From the vantage point of radical potentiality of revolutionaries who emerged in the last two centuries, the position of Malcolm X stands out unique. Precipitating the idea of Social Justice, revolutionaries put forwarded ideas and action plans in different manners across the globe, with the goal of liberation and emancipation from oppression of their living hegemonic societies and structures. Malcolm X is exceptional for his distinctive transcending position of projecting Islam as true potential for liberation, among the binary oppositions all revolutionaries had made in his time.
The significance of Malcolm X is that he rises from the heart of the metropolitan disenfranchised poor in the USA and moves out to reach one of the most massively manufactured civilizational other of ‘‘the West’’ in the Islamic world. Moving beyond any conformity and seeking the liberation potential, Malcolm X had changed his positions seeking the real truth. Thus, his revolutionary life was a way forward, comprising different periods, each succeeding ones getting advanced and becoming all-encompassing. Malcolm X carried with him different types of identities simultaneously according to the situations and occasions; still essentially being a proud Muslim, situating himself within (and countering) the hegemonic American empire.
In advancing his ideas and forging an alliance between the disenfranchised and marginalized, he so gracefully and courageously climbs over that dilapidated wall that mercenary Orientalists have constructed between the Western part of their own perturbed imagination and the rest of the world to separate the poor and the working class into the colonially engineered cultures and civilizations.
To understand the life and revolutionary appeal of Malcolm X, one must look into his short but energetic life; and want to understand the meandering positions that he took to the reach or seek the truth. The emergence of Malcolm X from a very unfortunate space, to the position of a world leader in his life time itself, stands out as an unparallel or rare event in the history. By the time that in December 1964 Malcolm X spoke before 500 people alongside the Tanzanian revolutionary Abdul Rahman Mohammad Babu and read a message to the audience from none other than Che Guevara, his stature and message as a global revolutionary had reached a far more embracing horizon than any Muslim revolutionary of his (or any other) time. In February 1965, when he took his revolutionary message to Europe, he spoke for the universality of a global uprising on par with anyone, ranging from Lenin and Trotsky to Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara!
Malcolm was exposed to brutal and violent racism in his early childhood itself, by witnessing his Father’s murder. He was arrested and jailed in his youth while he was a hustler. The prison days was the first breakthrough period of his life, being exposed and attracted to the ideas of Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad. After he was released from prison, Malcolm X spent few years transforming the Nation of Islam from its limited, ghettoized, and parochial vision into a vastly popular and increasingly revolutionary movement among African Americans.
Later two encounters marked another crucial moment that amount to a major epistemic shift in his revolutionary thinking: one was his trip to Arab and Muslim world and the other was in meeting with Fidel Castro. These two events, plus the July 1959 broadcasting of television report called ‘‘The Hate That Hate Produced’’ effectively turned Malcolm X into a national figure with a global perspective to his revolutionary politics.
The historic Hajj pilgrimage was the most important event of Malcolm’s life; the epoch-making shift which unraveled the true revolutionary potential of him. His ideas and visions got the wings to transcend the horizons of schisms and binaries and to unravel the true liberation potential of Islam through his words and deeds. The revolutionary potential was far wider and more radical than the ‘Black Muslim Brotherhood’ he was constructing so far. His speech after coming back from Europe tour was titled “Not Just an American Problem, but a World Problem”. Malcolm’s message got rooted in the understanding of Islam as a global brotherhood project promising the fraternity and egalitarianism among all. In short, not only his ideas and words and deeds, but his life itself is a great enlightenment for all who seeks justice and liberation.
Hamid Dabashi, in his book, Islamic Liberation Theology, rightly sums up; “Malcolm X shed one revolutionary skin after another, reaching out for nothing but a consistently emancipatory project, seeing in Islam not a matter of identity politics but a manner of liberating promises. Islam for Malcolm X was not only a combative occasion, but more as an infinitely liberating, progressive, alive, and living organism. In more than 200 years of encounter with colonial modernity, and literary hundreds of radical Muslim thinkers, no Muslim revolutionary comes even close to Malcolm X in the liberating, global, and visionary grasp of his faith and its place in facing the barefaced barbarity of economic and military world domination.
Perhaps because he emerged from the heart of that barbarity, perhaps because he was the direct target of its most racist ideas and practices – Malcolm X personified the life of a Muslim revolutionary for generations after ‘‘Islam and the West’’ had exhausted its historical calamities.”
