Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello everyone. This is your host, Roshan Iqbal, and you're listening to History Speaks. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome today's guest, Dr. Martin Vin.
From the very first time I met him, what has stood out most is his humility, his gentle manner, and his brilliant mind, though he never calls attention to it.
Martin is the son of refugees from the Vietnam War and was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He studied history and religion at the University of Virginia, earned a master's at Harvard Divinity School, and went to complete a joint PhD in Middle Eastern Studies and History at Harvard.
But of all his accomplishments, the one he treasures most is his loving partnership with his wife and and the joy of raising their bride and wonderful daughter together.
He teaches at Fairfield University in the Religious Studies department. He's a leading scholar in Muslim theology and Islamic studies, working at the intersection of ethics, Quranic studies and race and religion. His most recent book, Modern Muslim Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination, offers a contemporary vision of theology rooted in the practice of religious imagination.
Beyond his scholarship, Martin is generous, thoughtful and deeply committed to shaping conversations that matter. I'm thrilled to have him on the podcast with us today, and I cannot wait to dive into our discussion.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Oh, thank you. I'm looking forward for the forthcoming conversation.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Before we begin, Martin and I want to acknowledge the long and ongoing theft of Black knowledge production, the ways black intellectual, artistic and spiritual labor have been extracted, appropriated and re articulated without proper recognition, and explain why we feel justified in speaking about Malcolm X. Though we are not black, we also recognize how non black people often consume and reframe black thought and art. In what follows, Martin and I, as Brown people, seek to learn from and speak about Malcolm X not as appropriation, but in spirit of solidarity and accountability.
When we talk about Malcolm X, a man at the crossroads of race, religion and revolution, we step into a conversation that's part of the black intellectual and spiritual tradition.
That means naming a history too often left unspoken the long story of how black art, thought and creativity have been taken, repackaged and celebrated, but without the people who created them as an example. And it's kind of well known, but it bears repeating. Take jazz. Born in black neighborhoods of New Orleans in the early 1900s, artists like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington built something entirely new.
Improvisational, rhythmic, joyful and painful all at the same time.
Yet white musicians like Paul Whiteman and Benny Goodman were crowned the King of Jazz performing at Carnegie hall, while the black innovators who made jazz possible were often Barred from such status a few decades later, rock and roll followed a similar pattern. Black artists like Big Mama Thornton, Chuck Berry and Little Richard created the foundation. Big Mama Thornton recorded hound dog in 1952, full of spirit and power. Then Elvis Presley re recorded it in 1956 and became the global king of rock and roll. The music, the rhythm, the swagger, it all came from black creativity. But while the industry celebrated a white face today, debates over artists like Iggy Azela and Post Malone remind us that appropriation can mean detaching art from its history, the history that gave it power.
We start here to show what it means to enter someone else's story. Martin and I are not black. We are brown and Muslim. But Malcolm FX offers a bridge.
Why do we feel justified in speaking about him?
Because Malcolm was Muslim and one of his most transformative insights was about connection, linking the local and the global. Seeing the struggle of black Americans as the part of global fight against oppression, this vision resonates for Martin and I. We have roots in the global south, shaped by histories of colonialism and migration. In Malcolm's move from nationalism to internationalism, we find a bridge connecting us.
In his final years, Malcolm was building something larger than a single nation or race. A moral and political community grounded in faith and justice, seeking the oppressed of every color as part of one global struggle. His Islam was expansive, his politics planetary. So when we speak about Malcolm X, we do so with reverence and awareness. We're not speaking for him or for the black experience.
We speak with him as fellow Muslims, as people shaped by the global south and as admirers of someone who refused to separate the spiritual from the political or the personal from the universal. Martel and I also want to hold the Muslim community accountable for the racism. African American Muslims face a double burden. First from the broader culture, then within the Muslim community itself.
I'm deeply blessed to belong to an African American mosque I love. Yet I remain one of the few non black people there. A reminder of how much work remains.
That was a long preamble, but I felt it important to provide this context. So now to our conversation.
Martin, walk us through this idea. Your title is called Imagining the Muslim Malcolm X. It's evocative and inviting. Can you explain what you mean by this title and what were you envisioning with these words?
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely.
When I say Imagining the Muslim Malcolm, I see in Malcolm something vital, something important, something present, speaking to our times now. And so to walk us through those words, Imagining the Muslim Malcolm X, let me go in reverse and Start with Malcolm himself. I mean, he's as significant as ever, right? We are living in a time where race remains a dilemma, of an unfolding form of structural oppression that we haven't been able to root out. And if you think back to the resurgence of Black Lives Matter into American consciousness back in 2020 with George Floyd, all of a sudden, we're hearing Malcolm all over again. He is filling our social media feeds. His quotes, his speeches, video eclipse are everywhere.
And we also see the ways that various folks are claiming him, drawing upon him. You see people committed to revolutionary politics, to Marxism and socialism, Pan Africanism, Black nationalism, all trying to say, this is what Malcolm does for our causes, for the work that we're trying to do. All of that is good. It's important, right? And it's something that I would like to see the Muslim community be in conversation with, and it's beginning to move that way. But I wanted to try to center Malcolm as a Muslim voice, right? Which gets me to that kind of other element of the title, Imagining the Muslim Malcolm. And I want to think, what does Malcolm show us about the Islamic tradition? He is part of that tradition, part of our community. He has contributed. He is both a voice and a paradigm for us to follow. And so I want to be able to say Malcolm becomes a window for us into better understanding our own faith tradition.
And then this imagining. I don't want us to think that I'm trying to do some sort of imaginary exercise. This isn't about fancy or fantasy. This is about getting at something real, something true.
The imagination is actually this very critical element, a human faculty that God has given us. It allows us to explore the work of theology itself, of trying to understand what is our responsibility to the world and to God. And so I see Malcolm X as a guide in a sense, that he can helped lead us to what I see as the heart of Islamic theology. And what does that heart look like? If you go back to the Quran, it repeats it time and time again that what is it that the believer needs? They need to have faith, and they need righteous works. And I see Malcolm really carrying that out in his own life and continuing to exemplify that in the many years since his demise.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: You know, hearing you speak about how imagination is a critical faculty for us to understand theology, it just, like lifts my heart so much, I feel like we could stop here. It's so beautiful. But, you know, for the audience, I will continue with the podcast.
So you also use the term theology, and by your own accounts, your work has turned more concretely towards theology. Can you say more about how you're using it, understanding it? What does it mean for you to do theology as an academic scholar of Islamic studies?
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Sure. I think there's some several points I would like to hit in thinking about theology, explaining what I mean by theology, on the one hand, right. I am an academic in the Euro American academy, and theology represents a scholarly discipline, a way of understanding doctrine and belief, how that functions in the lives of people of faith, how communities understand the nature of God. And what's interesting is that if you look at the history of universities and colleges, theology was there in the beginning. If you look back at the history of institutions, right. Many of these august and revere institutions have roots as seminaries. And yet today, when you look spatially, geographically, at where these universities are now, theology may still exist. We have divinity schools, we have places like seminaries, but oftentimes they've been pushed to the literal margins of campus. You see this evident at places like Harvard and at Yale. And you also see it in the history of many universities that started off with religious affiliation and a commitment to theological thinking, and then all of a sudden, that being either sublimated or set aside altogether. And so for me, I want to kind of bring theology back into the discourse. And it, of course, has remained and it's very vibrant within Christian theological circles. But what do Muslims have to say?
And I would argue that Islamically, theology has always been a pillar of thought, kind of a central tenant or not tenet, but maybe an enterprise intellectual endeavor. But I think for many Muslims, we think of theology as a highly scholastic discipline, that it's rational, it's committed to argumentation, polemics, apologetics. It doesn't seem to have any sort of vitality. It doesn't animate our lives of faith.
But in my view, what is theology really about? It's about talking to God. I mean, the word theology literally means speech about God, understanding what do we know about him. But I like to frame it from, you know, the Quran advantage is that according to Islam, God has spoken. Revelation is God speaking to us, addressing us, addressing us through nature and creation, addressing us through the Quran itself and the Quran's eternal, that it's still speaking to us now. And as Muslims, we ought to be responding to it. And so I see theology as how do we respond to the call of God to that? You know what I said earlier about faith and righteous works? How are we actually doing it? Theology is our attempt to live it in our everyday lives.
And so to Bring this all together.
As a person, that is an academic, a Muslim in the academy, I want to create a space where Muslims can be unapologetically Muslim, to actually wrestle with the dilemmas of the world, the catastrophes and crisis we face from a vantage of commitment. Just as Christian theologians are articulating beautiful ways of understanding the world. I would love to see more Muslims do that. I saw Malcolm doing that. So that's why I think theology is so significant.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah. When I was like sort of listening to you in the writings that I've read of yours, I really love the move you're trying to make from a scholastic understanding of theology to theology as a pillar of thought or part of our lived experience.
Like you say, theology as a conversation with God, for God and with people.
Given what you've described, my next question would be, how did you come to this particular or new focus on theology?
Perhaps you could also say something about your book, Modern Muslim Theology, since that is where you first take up Malcolm X as a Muslim thinker.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Sure. With modern Muslim theology, I was trying to do many things, but I'll just try to narrow it down to two major movements. One is that I'm trying to create space, foster a field itself for Muslims who want to be able to articulate critical discourse on theology. To do so. Right. To do so in the confines that we operate and to kind of create a language, a way to reconceptualizing what theology is that is more accessible. And I think this gets to the other aspect is that theology, yes, is about, you know, responding to God, but it is not the domain exclusively held by so called theologians. Part of my argument is that we are all theologians. We're all struggling to figure out how to live our response. And it is not something that is insurmountable. It will take a lifetime of kind of training, expertise to achieve. Right. Our whole lines are an attempt to kind of become better people of faith. That theology asks us to, of course, use our reason, but to also draw upon our imaginations, to use our creativity. That it's also, yes, of course, about thought and principles and belief. But then how do we practice that? How do we bring that into the world? How do we affect the relationships all around us? And then maybe the last thing I'll say is that modern Muslim theology was really trying to say that if you want to think about what theology is, it's ultimately a kind of ethics about trying to how are you going to be in the world at the same time, oriented and responding to God all at Once.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: I mean, that was the aspect that I kind of really found moving and intellectually robust.
My next question is going to be a little bit more narrow and we are going to move more towards your thinking about Malcolm X. But I thought before we dive into Malcolm X as a thinker and how you have thought about his work, I wanted to give the listeners a quick snapshot shot of his life, just enough to set the stage so that the sort of broader outlines of his life are fresh in everyone's mind.
Malcolm was born on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the fourth of seven children. His father, Earl Little, was a Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Gravy's black nationalist movement. And his mother, Louise, a woman from the islands of Granada, instilled in her children a deep sense of black pride, self reliance and Pan African consciousness, which this is something we'll say a little bit more about later in Malcolm's life. Tragedy struck early. He was 6 when his father died under suspicious circumstances. Officially it was called a streetcar accident, but likely at the hands of white supremacists. Later, his mother was institutionalized when he was 13 and the children were placed in foster care.
And though the siblings were separated, they worked really hard to stay in touch. In his mid teens, Malcolm moved to Boston to live with his half sister, Ella Little Collins. Around the age of 15, she gave him a stable home, shaping him in ways that stayed with him his whole Life.
At about 17 or 18, Malcolm moved to Harlem, New York. He got involved in street life, hustling and petty crime, a period he later reflected on as part of his transformation.
He was incarcerated at around the age of 20 for burglary, and it was in prison that he embraced the Nation of Islam, educated himself and developed his vision for black liberation.
After his release, he became a prominent minister and spokesperson for the Nation of Islam.
In 1958, at age 32, he married Betty Shahbaz. They had six daughters. And after his assassination on February 21, 1965, at age 39, she dedicated herself to preserving his legacy.
In April 1964, at the age of 38, Malcolm undertook the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. The journey reshaped his understanding of Islam, race and global solidarity, showing him a vision of freedom that connected the struggles of black Americans to a worldwide fight for justice.
Even though his life was tragically shot, it was incredibly impactful. From Omaha to Boston, Harlem to Mecca and his travels across Africa, Malcolm's journey was marked by intellectual rigor, spiritual transformation and deep relationships, especially with the remarkable Women who supported, challenged, and inspired him.
So with the short sort of introduction to Malcolm's life, really touching on the main points, Martin, can you say more about how Malcolm X figured into modern Muslim theology? Why Malcolm, of all figures and thinkers you could have drawn upon?
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Oh, certainly.
And in many ways, what you just provided is a fantastic overview of the main points, highlights of his life, the stages that he kind of goes through.
What I was trying to do with modern Muslim theology is to enter him into how we can conceive them as part of the Islamic tradition. When people think of theology, right, what do we do? We tend to draw upon these intellectual luminaries in Christian theology. Names like Augustine and Aquinas and Karl Barth will be invoked in Muslim theology. You might hear about the Prophet Muhammad. You might hear about Ghazali or. Ghazali, yes. Or Mohammed Iqbal.
But then Malcolm rarely figures as one of those theological voices. And yet my contention is he offers us quite a bit.
And I think what's also compelling about him is that he's someone who's part of our living memory. He is still kind of within arm's reach.
That time is increasing, of course, but he's somewhat more tangible, somewhat more relatable that the struggles that he's fighting against we're still struggling against right now. And so I wanted to be able to say, here's someone who's coming from the United States struggling against forms of structural oppression that we still have to kind of confront. And so what I did is I tried to retell his life, not to recast it, but to try to focus on faith. What does it look like to understand Malcolm's life from that faith vantage, that his faith religiosity has always been something of concern, maybe because of how he was being raised by his parents when he has this kind of coming to God moment, so to speak, in prison. His Hajj pilgrimage religion is always there.
And what I tried to do is show that even though if you look at Malcolm's life from that vantage of faith, it is never divorced, never separated, but actually deeply intertwined with his struggle for justice, that these two things go hand in hand for him.
How I close the book was actually to say, well, let's actually look at his life of prayer.
This gets very little attention, but it actually has a fairly significant role within the autobiography. One of the things I always try to draw out and something I tried to spend some time on in modern Muslim theology was this quote that he has. He actually says that the hardest test he Ever faced was prayer, which to me is a really striking claim.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Because think about everything he went through. I mean, he's racism.
Yeah. He's losing his parents. He is thrown into the development of mass incarceration in this country, facing that racism, the scandal, the betrayal he feels with the Nation of Islam. And yet, near the end of his life, as he's relating a story to Alex Haley and they're drafting the autobiography together, he actually claims that no prayer was his greatest test.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: That's amazing. Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: And it's not even the prayer that he's trying to learn as he goes on Hajj. This is actually the prayer that he's doing in prison that he's learned about the Nation of Islam. He's in communication with Elijah Muhammad, learning about the teachings of the Nation, and it's lighting his mind on fire. Right. You can see it lighting up, and he's on board. But this is kind of like a theoretical agreement that the next step for him was, well, wait, this faith also entails an embodied aspect. It requires me to pray. And he describes how difficult it was to fall to his knees to actually open himself up to that humbling position of prayer.
And so that, to me. Right. Is worth exploring. And then, of course, well, what is his struggle with salah, with the obligatory prayer that you find in Islam, and his struggles on Hajj? What do these all reflect? And all these things shouldn't be seen as somehow separate and distinct from the struggle for justice, that this is also part and parcel of the righteous works that he's doing.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: I love the connection you made between prayer and social justice and how we tend to often think of them as something separate, especially because we live in late stage capitalism. Secularity is so profoundly everywhere that we tend to make fun of these things. But I think that these things are connected and the connection should be looked at. And it'll only enrich us if we were to pay a little bit more attention.
I will also say that I still, but not so much now, always struggled with prayer. And it is only recently that the postures of prayer have started to mean something so profoundly beautiful to me. And they really have started to sustain something inside of me. So it takes a while to come to that place when the posture of prayer is something that is enriching.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: So with this important change in mind, perhaps you can speak to us about how Malcolm continues to be relevant to your work now. I mean, you wrote a book. So what, like, how come you're still sort of thinking about him and what are you working on in respect to Malcolm now? And what new directions are you exploring?
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I should maybe go back a bit because I remember as I finished Modern Muslim Theology, I had engaged with Malcolm in a way that I thought was worthwhile. But I kind of told myself maybe I need to move on and explore other conversation partners, other theological voices that I could draw upon.
But there's something about Malcolm that I couldn't shake. I kept going back to him. And of course, this year, 2025 is the 100th kind of anniversary of his life that had he lived. Because of that, there has been a whole series of symposiums, workshops, gatherings, conferences, right in honor of Malcolm. I've been blessed to kind of particip in many of these convenings. And it got me to revisit Malcolm in really rich and unexpected ways. And so that's kind of led to two projects. One was already in progress. I had envisioned a follow up to Modern Muslim Theology. I wanted to zero in on particular forms of structural oppression that I felt come out of my own family narrative that I see as persistent within our context now, that is structural racism and mass displacement. And I wanted to create a book that would try to do a bit of theodicy, help us explain and understand from a Muslim vantage point how can we grapple with these dilemmas and then also offer a form of ethical response. And of course, Malcolm appears in that way.
So even though the arc of his life, all its various stages become places where we can actually try to understand these elements of theodicy and ethics. Right. You can go back to his early life, that his movement from city to city from when he moves from Omaha, Nebraska, then to Milwaukee, then to Michigan, this is part of the great migration. He ends up in Boston and then in Harlem, that he, along with millions of other African Americans are moving northwards looking for different opportunities. And these opportunities are oftentimes stymied. It's not what is expected. This is part of the institutional racism that is kind of adapting to this new social reality that is unfolding in the us you can look at his incarceration, the limits, challenges and opportunities that he discovers there.
And I tried to frame this, at least in this first book about theodicy.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Could you define theodicy for the listeners?
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah. Theodicy is trying to justify. How do we justify the existence of evil if we believe in an all powerful God, an all good God.
And so within Islam, where we maintain that God is good and all powerful evil exists, what does Islam have to Say about this? How does it kind of square this dilemma?
And I tried to turn to narratives in the scripture, in the Quran to find resources, and I, for me, one of the most prominent examples is actually the story of Moses and Pharaoh.
And when I look at Malcolm's life, the things that I just kind of outlined, I see the house of Pharaoh, that institutional racism coming down on Malcolm, affecting him in various ways at the same time. This isn't the end of Malcolm's story, right? He goes through all these things. He's being subjected to all sorts of barriers, all sorts of disadvantages, prejudices, and yet he emerges out of his carceral state, right, with this prophetic mentality that he embraces the model of the prophets that Moses, right? Here's this figure who is raised in the house of Pharaoh. His foster father is Pharaoh himself, able to leave that house, hear the call of God, and then fight for the liberation of his people, to end their enslavement. And what does Malcolm do? He leaves prison, and he calls out the injustices he sees in white America and tries to argue for the 22 million African Americans, for their dignity, for their liberation right from their situation, which is still ongoing.
And so I tried to, at least in this book, work this out. It's a project that I'm still mapping. But because of this 100th anniversary of Malcolm, I've also started writing a new project called Atheology of Malcolm X. It's tentative, but it's my attempt to actually look at major concepts, theological categories that we have in our Islamic tradition and see the ways that Malcolm, in his words, or perhaps in the deeds, the undertakings, the endeavors that he pours himself into, exemplify some of these ideas.
For example, there is a strong emphasis on building of community, on brotherhood.
And I see that as notions of ummah, of community, of iqwa, of brethrenship.
Malcolm's a martyr. He's a shaheed. How does that look? Right, from kind of Muslim theological perspectives, there's a notion of the gharib, the stranger. We have prophetic sayings talking about how Islam began as a stranger and shall return to a stranger, blessedness for the strangers itself, and that we should be in this world, right? Like a stranger traveler, someone passing along their way. Well, Malcolm is both the traveler and the stranger. To be an African American is to be someone on the margins of society, right? The great migration experience itself is kind of the embrace of deliberate estrangement, to move to new environments, to kind of put themselves in these vulnerable positions. And rather than this being purely kind of a position of constant vulnerability, Islam calls us to that. And are there ways to try to read these elements of Malcolm's experience and these kind of concepts in Islamic theology as consonant, as converging in ways that might inform how we today might approach our own relationship with God, our own kind of theology?
Both of these projects are still in development and I'm hoping to kind of bring them to a close in the months ahead.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: I love the parallels that you drew between Moses and Malcolm and then the house of Pharaoh and structural injustice in the US that was like, really, you know, the connections are kind of beautiful in there.
As you were talking about, you know, the aspects of Malcolm's life that are relevant to your work, I wanted to shed a little bit of light on the people who shaped Malcolm's thought.
And I think it's really important to pause and highlight the woman who made him who he was, both family and not.
We often think of Malcolm X as the singular self made figure, but in truth, his journey was held up at every step by a woman's strength, care and conviction.
So let's start with Malcolm's mother, Louis Little. She was a powerful influence. Both she and his father, Earl Little, were gravyites, followers of Marcus Gravy Pan African movement in the 1920s and 30s which championed black pride, self reliance and the unity of the African diaspora. You can really see the imprint of that ideology in Malcolm's later global vision. Louise herself was from Granada and she raised her children on Gravy's ideas of independence and dignity.
Even before Islam entered his life, that sense of black internationalism was already in his bones.
Take his older sister, Ella Little Collins. She played a truly pivotal role in his life. When Malcolm was 13, after his mother was institutionalized and he was placed in foster care, it was Ella who took him in and gave him a home in Boston. She believed in him when the system had written him off. Later, when he decided to make the pilgrimage to Makkah, she gave him the money that she had been saving for her own hajj so that he could go. That trip, of course, transformed his worldview, his understanding of Islam, race and the human community.
Ella Collins then is a very powerful example of the woman who supported him throughout his life.
And then there's Dr. Betty Shehbaz, his wife. Another extraordinary woman. Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, when Betty was 38 years old and still pregnant with twins.
They would be their fifth and sixth daughters. Betty converted to Islam because of him. Yes, but she was also a moral anchor and an intellectual force in her own right, as her life after his death has proved. She raised six daughters and kept his legacy alive and then beyond his family. When Malcolm began traveling, especially after Hajj, he met so many women who shaped his global consciousness and affirmed his growing sense of Pan Africanism. In Ghana, he connected with Maya Angelou, who was living there at the time, and part of a remarkable circle of African American expatriates that included Julian Mayfield and Shirley Graham Du Bois, the widow of W.E.B. du Bois. There were also younger black scholars like Sylvia Bone and Alice Windham, who deeply admired his emerging global vision, this idea that the struggle for racial justice in America was inseparable from the liberation of colonized people worldwide. And then there was the Queen Mother, Audley Moore, an older activist whose politics traced back to Marcus Gravy's movement and who often referred to Malcolm as one of her sons. These women, in different ways, expanded his sense of solidarity, helping him see black freedom struggle not just as an American project, but as a global one.
So when we think about Malcolm X, I think we have to remember he wasn't just a man transformed by struggle. He was also transformed through relationships. His spiritual and political awakening was braided together with the lives of women who loved him, challenged him, and kept his story alive long after he was gone.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe I can just kind of build on that because it's inspiring A lot of other references here on the front of his mother, Louise little.
Historian Eric McDuffie and Imam Al Karim are doing incredible work on that front.
You know, it's been discovered, right, that in the prison letters that Malcolm wrote to his siblings as he's discovering the Nation of Islam and the truth, right, that this new religious tradition offers. Islam offers. He actually writes to his brother and says, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but our first teacher, right, of the truth of Islam was our mother, which is really compelling. What does that actually mean? And. And Imam Abdul Karim and Eric McDuffie really tried to kind of untangle that for us.
But then I was thinking about Maya Angelou. So Maya Angelou, she's an expat living in Ghana, is really kind of taken by Malcolm X's visit, but she decides to go back to the United States with a really concrete reason.
Malcolm is starting these two new organizations, Muslim Mosque Incorporated and the Organization of Afro American Unity.
And she has experience working with Dr. King. And she's like, this new organization of African American Unity needs someone who knows how to coordinate how to direct things. And she wanted to bring those talents back to the States to help with the movement that Malcolm is trying to develop.
You know, part of. Part of the tragic story is that when she flies back to the United States, she lands in jfk. Malcolm is supposed to pick her up, but she calls him from a payphone, is like, I can't come right now. I need to see my mother in California first. But then I'll come back. Just give me a little bit of time. And then a few days later, when she's in San Francisco in the Bay Area, she catches wind, right, that Malcolm has actually been assassinated.
But if I were to finally just add one more woman who I think is. Yeah, yeah. Whose life gets intertwined with Malcolm, it's Yuri Kochiyama. A Japanese American from California ends up in the internment camps during World War II. So she goes through this whole experience, but it's when she moves to Harlem that she meets Malcolm. And, of course, Malcolm will inspire her. She catches his street preaching, but then she invites him to her home because she is hosting these three survivors of the atomic bomb attacks.
And it's a chance for Malcolm to learn right, from these visitors about what's going on there and to realize that the cause of African Americans is, of course, in solidarity with so many others. He was thinking about the Vietnam War, what had happened, Algeria. He's thinking about all these various struggles, and, of course, what Yuri Kochiyama helps facilitate.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Right.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Thinking about the American dropping of atomic bombs, that this is something else that we should also kind of have in our consideration for the cause of justice. So I wanted to at least include a few more details. There's just so much.
[00:36:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you so much. I always. It sort of irks me when, like, a person is spoken about in a vacuum, and especially the vacuum mostly sort of works towards eradicating women that are involved. So I really wanted to bring that up, and I really appreciate what the depth that you added. So this brings me to my last question, and. Which is, as you imagine, Muslim.
Imagine the Muslim Malcolm X. For our present, what specific challenges or issues are you hoping to address? And what does Malcolm X offer us now? Like, how should we. Like, after this podcast, how should we think about, like, what we could do in our everyday existence and more broadly, what is all this theology supposed to do? You know?
[00:36:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right. It's a tall order, but it's what I'm trying to address.
I mean, I think, first of all, right. Malcolm, of course, is important, but I think we need to make a Distinction that he may be iconic, but we don't want to kind of approach him in an idolatrous way. We want to kind of put him on the pedestal. I think there's too many cults of personality.
One of the beauties of Malcolm is that he was human, that he made mistakes. He was ready to accept the mistakes he made, to adapt, to really kind of embrace change and transformation when circumstances demanded it. Right? And I think that's a lesson for all of us, that we should be open to the fact that we may be wrong at times, that we have something to learn from others.
And then I also want to resist this idea, right. Like you were just mentioning that Malcolm was a solitary figure, that he. I tend to think of him, he's a bright star, but he's part of a larger constellation, and we need to account for all those other people. And what was Malcolm doing? He was trying to build a community.
And so rather than think, how can we be like Malcolm in a singular individualist fashion, I think it's more productive to think, how can we be part of the community that he and so many others envisioned, that they dreamed, right, that we would come together in a type, in all sorts of solidarities, all sorts of cooperation, to build something, critiquing things. And Malcolm was really good at critique. He called out unrelentingly, unapologetically, the crimes, the transgressions of America. And yet he was also trying to build. And building is so much harder. And what is he building? He's building community.
So often what gets overlooked are the things that he's doing on the ground. And there's plenty of memoirs from people around him, accounts from people who are close to him that relate the things that he tried to do on that interpersonal level.
The thing about Malcolm is that, yes, he's this fiery kind of orator, right, who can take the stage and captivate, but people know that he was so personable, one on one, that he was an incredible listener, that he would be patient and want to get to know, what is it you're trying to get at? Where are you coming from? And I think that's something he was trying to impart to the other members of his community. We have ideas of the classes he taught, of the values he's trying to instill. I think one of the most important things that he did is he's trying to bring awareness, you know, conscientious ation. Right. Education to his community. So we have records of the types of gatherings he would have. He would Take the young children, the Nation of Islam, to museums and observatories every Saturday morning.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: Wow. I didn't know that. No.
[00:39:33] Speaker A: He was amazing. He was invested in the next generation, the future, and he was constantly trying to do this work.
And in my opinion, what we need to do is very similar work. Right? We think of Malcolm as radical, as audacious, as trying to do the impossible.
But that's what I think Islam's all about. Islam is radical. It's audacious. It's trying to achieve the impossible. And yet we are told by God, right, that these things are not impossible, that they are exactly what we should be committed to. And so I think Malcolm is trying to embrace the Sunnah, the example of the prophets, in trying to bring faith and righteousness to the world.
But he was doing it, and we should be doing it in our immediate localities. Who do we have around us? There are, of course, terrible forms of structural oppression. And in some ways, it feels overwhelming to imagine how can we dismantle this? How can we unmake these types of injustices?
But this work is slow. It takes dedication and will take generations. And what Malcolm was doing as he's taking those kids to the museum, as he's training the people around him, he's trying to pave the way for a future community, of a community to be. And so what we should be doing is thinking in our communities around us, who needs help, who wants to be part of the community but isn't, who's in the community with needs that we can address, and what can we learn from those around us? And so I think what we have to do is kind of to take this risk, to accept the challenge that Malcolm modeled for us, right? That if you're going to have faith and you need to try to work as righteously as possible with those around you, I think, you know, despite as. As. As insurmountable as the current moment is, and things seem to be falling apart, all things can be possible.
I think Malcolm X believed that. That he was willing to give his life for it. So we need to take a similar type of risk. Like, what kind of sacrifices are we willing to do to be with each other to build community in these moments?
[00:41:34] Speaker B: I love, like, how you sort of told us that, yes, Malcolm was radical, and we need not be radical in that way, but we can be radical in the way in which we create community.
So we, all of us, can be involved in radically creating community. And slowly that will bring about change.
So thank you so much for being with us. Today. Martin, we are really grateful for all that you shared with us and your work. And we wish the well.
We wish you well. Not the well. Thank you.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: No, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.
