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Malcolm X Changes Views, Denounces Elijah Muhammad

Oct. 3, 1964 - Malcolm X has renounced the philosophy of black racism and denounced Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslims, as a religious “faker.”

In a letter from Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to a friend in New York, Mr. X said he had embraced the brotherhood of man and “shall never rest until I have undone the harm I did to so many well-meaning, innocent Negroes who through my own evangelistic zeal now believe in [Elijah Muhammad] even more fanatically and more blindly than I did.”

Malcolm X broke with Elijah Muhammad, who advocates black separatism, earlier this year and founded his own nonsectarian black nationalist organization. He has spent many months in Mecca studying with the grand imams of Islam — ranking scholars of Islam — and working with the Muslim World League.

In his later dated Sept. 22, he wrote:

“For 12 long years I lived within the narrow-minded confines of the ‘strait-jacket world’ created by my strong belief that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger direct from God Himself, and my faith in what I now see to be a pseudoreligious philosophy that he preaches. But as his then most faithful disciple, I represented and defended him at all levels…and in most instances, even beyond the level of intellect and reason.”

Malcolm X continued:

“I declare emphatically that I am no longer in Elijah Muhammad’s ‘strait jacket,’ and I don’t intend to replace his with one woven by someone else. I am a Muslim in the most orthodox sense; my religion is Islam as it is believed in and practiced by the Muslims here in the Holy City of Mecca.

“This religion recognizes all men as brothers. It accepts all human beings as equals before God, and as equal members in the Human Family of Mankind. I totally reject Elijah Muhammad’s racist philosophy, which he has labeled ‘Islam’ only to fool and misuse gullible people, as he fooled and misused me. But I blame only myself, and no one else for the fool that I was, and the harm that my evangelic foolishness in his behalf has done to others.”

Malcolm X wrote that he was neither anti-American, un-American, seditious, nor subversive, but an open-minded man who was trying to weigh everything objectively.

He said he was “fed up with strait-jacket societies.”

“I respect every man’s right to believe whatever his intelligence leads him to believe is intellectually sound,” he said, “and I respect my right to believe likewise.”

After reaffirming his belief in Allah as the Supreme Being and in the Prophet Mohammed, Malcolm X said, “yet some of my dearest friends are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists — some are capitalists, Socialists, and Communists — some are moderates, conservatives, extremists — some are even Uncle Toms.”

“It takes all these religious political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients,” he said, “to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.”



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