Late Malcolm X: To eradicate racism, America needs to learn from Islam, a letter from Malcolm X
America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem
Malcolm X when he returned from the Hajj for the very first time in April 1964. After leaving the Nation of Islam in March 1964, he made Hajj, which helped change his perspective on whites and racism completely.
Here is an excerpt of a letter El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) wrote about his Hajj experience. In it, he explains what it was during this blessed journey that made him so profoundly shift his perspective on race and racism:
“America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white, but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color” Malcolm X added
“During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug, while praying to the same God, with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana.
We were truly all the same, because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude.
I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man, and cease to measure and hinder and harm others in terms of their differences in color.”
Who was Malcolm X
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement.
