Adultery! Why, any Muslim guilty of adultery was summarily ousted in disgrace. One of the
Nation's most closely kept scandals was that a succession of the personal secretaries of Mr.
Muhammad had become pregnant. They were brought before Muslim courts and charged with
adultery and they confessed. Humiliated before the general body, they received sentences of
from one to five years of "isolation." That meant they were to have no contact whatsoever with
any other Muslims.
I don't think I could say anything which better testifies to my depth of faith in Mr. Muhammad than
that I totally and absolutely rejected my own intelligence. I simply refused to believe.
I didn't want Allah to "burn my brain" as I felt the brain of my brother Reginald had been burned
for harboring evil thoughts about Mr. Elijah Muhammad. The last time I had seen Reginald, one
day he walked into the Mosque Seven restaurant. I saw him coming in the door. I went and met
him. I looked into my own brother's eyes; I told him he wasn't welcome among Muslims, and he
turned around and left, and I haven't seen him since. I did that to my own blood brother because,
years before, Mr. Muhammad had sentenced Reginald to "isolation" from all other Muslims-and I
considered that I was a Muslim before I was Reginald's brother.
No one in the world could have convinced me that Mr. Muhammad would betray the reverence
bestowed upon him by all of the mosques full of poor, trusting Muslims nickeling and diming up to
faithfully support the Nation of Islam-when many of these faithful were scarcely able to pay their
own rents.
But by late 1962, I learned reliably that numerous Muslims were leaving Mosque Two in Chicago.
The ugly rumor was spreading swiftly-even among non-Muslim Negroes. When I thought how the
press constantly sought ways to discredit the Nation of Islam, I trembled to think of such a thing
reaching the ears of some newspaper reporter, either black or white.
I actually began to have nightmares... I saw headlines.
I was burdened with a leaden fear as I kept speaking engagements all over America. Any time a
reporter came anywhere near me, I could hear him ask, "Is it true, Mr. Malcolm X, this report
we hear, that.. ." And what was I going to say?
There was never any specific moment when I admitted the situation to myself. In the way that the
human mind can do, somehow I slid over admitting tomyself the ugly fact, even as I began
dealing with it.
Both in New York and Chicago, non-Muslims whom I knew began to tell me indirectly they had
heard-or they would ask me if I had heard. I would act as if I had no idea whatever of what they
were talking about-and I was grateful when they chose not to spell out what they knew. I went
around knowing that I looked to them like a total fool. I felt like a total fool, out there every day
preaching, and apparently not knowing what was going on right under my nose, in my own
organization, involving the very man I was praising so. To look like a fool unearthed emotions I
hadn't felt since my Harlem hustler days. The worst thing in the hustler's world was to be a dupe.
I will give you an example. Backstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem one day, the comedian Dick
Gregory looked at me. "Man," he said, "Muhammad's nothing but a.. ."-I can't say the word he
used. Bam! Just like that. My Muslim instincts said to attack Dick-but, instead, I felt weak and
hollow. I think Dick sensed how upset I was and he let me get him off the subject. I knew Dick, a
Chicagoan, was wise in the ways of the streets, and blunt-spoken. I wanted to plead with him not
to say to anyone else what he had said to me-but I couldn't; it would have been my own
admission.
I can't describe the torments I went through.
Always before, in any extremity, I had caught the first plane to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. He had
virtually raised me from the dead. Everything I was that was creditable, he had made me. I felt
that no matter what, I could not let him down.
There was no one I could turn to with this problem, except Mr. Muhammad himself. Ultimately that
had to be the case. But first I went to Chicago to see Mr. Muhammad's second youngest son,
Wallace Muhammad. I felt that Wallacewas Mr. Muhammad's most strongly spiritual son, the son
with the most objective outlook. Always, Wallace and I had shared an exceptional closeness and
trust.
darsice
(darsice)
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