In and out of this world: material and extraterrestrial bodies in the Nation of Islam

Abstract

Hierarchies of power construct the category of place as restricted moral and social space; thus, power sets physical and symbolic boundaries on places to be in and on forbidden places while at the same time establishes norms, including religious ones, to ‘justify’ sticking to ‘one’s place’. Therefore, the oppressed is a double victim of physical immobility and moral degradation. In various forms, Islam has been mobilized in the black movements in the USA since the nineteenth century (Jackson 2005). To counter this double persecution, black movements of emancipation had to develop strategies of both social freedom and intellectual liberation. The Nation of Islam (NOI), the largest Black Nationalist organization in the US, the subject of this book by Stephen C. Finley, mobilized various religious symbols to restore the dignity of black people, undermined by slavery and racism in the US. Stephen C. Finley, the author of this book, is Associate Professor of religious studies and African & African American Studies at Louisiana State University; so far he has conducted extensive research on African American religious traditions and thought. Finley combines analytic tools of the history of religions, psychoanalysis and critical sociology. In this book, Finley argues that what motivated The Nation of Islam ‘was (re)forming black embodiment, or efforts to retrieve, reclaim, and reform black bodies from the discursive white normative gaze, bodies first formed in and by the pain and performance for white pleasure during the period of enslavement in America’ (p. 2). For Finley, being out-of-place means ‘not belonging, and engaging in activities that were viewed as violating established social conventions that regulate space and activity’ (p. 4). To defy these racist norms of in-placeness and out-of-placeness, The Nation of Islam invented ‘discursive, ritual, and doctrinal claims about what it means for a black body to be perceived performing not only out-ofplace’ (p. 4). Each leader of The Nation of Islam (Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed and Louis Farrakhan) developed symbolic and social strategies for challenging the racist perceptions of in-placeness and out-of-placeness and promoting dignifying strategies for the black people. In chapter I and II, Finley shows how Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975) mobilized the Myth of Yakub (a black scientist who created the white race as esthetically disfigured, psychologically infirmed, and religiously demonic to oppress the black people). Finley maintains that the Myth of Yakub offered a theological phenomenology that explains ‘the social order, for racial