Arabic on the “separation wall”: “how does it feel to be a problem?” Byronn
365

(who I have known since 2006), relayed to me, that although he read much of Said’s
work and learned about Palestine through his friend Suheir Hammad, “nothing really
prepare[d] me for what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.” Bryonn’s
rooted witness inspired several revelations. For one, “Refugees,” Byronn conveyed,
“reminded me of the young brothers at Rikers.” Elaborating on this engaged witness
critical analysis “Nearly everywhere we went in Palestine and Israel, I felt something I
have only consistent experienced in one other place: prison…Malcolm X said that no one
should be put in a cage with bars.”
495

Soon after, I developed a friendship with dream that deepened when she invited
me to join her in Ferguson for the Black Lives Matter Freedom Ride Labor Day Weekend
of 2014 (organized by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell Moore), just weeks after the fatal
police killing of teenager Michael Brown. Although I had heard Patrisse’s name
frequently invoked in Los Angeles organizing circles and through my work on prison
abolition (including Dignity and Power Now’s local work), that weekend in Ferguson
was the first time we met. From that moment, we—dream, Patrisse and I—continued to
formatively build movementships with each other. In particular, dream and I traversed
“difficult conversations” concerning anti-Blackness in Arab diasporic culture and
discourse, the Orientalism and anti-Arab rhetoric reproduced in American culture, and
freedom dreaming on what a powerful practice of Afro-Arab engaged witnessing could
look like. Dream continued to offer Ahmad and I discursive opportunities to sharpen our
critical rigor, but even, at times, a couch to crash on along with connections within her

495
Bryonn Bain, email interview with author, October 15, 2015.
366

friendship and professional network.
Ahmad and I eventually received funding from a family foundation, drafting a
proposal that originally imagined a delegation of “radical youth of color organizers.” The
trip was also set for August 10, 2014. The Gaza invasion and concomitant violence in
Jerusalem motivated the foundation and organization to indefinitely postpone the trip.
Little did we know real-time ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the military-
response to a popular insurrection in Ferguson would profoundly shape a new iteration of
the Black freedom movement and Palestine-solidarity organizing. Mike Brown’s killing
elicited a “Ferguson Uprising” that led to the founding of Ferguson/St. Louis based racial
justice group Hands Up United, and for Black Lives Matter to assume a central role in the
conversation on police brutality and state violence. This transformed the composition of
the trip that was diverse in generational, racial/ethnic, and professional representation.
Since changing the date of the trip naturally led to conflicts in schedules, we filled those
open slots, reconstituted the delegation to include members from Hands Up United, Black
Lives Matter, Black Youth Project, and Justice League NYC (formed in response to the
killing of Eric Garner); transforming the “radical youth of color organizers” delegation
into a Black radical transnationalism-minded delegation.
4) Blackness in 48/67
As part of the overall project of the dissertation, I have tried to illustrate “Afro-
Arab” as a dynamic fusion of separate and overlapping identities bound by and
communicating through a dash. On this delegation, Black Americans encountering Arabs
and Black Americans encountering Afro-Palestinians and other African-descended
367

communities in 48/67, demonstrated the fluidity of the “Afro-Arab” framework and
global understandings of diasporic Blackness. On our first day in Jerusalem, we visited
the Afro-Palestinian “corner” in East Jerusalem and were led on a tour of the Old City by
Yasser Qous, a member of the community. We discovered the migration patterns that led
to the eventual settling of the African community that also led to inter-marriages between
African hajj migrants and the Palestinian community. After Mecca and Medina, African
migrants concluded their pilgrimage with a trip to the third holiest society in Sunni
Orthodox Traditional Islamic practice: Jerusalem. And some never left.
On Eastern Orthodox Christmas eve, we found ourselves meandering through
outdoor celebrations close to our hotel. Delegates were surprised to see a majority Black
crowd (mostly East African) and wondered the origin of this community that led them to
Bethlehem. In Bethlehem, we also had riveting conversations about how white
supremacy operates in a U.S. setting that could be informative for understanding the
direction of Zionism. The Palestinians we were in conversation with believed that a one-
state solution would be put an end to Zionism. However, being very conversant in the
operations of white supremacy, most of the delegates (and I) furiously opposed this
characterization. White supremacy in a U.S. context historically transmuted itself to
“appear” to maintain a majority (thereby fortifying systems of domination).
In Nazareth, we unexpectedly found ourselves embroiled in a combative
discussion on race in a dinner with Palestinian filmmaker Nizar Hassan. Blackness and
race as an operative framework was refuted by Nizar who adopted an old white
communist frame of “class analysis” divorced from intersectional applications of race.
368

Marc referenced 18
th
century chattel slavery to explain how white supremacy operates
against and thus transcends the logic of capitalism and class consciousness.
On the last night of the trip, right after Ahmad and I left to cross the Jordanian
border to catch our flight the next day, Israeli anti-Zionist and anti-police brutality
activist David Sheen visited delegates in their hotel lobby in Bethlehem to educate them
on the 48 Ethiopian community activism against police brutality and on the detention of
sub-Saharan refugee and migrant populations. He showed them videos of anti-police
brutality protests he documented, including a recent one in response to the police killing
of a young Ethiopian man. This led to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse initiating a
YouTube series in collaboration with David Sheen exploring the contours of Blackness in
48/67 titled “Behind Enemy Lines.”

369

5) Play as Power: Role of Affective ties, Black Joy and Art in Movement Building

“Minus the oppression, this shit (life) is fantastic”
-Tara Thompson

Figure 41: At Singer Cafe in Bethlehem, saying goodbye to Diana, who helped me weather the psychological blizzard
of an Israeli border crossing interrogation. Photo courtesy of Chris Hazou.

When we think of organizing work, the daily struggle to survive and challenge
systems of domination eclipses most others. Rarely do we study mechanisms for and
practices of joy; and the role that affective ties play in producing personal politics.
Hashtagged often but with scant analytic writing on it, #Blackjoy has been centered in
what some organizers like Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)
author Adrienne Maree Brown have called a “pleasure activism.”
From the first night, drinking “Diablo” in “East Jeru” and listening to Arabic
370

music and Juvenile’s “Back That Thang Up” with one of our delegation guides, Najwan,
we bonded with locals through practices of joy-making. Narrating stories of joy in
occupied Palestine added dimensions to understandings of resistance. When we visited
the arts-based community center, Shoruq in Dheisheh refugee camp; we were ushered
into a recording studio used by an all -female teenage rap group. Later, the youth at the
center taught delegates how to debkeh. Towards the end of the trip, delegates
incorporated the debkeh into the beginning of a solidarity flash mob we performed in
downtown Nazareth. A soundtrack of “trap music” and boisterous laughter punctuated
the trip. One of the running jokes, riffing off of #Blacklivesmatter and as a result of
protracted sleep deprivation, was the promotion of “Black Sleep Matters.” On a van ride
(where most of the jocular moments took place), Umi and Tef parodied an interview with
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, “explaining” the Black Sleep Matters movement’s “sleep in” and
how Obama would comment, “I too have children, and they sleep too.”
496

Another joke involved a contentious “Top 5” list. The classic NYC tradition of
assembling a “Top 5” list of the best rappers found its way onto our van early in the trip.
Outrage reverberated throughout every inch of the a snowed in hotel room in Bethlehem
when Marc not only left deceased West Coast rapper Tupac from his list but added insult
to injury proclaiming, “he wouldn’t even make it to my Top 20.” From that moment on,
delegates were suspicious of any of Marc’s attempts to qualify most anything. In
response to the collective opposition, that next day, Marc presented a compilation of “20
songs by rappers better than Tupac” he had spent the night before curating and pointed

496
I could imagine this would be great footage to incorporate
371

arguments he designed to counter our Top 5 embrace of Pac. To further protract this joke,
I requested that delegates compose their own “Top 5” list of memorable moments from
the trip.

Figure 42: #Blacksleepmatters headquarters/joy-making epicenter/our mobile sanctuary/the tour bus. Photo courtesy
of Chris Hazou.

Other “play as power” moments include the snowed in day in Bethlehem. 48/67 is
ill equipped to manage snowfall (as it so infrequently occurs), and thus, when it does
happen, roads close, making it impossible to travel. The snow started to fall on Orthodox
Christmas Eve. We joined local festivities in Nativity Square, stacking our cell phones in
an effort to stay connected to humans even in Wi-Fi hot zones as we sipped on mint tea.
Through empty Bethlehem streets, we sang protest songs in the middle of the night on
372

our journey back to the hotel as Christmas eve faded into Christmas.
497
Another aspect of
Black Joy I want to develop is the concept of inhabiting “active freedom.” At Campus in
Camps in Dheisheh refugee camp, Isshaq Al-Barbary exposed delegates to project’s
divergent framework on liberation. Campus in Camps is driven by the question, “what
happens if we structure social life around the refugee camp?” Once again, Al-Barbary’s
elaboration of Campus in Camps view on refugee camps as the “political exceptions”:
We don’t own the land, but we have a right to the land. What is private and what
is public? There is no such private or public on social or political level. What is
the alternative? I looked to our past. Our present is part of our past: Collectively
owned land. You only own it if you use it. This reflects so much what exists in the
camp. The camp is the common, extra-territorial.
498

Controversially, this conception of politics and liberation leads Campus and Camps to
oppose “right of return” that fetishes land ownership as symbolized by keys. It also
transforms the relationship they have to the land, instead of defining a liberated
community around “Palestine.” They seek to organize people around a historic
relationship with the Mediterranean Sea, and as such see themselves as “Mediterranean
peoples.” As the conversation deepened into philosophical questions of imagining
freedom; Tara punctured heady dialogue by declaring “I’m gonna tell y’all I feel mad
liberated now. I feel mad fucking liberated right now.”
499
The room collectively agreed.
We did feel mad liberated, at that moment. What does it mean for #Blacklivesmatter,
Ferguson/St. Louis and Dream Defender activists to share a “feeling” of “active freedom”
with Palestinian refugees in a camp in Bethlehem?

497
Also great footage.
498
Rostock, trip footage.
499
Ibid.
373

Figure 43: DDPalestine delegate femmes prep for protest with matte red lipstick application. Photo Courtesy of Chris
Hazou.

Lastly, the now viral video of our “flash mob” demonstration in solidarity with
Palestinians transported this euphoria into a square in downtown Nazareth. Directed and
choreographed by Patrisse, the flash mob was a product of one late night rehearsal and a
request from Najwan. Suited in our Mahmoud Darwish poetry sweaters (procured from
the museum in Ramallah) and with the femmes sporting matte red lipstick, we joined
hands in a circle in front of an oversized Christmas tree. Tef and Aja wrote bars and
poems that eve, while Charlene and Umi practiced harmonizing their rendition of anthem
374

“Ella’s Song” and all of us refreshed our debkeh timing.
500
Marc opened the
demonstration outlining the intent behind our delegation:
We came here to Palestine to stand in love and revolutionary struggle with our
brothers and sisters. We come to a land that has been stolen by greed, destroyed
by hate. We come here and we learn laws that have been co-signed in ink but
have been written in the blood of the innocent. stand by people who continue to
courageously struggle and resist the occupation; people who continue to dream
and fight for freedom. From Ferguson to Palestine, the struggle for freedom
continues.
We debkeh-ed to the tablah drumming of Steven’s 48-residing Palestinian friend
Hamoudi. Geared out in sweaters reading “Unapologetically Black” and “Dream
Defenders,” Charlene and Umi took the stage, powerfully crooning, "We who believe in
freedom cannot rest until it comes”—a refrain from “Ella’s Song” that soulfully
epitomized the mission and drive of the delegation. “We sit in a sea of settlements. Here
is a protest in a form of prayer,” testified Aja, “Watan bidoun shaab, shaab bidoun watan
(“A home/nation without a people, a people without a home/nation”). We survive in the
telling—unafraid—we survive in the telling. We survive.” Tara led us in a chant,
“Palestine to Ferguson: end the occupation. Ferguson to Palestine: we fight to free our
nation” that was followed by Najwan’s call and response “Falasteen, hurra hurra!
Ikhtilal burra, burra” (“Palestine, free, free. Occupation, out, out!”). We then add another
language to our polyglot protest, “viva, viva, Palestina.” 48 native Najwan orchestrates a
chant transition, “Black Lives Matter” punctured by aywah’s (yes’s). As if the chants
were inextricably interlinked in that moment, we continue to go back and forth between
“Falasteen, hurra hurra! Ikhtilal burra, burra” and “Black Lives Matter.”

500
Also incredible footage and pedagogical tool!
375

Upon our return, we uploaded the entirety of the single camera 9-minute video.
The Dream Defenders team circulated a Press Release announcing the release of the flash
mob video:
Representatives at the forefront of the movements for Black lives and racial
justice took a historic 10-day trip to Palestine to connect with activists living
under Israeli occupation and did a flash mob in Nazareth to show solidarity for the
Palestinian community.
The delegation of Black and Latino journalists, artists, musicians, and community
organizers from Ferguson, Missouri, Black Lives Matter, Black Youth Project
100, and Dream Defenders returned from a historic 10-day trip to the occupied
West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel.
Partly an organized action, but more so an organically emerging testimony to 9 days of
nonstop witnessing, this video titled “Solidarity Demonstration in Nazareth: Ferguson to
Palestine,” pedagogically embodies the essence of an engaged witness generative artifact.
6) Writings, Art and Sustained Connections (Friendships and Movementships)
Almost immediately after their arrival back in the states, Dream Defenders
organized a report back to their Miami, Florida community, featuring a chronological re-
telling of the trip connected by pictures, delegates’ reflections and political context.
Although Ahmad and I consensually agreed not to request or even implicitly pressure
delegates to write about their experiences, participants were so moved, they voluntarily
recounted their experiences in op-eds for the Huffington Post, Ebony, the Miami Herald,
The Source, Global Grind, Stop Being Famous, and other outlets. Kristian Davis Bailey
376

covered our trip for Ebony while we were still in 48/67, which triggered more coverage
before we even returned to US soil.
501
Interviewed by Colorlines Marc remarked:

501
Op-eds by delegates and media coverage of our trip:Media coverage: “Can We Dream
Together: Organizers, Activists, and Artists from Ferguson and the Dream Defenders Visit
Palestine—A Story in Photos and Tweets,” Ummah Wide, January 8, 2015,
https://ummahwide.com/can-we-dream-together-palestine-f6b5c6d5fb15
Kristian Davis Bailey, “Dream Defenders, Black Lives Matter & Ferguson Reps Take Historic
Trip to Palestine,” Ebony magazine, January 9, 2015, http://www.ebony.com/news-views/dream-
defenders-black-lives-matter-ferguson-reps-take-historic-trip-to-
palestine#axzz3OKz28GgeRamiz Parchment, “Ferguson Protesters Visit Palestine Intentions To
‘Build Relationships with Those on the Ground Leading the Fight for Liberation,” Inquisitr,
January 13, 2015, http://www.inquisitr.com/1752652/ferguson-protesters-palestine/
Moreh B.D. K., Reagan Ali, M.A. Hussein, “Ferguson Anti-Police Brutality Protesters Take
Historic Trip To Palestine,” Mint Press News, January 13, 2015,
http://www.mintpressnews.com/ferguson-anti-police-brutality-protesters-take-historic-trip-
palestine/200717/
Christina Coleman, “A Global Conversation: Freedom Fighters from Black Lives Matter, Dream
Defenders, & More Protest Occupation of Palestine with Solidarity Demonstration (VIDEO),”
Global Grind, Janaury 15, 2015, https://globalgrind.cassiuslife.com/4050056/freedom-fighters-
from-black-lives-matter-dream-defenders-protest-occupation-of-palestine-with-solidarity-
demonstration-video/Annie Robbins, “‘Protest in the form of a prayer’: Dream Defenders
demonstration in Nazareth makes connections from Ferguson to Palestine,” Mondoweiss, January
15, 2015, http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/demonstration-connections-palestine/
Julianne Hing, “Video: Black Lives Matter Delegation Visits Palestine,” Colorlines, January 16,
2015, http://www.colorlines.com/articles/video-black-lives-matter-delegation-visits-palestine
April Dawn, “Ferguson Activists Bring Solidarity to Palestine with Poetry & Song,” The Source,
January 16, 2015, http://thesource.com/2015/01/16/ferguson-activists-bring-solidarity-to-
palestine-similarities-between-palestine-ferguson-are-many/ Rania Khalek, “Watch: Ferguson
activists bring message of ‘love and struggle’ to Palestine,” The Electronic Intifada, January 16,
2015, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/watch-ferguson-activists-bring-message-
love-and-struggle-palestine
Marwa Abdulhai, “Dream Defenders: From Ferguson to Palestine, We Cannot Rest,” Muslim
Girl, January 17, 2015, http://muslimgirl.com/9592/dream-defenders-ferguson-to-palestine/
Queen Arsem-O’Malley, “From Ferguson To Palestine, The Struggle For Freedom Continues,”
{Young}ist, January 19, 2015, http://youngist.org/ferguson-palestine-struggle-for-freedom-
continues/#.WYIsXccSTX9
Adam Hudson, “How Subjected Bodies are Connecting the Struggle Against Collaborating
States,” Al-Akhbar English, January 24, 2015, http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/23374 Alex
Kane, “The growing ties between #BlackLivesMatter and Palestine,” Mondoweiss, January 26,
2015, http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/between-blacklivesmatter-palestine/ Heike Schotten, “All
Lives Matter: from Ferguson to Palestine,” Juan Cole: Informed Comment, January 27, 2017,
https://www.juancole.com/2015/01/matter-ferguson-palestine.html Heike Schotten, “Racism and
rhetoric, from Ferguson to Palestine,” Mondoweiss, January 28, 2015,
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/rhetoric-ferguson-palestine/
377

At the best and brightest moments of the freedom struggle, our people have
looked internationally to forge solidarity and seek justice…We found common

“Tara Thompson on Dream Defenders delegation to Palestine,” Sojouner Truth Radio, January
29, 2015, https://soundcloud.com/sojournertruthradio/1-29-15-tara-thompson-on-dream
“BHM: Faces from the New Civil Rights Movement – Ciara Taylor of Dream Defenders,”
AfroPunk, February 2, 2015, http://afropunk.com/2015/02/bhm-faces-from-the-new-civil-rights-
movement-ciara-taylor-of-dream-defenders/
Josh Odum, “The New Guard: The Impact Of Young Black Activists,” Generation Progress, July
17, 2015, http://genprogress.org/voices/2015/07/17/37790/the-new-guard-the-impact-of-young-
black-activists/

Op-eds and Organizational Statements:
“#DreamDefenders, #BlackLivesMatter & #Ferguson Reps Take Historic Trip to #Palestine,”
Hands Up United, January 9, 2015,
http://www.handsupunited.org/blog/2015/1/9/dreamdefenders-blacklivesmatter-ferguson-reps-
take-historic-trip-to-palestine
“From Ferguson to Palestine: Dream Defenders, BYP100, Black Lives Matter, and Ferguson
Activists Travel to Palestine,” Black Youth Project, January 12, 2015,
http://www.blackyouthproject.com/2015/01/from-ferguson-to-palestine-dream-defenders-
byp100-black-lives-matter-and-ferguson-activists-travel-to-palestine/
Ahmad Abuznaid, “It’s not just about breaking protocol,” Miami Herald, February 25,
2015, http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article11170541.htmlCherrell Brown,
“Solidarity from Ferguson to Palestine and Back,” Huffington Post, February 20, 2015,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cherrell-brown/solidarity-from-ferguson-_1_b_6715162.html
Charlene A. Carruthers, “21
st
Anniversary of the Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre: Hebron,” Black
Youth Project (originally published on Stop Being Famous), February 25, 2015,
http://blackyouthproject.com/21st-anniversary-of-the-ibrahimi-mosque-massacre-hebron/
Tef Poe, “From Palestine to Ferguson,” Riverfront Times, February 27, 2015,
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/musicblog/2015/02/27/from-palestine-to-ferguson Maytha
Alhassen, “Malcolm X, #BlackLivesMatter & the Middle East,” NewBlackMan (in Exile), March
17, 2017, http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2015/03/malcolm-x-blacklivesmatter-middle-
east.html
Aja Monet, “The Miseducation of Solidarity,” Ebony magazine, May 15, 2015,
http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/the-miseducation-of-solidarity-504
Philip Agnew (now Umi Selah), “A Direct Line Between Love and Hate
(Or: No, Mr. President, There's No Comparing Israel and the Civil Rights Movement,” Ebony
magazine, June 1, 2015, http://www.ebony.com/news-views/a-direct-line-between-love-and-hate-
or-no-mr-president-theres-no-comparing-israe#axzz3budr6CNa
Sandra Tamari and Tara Thompson, “From Ferguson to Palestine, We See Us,” Huffington Post,
October 16, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tara-thompson/from-ferguson-to-
palestine_b_8307832.html
Marc Lamont Hill, “Why Every Black Activist Should Stand With Rasmea Odeh,” Huffington
Post, October 13, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-lamont-hill/black-activist-should-
stand-with-rasmea-odeh_b_8288682.html

http://makheruspeaks.blogspot.com/2015/01/from-ferguson-to-palestine-solidarity.html

378

ground with organizers, activists, and everyday citizens who are dealing with
white supremacy, state violence and other forms of social injustice…By the end
of the trip blacks from the States were chanting “Filistine hurra, hurra!” and
Palestinians were chanting “Black lives matter!”
502

Since the delegation, Marc has traveled to 48/67 four times (and is planning more trips),
connecting with and interviewing the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem. I asked
him if and in what ways the trip influenced him to engage differently with the issue of
48/67 on media. He responded, “I understand the issue so many more levels. I can speak
with a different authority.” Marc continued, “Before I went, people (Zionists) would say,
‘if you just went there you'd understand’. having the ability to stop that silly argument
has been practically helpful.” As someone enlivened by details, I insisted on further
elaboration. Marc obliged:
I also understand the nuances of the place differently. For me, it was [about]
understanding what resistance looks like in everyday form. Two months ago
[September 2016] I was sitting at a cafe at via doloroso. The young people were
sitting on the steps of the church and other sites. Tourists would have to walk
around them step over them or ask them to move. All day long, they were
committed to not moving. It was minor form of resistance, but they were asserting
their sense of belonging in the place. At the same time (this was high holiday
season) police were stopping and searching them every 10 minutes, like
clockwork.
503

Other outcomes include speeches and lectures at universities across the country, poems
written by Aja Monet, the aforementioned video series produced by Patrisse Cullors and
David Sheen, and future trips.
That April, Aja Monet helped to organize a trip for members of the Shoruq hip-
hop group teenage girls (with rap coach Mohammad Azmi accompanying them) to visit

502
Julianne Hing, “'Black Lives Matter' Goes International,” Colorlines, January 30, 2103,
http://colorlines.com/archives/2015/01/black_lives_matter_goes_international.html
503
Marc Lamont Hill, interview with author, on Facebook Messanger, December 31, 2016.
379

NYC. I joined them for the entirety of their day in Harlem, my former place of residence.
That day, we walked across 125
th
street, ate at 116
th
’s famed soul food spot Amy Ruth,
and visited the Harriet Tubman statue (offering a mini-lecture in Arabic on Tubman’s
role in the history of the Black Freedom struggle). As night fell, we trekked westward
through Morningside Park to catch the tail end of “Pops’” weekly Sunday art-gathering.
A decade ago, Aja and I first met in passing at one of these gatherings that overflowed
with salmon croquette and poetry at legendary Last Poet Abiodun Oyewole’s (or “Pops”)
Harlem residence. The miniature sound system was out and djembe drumming greeted
us. We entered a space that miraculously transformed from sports viewing zone to
collaborative art-making sanctuary every Sunday. Mohammad tried to thaw the young
Shoruq women’s cold feet by stepping up to the plate—the center of the living room—
and spitting a few of his Arabic rap bars. Set to djembe drumming and guitar strumming,
the Shoruq girls eventually warmed up and shared verses. Abiodun responded to this
historic cultural exchange by reflecting on the intersections of the Black Freedom
struggle with Palestinian liberation.
504

504
I have great footage from this exchange!
380

Figure 44: The Last Poets' Abiodun Oyewole with Shoruq rap group and coach Mohammad in Harlem, NY. Photo by
author.

In the following days, we took them on the Staten Island South Ferry and they
closed their trip with their first international performance at a banquet in The Bowery.
Aja explained her motivation for taking the young ladies of Shoruq on the Ferry and
throughout NYC on the subway, “I wanted them to feel what mobility feels like.”
505
Aja
and teens continue to stay in touch; which inspired Aja to co-author a grant proposal with
Ahmad to return to Shoruq to lead arts-based educational workshops for the youth. Part

505
Aja Monet Bacquie, in conversation with author, May 2015.
381

of the work that engaged witness seeks to perform is to emphasize the two-way
exchange, and not just feature a solely American narrative of witness. The Shoruq girls’
trip challenged Aja to think deeper about political solidarity, which she explored in her
piece for Ebony Magazine, “The Miseducation of Solidarity.” In this May 15, 2015 op-
ed, Aja questions Lauryn Hill’s stated reasons for cancelling a previously scheduled
concert in Tel Aviv through the story of her engaged witness travel to Palestine:
I first met them this past January while on a delegation of several Black American
activists and organizers to Palestine. We were welcomed into their space and they
taught us dabke, holding our hands, patiently sharing culture. It has been quite a
marvel to witness my country through their eyes these past few days. To see the
way strangers, media and friends have treated the reality of the lives before them.
While showing these girls a bit of my city, I kept envisioning the immobilizing
soldiers, and searches, flashbacks to checkpoints in Ramallah instead this time
remixed to hard-earned visas for Palestinian refugees and the blue gold standard
of the American passport.
506

In a May 4, 2015 statement on her Facebook page, Hill explained that her original
intention for performing in Tel Aviv was conditioned on a show in Ramallah. She only
pulled out of the Tel Aviv show, she explained, because the concert in 67 was not
materializing.
507
BDS organizers have held a firm line on calling for cultural boycotts of
concerts in 48 (even if they plan on “balancing” their time in the region with a show in
67). In fact, Ahmad and I agreed to remove rapper Talib Kweli from our trip if he didn’t
cancel a scheduled show in Tel Aviv (who was on our initial list for delegates on the
original August 10, 2014 delegation). Eventually, after conversations with Ahmad, a

506
Aja Monet, “The Miseducation of Solidarity,” Ebony, May 15, 2015,
http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/the-miseducation-of-solidarity-
504#ixzz4kZbwmDzm .
507
Lauryn Hill, Facebook, May 4, 2015,
https://www.facebook.com/mslaurynhill/posts/1055564387804576 .
382

Palestinian rapper from the Lyd-based hip hop group DAM (which is in 48), and
receiving much opposition on Twitter, Kweli pulled out the summer 2014 festival he was
scheduled to perform at in Tel Aviv. Based his politics and previous public expressions
of support for Palestine, activists and fans were shocked by Kweli’s initial decision. After
all, Kweli with Yasiin Bey as Black Star performed at a NYC fundraiser hampton
organized to raise money for refugees in the Jenin refugee camp massacre in 2002. A
decade later, Kweli even shouted “Let’s get free just like the Palestinians!” at a 2012
concert in Los Angeles.
508

Defining radical solidarity towards justice as “righteous love” and eschewing
demands for reciprocity or alliances foundationally built on “reasoned hate,” Aja credits
instances of witnessing in Palestine (on our delegation) and through Shoruq girl’s
engaged witnessing eyes on their trip to NYC. for sharpening her vision on solidarity and
political analysis on the occupation of Palestine:
While visiting Palestine, I learned that Palestinians were not only in the midst of
an atrocious conflict with the Israeli State by way of settlers, displacement, and
discrimination but that in actuality what we were witnessing was indeed
occupation and in fact an open-air prison—a violation of many, if not all, human
rights.
The reason why I take such a strong position on Palestine is because I have
witnessed it for myself and I am reliving the witnessing through the eyes of three
young girls viscerally outraged by the State violence of America on Black bodies
as they learn of the militarized response in the Baltimore uprising. I watch one of
the girls take a few dollars out of her wallet from a given per diem, shocked by a
homeless man begging on a 6
th
Avenue street corner and I see the confusion and
frustration birth an understanding between us:
This is where we went wrong–

508
Sama’an Ashrawi, “Black Star: Palestinian Solidarity,” YouTube, September 24, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kscYyV2e2N8 .
383

this treasured secret small enuff
to fit the hole in our hearts,
we did not love our people more
than we hated our enemies…
You wanna know what Palestine taught me?
To feel, feel.
To feel closer to strangers than passports.
509

Figure 45 Aja Monet with Shoruq rap group on the eve of their performances in New York City. Photo by author.

509
Aja Monet, “The Miseducation of Solidarity,” Ebony, May 15, 2015,
http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/the-miseducation-of-solidarity-
504#ixzz4kZbwmDzm .
384

In New York, again, a year and half later (December 13, 2016), on a stage in a
small playhouse in downtown NYC, Aja Monet recited a poem, a generative artifact from
our delegation, as part of a production sponsored by Vagina Monologues and One Billion
Rising’s Eve Ensler. “The Giving Tree” is a detailed engaged witness testimony that
marries our delegation’s visits to Hebron and Sheikh Jarrah with imaginary-realities in
Galliee and Silwan. When she broaches Sheikh Jarrah, she mentions poet Mohammed El-
Kurdi by way of his grandmother,

Doors arrest the body, walls are everywhere. If her wrinkles
could speak, they’d say: Is there a country where humans will
find refuge? Her dimple would follow, Here

is my grandson, Muhammad, a poet. Please bring him.

On account of much serendipity, Mohammed is in the audience, hearing Aja’s poem for
the first time. Immediately after the show, Mohammed rushes to the stage, unwraps the
keffiyeh hanging from his neck and adorns Aja with it, as if anointing her title of
cherished witness.
A CBC staffers delegation recently returned from the West Bank, laying the
groundwork for a trip composed of their legislators’ future delegation to the region. The
delegations were and are being organized by New America Fellow Zaha Hassan, who
explained to me the role DDPalestine played in motivating this historic project (as this
will likely be the first time CBC visits the West Bank without including the requisite
“parity” visit of Israel since the 1979 trips).
Lastly, as it was always Ahmad’s vision to maintain the transnational relationship
between Dream Defenders and Palestine, multiple Dream Defenders delegations have
385

traveled to 48/67. They include Dream Defenders who did not attend the first trip,
national organizers from other movements, media influencers; and for the arts-based
workshop in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem in the summer of 2017, Aja Monet
and a crew of singers, rappers, and artists. These trips have fortified Dream Defenders’
commitment to Palestinian liberation—so much so, it (DDPalestine) has been designated
one of seven projects listed on the organization’s site. On the project’s web page,
movementship work and the power of engaged witness are credited for strengthening
Dream Defenders’ support for Palestinians “struggle for justice”:
Delegates have a chance to see the land and occupation up close, while engaging
in dialogue and relationship building with Palestinians on the ground engaged in
the struggle for justice. DDPalestine is a part of the resurgence of internationalism
within the US based movement for justice, especially inspired by the connections
of Black & Palestinian liberation. Historically this movement has existed for
decades, with no shortage of figures exchanging commitments of solidarity, and
here we are again, declaring that our liberation is tied together…One page and a
couple of paragraphs are not nearly enough, this is more of a quick shot of the
context, and we would suggest both reading several documented sources as well
as visiting Palestine for yourself.
510

As for myself, moved by the generative artifacts emerging from DDPalestine, I have been
in preliminary conversation with activists about organizing delegations to Palestine and
also organizing delegations of Afro-Palestinians and grassroots activists to travel to the
U.S. to meet with their Black diasporic counterparts. A little over a month after our
return, I presented preliminary findings on the legacy of the Black radical
transnationalism on Palestine for a presentation and interviews at Duke University’s “The
Legacy of Malcolm X: An Afro-American Visionary, Muslim Activist” conference in
February 2015 (on the 50
th
anniversary of Malcolm’s assassination). Initially, I had no

510
“DDPalestine,” Dream Defenders website, http://www.dreamdefenders.org/ddpalestine .
386

intention of speaking about the DDPalestine delegation. My talk for the conference, titled
“Islamic Humanism on Malcolm’s Pro-Palestine Politics,” was an earlier version of my
case study on Malcolm X’s engaged witness of Gaza and the generative textual artifacts it
yielded.
A couple of minutes before the start of the panel, I noticed the oft-referred to
“brainchild” of MLI (Muslim Leadership Initiative), former Muslim chaplain to Duke,
University of North Carolina (UNC) and North Carolina State University students, Imam
Abdullah Antepli. Imam Antepli approached the panelists to exchange salaams (Islamic
greetings). Knowing the impact of his political work on undermining Muslim American
organizing and support for BDS, I couldn’t summon a cordial response. I asked myself,
“What would Malcolm X do in this moment? How has studying his historical legacy
prepared me to act in this situation?” This line of questioning was clearly intensified by
the fact that I was presenting on Malcolm and the genealogy of his commitment towards
a free “Arab Palestine.” As we took our seats, I circulated a “survey” of sorts to my
fellow panelists: “Would you all have a problem if I publically shamed MLI?” The
options I gave them were: “Yes, No, Undecided.”
With the consent of the panel, I requested to go last so I could completely
overhaul my presentation. I created new slides, located our proposal to funders explaining
the historical precedence of Black American delegations to Palestine and the material
outcomes of witnessing. I revised my presentation so that it began by contextualizing the
relevance of Malcolm’s anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation politics to the current
Movement for Black Lives; which allowed me to present DDPalestine as part of this
387

continuum of Black radical engagement with Palestine initiated by Malcolm X. I
introduced my paper by couching our trip within a legacy of Black American radical
travel to Palestine, beginning with Malcolm X; and emphasized the historical irony that
the day our Black delegates landed in Ben Gurion airport, the MLI fellows also landed in
Tel Aviv. Since their delegation was sponsored by a Zionist organization, arriving into 48
through Tel Aviv was a risk they (and obviously not Ahmad or I) could afford. I
contrasted the intention of our trip with the goals of MLI’s partnership with a notoriously
avowed Zionist organization, invoking Sana Saeed’s characterization of their trip as part
of a “faithwashing” mission. Not captured in the video recording of the talk, but chiseled
into my mind, most of the audience’s eyes and mouths were fully agape. Later, I came to
learn that I was the first person to publically condemn MLI in front of the Imam. In
conversations after my disruption, students and faculty explained to me fissures and
heated tensions Antepli’s MLI organizing brought to the Muslim community in the
Research Triangle.
There was little question in my mind, even being fully mindful of the harassment
I would likely receive from Zionists should I explicitly condemn MLI, that I could pass
the opportunity to practice what historian Manning Marable called “living history.”
511

Lecturing on Malcolm’s radical support of Palestinian liberation cultivated through an
anti-colonial, anti-racist and Islamic humanist framework while ignoring the politics of a
“Muslim Zionist” leader, would be a profound betrayal of Malcolm’s legacy. To my
surprise, I was not harassed or trolled (as they say) online. More stunning, immediately

511
Manning Marable, “Living Black History: Resurrecting the African American Intellectual
Tradition,” Souls 6 (3-4), 2004.
388

after my presentation, I was approached by an editor for an academic press, gauging my
interest in converting this last chapter of my dissertation into a book.

389

EPILOGUE: WITNESSING A GENOCIDE IN REAL TIME
“We have become like travellers…with our suitcases always ready. We have learnt what
are the things that we really need and we have given the rest away. Since we feel death
coming from every corner we don’t keep extra food or money. We share it. We consume
less. We waste less. We even walk more to avoid wasting oil, we’re becoming friends of
nature. :)
Our relationship with each other has improved, we don’t worry about things we used to
worry about before.
I offer my house to others and I may have to leave it any minute, so I keep it clean and
neat.
I understand now why some people choose a life of travelling, because travelling makes
you see your goals in life more clearly. It makes the world smaller in your eyes, and
keeps you closer to God. We’ve learnt the hard way, it’s true, but we finally woke up to
what we didn’t see before. We are suffering oppression and poverty, but we’re trying to
change the world.
Wait for us, we are the Syrian people.”
-blog post translated from Arabic to English by Leila Nachawati, August 25,
2012
#

“As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution
irresistible.”
-Toni Cade Bambara
#

I dreamed this war would end before my dissertation was complete. But here I sit
revisiting this dissertation in revision writing mode, a day after a US strike on a Syrian air
base in Homs, a day after a chemical attack on Khanu Sheikhoun. In what world can just
bearing witness or engaged witnessing transformatively intervene, disrupt genocidal
madness? This project of exploring the insurgent power of engaged witness was largely
born from the life example of a journalist and friend, Anthony Shadid, who passed while
on assignment in Syria on February 16, 2012. In a January 2010 email exchange between
us, after Shadid shared details about the hotel bombing he experienced in Baghdad (he
had just returned to Iraq for the New York Times), I inquired: “Why do you go back?
390

What is the draw?” He responded, echoing the tenets of engaged witness: “The US
wrecked this place, and I feel like there's a responsibility to chronicle how it turns
out. Might sound a little self-important, but I do feel like the events that are going to
define this place and its people are only get started.”
512

What does it mean to be a witness to genocide and mass displacement in real
time, a genocide unfolding before our very eyes? Or as my friend, American studies
scholar Randa Tawil wondered about academic work while connected to behemoth peril,
“what of the absurdities of writing in this moment?” referring to the December 2016
siege on Aleppo. During this siege, children and their parents tweeted out “I am waiting
to die”-type posts reminiscent of the content produced by the #ifidieinpolicecustody
hashtag—a response to the murder of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015.
513
Finally, the
picture I posted two years prior (in the summer of 2014) of Kafranbel’s protest practice
of multi-lingual sign-making expressing solidarity with Black Americans over the murder
of Eric Garner, stating “we too know what it’s like to not be able to breathe,” began
circulating.
514
It was the first moment I watched friends across movements display
sentiments of disappointment with their own solidarity work. “We failed Aleppo” being
the conclusive analysis. I wondered, what took so long? Why did close to half a million
dead (mostly civilians) and half the country’s population—11 million displaced—need to

512
Anthony Shadid, email exchange with author. January 2010.
513
Erica K. Landau, “I’m waiting to die tonight,” Vice, December 12, 2016,
https://news.vice.com/story/i-am-waiting-to-die-syrians-in-aleppo-are-posting-final-goodbyes-
online ; Lauren Barbato, “The Powerful ‘If I Die in Police Custody’ Hashtag Was Inspired By
The Deaths Of Sandra Bland & Anthony Ware,” Bustle, July 20, 2015,
https://www.bustle.com/articles/98466-the-powerful-if-i-die-in-police-custody-hashtag-was-
inspired-by-the-deaths-of-sandra .
514
December 13, 2014.
391

happen before there was a desire to be “bound up” in the liberation of Syrians? Why was
their revolution not irresistible? I became preoccupied with the question: In what ways
have I failed as a cultural worker?
As the research and writing for the project commenced, I became distracted by the
azmeh (English would translate this Arabic word into “crisis,” stripping it of its intended
gravity) ancestral homeland. As much of the research for this dissertation was completed
during the unfolding of the azmeh in Syria, I continued the practice of delegations and
also continued to sharpen understandings of engaged witness on these trips—but I was
troubled by what followed the equal sign of my formula for an engaged witness justice:
what viable generative artifacts could come out my delegations to Turkey and Greece
towards justice for people from Syria? I even co-edited a volume of “eyewitness”
accounts and testimonies from organizers, activists, and participants from the “Arab”
uprisings. This still does not feel enough.
I also couldn’t get away from the ways the academic Left continued to fail
Syrians—especially those involved in the most radical projects (some anarchist) and
practices (critical migration practices) around commoning. History-writing doesn’t do the
best job of accounting for the enduring ways memory continues to live in our bodies. As I
write about commoning, the multi-sensory experience of daily trips to refugee camps
over-takes my body like an alien invasion. I am reminded of entering the tent belonging
to the Syrian Kurdish man, with a young Palestinian from Syria and an Iraqi. All of us in
a circle, sharing our voices through classic Arabic standards. Ali, who introduced himself
as “Ali Iraq” to me, melted me with his rendition of legendary Egyptian songstress Um
392

Kaltoum “Inta Omra.” I would argue he rivalled her—not that this is a competition. I’m
transported even thinking of the way his voice cascaded from his lips with the
smoothness of warm butter, and with the force of war drums. Time froze. The rough
ground, UNHCR tarps over a mix of beach sand, rocks and soil, a few yards from the
shore on the Greek Island of Chios—all that vaporized in between the rising notes. It was
a beautiful moment in such an ugly place.
At its most earnest this project hopes to offer new visions of liberation that arise
applying multi-vector historical lenses with polyglot gradience. Contrasted by the
academia’s rigid adherence to standards of Arabic transliteration, there are camps in
Greece where Iraqis, Syrians, Algerians, Palestinians and Lebanese are developing a new
colloquial Arabic coherency to communicate with each other (especially between regions
in these countries and across). An orchestra of Kurdish, Urdu, Pashto, French, Somali,
Amharic commingling, this was a newly emerging lingua franca in the camps.
It was a Palestinian refugee camp’s radical knowledge production project,
Campus in Camps, that re-framed the idea of solutions revolving around modern nation-
state systems. This was the generative artifact I carried from Bethlehem to Chios.
Additionally, these trips across pebbled Greek Island shores, through barbed-wire
captivity complexes, Athenian anarchist squares and witnessing the itinerant movements
of displaced peoples across persistently porous Syrian-Turkish border reconfigured my
relationship to the state as a vessel for freedom or dignity. These visions of a borderless
freedom, of a “return to the commons,” were initially sparked by my travels across the
post-uprisings mashriq and maghreb (MM) in the summer of 2011. Tunisian youth
393

created food banks for Libyan border crossers. Egyptian “revolution” activists joined
their compatriots in Libya. I witnessed how the fall of Qaddafi destabilized Mali’s fragile
tribal power networks. Late night shisha sessions in Hamra, Beirut were spent with
Bahraini activists and Palestinian and Syrian refugee workers, trying to assess the safety
of Shi’a and Sunni friends meeting publicly during heightened sectarian tensions. We
were already living a borderless life. It just produced violent results in its attempts to re-
entrench monocultural domination.
Perhaps freedom is not a destination. Perhaps freedom exists in the practice of
friendship and artistic production; as vessels and containers for joy-making. Friendship
and artistic production, where we liberate from self-alienation and the alienation of
creation allows us to draw closer to realizing the beloved community that rests on
grounds of the commons. And maybe in the transit, the traveling like the landless,
mindful “Syrian traveller,” the transgressing of arbitrary man-made national borders, that
we can find possibilities for embodying a freedom electrified by joy.
I don’t know who will read this or what they will get out of it. I just hope there is
some inspiration to think a little bit differently about history, Arabic, race, solidarity and
freedom and explore the radical power embedded in engaged witnessing, friendship and
travel.

394

A final testimony

She projects dreams into seven heaven
Hoping it will rain freedom
washing dantes and descrates
in the sewer of colonial histories
hoping we forget the Human
and remember the
Breath
remember our dialectics
sacred syncretisms
metaphysical in productive tension
What is this strange language
That ends a thought with punctuation
Forsakes the waw

What is this practice
That cripples spine
To mimic
Linear narratives
protract and replenish
disciplining systems of domination
where predators are promoted
pillagers are celebrated
What is this document
That demands
Coherency
Congruence
Critique
Conclusions
Consistent tenses
Conjugated agreements
Citation
polished paradoxes,
as questions
remembrance past the point of nostalgia,
prayer,
She lives in the crater of supplicating hands

You wheat toasted by a summer sun
You the smell that rises from the ground after the rain
You twig on leaning branch
395

You gait balanced by swinging hips
You drenched in infinite beauty
You the light from dawn breaking
You fertile garden
You with a hamza ending
You with clinging finger cymbal for heartbeat
You dance of the ancestors
Arequibe
You that evades/defies naming conventions or Bedouin cosmologies
You who could only be their misa
remember who you are past the point of nostalgia
Rain freedom
Rain freedom
Rain free from him.

She pleads with the ancestors in the sky
“Be my witnesses
Tell
what the first eye beholds”

396

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Government Documents
Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice (listed by numerical file
number)
100-399321 Malcolm X Little
100-441765 Muslim Mosque, Incorporated (MMI)
100-442735 Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU)

ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS CONSULTED

Aliya Hassen Papers, Michigan Historical Collections Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services record