Moorish Science Temple converts claimed a Moroccan identity to escape US blackness

Evidence

The history of enslaved Muslim Africans took a di√erent path in the early twentieth century, when, seeking to displace notions of biological race, Noble Drew Ali and his followers founded the Moorish Science Temple. In doing so, they sought to identify not with enslaved Africans but with a di√erent category—that of ”Moorish American,” or descendants of people from Morocco. The term ”Moor,” a common appellation for Muslims and Arabs in U.S. popular culture in the nineteenth century, was in direct contradistinction to the notion of ”slave.” (Take, for example, the case of Abdur Rahman, the so-called Prince among Slaves, who was defined racially as ”Moorish” rather than as ”black” once his royal lineage was revealed [Curtis 2009].)≤≠ For Ali’s followers, claiming a Moorish background represented a shift from racial identi- fication to ethnic and religious identification that, they hoped, would shield them from discrimination and prejudice. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 195

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of religious identity as a strategy to escape racial categorization, which echoes in later diaspora identity claims.
• SEED: The Abdur Rahman case — a man reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘Moorish’ once his royal lineage was revealed — is a striking example of race as a status-contingent label worth an article.