Cover of The Aliites
The Aliites Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali
by Spencer Dew
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Cloth: 978-0-226-64796-8 | Paper: 978-0-226-64801-9 | Electronic: 978-0-226-64815-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

“Citizenship is salvation,” preached Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the early twentieth century. Ali’s message was an aspirational call for black Americans to undertake a struggle for recognition from the state, one that would both ensure protection for all Americans through rights guaranteed by the law and correct the unjust implementation of law that prevailed in the racially segregated United States. Ali and his followers took on this mission of citizenship as a religious calling, working to carve out a place for themselves in American democracy and to bring about a society that lived up to what they considered the sacred purpose of the law.

In The Aliites, Spencer Dew traces the history and impact of Ali’s radical fusion of law and faith. Dew uncovers the influence of Ali’s teachings, including the many movements they inspired. As Dew shows, Ali’s teachings demonstrate an implicit yet critical component of the American approach to law: that it should express our highest ideals for society, even if it is rarely perfect in practice. Examining this robustly creative yet largely overlooked lineage of African American religious thought, Dew provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Spencer Dew is Religion Teaching Fellow at Wittenberg University and affiliated faculty at The Ohio State University.

REVIEWS

“In this remarkable book of personal and communal atonement, Dew honors what he calls ‘the intellectual aikido’ of Aliite thinkers across a hundred years of insistent devotion to the ideals of American citizenship. Placing the Aliites in the proud company of American freethinkers, Dew lays before us an alternative tradition of American democracy—of civic engagement as religion—from the founding of utopian communities to the courting of FBI surveillance. The Aliites introduces us to a fecund and vital vernacular legal imagination, one that could only be American.”
— Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Indiana University Bloomington

“A genuinely original work, The Aliites makes significant contributions to the study of religion, religion’s relationship to the law in the United States, and larger themes and patterns among Aliites. Dew’s organization of the book around elements of the Great Seal is creative and generative, foregrounding his excellent study of the centrality of the law and practices of citizenship in Aliite thought. This book offers the best interpretation currently available of many practices that contribute to outsiders’ evaluations of some of the modern groups as criminal, making it an enormously valuable work.”
— Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

"Dew’s book provides much more than description on these Aliite groups. He takes us into the complex workings of their theologies, ideas about law and citizenship, arguments about race and identity, and how Aliites interact with other American citizens. As such the book will find its place on many bookshelves and syllabi, especially for scholars of African American religions, religion and law, and religion and social identity. Dew’s interrogation of religion, race, and law is a model for scholars who study this intersection. Well-written, clearly argued, and full of original scholarship."
— American Religion

"Dew’s The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali is a brilliant book brimming with sharp analysis and abundant compassion. . . . Spencer Dew has written the landmark book on the after-lives of the religious teachings of Noble Drew Ali."
— Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"Aliite thought and practice should be recognized as fitting within a broader American tradition of seeking legal recognition, and thus justification, for religious practice and identity. Spencer Dew’s well-written, thoroughly researched account is a rich contribution to the literature on religion and law, while also providing thoughtful and necessary insight into the practices and beliefs of a lesser-known religious tradition."
— Nova Religio

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0001
[citizenship;nationality;sovereignty;Noble Drew Ali;Moorish Science Temple of America;race]
Noble Drew Ali preached a distinctive theory of "nationality," telling his followers that rather than "negro, black, or colored," they were actually Moorish. Recognition of this true identity would guarantee acceptance as full citizens of the USA, Ali taught, insisting that not only was this the case for all ethnic groups (all "nationalities") within the US, but that this was part of Allah-God's plan for humanity, wherein each "nationality" had its own distinct religion and prophet, flag and culture.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0002
[Democracy;Secularism;e pluribus unum;Chicago;Noble Drew Ali;Moorish Science Temple of America]
This chapter grounds Noble Drew Ali's understandings of pluralism and democracy in the political and social scene of 1920s Chicago. Expanding on Ali's understanding of American democracy, this chapter argues that Ali's system, by universalizing difference, leveled it. Two other Aliite religions (the Nuwaubian Yamassee and the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah) are introduced as well, sharing with the Moorish Science Temple of America an understanding of American secularism as, in fact, a sacred order, designed by Allah.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0003
[sovereignty;politics;law;political theology;Noble Drew Ali;constituency;international law;natural law]
Turning to the constellation of stars on the Great Seal of the US, this chapter argues that sovereignty is a matter oftense, ever-shifting relations between multiple levels of sovereignty, a fact played out in Aliite theory and practice as well. Examining Aliite theories of and claims to sovereignty, focusing first on the sovereignty that is manifest through law by collective political negotiation as citizens, then turning to Aliite imagination of and appeal to international law, this chapter shows how Aliites identify "true law" as the ultimate level of sovereignty within a lived reality of layered and negotiated sovereignties. Such an understanding of ideal law as always above the legal (as enforced by the state) helps Aliites negotiate not only the multiple, contradictory, claims about sovereignty made in American law and politics but also to balance faith in “rule of law” with an often unjust and oppressive rule of the legal.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0004
[politics of recognition;state authority;Moorish Science Temple of America;Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah;Nuwaubian Yamassee;magic;fetishism]
This chapter examines Aliite engagement with recognized sources of state authority and the ways Aliites court favor by claiming—and offering evidence of—past recognition by the state, from the citation of the original MSTA's state registration paperwork as proof of endorsement of Ali's mission to the citation, by Washitaw, of an imagined Supreme Court precedent they call “the 1848 Supreme Court Case” “United States v. Henry Turner’s Heirs.” After consideration of Aliite emphasis on the Supreme Court’s actual decision in Dred Scott v. Stanford, which is widely read by Aliites as authorizing the ongoing legal exclusion of “negroes” from citizenship in the United States, the chapter concludes with a caution about describing Aliite use of legal texts as “magical” and consideration of how Aliite examples can contribute to contemporary academic criticism of the politics of recognition.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0005
[Sovereignty;state;power;law;love;criminalization;sovereign citizens]
This chapter Aliite encounter with and argumentation before representatives of the power of the state, specifically judges and police officers. Aliites use such encounters to attempt to convert and compel state agents to accept true law, a process rooted in understandings of the compelling power of law as love, as natural and divine, a truth knowledge of which is preexisting in all humans. While legal performances in courtrooms and on the streets serve as essential aspects of the struggle of citizenship, to align American with All-Law’s law, watchdog groups and law enforcement criminalize such practices, misrepresenting Aliite communities and beliefs, most especially the belief that the power of the state can only be met with the power of law.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0006
[surveillance;masking;performance;Moorish Science Temple of America;Nuwaubian Yamassee;Malachi Z York;Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah;FBI;Mardi Gras Indians]
This chapter examines Aliite engagement with surveillance, from public performances of Aliite nationality through garb and parades to Aliite responses to the constant accusation that such performance of identity is, in fact, a masquerade. Examining Aliite claims about and performance of true identity, this chapter draws a parallel between Aliite visual display and the practice of “masking” engaged in by Mardi Gras Indians before turning to Aliite understandings of and responses to the gaze of the state, from MSTA responses to investigations by federal law enforcement to Yamassee emphasis on use of public media to Washitaw faith in FBI surveillance as a path to state recognition. The chapter concludes with a note on Aliite investment in self-surveillance, on the use of cell phone cameras both to document displays of identity and as protection against state violence.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0007
[knowledge;epistemology;research;authority;etymology;religion;evidentiary]
Aliite knowledge practices involves engaging in sources widely acknowledged as authoritative within the broader society and producing from those sources evidence in support of preconceived Aliite claims. Such “research,” with its emphasis on the “evidentiary”—on that which is capable of functioning as compelling evidence within legal discourse, has three major ramifications within Aliite communities. First, Aliite thinkers must negotiate the cognitive dissonance generated by their simultaneous contestation and cooptation of authoritative sources condemned for their role in maintaining ignorance yet lauded for hidden truths “uncovered” within them by such thinkers. Second, Aliite thinkers safeguard both pieces and practices of knowledge, rendering knowledge public yet also securing it as the exclusive property of a given thinker, and, third, Aliite emphasis on fact over belief, and truth over superstition leads to reconceptualizing and, in some cases, rejection of the term “religion,” even as “religion” is simultaneously mobilized as a legal category in order to achieve rights and accommodations within the legal system.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0008
[utopianism;Moorish National Home;Tama-Re;citizenship;law;self-determination]
This chapter examines three Aliite social experiments, the Moorish National Home run by Charles Kirkman Bey’s MSTA organization, the Nuwaubian Yamassee settlement of Tama-Re, and the dream among present members of the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah for a reservation, utopian projects real, imagined, and hoped for, all examples of Aliite self-determination though all also involving negotiation with the power of the state. Testified to, memorialized, and anticipated, these three social experiments model the benefits of nationality adhered to and authentically manifested in community. Understood as part of the work of citizenship, these social experiments are read by Aliites as proof of the possibility of an alternative America, one reordered in accord with true law.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226648156.003.0009
[nationalization;citizenship;law;alternity;otherwise possibility;illegality;Noble Drew Ali]
Moorish Science Temple of America nationalization ceremonies—patterned off of the naturalization ceremonies that incorporates immigrants as new citizens of the United States—are understood as legally marking one’s reclamation of Moorish nationality and, thus, transforming participants from outsiders, excluded from the American political process, into full citizens of the USA. For Aliites, citizenship is more than mere legal status; it is a process of world transformation, world salvation, a responsibility to participate in the struggle to instantiate true law on earth. This concluding chapter locates Aliites faith in such universal and eternal All-Law as a faith in alternity, in an otherwise possibility to the dangers of state systems and aw enforcement.
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2019. Page maintained by BiblioVault.