i am almost done with this. i have to read the introduction and epilogue. i have read through the main part of the book.my favorite chapter is chapter ten( called satan) which goes into the beliefs of the nation of islam(yakub and the creation of white people) i like alex haley as a writer because he's direct and not poetic. a lot of white writers are too poetic and like to sniff their own fartsi also like the part where he talks about his trip to mecca and how seeing white muslims changed his view of white people. It shows how deluded he was thinking that arabs and muslims in general were non-racist. if black africans flooded saudi arabia arabs would become racist just like white peoplemalcolm x was also inconsistent and hypocritcal. he was whining about white people stripping the black man of his culture while he is for stripping white people of their culture by converting them to islam. Converting white people to islam would make them culturally arab he would whine about the bad things white christians did while ignoring all the bad stuff muslims did(arab slave trade for example).he would whine about christians calling non-christians pagan while muslims call non-muslims kaffirs
the black islam thing is interesting
>>25625181my favorite chapter is the saved chapter, where he starts self-developing in prison through his reading of literature and taking courses. And you're right about his hypocrisy, I think it's more out of ignorance more than anything. Having lived in the middle east as a black person, the arabs are racist as hell, and the whole Islam being the black man's religion thing fails knowing that Muhammed was pale skinned with a reddish tinge to his hair. Not only that, but complaining about slavery and all that in America while praising Saudi Arabia, which only banned Slavery in 1962, two years before his Hajj, is very stupid. Having said that, Malcolm X's life was very interesting and it's nice to see he turned it around, he fell into a cult basically and switched it with a more mainstream Islam (but which still had cult-like tendencies itself). This is one of my favorite autobiographies.
>>25625181I liked the book, but not for the reasons other people do. His grievances with white America are reasonable to the same extent an Irish man is allowed to have his grievances with britain. he is completely dead wrong about islam though
>>25625181>>25625181I'm more interested in the esoteric splintering that NOI went through after Malcom X's assassination. Whatever Clarence 13X was on, that's where you see the movement being taken in some truly radical directions.
>>25625181Its a pretty entertaining read. I am unsure how accurate it is, Haley is a known liar making up everything in ROOTS then in Malcolm's bio he made upnhis beef with King.Brother Malcolm's is best enjoyed through his speeches.I agree with people here about Saudi and I am curious how his views would have changed if mossad/CIA didnt Kirk him.
>>25627282i think he still hated white people after returning to mecca. he liked white people in so far as they weren't themselves. he liked white people who were culturally non-white.he still had a problem with white people who were culturally white
None of this would happen if we lived under buddhistic-autocracy or a daoist one.
>>25627425returning from mecca*
>>25627417i read this 5 years agomichael muhammad knight is a white sunni muslim who writes books about islam
>>25627417father allah(clarence 13x) became less radical later on and didn't hate white people to the same extent as the nation of islamhe was pro-vietnam war he held conservative positions later on in his life that 5 percenters like to overlook
>>25627395fair
>>25627425honestly idk, it's hard for me to see what his thoughts and positions after mecca because he didn't have that long a life afterwards. he definitely had more evolving to do. In his book, he talks about the realization that his thoughts that all the interactions he had with whites were bad was incorrect and he had overlooked all the times he got treated with kindness. Plus he read the Greeks (unironically).
>>25625181Keep in mind Malcolm X was only 39 when he died and he grew up in poverty in a pre-internet era, so he had little access to information, but he was obviously very smart and willing to update his beliefs. I think if he were alive today, he would have at least considered all the flaws you're ascribing to him regarding arabs and islam.
>>25625181If you like Haley then you absolutely need to read Roots, its a great epic.
>>25626919It was created by a half Irish half native guy who had a serious substance abuse problem and larped as an Afghan.Nation of Islam is Wakanda of the time.
>>25627433Surely none of this would have happened if you were the supreme dictator of earth :)
>>25628457also fair
>>25625181>>25628457I get the unironic sense that Malcolm would have become Ghaddafi’s greatest fanboy and that had he lived past 1965, he would have steered Black Power far more towards Lybian-type Third Internationalism than the mostly Maoist direction it took under the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army with his personality cult alone.
>>25628717What Wallace D Ford was and his reasons for inventing the NOI will always remain a mystery that brings up more contradictions than answers. Best I can gather is he realized the black population of Detroit was easy pickings and that mixing the Moorish Science Temple (itself an Afrocentric mix of AMORC and other Masonic-adjacent and New Thought ideas) with even more fringe theosophical factors was easy money. I’ve seen a lot of people claiming he was actually Ahmadi, but aside from being a modern offshoot of Islam, it really doesn’t share a lot doctrinally with the NOI.
