Foreign Islamic authority’s censure had little effect on American Muslim groups

Evidence

Majid wrote that Ali thought himself to be a prophet and composed his own holy scripture, The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple (1927), which did not include a single verse from the Qur’an or a single allusion to the Sunna. Al-Azhar responded in November 1931 by releasing an English translation of its fatwa, which declared Ali an “unbeliever or a mentally-deranged person.” … If the fatwa was ever distributed in the United States— and there is no evidence indicating that it was—it had little impact on the growth of the MSTA, which boasted thousands of members by the 1940s. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 386

Categorization

• XREF: The pattern of foreign ‘stay in your lane’ authenticity rulings against US-based religious innovations parallels Catholic Church censure of Americanism and Pentecostalism.