Noble Drew Ali, A Jazz Age Prophet

ODD TRUTHS: NOBLE DREW ALI, A JAZZ AGE PROPHET

Timothy Drew (also known as Noble Drew Ali) rose to prominence in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, the era of bootleggers, speakeasies, and flappers. Although he was part of this milieu, Drew was destined to be the spokesman for what he saw as a spiritual answer to racial oppression. His Moorish Science Temple of America, first established in Chicago in 1925, was one of the first Afrocentric religious movements in the United States.

Like any other charismatic leader, his origins are veiled in mystery. Some reports state that he was a former Prince Hall Freemason; others maintain that he was raised by gypsies and initiated into mystical societies by Sufis and Essenes in the Near East. Whatever the case, Noble Drew was influenced by more than just Islam. His main work, Circle Seven Koran contains excerpts and ideas from the Bible as well as contemporary Theosophical and Rosicrucian documents. Drew was also something of a wonderworker. Possibly gaining inspiration from Harry Houdini and American folk healing traditions, Drew regularly advertised his supernatural abilities. A 1927 flyer reads:

 

“Don’t Miss the Great Moorish Drama

Look! Look!

Come ye everyone and see

The Seventh Wonder of the World

…The Prophet Noble Drew Ali, will be bound with several yards of

rope, as Jesus was bound in the Temple at Jerusalem

And escaped before the authorities could t[ake] charge of Him; so will

the Prophet Drew Ali, perform the same act, after being bound by any

one in the audience and will escape in a few seconds.

He also will heal many in the audience with[out] touching them free

of charge, as they stand in fr[ont] of their seats manifesting his divine

power.”

Of course, if anyone required additional medicinal remedies, he or she was encouraged to purchase products from Drew’s Moorish Manufacturing Corporation. Naturally it wasn’t long before Drew began to attract the attention of the FBI. His final years as the leader of the MSTA were marked with internal corruption, sexual deviancy, and clashes with the police. After his death in 1929, infighting between the MSTA’s ministers turned to turf wars that resulted in the deaths of temple members and policemen. Despite the U.S. government’s attempts to shut down its congregations, the MSTA had a lasting influence on the Nation of Islam, which gained notoriety in the civil rights era through its most outspoken minister Malcolm X.

To learn more about the life of Noble Drew, I spoke with Dr Patrick Bowen, a religious studies scholar who specialises in narratives of religious conversion and non-mainline religious in the West.

The Custodian: The story of the Moorish Science Temple of America is perfect movie material. Do you know if anyone is currently working on getting the story to the silver screen?

Dr Patrick Bowen: There are of course countless youtube videos about the MSTA, but as far as I know, no, no one is working on a big-budget movie or high-quality TV mini-series. I would agree, though, that the MSTA story is incredibly interesting–one that should be told to a broader audience.

C: What first got you interested in Noble Drew Ali?

P: Everything primarily sprang from me trying to find evidence of early U.S. white and Latino converts to Islam. In 2007 or 2008, while I was doing background reading on Islam in America, I picked up Peter Lamborn Wilson’s book Sacred Drift and Michael Muhammad Knight’s book on the Nation of Gods and Earths, and in both of those works the authors mention whites being connected with Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America. Then I did some internet research and found an MSTA nationality card that was written in Spanish. At that point, I realised that if I was going to find new clues about these purported early white and Latino affiliates and members of the MSTA, I had to learn all I could about Noble Drew Ali and his movement.

C:  Much of the enigma surrounding him stems from his mysterious origins. Does your research support the possibility that he travelled to and was spiritually initiated in countries like Morocco and Egypt?

P: So far, I have not found any historical evidence that strongly supports this. However, I still cannot entirely exclude the possibility, especially because I believe he probably had contact with individuals who did travel to Morocco where they received training in initiatory forms of Islam.

C: What were the primary tenets of Noble Drew’s teachings?

P: That the people who are typically called African Americans are not ‘black’, ‘coloured’, or ‘negro’–they are Moorish Americans. They come from a great ‘nation’ (the Moorish nation) and have been given by God a great religion: Islam. This religion calls them to live a life devoted to the principles of Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice. Noble Drew Ali also encouraged the development of political and economic power in the African American community.

C: To what extent was the Nation of Islam influenced by Noble Drew’s religious movement?

P: Without doubt, in the late 1920s the MSTA was greatly responsible for spreading the message that African Americans were (or should be) Muslims, and this helped foster the environment in which the NOI would thrive. At least some of the NOI’s early members had been in the MSTA. Also in the early 1930s one NOI member told the press that the NOI’s founder, WD Fard, claimed to be from Morocco–which suggests Fard was trying to frame his movement as connected to the MSTA in some way.

Both groups clearly had Masonic and esoteric influences; both proclaimed that African Americans’ true religion was Islam–a fact that, through slavery, white Americans had caused African Americans to forget; both emphasised the existence of a modern living prophet; both talked about African Americans’ divinity; both were strongly influenced by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; and both referred to African Americans as ‘Asiatics’. There are also lesser-known connections between the NOI and some of the various Moorish factions that sprang up after Noble Drew Ali passed away in 1929–so much so that it seems that there was a lot of exchanging and blending of ideas during the 1930s and 1940s, and a number of MSTA members joined the NOI and vice versa. At the same time though, many of the thematic similarities could also be due to yet another shared Islamic influence from Abdul Hamid Suleiman (the leader of Newark’s Caananites Temple in 1923) or perhaps the Sunni Muslim and former follower of Marcus Garvey, Duse Mohamed Ali.

C:  At one point, the Moorish Science Temple had about 10,000 members spread across the United States. What were the reactions of non-members, white and black, to its growth?

P: The greatest amount of attention came in the late 1920s when Noble Drew Ali was leading the movement; there was consistently positive press coverage by the main black newspaper in Chicago, the city of the group’s headquarters. Occasionally Moors were mentioned in the both the black and white press in other cities, but this was typically after the group had drawn negative attention for infighting or for conflicts over not having paid for permits for their soapbox preaching. In the fall of 1929, after Noble Drew Ali died, a schism ultimately led to one Chicago faction being involved with a shootout with police–an event that shattered the group across the country and gained national headlines in the black and white press, which somewhat hurt the group’s image for years to come.

The FBI began investigating the MSTA in the early 1930s because of rumors of ‘subversive’ activities. Instead, they discovered that after 1929, the MSTA was extremely fragmented. Some MSTA groups were extremely isolationist and rejecting of society while others were very eager to develop political ties and relationships with non-members of a wide variety of backgrounds, but I would say that most MSTA members in the 1920s through 1950s were basically in the middle. After Noble Drew Ali passed, there was little mention of the MSTA in black press and almost nothing in the white press. This is important to recognise because one of the big reasons why the NOI had such a greater impact on American society starting in the late 1950s was the fact that it got a relatively huge amount of attention from both the black and white press. The MSTA, in contrast, was largely spread by word of mouth and through personal contact with members–few of whom were particularly energetic or able proselytisers. This meant that most white Americans never learned of their existence and, while many African Americans who lived in cities with a decent MSTA presence–like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Baltimore–had probably heard about or even knew members of the local Moorish groups, perhaps because they patronised their businesses, knowledge about the group tended to be minimal.

Click here for more on Dr Bowen’s research.

Further Reading

Noble Drew Ali’s Pure and Clean Nation by Emily Suzanne Clark

Islam in the African-American Experience by Richard Brent Turner

Elijah Muhammed and Islam by Herbert Berg