Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America: “[T]hat They Will Be Law-Abiders and Receive Their Divine Rights as Citizens”Footnote ⁷

One of the many African American new religious movements to emerge from the Great Migration to northern cities, the Moorish Science Temple of America was founded as “a divine and national movement” by Timothy (or perhaps Thomas) Drew, who adopted the title Prophet Noble Drew Ali (1886–1929).Footnote ⁸ After an earlier religious experiment in Newark, New Jersey, Drew Ali moved to Chicago around 1925Footnote ⁹ and shortly thereafter began preaching a religion rooted in Islamic symbolism borrowed from fraternal societies (e.g., the fez, “Allah-God” as the name of the deity); metaphysical Christianity (particularly the New Thought movement, including one gospel, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, sections of which Drew Ali incorporated into his own scripture, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America or Circle-Seven Koran); and the unique political setup of and possibilities offered by the city of Chicago. As a city of ethnic diversity, with semiautonomous neighborhoods wherein immigrant communities kept their own traditions and started their own newspapers, yet also a place wherein such communities were vested in governance and were actively courted as and rewarded for being voters, Chicago represented for Drew Ali a model of Allah-God's utopian society. Here each individual lived under “his own vine and fig tree” of “national” identity, and yet individuals from assorted nations were all recognized as “Americans.” These “citizens of the USA” were such not, as Drew Ali understood it, in spite of their difference but through such difference, because each citizen acknowledged and proclaimed his or her “national” identity.Footnote ¹⁰

In short, Drew Ali saw a possibility for African Americans to find full recognition as American citizens, and so he taught that African Americans were “neither black nor colored nor Negro,” but rather Moorish-Americans like other hyphenated ethnic Americans found in the city of Chicago.Footnote ¹¹ Drew Ali aligned his movement with a particular political party—the Republican machine of Mayor William Hale Thompson, who by 1927 was actively searching for votes in the Second Ward “Black Metropolis” where Moorish Science was based. Early Moorish Science contained teachings about spiritual healing and the nature of divinity within all people, but much of the doctrine written by Prophet Drew Ali emphasized this-worldly concerns, specifically a project of “uplift” predicated on Moorish-Americans embracing the responsibilities of citizenship. Voting was presented as a “sacred duty,” participation in democracy as a necessary step for “salvation.” This attention to the responsibilities of citizenship served three purposes. It offered Moors an orientation in history tackling questions of theodicy, an orientation in discourse addressing the legacy of slavery and racism in America, and an orientation in the present context which motivated behavior and promised improvement on a practical economic level as well as on the level of status.

In assorted speeches, newspaper articles later canonized as scripture, and his Holy Koran, Drew Ali taught that African Americans had fallen into slavery as a punishment for abandonment of their identity and its related responsibilities.Footnote ¹² Ignorance followed, of the glories of Moorish civilization and of Moorish identity generally. Drew Ali claims to have been “prepared” by Allah as a prophet with the mission of alerting the sleeping Moorish nation to their true identity and aiding them in a communal process of “uplift” back into knowledge of—and responsible action rooted in—that identity. Moorish Science, also called Islamism, was the natural religion of so-called black people. While Allah was the god of all “nations” or races, part of Drew Ali's mission was “to return Christianity to the Europeans,” to white people, and alert Moors that they had drifted from the religion of their ancestors to a religion designed by Allah for a different nation. Drew Ali wrote that he had been sent “to warn my people to repent from their sinful ways and go back to that state of mind to their forefathers’ Divine National principles,” which state of mind would lead to real, practical results in the world. As the quote continues, Drew Ali explains that as Moors recognize, declare, and enact their true identities, “they will be law-abiders and receive their divine rights as citizens,” meaning that they will behave a certain way (in accord with the wider society's laws) and thus be treated a certain way (vested in the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship).Footnote ¹³

Drew Ali's narrative of history did not merely place the blame for slavery on some past catastrophe of disobedience or on ongoing affiliation with Christianity. Rather, the “state of mind” he mentions in the above quote is contrasted, repeatedly, with that mindset imposed upon Moors by slavery and reinforced by the ongoing legacy of racism, a mindset emphasized on the level of unconscious language use, most notably names. Moors have been kept blind to their true identity by the imposition of racist language onto them, language Moors themselves eventually adopted. “You are neither Negro, black, or colored,” Drew Ali wrote. Those who accept such labels have been brainwashed. Those who believe themselves to be “black” or “Negro” behave as racist white society expects “blacks” and “Negroes” to behave. It is each individual's responsibility to uplift him or herself, beginning with a change in discourse. This dichotomy of “Moor” and “Negro” as markers of mindset and behavior continues to dominate Moorish Science rhetoric. One contemporary sermon, turning to the history of the Moors in America, argues “the first generation was stripped of their nationality and the words Negro and black were placed upon them … and they took on certain characteristics that were not theirs … They were being fraudulent. Do not act like a black person; do not act like a Negro. Be a Moorish American.”Footnote ¹⁴

To be Moorish, for the first generation of Drew Ali's followers, meant behaving in new ways, ways that were suddenly possible in, made sense in, and were rewarded in northern cities. Voting, in Drew Ali's writings, becomes one of the foremost marks of Moorish behavior, along with industriousness, self-respect, and attention to hygiene and presentation. Drew Ali writes, “Anytime a man or a woman fails or refuses to cast a sacred ballot at the polls,” anytime they refuse the “rights of an American citizen,” they become subject to “Political Slavery.” In short, they become “Negroes” again, rather than owning up to their “divine birthright” as Moors.Footnote ¹⁵ This emphasis on voting coincided with Mayor Thompson's push for votes in the predominantly black second ward, his Republican Party's alignment with leading African American politicians including Louis Anderson and Oscar De Priest, and the Republican machine's reward of African American ward bosses and community organizers with Chicago-style patronage in public jobs such as postal work. Drew Ali, new to the city, courted Republican Party candidates, inviting them to photo ops and endorsing them in the pages of his Moorish newspaper, The Moorish Guide.Footnote ¹⁶ The history of early Moorish Science is very much the story of a man attempting to advance the profile of his organization through city politics. As he declared in one press release, “All Registering,” “three thousand Moslems … are making ready to register every Man or Woman in order to take the lead for the various candidates whom they have been instructed to vote for,” including Anderson and De Priest and the wider “regular Republican Organization.”Footnote ¹⁷ As contemporary Moorish pro-voting thinker Azeem Hopkins-Bey puts it, this “was what we'd call today a voting bloc.”Footnote ¹⁸

Fragmentation of the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Scriptural Roots of Sovereign Theories

By the time Drew Ali died in 1929 (of natural causes, according to the coroner's report, though various Moors have advanced other theories, including complications from a police beating), the movement was already in the process of fragmenting. The loss of the founding charismatic figure led to an all-out schism, with three major factions competing for use of the mantle of the prophet and the title Moorish Science Temple of America. One result has been confusion for outside observers, from academics to law enforcement professionals. The Moorish Science group studied by Arthur Fauset in the 1940s, for instance, for his groundbreaking Black Gods of the Metropolis, were members of a splinter group following one of the men who claimed to be Drew Ali “reincarnated.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Federal Bureau of Investigation, seeking out Moors who refused to register with the Selective Service System during World War II, repeatedly interviewed those in the resolutely patriotic group led by a migrant to Chicago named C. Kirkman Bey. It is important to note that since 1929 there has been no single “Moorish Science Temple of America.” While it is an old saw in religious studies that no religion is monolithic, in the Moorish Science case the fragmentation is divisive enough to lead to multiple private battles and public lawsuits over the use of variations of the Moorish Science Temple name.Footnote ²⁰

Drew Ali's death led to a crisis in leadership, as is often the case in religious movements, but in the case of Moorish Science the prophet's statements then also lent themselves to diverse interpretations. Drew Ali's written oeuvre, from the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America to assorted shorter articles, essays, and addresses canonized as scripture in the Moorish literature, are often ambiguous at best in their employ of key terms such as “nation” and “nationality.” While some behaviors of Moorish groups can be seen as innovations derived from sources outside the Moorish scriptural canon—such as the taboo on alcohol and meat observed by the Philadelphia group that Fauset studied—divisions regarding participation in or rejecting the authority of local and federal government are linked back to interpretations of Drew Ali's own words. The divide between those Moors who continue to be law-abiding and those who engage in interpretations and actions best classified as sovereign draw their authority from the same writings—and often from the same passages. Consider, for instance, this statement from Drew Ali:

For some Moors, this passage is interpreted to mean that declaration of oneself as a Moorish American (rather than a Negro or a black), guarantees full citizenship in the United States. Therefore, one must abide by the laws of the United States and refuse the titles and behaviors associated with the oppressed black past in order to avoid the contemporary slave-like state of subjugation and oppression. “The names and principals that delude to slavery” are terms such as Negro and black and the mindsets—the delusions, to parse Drew Ali's pun—associated with those racist terms. Azeem Hopkins-Bey offers a lengthy, detailed, line-by-line explication of this passage, coming to the ultimate conclusion that “the free national name aforementioned here refers to your nationality. You are recognized as an American citizen due to your Moorish-American identity.”Footnote ²² An anonymous writer for the “Moorish American News” website echoes this interpretation, phrasing it in (American) Constitutional terms:

A recent cover story in the same publication, “Why We Moors MUST Rock the Vote,” also addressed the issue.Footnote ²⁴ The Azeem Hopkins-Bey piece was published on a website run by Sharif A. Bey's Operation Proclamation/The Act 6 Movement “a nation-wide call to Moorish American political unity” which sees its major objective as the fulfillment of Noble Drew Ali's plan for “A CONCENTRATED POLITICAL BODY, ACTING/MOVING AS A SINGULAR PERSON (ie, FREE NATIONAL BALLOT), [as] the ONLY way to effectively address our unique issues in a real and meaningful way.” The movement's homepage quotes the prophet as saying that Moors “MUST depend upon for their earthly salvation as AMERICAN CITIZENS,” interpreting salvation to mean liberation from oppression in the here-and-now and thus possible only through organized and informed participation in the democratic process.Footnote ²⁵

Sovereign interpretations stand in direct conflict with such readings. To quote one recent and blunt formulation: “Sovereign Moorish Nationals are not bound by any city, county, state, federal, criminal or civil laws of the land.”Footnote ²⁶ For this sovereign Moorish thinker, Titus King Connally-Bey, “Sovereignty” is that legal condition which results from “Declaring” one's “Free National Name.” For such purposes, Connally-Bey includes a legal form at the end of his book, ready to be “exercised, affirmed, certified, and invoked” with a series of signatures on the blanks provided.Footnote ²⁷

While Sharif A. Bey calls such interpretation “outright condemnations of core tenets of the MSTA teachings,”Footnote ²⁸ both sides draw on the same language and the same texts. Sharif A. Bey's pro-voting “Operation Proclamation” is rooted in a reading of Article 6 of Noble Drew Ali's “Divine Constitution and By-Laws,” the earliest governance document of the Moorish Science Temple of America. Likewise, Connally-Bey, in his “Declaration of Free National name” form, cites the exact same Article: “With us all members must proclaim their nationality and we are teaching our people their nationality and Divine Creed that they may know that they are a part and a partial of this said government.” Again, the crux is interpretation: “this said government” means, for Sharif A. Bey and other law-abiding Moors, the American government; for Connally-Bey “this said government” is that separate and sovereign government first established by Drew Ali's Divine Constitution (and later adapted into subsequent Constitutions, including one published by Connally-Bey himself).Footnote ²⁹ As one of several “Moorish American Governments” explains it, “Noble Drew Ali introduced The Divine Constitution … the world's 2nd shortest amass of constitutional laws of any government on earth to date, save the United States. Our Divine Constitution is the supreme natural laws empowering the Moorish American People as an independent and sovereign nation.”Footnote ³⁰

In the wake of the charismatic founding figure, Noble Drew Ali, Moors turned to his scriptural legacy and encountered, therein, textual ambiguity which could be interpreted along divergent lines: resolutely in favor of American citizenship as the sole path to “salvation” or declaring a radical break with America and establishing a new sovereign government. Moorish identity thus came to mean, as early as 1929, either an affirmation of the rights and responsibilities of American democracy or an existence outside the jurisdiction of that legal and political system. For a movement that emphasized, from the start, “unity” and practical advice on legal and political behavior, this situation led to both rupture and exchange. Various contemporary Moors and Moorish groups, for instance, actively debate each other's claims, not only to authenticity in regard to Moorish identity and the use of such titles as Moorish Science Temple of America, but also in terms of hermeneutic strategies, legal tactics, historical narratives, and means of publicizing their assertions and the relation of their claims to the real world. I will detail some lines of sovereign logic and behavior, but it is important to note that Moorish communities, far from existing in isolation from each other, are constantly interacting—contesting, questioning, rebutting, reinterpreting, and selectively borrowing from each other.

The search for “real” and “correct” Moorish Science is a dominant theme in contemporary Moorish discourse, across the spectrum of interpretations. Consider, for instance, the following exchange in the comments section of Azeem Hopkins-Bey's aforementioned explication of the meaning of “free national name” on the website run by the pro-voting Operation Proclamation. A visitor identifying as Chris writes: “About citizenship. I'm confused.” He then goes on to quote an interpretation of Dred Scott v. Sandford, writing that this decision “declared that no one of African descent, imported or not, would ever be considered a CITIZEN of the U.S.” Chris goes on to say that he has been taught that such African-descended people were thus later “designated as 14th Amendment citizens” or “ARTIFICIAL PERSONS,” an interpretation he attributes to “the teachings of Elder Taj Tarik Bey.”Footnote ³¹ Sharif A. Bey responds the following day with his own, contrasting interpretation of the Dredd Scott case: the decision is based on the “political classification” of Scott as a “NEGRO OF AFRICAN DESCENT,” which he calls “a culturally and politically ambiguous term, or ‘mark,’ that renders the recipient devoid of political standing or consideration.” He goes on to say that “Prophet Drew Ali taught us that a MAN cannot be a negro, and nothing but a man can obtain citizenship,” that nationality “cannot exist absent citizenship,” and that by rejecting the mark of “Negro” and proclaiming one's national identity as Moorish American one is, in fact, a citizen of the United States.Footnote ³²

Here we have an example of three dominant themes within contemporary Moorish discourse: an engagement in historical legal texts, a recourse to etymology, and an emphasis on the practical ramifications of claims. In sovereign circles, moreover, we see specific sacred historical narratives (this notion of the Fourteenth Amendment vesting Moors with an “artificial citizen” or “straw man” status), strategic use of etymological research to authorize claims (typically involving multiple dictionaries and multiple, especially older editions of these dictionaries), and a focus not only on instructing Moors in behavior with practical legal efficacy but also publicizing examples of victorious encounters (encounters presented as proving the truth as well as the effectiveness of sovereign teachings).

“An Artificial Entity”: Bandele El-Amin's Moorish Republic of New Kemet and Sacred Historical Narratives of Straw Men and the Fourteenth Amendment

Bandele El-Amin is a major figure in contemporary sovereign Moorish discourse. A prolific author and the head of an organization called the Moorish Republic of New Kemit, El-Amin offers workshops on identity, history, and sovereign legal tactics in the Dayton, Ohio, area and, through various websites and assorted books, reaches out in an attempt to educate a wide range of sovereign African Americans, not merely fellow Moors. El-Amin's project is twofold, at once legal and pedagogical, invested in practical tactics for negotiating the law and a general uplift via culture and morale. He phrases his first “objective” as “to create a basis for Blacks to change their status in U.S. law,” which involves, among other things, release from prison of “many prisoners … due to lack of jurisdiction or defect in convictions. Learn Constitutional rights to represent in Propia Persona.”Footnote ³³ His “second objective is restoring Blacks to the human race with a re-education process. This process consists of culture (history, religion, language and politics), which are missing keys in Black's psyche.”Footnote ³⁴

El-Amin bases his legal theories in a narrative of sacred history, a religious story of catastrophe akin to—and surely influenced by—other sovereign citizen narratives.Footnote ³⁵ El-Amin combines two plot lines with echoes in various sovereign and conspiracy theories. In his telling, the Constitution was revoked by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, never to be reinstated, but it was also (again?) revoked during the Franklin Roosevelt administration (either by Roosevelt or by certain elite bankers/the Illuminati) as a response to the Stock Market crash and the start of World War II. This dual historical narrative allows El-Amin to emphasize the 14th Amendment as a source of legal problems for citizens while also explaining the discrepancy between the historical reality of Drew Ali's urging Moors to obey the laws of the land and El-Amin's contemporary, sovereign teachings. According to El-Amin, the role of laws—indeed, the legality of the ruling system—changed after the death of Drew Ali. While the prophet “instructed (the Moors) to go by, and obey, the laws of the federal, state, and county governments,” he did so because in the 1920s, according to El-Amin, “the individual states of the United States of America, were Sovereign.”Footnote ³⁶ In El-Amin's telling, Drew Ali chose death in order to continue his struggle for the uplift of the Moorish people as a spirit, presumably out of prescient knowledge of the political and financial trauma that was to come. The Stock Market crash and Great Depression, El-Amin argues, allowed the Illuminati, with their Federal Reserve Bank, to strip sovereignty from the states and set up a new government, the “Corporate United States of America” serving “the elite few” at the expense of the masses. The Constitution was revoked and “perpetual Maritime Law … went into effect in 1933” when Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress for “The War Powers.”Footnote ³⁷

While El-Amin gestures at more widely held conspiracy theories (the mention, above, of the Illuminati, for instance, which is the only reference to that group in his book, or his parenthetical flagging of President Roosevelt as “a Master Mason”) the precise villains and their rationale remain vague in El-Amin's drama.Footnote ³⁸ What he makes clear, however, is that the Constitution, after 1933, was no longer recognized by government or the courts; instead “color-of-law” and “private law” went into effect. In his words, “These acts, in effect, were designed to neutralize the sovereignty of the ‘Natural Person’ and to steal the birthrights-protections of the Natural People, which were secured by the ‘Supreme Law of the Land’—being the Constitution.”Footnote ³⁹ In the wake of 1933, then, the rights and responsibilities of which Drew Ali spoke were illegally and unjustly stripped away; Moors (and other citizens) existed in an oppressive and illegal situation—in opposition to the US Constitution and the divine or natural law on which that document was based. El-Amin's earlier historical narrative is largely parallel to this one. He claims that when the states of the Confederacy seceded from the Union, “The Republic form of Government … ceased to exist.” Thus, since April 1861 “there has been no ‘de jure’ (sanctioned by law) Congress and no authentic federal government. Everything functions under ‘color of law’ (the appearance or semblance, without substance, of legal right). Through Executive Orders under authority of the War Powers, (i.e. emergency, i.e. the law of necessity) the ‘law of necessity’ means no law whatsoever.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Why Roosevelt would need to repeat these steps is unclear, but El-Amin needs this double-pronged explanation in order to explain not merely why citizens have been stripped of their rights, but also that a false or “artificial person-corporate entity-franchise entitled ‘citizen of the United States’” has been created for everyone born in this country. As El-Amin reads the “so-called (fraudulent and unratified) Fourteenth Amendment,” this is an act created to resolve war debt, offering over to what he calls “the Bankers” “corporate entities that are legally subject to the jurisdiction which they exist.”Footnote ⁴¹

Far from vesting African Americans in full citizenship, then, the Fourteenth Amendment, in this dystopic sacred historical reading, represents a new, more complex and nefarious, form of slavery: financial slavery to the corporation masking as a state. People born in America have their freedom stripped from them with the issuance of legal documents, beginning with the birth certificate. The birth certificate is proof of “corporate status” rather than free national or sovereign natural status. Evidence of this claim, El-Amin teaches, can be found in the way the name is written on official documents. Birth certificates, for instance, refer not to individuals but to the “artificial person” or “straw man” created as a slave to the bankers:

El-Amin's elaborate narrative of history sets up a series of specific problems that his project of legal intervention and education then seeks to solve. In a country in which the Congress is illegal, the Constitution suspended, the Republic nonexistent, and citizens reduced to slaves serving unjust and avaricious elites, the religious notion of “salvation” becomes first and foremost a legal struggle.

At the start of one of his several recent books, El-Amin declares the text's goal to be “to assist so called Black people in correcting their Nationality and status on the record in the US. The nationality focused on is our indigenous and Moorish/Muurish status.”Footnote ⁴³ The “process of naturalization” outlined by El-Amin involves two steps. First, he urges his audience to change their names (to engage in the “correction” of this “attribute” of identity, to use his terms). This step “is vital to linking you to your nobility,” though it is the second step that carries legal efficacy. That second step is the creation of paperwork that must be “filed and used for recognition of your legal status.”Footnote ⁴⁴ These two steps require two different types of documents. The first involves a “Proclamation of Nationality and Birthright,” which is “similar to a Baptismal that Christian's use,” in that it notes indigenous name and “spiritual creed.” This, in El-Amin's description, is primarily symbolic. The second type of document, however, is a “Declaration of Nationality” which is of legal use for “[r]ight to travel, proclaiming indigenous/Moorish status, dual citizenship, Jurisdiction, Positive identification, and domicile.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This document is the first step in the larger process and practice of “Renunciation of corporate U.S. status.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Rejection of corporate status, for El-Amin, plays out through specific actions one does (or refuses to do) in daily life as well as specific actions one does (or refuses to do) when confronted with police officers or other authorities from the legal system. Thus, while El-Amin gives advice to avoid getting married with a marriage license (this makes you “a slave” of the state)Footnote ⁴⁷ and includes both the phone number for and a transcript of his own conversation with a customer service representative of the Social Security Administration, from when he called to inquire about the process for terminating his number,Footnote ⁴⁸ El-Amin also offers guidance for what to do when one is “charged with a crime.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The only specific criminal charge El-Amin prepares his audience for dealing with is one that he also prepares them to commit. His insistence (in keeping with broader sovereign citizen claims) that there is a distinction between being a “traveler” and a “driver” (that the latter implies payment for the service of driving) allows him to argue that “you should not have to be subject to any licensing laws, with the exception for Truck Drivers or Delivery Drivers that are employed under commercial law travel,” as a private traveler does not require a license.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, when stopped by police at a traffic stop, El-Amin instructs his readers to “give them your insurance card and your Moorish I.D. card. Remind the officer that you are under international law.”Footnote ⁵¹ Should this fail to convince and a citation be forthcoming, El-Amin advises the following:

• • “[F]ile your nationality documents along with whatever motions/affidavits you are using.”

• • Refuse representation from an attorney: “represent yourself.”

• • Be wary (though he does not spell this out clearly) about “appearing” in court, which he says, submits you “to their jurisdiction. You should ‘Appear’ Specially and not generally. The key is jurisdiction and status.”

• • In dealing with your case, “Certain motions will assist you in court.”

• • Always “request a continuance. This will allow you more time to prepare your case. You also need to request a discovery packet.”

• • “If there were any reason to doubt probably cause, you should file a motion to suppress.”

• • “If a motion is denied by the judge, you can appeal that motion.”

• • “Never make a plea. Always let the judge make a plea on your behalf.”Footnote ⁵²

I noted above that El-Amin's project also includes a component of education into culture and identity. Indeed, he frames the mission of the Moorish Republic of New Kemit organization in the following manner: “to practice and teach African centered philosophy, thought and ritual … to educate Blacks of their Moorish/African heritage,” but while there is emphasis on traditional African culture, cuisine, and healing, El-Amin's primary focus is clearly to help people “understand law and how to retain their human (sovereign/constitutional) rights through nationality.”Footnote ⁵³ El-Amin ran multi-week seminars for teaching those in the Dayton, Ohio, area to become what he calls “first rate” or “first class citizens.” He reports that one recent session consisted of two groups: one that began with forty students, of which thirty-two “remained throughout the entire course”; and another that began with twenty-five students, of which fifteen remained.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although these seminars tested participants’ knowledge of specific African-derived terms and historical trivia, El-Amin considered the most important assessment of student learning to be “a ‘hands on’ observation of subject groups in real life scenarios.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This course component, which El-Amin calls the “actual test,” displays the subject's ability to interact in society with results. An example is how to talk to a police officer at a traffic stop. How you let a police officer know your rights as a Moorish American? The tone of voice and response must be acceptable by the instructor. A Mock trial or simulation court trial may be created to test the student's skills in law, orating and attitude.”Footnote ⁵⁶

El-Amin's focus on the real-world application of his teaching is consistent with his conception of this “knowledge of law” as having practical value. Such performances, moreover, are necessary marks of Moorish identity; to be able to handle oneself in street encounters with police officers and in courtroom confrontations with judges is a mark of having come into true consciousness of one's identity and rights.

“You Must Know the Truth of Your Nationality and the Name of Your People”: Etymology as Authority across the Spectrum of Moorish Interpretations of Nationality, from Operation Proclamation's Sharif A. Bey to Sovereign Theorist Taj Tarik Bey

When, in the 1920s, Noble Drew Ali taught that “You must know the truth of your nationality and the name of your people,” he was arguing that terms such as “black,” “negro,” and “colored” were incorrect appellations, labels foisted upon unconscious Moorish-Americans as a way to insure that they remain “unconscious” of their true identity, responsibility, and potential.Footnote ⁵⁷ Drew Ali's understanding of American racism is expressed, here, as at once ubiquitously present in and normalized through language. Racist labels have the effect of reinforcing oppression on the level of image (held by self and other), and even (maybe especially) unconsciously. To call oneself a negro is to consent to the meaning given to that term by those in power, those who call one a negro. On a conscious level, if one believes that one is a negro, a concept defined by racists, then one is not only trapped legally (i.e., a negro is not a citizen), but also in terms of thought and behavior (i.e., to believe that negro defines one's identity, to behave like a negro, is to think and live in opposition to the worldview and behavior of a Moor). Ali points to the power of language as a means of oppression while, at the same time, alerting his audience to language's radically liberating potential. By using different words, Drew Ali teaches, individuals can begin to break out of the mindset of the dominant racist society. This is a tactic that would rise to national attention in a group that developed out of Moorish Science teaching, the Nation of Islam, when “slave names” were replaced, not only with original, African names, but most notably with the iconic X, a cipher for the slave industry's erasure of black Americans’ connection to and knowledge of their African heritage and history. Instead of going by the name of the family that used to own your ancestors, you remake yourself with the mark of history's erasure: the name becomes weaponized. Drew Ali was teaching this years before the Nation of Islam began: “Negro” is racist society's last line of defense against Moorish consciousness. Reject the term, embrace your true national name—“El” or “Bey” in early Moorish science—and break free from “mental slavery.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Contemporary Moorish thinkers—across the spectrum of interpretations on nationality, from pro-voting to sovereign—take Drew Ali's emphasis on language farther, sharing a belief in an objective truth under the socially contingent delusions of terminology. In short, the science of etymology is valorized as a means of obtaining the true and thus efficacious meaning of a given word. One result of this is strategic employ of an eclectic array of dictionaries and claims about language, its development, and meaning.

Consider, for instance, pro-voting Operation Proclamation founder Sharif A. Bey's introduction to legal logic in one of his books. “Therefore, when a Man calls him or herself a ‘human being,’” he writes, “they are saying, ‘I'm an animal; I'm non-religious; I'm unrepentant; I'm wicked, sinful and dissolute; I'm subject to carnal nature's law, rather than Allah's Law.’”Footnote ⁵⁹ He comes to this “definition” via an etymological examination of terms. People act a certain way, morally—so this logic goes—because they are under the incorrect assumption that they are accurately described by a certain term. Terminology determines ontology—even if the aforementioned “human being” does not realize the “true” meaning of the term he or she uses to describe him or herself.

Sharif A. Bey gets from “human being” to “non-religious … unrepentant … sinful … carnal,” through recourse to dictionaries. The employ of such texts is selective. He first turns to “Ballentine's Law Dictionary, 1948 Edition,” where he finds that “‘Human Being’ is defined as follows: ‘See monster’. From the same dictionary, ‘monster’ is defined: ‘A human-being by birth, but in some part resembling a lower animal.’” To learn more, A. Bey turns to yet another dictionary, “Oxford New English Dictionary of 1901,” wherein “‘human’ is defined as ‘3. Belonging or relative to man as distinguished from God or superhuman beings; pertaining to the sphere or faculties of man (with implication of limitation or inferiority); mundane; secular. (Often opposed to divine).’ … . Thus, ‘human’ means ungodly.”Footnote ⁶⁰ A. Bey's move is scientific—following Noble Drew Ali's association of science with his religion—Moorish Science, or Islamism.Footnote ⁶¹ This “scientific” move is perceived to be and presented as objective, speaking to true identity (the reality of the thing as revealed via the understanding of its actual name) as well as revealing a truth of practical use value in the world. Knowledge of the meaning of words, their definitions, is no mere trivial knowledge. A. Bey argues; rather, such knowledge is potentially efficacious in that arena wherein words most obviously have real effects: the legal.

Moorish thinker Taj Tarik Bey—one of the elder statesmen of sovereign Moorish discourse, a prolific author and prominent presence on the Internet—follows a similar logic, explaining the etymology of the term “black”:

Europeans “branded us” with names to “remove us from that [legal] status,” Tarik Bey argues.Footnote ⁶³ The result of this branding was and is a widespread confusion and, worse, an emotional attachment to confused identity and terminology, such that people insist on being proud of being black, and talk of “black culture,” which Tarik Bey explains as meaning, simply, “dead culture.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Tarik Bey is quick to emphasize that this discussion of terminology is not merely academic: words matter in the real world, most immediately and especially, in the realm of law.

In law, one must name things correctly. As Tarik Bey cracks, “In law, if I'm selling you a pit bull, and the pit bull goes meow, that's a violation.”Footnote ⁶⁵ More seriously, in one of his many passionate acts of evangelism and teaching recorded on YouTube, he challenges a young man with what he claims is the first and most important question, the question that will determine whether any future conversation can take place: “Do you know etymology?”Footnote ⁶⁶

Without a shared understanding of the true meaning of language, communication is impossible. Etymology, for Tarik Bey, is the foundation for all conversation, “the science that treats of the origin, the root, the nature, and the spirit of the words.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Such a science is universal and, indeed, invented by Africans, though today Europeans use it as a tool of oppression. To be precise, Tarik Bey holds that “the language that we usually use is called connotative linguistics, which is introduced into societies where people are held in servitude so that their own language traps them.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Lack of knowledge of etymology “will cause failures . . . . In law and in standings and in contract, you would fail all the time, which makes us incompetent.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Legal expertise is valued in, and understanding of terminology as key to such expertise is recognized by, Moors and Moorish communities universally, across divides of factionalism, debates of lineage and theology, or the spectrum of interpretation regarding nationality and citizenship. The sources of “truth” in relation to words, however, are not agreed upon. At times, among some thinkers, this is explicitly recognized and even—as for Taj Tarik Bey—a perennial source of frustration. “Truth,” a Moorish National website reminds us, is defined by Black's Law Dictionary 4th Edition Revised as the “Agreement of thought and reality,” but in practice, such an agreement is fluid, allowing for creative claims to be backed by the authority of seemingly objective, “scientific” etymological interpretations.Footnote ⁷⁰ All that is required is recourse to a dictionary.

The dictionary, offering definitions and, in some cases, etymology, provides the Moorish thinker with an invaluable resource. Which dictionary or dictionaries are consulted becomes an important question for sovereign theorists, who often insist upon specific dictionaries. Sometimes choice of dictionary has a clear practical purpose, as when Sharif A. Bey wove together citations from two older edition dictionaries in order to bolster his line of thought. El-Amin tells his readers that, as part of their journey toward freedom, the “First thing is to purchase a Black's Law Dictionary.”Footnote ⁷¹ Because of its name, there are debates in Moorish communities as to whether this dictionary is intended for or part of the racist oppression of Moors, but when it is used, it is often older editions, the antiquated definitions of which prove more amenable to certain interpretations. One online thinker argues that any edition past the fifth edition is invalid: “The reasons why is the definitions change and, in some instances, the definitions are incomplete,” though his interest is particularly in words like “driver,” the older definitions of which are more easily read as not applying to “travelers” piloting motor vehicles down free roads.Footnote ⁷²

Thought such as this has been borrowed from and is shared with other sovereign groups. Distinctive to Moorish Science, however, is this dynamic by which the priority given to terminology allows for radical interpretive creativity, ranging from a focus on Oxford English Dictionary etymology represented by Taj Tarik Bey, who cautions that one must know the etymon of all words, and recommends the Oxford English Dictionary,

to the popular riffing on sounds and associations and numerological significance represented by, say, Brother Eric Mungin Bey's book, Discover the Key to the Moorish Questionary[;]Footnote ⁷⁴ or the sort of analysis of idioms and claim to comparative (but free-form) “etymological research” performed by Amen A. El in his The Passion and Resurrection of the Moorish Hiram.Footnote ⁷⁵ Words may be everything to Moorish Science, but they are fluid, shifting, easily claimed and contested. Taj Tarik Bey expresses his frustration: “if you don't know etymology, what difference does it make what answer I give to you?”Footnote ⁷⁶ But he also recognizes the root of the problem when he poses this question in more technical terms: “Are you going to give me a definition or a connotative opinion?”Footnote ⁷⁷ This, lamentably, is the contemporary case: opinions hold the day. This is lamentable not only for the many Moors attempting to discern which path of Moorish Science is “right” and “true,” but also for those Moors who, in evincing their belief in sovereign claims, end up with multiple convictions, and ultimately, for the police officers, judges, and lawyers who must attempt to negotiate these sorts of claims. In the end, any opinion about a word, if proof texted by reference to a dictionary, can pass as legally competent.

The Magical Efficacy and Plausibility of Sovereign Moorish Legal Nomos

Neither the specific meaning of words nor the specific authority needed to support a claim to meaning is set, yet sovereign Moorish logic is hardly a state of interpretive chaos. Likewise, with the words of Noble Drew Ali, meaning varies with the interpreter, but the authority of the source is assured. With etymology, sovereign Moors share a coherent system for researching and authorizing meaning, even if such meaning is, ultimately, subjective and individual, even within the broader sovereign Moorish legal nomos. The situation exemplifies what Robert Cover terms “Babel”: “not incoherence but a multiplicity of coherent systems,” an excess of normative worlds undergirded by narratives.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even within the shared sovereign Moorish nomos, myriad interpretations are possible and, indeed, proliferate, etymologically as well as exegetically. The “problem of intelligibility among communities”Footnote ⁷⁹ in this Babel is not merely a problem of communication between sovereigns and non-sovereigns, Moors and the state, but also between sovereign Moors and their fellow sovereign Moors. Indeed, one popular genre of sovereign Moorish YouTube video is that of debates or “battles” between sovereign Moorish thinkers who spar over conflicting versions of and methods for acquiring sovereign Moorish truth claims. A range of specific claims thus exist within a shared nomos, drawing on a shared lineage, a shared canon, and shared processes of authorization.

Like others in the sovereign citizen movement, sovereign Moors also hold to a shared conception of law as a transcendent power with the potential to change reality. Sovereign eschewal of specific laws and levels of authority/jurisdiction is not rooted in chaotic disregard but, rather, in an idealization of law as universal, communicable, and just. Sovereigns share a faith in the power of law to set the world right. Indeed, as scholar of new religions Catherine Wessinger has shown, sovereigns approach law and engage with law as if it were magic. Writing about the sovereign Montana Freemen besieged by FBI agents at a farm in Montana in 1996, Wessinger observes that the Freemen's engagement with legal discourse and documents resembled the use of magic. The value of this observation is that the sovereign legal nomos lived by the Freemen could be, by scholars, “analyzed in terms of magic,” which Wessinger goes on to define as essentially a collection of “rituals (often involving speaking or writing words of power) that are believed to have the power to effect changes in the physical world.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This communal faith in law's transcendent efficacy, its power to alter circumstances, is shared by sovereign Moors, and to approach this understanding of the law as magical calls for further consideration of how magic is seen to work, by magicians, in a world largely populated by those who do not believe in its power.

The work of psychologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann provides insight into how contemporary magicians maintain the plausibility of a magical worldview. Emerging from ethnographic work with a range of magic practitioners in England, Luhrmann's book, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, makes a case that magicians evaluate the success of their magic via methods learned as part of the process of becoming a magician. First, perceptions of experience are distorted in favor of a bias toward the magical. Next, interpretations of those experiences are offered which likewise reflect that bias. Finally, rationalizations are constructed to advance and privilege the plausibility of magic as an active factor in the world.Footnote ⁸¹ Luhrmann argues that such a pattern of perception, interpretation, and rationalization is learned as part of the process of becoming a magician. The plausibility of magic is maintained in two ways. First, by switching focus from the “world of uncertainty” to the individual and her experience, the magician can maintain the plausibility of magic by locating magic's efficacy in perception of “a greater sense of self-control and personal competence.”Footnote ⁸² Likewise, this process of biased perception, interpretation, and rationalization allows for a wide range of experience to be read as evidence of magical success and for attention to be given to (and validation received from) instances of partial success as well. Thus, even in cases of “apparent failure” the magician can find proof that magic works, “as when some event occurs that seems associated with the ritual, even if it is not its goal.”Footnote ⁸³

When Chief Noble Bandele El-Amin writes that “The difference between a black person and a Moor is that Moors know the law and black's do not,” he is referring to something far more than mainstream understandings of—or a mainstream nomos of—the legal. Indeed, in his writing, El-Amin offers his readers initiation into an occult system of knowledge, which, as surely as any sorcery, is believed to have real and practical effects. El-Amin would surely balk at this characterization, as, for him and his co-religionists in the world of sovereign Moorish ideology, legal knowledge is objective, legal discourse is efficacious because recognized as real, and legal behavior is preeminently this-worldly, not the stuff of metaphysics. Yet the law, for such Moors, is understood to be a hidden reality, concealed by elaborate histories of conspiracy and oppression, revealed by certain adept masters as the salvation of their followers. Legal knowledge, for sovereign Moorish thinkers, is a specific set of skills, and the process of learning those skills, that parallels the learning of magic as outlined by Luhrmann. To learn magic—and to learn sovereign Moorish law—is to learn how to perceive, interpret, and rationalize experience such that one can provide evidence in support of the plausibility of one's claims.

The Hermeneutics of Supersession: Conflation of the Sovereign Legal Nomos with the Nomos of the State

Yet if one challenge for contemporary magicians is that they live in a world populated by those who do not believe in magic, sovereigns live in a world in which the power of law is unquestioned. Indeed, sovereign Moors find themselves in a situation in which their own claims about the law, while in conflict with dominant claims, can nonetheless be read as validated by the existence of—and palpable power of—this dominant legal nomos. Cover argues that a given legal nomos is formed via “two corresponding ideal-typical patterns”: the “paideic,” predicated on “a common body or precept and narrative, a common and personal way of being educated into this corpus, and a sense of direction or growth that is constituted as the individual and his community work out the implications of their law”; and the “imperial,” wherein “norms are universal and enforced by institutions. They need not be taught at all, as long as they are effective.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The American legal situation is thus characterized not only by the Babel of conflicting nomoi but also by “a radical dichotomy between the social organization of law as power and the organization of law as meaning.”Footnote ⁸⁵ He writes of the courts as necessarily jurispathic (law-killing), judging as they do between laws and seeking to terminate many of the various laws produced by communities in acts of “extrastate jurisgenesis.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The sovereign citizen example, however, reveals the existence of extrastate communities that do not merely engage in the cultural creation of law but, further, engage in the jurispathic act of judging between laws under the framework of there being only one. Sovereign citizens understand the situation of multiple interpretations as one not of multiple nomoi but of incorrect understandings of one superior, universal nomos. In Cover's language, sovereigns, like apologists for the courts, “state the problem not as one of too much law, but as one of unclear law,” a move which, by approaching the situation not as one of multiple coherent interpretations of the law, but, rather, “difference of opinion about the law seems to presuppose that there is a hermeneutic that is methodologically superior to those employed by the communities that offer their own law.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Sovereign citizens do not merely appropriate legal discourse, seizing a tool of the state to use as a weapon for their own liberation;Footnote ⁸⁸ they appropriate as well the state's attitude about and conception of its jurispathic role. At the same time, conflating their own nomos with that of the state allows for the state's undeniable power of state application of the law—to arrest, to imprison, even to control the protocol for communication within the courtroom—to be read, by sovereign Moors, as further evidence of their own claims about “the law” in general. The power of the state, exerted in the service of its own jurispathic action, is perceived, interpreted, and rationalized by sovereigns within their own jurispathic desire.

Cover writes that “most communities will avoid outright conflict with a judge's interpretations, at least when he will likely back them with violence.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In those cases (when state and community offer conflicting interpretations) “the community must elaborate the hermeneutics of resistance or of withdrawal.”Footnote ⁹⁰ There is a third option for sovereigns. Sovereigns insist “nomos other than that of the state” persists in the face of conflict, wherein conflation of the sovereign nomos and the nomos of the state allows for a response to conflict that is neither withdrawal nor resistance but, rather, a hermeneutics of supersession, as sovereign “law” is argued as the correct and only version of “the law.”Footnote ⁹¹

In this hermeneutics of supersession, moreover, the obvious power at play in interactions in court or confrontations with police reinforces sovereign understandings about the overarching (magical) power of the law. For instance, sovereign Moorish lecturer Queen Valahra Renita El Harre-Bey (“Queen V”) begins her lesson on “Black's Law,” with the question of “what law really is.”Footnote ⁹² Law is singular, and while her claims are at once practical and theological, she urges her audiences—both in person and via the internet, where her recorded presentations are available on YouTube—to acquire and use true knowledge of the law, a task which requires confrontation in the institutionalized settings of legal authority, the courtroom, the encounter with the police officer, the realm of tax documents, and other official legal forms. Via appeals to the scriptural tradition of Noble Drew Ali and various etymological claims rooted in selective dictionary use, Queen V argues that law and religion, for Moors, are one, and that, moreover, the only actual law is that performed by sovereigns. She is explicit: “The only people who can issue law are people who are acting in their sovereign capacity,”Footnote ⁹³ and all others (those in “corporate ward status,” those contractually bound by birth certificates) are merely “us[ing] words of art to make you believe in fact that law is on the table when you walk into a courthouse or a court room.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Only the sovereign can bring law into the courthouse. Only sovereigns can recognize true law, and only sovereigns can use it. “Law can only be used by people who are in their sovereign capacity,” she says.Footnote ⁹⁵ And while this excludes the 99 percent of the world that live in legal slavery from using the law, her mission is to uplift people by educating them into true legal knowledge and, thus, liberation. She urges her listeners to look up the word “citizen” in any legal dictionary, where they will learn that “A citizen is not a sovereign.”Footnote ⁹⁶ She then proceeds with her lessons, imparting sovereign legal knowledge and skill such that her audience, formerly unconscious of their oppression as well as their potential power through law, can now stand equipped with expertise and assert their legal rights. She instructs them, for instance, to declare to judges, “My honor—not your honor,” and demand proof of jurisdiction over sovereigns: “What is your status? What is your nationality?” A European (white) judge, after all, cannot be sovereign here in the land rightfully owned by Moors: “If they want to be sovereign, they've got to go home. They cannot be sovereign here.” Ask them, “Where is your proof of naturalization in my land,” she instructs, “Who gave you the authority to be here; who issued you the authority to act in any capacity?” If such questions prove futile, she tells her followers to simply “stand mute,” “stand in your square,” the so-called court has no authority over you, can do nothing to you.Footnote ⁹⁷ There is no law in the court except for that law which the sovereign knows and expounds: this is the hermeneutics of supersession, jurispathic in the face of Babel, yet surely chaotic seeming to the judges and lawyers who find themselves facing such a sovereign legal expert.

“To know the law—and certainly to live the law,” Cover writes, is essentially to know and live out a set of commitments, commitments that may well put the individual in conflict with (and thus subject to the violence of) the state.Footnote ⁹⁸ To know the law as a sovereign Moor is to proclaim an identity in relation to the law and to take part in methods of authorizing interpretations and claims rooted in history, scripture, and etymological interpretation. Commitment to the power of names and words, narratives and readings of statements from the founding prophet, Noble Drew Ali, is part of a broader commitment to a legal nomos in which law is understood and engaged as magical. For sovereign Moors, to approach the law “in terms of magic” is also to employ strategies for the maintaining of plausibility for that conception, to be educated into biased perceptions, interpretations, and rationalizations that read evidence for law's magical nature in a range of experiences—even in conflictual encounters with the legal nomos of the state. For, finally, to be committed to a sovereign Moorish legal nomos is to be committed to a hermeneutics of supersession, wherein the appearance of law in the courts and in interactions with officials is explicitly false law. The sovereign Moorish nomos is jurispathic, convinced that there is only one true law. The duty of the sovereign Moor is to uplift others by educating them into knowledge of that law—as set of commitments and as ideal, as identity and array of skills, as nomos and as practice.