The FBI treated Black Muslims’ political Islam as a national security threat for decades.

Evidence

African Americans’ deployment of Islam as a political liberatory ideology made them uniquely threatening to the US government. Beginning in the 1930s, the FBI surveilled and investigated the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the UNIA as purportedly radical movements. Internal memos communicated the FBI’s belief that the NOI was a national security threat. Elijah Muhammad’s correspondence in the late 1950s with Arab Nationalist Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser cast more suspicion on Black Muslims’ national loyalty. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 598

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader surveillance literature (e.g., FBI COINTELPRO, redlining of dissent) and to claims about how governments criminalize religious-political minorities. — connects to: The FBI surveilled black Muslims as seditious threats more than white Arab immigrants