by Susan Jacoby
Koestler beautifully described the combination of seduction and hope involved in all conversions when he wondered about his eventual fate after communism. He noted that he had been a Party member for seven years—the same amount of time that Jacob worked for Laban in order to receive permission to marry his daughter, Rachel. When Jacob’s time was up, his bride was led into a dark tent, and he discovered the next morning that he had slept not with Rachel but with her ugly sister, Leah.
I wonder whether he ever recovered from the shock of having slept with an illusion. I wonder whether afterwards he believed that he had ever believed in it. I wonder whether the happy end of the legend will be repeated; for at the price of another seven years of labor, Jacob was given Rachel too, and the illusion became flesh.
And the seven years seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her.21
* * *
*1 The more widely publicized examples include the firm stance of the Lutheran Church in Denmark against the Nazi occupiers’ attempt to deport all Danish Jews to Auschwitz; the help offered Jews by many bishops, priests, and nuns in northern Italy; the actions of historically Huguenot communities in Vichy France; and the resistance of the “Confessing Church” of dissident Lutherans in Germany. The Confessing Church in Germany, however—in contrast to the Danish Lutheran Church—was less helpful to unconverted Jews than to those who had converted to Protestantism and were nevertheless being persecuted.
*2 He was, however, deeply interested in the paranormal, and left the bulk of his estate to establish a chair for research in parapsychology at a university in Britain. Oxford and Cambridge turned down Koestler’s bequest, which was finally accepted by the University of Edinburgh. Koestler’s late-in-life enthusiasm for parapsychology had something in common with the interest of aging nineteenth-century freethinkers in spiritualism—a particularly common phenomenon among those whose children had died at an early age. In 1983, suffering from Parkinson’s disease and terminal leukemia, Koestler committed suicide along with his wife.
*3 For the most thorough examination of this subject, see The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (1969) and A Question of Madness (1971) by Zhores Medvedev, and Let History Judge (1971) by Roy Medvedev.
*4 Anyone who has read my book Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (2009) will know that I, like nearly everyone who has revisited this case during the past thirty years, am convinced that Chambers told the truth and Hiss lied in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 and his two trials in 1949 (the first ending in a hung jury and the second with a conviction). For several decades, however, a majority of liberal intellectuals thought Chambers was the liar.
*5 In The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that natural selection becomes subordinate to environmental factors—which include the moral evolution of man—as soon as humans enter into a state of civilization. “The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy,” he said, “which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered…more tender and widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature….If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and the helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”
*6 Tolkien’s mother was a convert to Catholicism from the Baptist faith. Her conversion in 1900 led to a permanent break with her Baptist family, which cut her off from all financial support (she was a widow) after she became a Catholic. Tolkien’s mother died of diabetes when he was twelve, and she named a Catholic priest as his legal guardian so that he would be raised in her faith.
*7 Bishop Sheen was named “Venerable”—a first step on the road to sainthood—in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI. He was supposed to be on the fast track toward beatification—the penultimate step in the march toward sainthood—when his corpse became the subject of an unseemly battle between the Archdiocese of New York, where he spent most of his career and died, and the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, where he was born. Sheen is buried in the crypt beneath Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and New York is not about to give up his body to be the centerpiece of a new shrine in Peoria. Pope Francis will presumably have to referee this embarrassing turf war.
*8 Margaret Budenz, who died in 2002, was a teacher at a Catholic girls’ school for many years. One of her former students, People reported in its dutiful pursuit of celebrity, was Jane Curtin, then appearing on Saturday Night Live.
PART VII
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
20
“THE GREATEST”: MUHAMMAD ALI AND THE DEMYTHOLOGIZING DECADE
ON APRIL 8, 1966, Time magazine published a cover story with the stark interrogatory headline “Is God Dead?” The article, which brought Time its largest newsstand sales in two decades, was a response to the secularization (real and perceived) of American society in what Philip Roth has called “the demythologizing decade.” It was also an effort to come to grips, through a year’s worth of interviews with theologians and religious leaders, with the future of religion at a time when fewer and fewer people believed in the literal God of the Bible, that all-powerful being who dispenses rewards and punishments from a vantage point that humans cannot hope to know or judge. The lengthy analysis—a departure from the terse style that defined the magazine—was concerned almost entirely with the challenge to traditional Judaism and Christianity posed by secularism, atheism, and science. Islam, despite the highly publicized conversion of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, was never mentioned. The author had nothing to say about any form of religious conversions—a peculiar omission at a time when the baby boomers were exploring both liberal and conservative religious ideas unimaginable to earlier generations during which even conversions from one mainstream Protestant denomination to another could become cause for soul-searching and social scandal. As we know, God turned out to be very much alive for a majority of Americans (though His health was much poorer in Europe). But many of the young would choose to worship a divinity who looked quite different from the white-bearded celestial God of their fathers.
The widespread religious experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed (to some of the young as well as to members of older generations) to be one part of a rebellion against every cultural force, including traditional faith, that had shaped the parents of the boomers. Nice middle-class American boys and girls returned, intoning Vedic chants, from trips to India. Children of observant but non-Orthodox Jews suddenly discovered religious “roots” dating from eighteenth-century Poland rather than from New York’s cosmopolitan Upper West Side (or, for that matter, from the Lower East Side of the first-generation immigrants, who had seized eagerly on the secular public education denied them in Eastern Europe and Russia). Protestants brought up in families whose idea of religion had been getting baptized, married, and buried by a minister (and attending services on Christmas and Easter) suddenly discovered as personal and demanding a relationship with God as Peter Cartwright did in the early nineteenth century. Some of these “converts” of the sixties did not stay converted after they had managed to irritate their parents sufficiently and thumb their noses at the bourgeois American social order. For others, however, there were deeper and more lasting religious, cultural, and political motivations, and their attitudes would eventually lay the foundation for a more widespread American acceptance of all types of conversions, as well as for the right to reject religion altogether.
No one personified this transition with greater controversy and clarity than Ali. If you were young when Ali was young and believed that it was possible to make the world over again, he resides somewhere in the region of the brain reserved for the incomparable, the unbroken, the unintimidatable ones who stand up to their society and say, “No.” If you hated the social instability of the period (whether you were young, middle-aged, or old), you considered Ali a traitor. From either persp
ective, Ali was no more a “typical” convert of the American sixties than Augustine was a typical convert to Christianity in the fourth century, or Edith Stein was a typical German Jewish convert to Catholicism in the third decade of the twentieth century. However, his conversion was—like those of Augustine, Stein, and many other well-known people described in this book—inseparable from the contemporary social upheaval that was producing a widespread re-examination of the accepted truths of dominant and respected religions.
Nothing could have been more inconvenient for Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay and raised a Baptist in Louisville, than his conversion to Islam in 1964 and his attempt, three years later, to claim conscientious-objector status when he was about to be drafted during the Vietnam War. Since I was already an atheist, I had no more admiration for Islam than for any other religion when Ali announced his conversion; indeed, I wondered at the time whether he knew anything about the historical role of slavery in the Muslim as well as the Christian world. What impressed me about Ali was not his substitution of one proselytizing, truth-monopolizing religion for another but his willingness, as a famous athlete, to place his career on the line for what was bound to be a wildly unpopular exercise of personal conscience. I thought at the time that Ali was likely to be assassinated. Looking back on that decade—bloodily punctuated by the murders of little girls attending church, civil rights workers and demonstrators in Mississippi and Alabama, the president of the United States, a presidential candidate, and the nation’s most important black leader—I still find it surprising that Ali was not gunned down in his twenties.
These days, the mortality of the seventy-four-year-old former heavyweight champion is all too evident. The young boxer whose wits and tongue were once as quick as his fists and feints, as he effortlessly came up with unforgettable phrases, from “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” to “I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark,” has fallen silent. Ali, who once estimated that he had taken twenty-nine thousand punches to the head in his long athletic career, suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease, which has destroyed his speech.1 I remember that his words already sounded mildly slurred when he was in the late stages of his boxing career, as the 1970s drew to a close. Another of his sayings was “I am the greatest. I said that before I even knew I was.” But “the greatest” knew no more at that time than the rest of society or the medical establishment about the long-term effects of repeated concussions. (It was well known, though, that many aging boxers suffered from what was called “punch-drunk syndrome.”)
I was working on the college newspaper at Michigan State University on the day in 1964 when the twenty-two-year-old Ali, the seven-to-one underdog who had just become heavyweight champion of the world by defeating Sonny Liston, announced that he was joining the Nation of Islam and changing his birth name of Cassius Clay. I have never had any use for boxing (in spite of all the great sportswriting it has produced), but, as a reporter, I immediately recognized the importance of his conversion, not only as the individual statement of a lionized black athlete but as a leading indicator of social changes that would become more pronounced in the second half of the 1960s.
Islam, as one of the world’s three historical monotheistic faiths, did not mean to Americans then what it means now. Islamic extremism was not associated with international terrorism—a concern that scarcely existed in the American consciousness before the Palestinian terrorist group Black September murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Even after Munich, even after the first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center, in 1993, American concern about terrorism did not reach anything like the levels it did after the 9/11 attacks in the United States or the November 13, 2015, assaults that left 129 dead in Paris—a city shaken ten months earlier by murderous ISIS attacks on a kosher supermarket and the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. There were many fewer Muslim immigrants in the United States of the 1960s than there are today, and Americans were not so much hostile to as ignorant about the varieties of Islam practiced around the world. But Americans were aware of one form of the Muslim faith—the Nation of Islam, headed by Elijah Muhammad and known, to most whites, as the “Black Muslims.” That was the group Ali had joined, and the majority of white Americans considered it to be both anti-white and anti-Semitic (not without reason, based on Elijah Muhammad’s rhetoric). Ali’s conversion was not sudden, and his interest in the Nation was of some years’ standing; he had first learned about the organization in 1959, when he fought in a Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago, Elijah Muhammad’s home.
What apparently impressed the teenager about Elijah Muhammad’s organization was its emphasis on the need for black self-sufficiency—at a time when the slogan “Black Power” had not yet been used publicly and the civil rights movement emphasized racial integration. When Ali proposed to his English teacher at Louisville’s Central High that he write a term paper on Black Muslims in America, she became nervous and refused to approve the subject. “Something had resonated in his mind,” writes David Remnick, the New Yorker editor who began his journalistic career as a sportswriter for The Washington Post, “something about the discipline and bearing of the Muslims, their sense of hierarchy, manhood, and self-respect, the way they refused to smoke or drink or carouse, their racial pride.”2 (The group’s emphasis on self-discipline also accounted for its appeal to young black prison inmates who were trying to turn their lives around.)
The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 in Detroit by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, a somewhat mysterious figure who disappeared in 1934, when the leadership of the group was assumed by Elijah Muhammad (no relation). In the theology preached by both Fard and his successor, a single atom began to spin, about seventy-six trillion years ago, and that atom produced the earth and then the first man—a black man—now known as Allah. Allah, in turn, created the rest of the universe and the entire black race. Those who consider the story of Allah as the first black man inherently less plausible than the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or, for that matter, than the stories of the Quran revealed to the Muhammad in the seventh century, may dismiss the Nation of Islam as a cult. For me, the Nation’s beliefs add up to just one more entry in the catalogue of goofy religious myths, enabling specific groups of people to single themselves out as special in the eyes of the creator of their world. In any case, and whatever one thinks of any religion, it is safe to say that most white Americans had never heard of the Nation before the early 1960s. They were also unaware of a history, which antedated the sixties, of Islam’s attraction for black American artists and intellectuals.
An astonishing number of well-known jazz musicians, for example, became Muslims in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These included, among many others, the pianist Ahmad Jamal (born Fritz Jones), the singer Aliyah Rabia (Dakota Staton), and the tenor saxophonists Musa Kaleem (Orlando Wright) and El Hajj Abdullah Rasheed Ahmad (Lynn Hope). All of these musicians had many white fans, and their conversions did not attract anything like the attention or hostility that Ali’s would in the sixties. As Hisham D. Aidi observes in Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture, many journalists, including members of the black press, thought “that Muslim identity helped blacks in America sidestep (legal) racial barriers, especially down South.”3 That might have been true, at least for the few who talked publicly about being Muslims and actually performed in exotic-looking garb that might be associated, rightly or wrongly, with Islam. But it seems doubtful that most whites who liked jazz knew anything about the relationship between Islam and their favorite musicians. I was a huge fan of Ahmad Jamal and heard his trio perform in a Chicago nightclub in 1961, when I was fifteen. It never occurred to me that the name of the handsome black pianist had anything to do with his religion. If I had thought about it at all (which I did not, in my ignorance and starstruck awe), I would have assumed that “Ahmad Jamal” was a stage name.*1 Artists have always receiv
ed a pass for somewhat unconventional behavior, and black musicians could practice their faith, whatever it might be, without drawing much antagonism from white or conventional middle-class black America. (Oh, those crazy bohemians!) Ali, far more famous than any musician, would receive no such pass.
One might think that African American interest in Islam in the twentieth century was derived from knowledge passed on from generation to generation by the descendants of educated Muslim slaves like Omar ibn Said. However, scholars who have explored the long-neglected subject of enslaved African Muslims in the United States can establish no such connection. Sylviane A. Diouf, whose Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas is a scrupulously researched account of both the efforts and the failure of literate Muslim slaves to pass on their religion, points out that Elijah Muhammad, despite the Islamish trappings of many of his followers, never claimed to be descended from Muslims. His father was in fact a Baptist minister.4 The last black Americans born to slaves who had any knowledge of their Muslim origins would have died by the 1920s. And the hostility toward—often outright prohibition of—slave literacy in the United States provided a particular obstacle to the passing on of knowledge about a faith that depended on a book and, unlike Christianity, forbade visual representation. As Diouf observes, “It is one thing to maintain one’s literacy in Arabic, but it is quite another to acquire it from scratch in the absence of time, adequate structures, and tools….Even if a book or Koran in Arabic was available, doubtless a slave child could not have found the amount of time necessary to learn how to read it.”5