African American Islamic movements multiplied through travel and Cairo study

Evidence

The rate of such exchanges only accelerated in the 1930s. In 1930, W. D. Fard, a person of color whose background remains contested, founded the NOI, originally called the Allah Temple of Islam, an organization influenced by the Moorish Science Temple. In 1931, Muhammad Ezaldeen (1886–1957), perhaps a former member of the MSTA, went to Cairo, Egypt, and studied Islam under the auspices of the Young Men’s Muslim Association. He came back to the United States in 1938 and established the Addeynu Allahe Universal Arabic Association (AAUAA), an African American Sunni Muslim organization that became successful along the East Coast. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 388

Categorization

• XREF: The U.S.-Cairo axis of Islamic learning in the 1930s echoes the reader’s project on how fear of Islam constructs authority; here authority is being actively imported and reworked by African Americans rather than imposed.