"Upon the publication of The Black Muslims in America in 1961, it instantly became the foremost source on the Nation of Islam [NOI]. Although Lincoln imagined the book as an academic work, he wrote to Muhammad that he hoped it would also "be published... for the general public. Neither, however, could have anticipated its immense popularity. In its first six months in print, the publisher shipped over ten thousand copies. Interest came from both within and beyond the United States. Beacon Press publicized the book heavily, sending an incredible forty-three thousand complementary paperback copies to professors in 1962 alone. The book was reviewed in Arabic and translated in an abridged form in German. An in-depth review of the book by Shad Polier, a lawyer who founded the American Jewish Congress, even made its way to the desk of Harris Wofford, who was appointed special assistant for civil rights by John F. Kennedy the same year the book was released."
Lincoln's book was unique not only for its timing and reach but also for its grappling with the question of the Nation of Islam's religious orthodoxy. Pages of his handwritten notes were titled "deviations from Islam," and the book dedicated a chapter to "The Black Muslims and Orthodox Islam." Lincoln's research reflected a dual focus on issues of Islamic orthodoxy and African decolonization that characterized Moslem World and the U.S.A. In an anonymous survey, Lincoln asked rank-and-file members if the NOI was "recognized by 'orthodox' Islamic leaders in the U.S.A." He inquired whether Elijah Muhammad relied on international funding and whether Malcolm X was "received" in Mecca during his tour the previous summer, In another survey, a question on the growth of the "Moslem movement in the United States over the last decade was followed by another, which anticipated that respondents would see its global connections. A separate question asked, "Who do you regard as the major figure in this new period of the re-emergence of the darker peoples of the earth?"
Lincoln compiled most of his research in 1960, during which sixteen countries freed themselves from French, British, and Belgian rule. Responding to both African decolonization and the Nation of Islam's interest in this global development, nearly half of Lincoln's seventeen questions in one survey dealt with Africa and world affairs. Whether or not Lincoln had read the Moslem World article "The Black Man and Islam," he had a better grasp than most scholars and journalists of the group's concern with Islam and the importance of its links to African decolonization as well as the Black freedom struggle within the United States.
Yet Lincoln interpreted some of its anticolonial stances through the neo-colonial framework of The Hate That Hate Produced. For example, his hand-written notes reveal one of the earliest Black critiques of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, made by the NOI. But he simply equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, noting that while Muhammad was not "specifically anti-Semitic," he was "violently anti-white, with 'white' including Jews":
In the last two years, anti-Zionism has crept into his hate campaign.. Anti-Zionist doctrine is just now becoming a part of overall temple propaganda. Egyptian attaché to the United Nations Ahmad Zaki El] Borai and Bashir are working closely with Malcolm X on a long-term project including the importation of a group of dark-skinned Arab-propagandists. Arabs are frequently in touch with E[lijah] in Chicago according to Naeem.
Lincoln missed the meaning of this shift for the Nation of Islam and the Black freedom movement more broadly. Muhammad had long used Jewish Zionism as a key historical precedent for the NOI's vision of nation- hood, particularly its claims for land in the United States, and as a model for state building. Lincoln's notes offer a window into the internal debates within the NOI, which were initiated by Arab Muslim advisers and aimed to help develop a settler-colonial framework for understanding Israel's relationship to the Arab world.
Scholars have often pointed to Malcolm X's 1964 essay "Zionist Logic" in the Egyptian Gazette, in which he argued that Israel was a "new form of colonialism," as one of the earliest anti-Zionist critiques made from within the Black freedom struggle. There he argued that Zionism had no legal or religious basis but was simply colonialism camouflaged as philanthropy and economic aid to developing nations. He linked Israel to racial capitalism, charging that twentieth-century imperialism was driven by "Zionist dollarism," and explored what solidarity with Palestine might look like. Yet understandings of Malcolm's thought after his break with the NOI are often grounded in an erasure of the Nation of Islam from intellectual histories of the Black freedom movement. Lincoln's notes suggest that the NOI had moved toward anti-Zionism as early as the late 1950s.
Ironically, the author with the most nuanced positioning of the NOI within both political and religious domains coined a phrase that marginalized the Nation of Islam from both Black Nationalism and global Islam. In contrast to the documentary, which had simply erased Muslim practice, Lincoln tried to capture the NOI dual relationship to Islam and the civil rights struggle by calling the group the "Black Muslims." In his dissertation, Lincoln went to great lengths to explain the moniker. It was meant to be "descriptive, definitive, and delimiting descriptive because all its members are "Black, definitive in that "Muslims suggested connections to "classical Islam," and delimiting in that it "distinguishes this particular group from all others, here or e whatever religion, and of whatever race or social group." Lincoln made a distinction between "Muslim," which referred only to those in the NOI, and "Moslem," used for "followers of classical Islam," and explained that throughout the dissertation, "Muslim' refers only to an American Negro follower of Elijah Muhammad." But by the time the book was published, this careful parsing had fallen away.
Lincoln's early framings of the Nation of Islam reflected his own precari ous position as a Black scholar who was pulled between the Black Nationalism of the NOI and the white liberalism of academia. To his advisers at Boston University, Lincoln described the Nation of Islam in fundamentally negative terms, as a cult that represented the failing of American democracy to achieve racial equality. Echoing the language of The Hate That Hate Produced, he framed the NOI as a "particular problem" and a "Black cult of hatred." He compared it to the White Citizens' Councils of the South, and one undated manuscript concluded by reproducing the documentary's argument verbatim: "Black Nationalism is the symbol of the hate that hate produced. "
To Elijah Mahammad and the NOI, in contrast, he positioned himself as a potential ally, an educator who happens to be Black... (and perhaps a more sympathetic one). Soon after the documentary aired, he wrote Muhammad that it and the subsequent articles in Time and other magazines, have possibly contributed to rather than clarified the public distortion. "I have on many occasions to speak of Islam, and to dispel many of the popular misconceptions regarding your leadership." He even claimed that he was often mistaken for a Muslim, adding that "I have felt that many of your goals are not only desirable, but presently attainable, and I have felt constrained to say the issue has arisen." Although many ministers within the Nation of Islam would later discredit and dissociate themselves from the book, Lincoln made a compelling case to Elijah Muhammad for the significance of his project. The success of the documentary enabled Lincoln tomake appeals both to academics who were skeptical of the movement's importance and to the NOI, which was seeking a more accurate portrayal.
In early 1961, Muhammad went so far as to consider mobilizing the Fruit of Islam to sell Lincoln's book at its next Saviours' Day Convention. If the NOI agreed to purchase five thousand copies, Beacon Press would charge the group just two-thirds of the retail price. Although Muhammad had corresponded with Lincoln throughout his research, he had not read the final manuscript and left the decision to Malcolm. "If the book is not good enough for us to sell to the public, then we will not sell it," Muhammad wrote. "On the other hand, if you think it is suitable for us to back up,the printers offered a very good commission to the Muslims.""
- Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. p. 40-43
