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El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X)
"Islam, revolution and racism" by Federica Mereu II
According to Elijah Muhammed, spiritual head of the
Nation of Islam - the sect Islamic pseudo inside which Malcolm X served in the military for twelve years, for “to put again standing this mighty race”, the blacks would have had to take conscience of their poverty, to abandon the immoral life that you/they conducted and, above all, to identify the responsible of their conditions: the white man (“white hand is the devil”). To raise physical conditions, moral, social and politics of the Afro one - Americans, the Nation of Islam proposed a solution that was articulated in two moments maieutici: a pars destruens: to destroy the false definitions of identity and a pars construens: to build an authentic identity.
Through the hate, it was intended to destroy the false identity of the blacks. Which strength in fact would you/he/she have been able of to shift them, to push them to react to the oppression transforming them from subdued, passive and impotent subjects in fearless warriors? The hate. Through the antagonism and the conflict with a hostile group, in fact, it also increases the sense of solidarity, of cohesion and above all it increases the identification with his/her own group.
In a second moment you/he/she would be been able to reconstruct, in the void formed him an authentic identity. According to Luciano Gallino, identity and identification they are trials that are implicated to circumstance: “identity is not given neither subjective neither objective without the reference to some form of identification, neither identification exists that I/you/he/she am scindibile from an identity” [Gallino 1982: 145]. But which strong ideology in which to believe, to which to stick, in which to identify would have been given sense to their existences and reawakened the ancient pugnacious spirit? The Islam, “the natural religion of the blacks” - considered today from some as “the last ideology” - a religion that nourishes an enough position of hate toward the unfair ones and the oppressors, was the answer to their necessities.
Through the identification with a religion, the Nation of Islam offered an identity suitable to the aspirations of the blacks, the identity of muslim, Moslems, that it allowed of riappropriarsi of the historical memory and their roots in the native earth, Africa. During the years when it was spokesman of Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X infuocava the minds of the blacks through a strong antagonistic opposition with the whites, with extremist positions, religious fanaticism and ideal separatist. In this sense the hate was a tool to refuse the definitions of the reality given by the whites and developed a function catartica and
liberatrice.
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