Clay Starts his Faith Journey by Attending

the Lessons Offered by

Elijah Muhammad’s Organization

The world boxing champion : “I liked what I heard

about Islam and wanted to learn more”

Cassius Clay went to meet Elijah Muhammad’s community in the mosque in Miami in order to have a closer look at the teachings of this religious group. This meeting constitutes a turning point in his life ; even more, it was the most important stage of his faith journey which led him to Islam whose teachings he started to learn through his meeting with this community.

Clay admitted that he had a spiritual feeling for the first time in his life when he entered the mosque in Miami. He found a man called Brother John who was preaching to the audience. The first words he heard him say were : “why do they call us Negroes or Blacks ?” which he answered : “This is the way the white man takes away our identity from us. When you see a Chinese coming to you, you will know that he comes from China. When you see a Cuban, you will know that he comes form Cuba. This is similar to when you see a Canadian you will know that he comes from Canada. So what is the country the Negroes claim to be theirs ?”

The questions heard by Clay in Miami’s mosque caused him a psychological shock, a new awareness and a great change in the course of his life. He listened to the remaining part of the sermon with some attention. We will discover below how he became convinced of joining Elijah Muhammad’s community with a view to learning the Islamic principles.

Clay related how he was greatly influenced by John’s method of sermonising in Miami’s mosque, where he went following a previous appointment with Sam. Clay had met Sam in Miami, and the latter told him about his belonging to the community of Elijah Muhammad, who had personally sent him from Chicago to Miami.  His mission in Miami was to help the community spread its teachings in this city. Sam was very proud of the new mission he had been entrusted with. That is how Clay found John talking in the mosque about the American Blacks identity. In his speech, he said that anyone who came from China was known as Chinese, anyone who came from Cuba was called Cuban and any one coming from Canada was called Canadian. John denounced the fact that they had no names to identify them and that they were called Negroes or Blacks.

Clay said : “I said to myself what is this guy talking about ? I had my own name, but I still paid full attention to his explanation of the issue of identity in the course of which he said : ‘When a person named Young comes to us we know that he is from China ; when a person named Goldberg comes to us we know that he is a Jew ; when a person is called O’Reilly we know that he is Irish. Similarly, Rolling Thunder and Silver Moon are Indians. But when someone says ‘Mr Jones or Mr Washington’, you don’t know where he comes from. We were named by our white masters. When Mr Jones has fifty slaves, they are all called Jones’ Negroes. They are all called by the name of their master, Jones, as they bear his name. When Mr Washington buys these slaves their name becomes Washington’s Negroes; and they all bear his name.’”

Clay said : “This was plain to me, I was able to feel and perceive what Brother John was saying. His talk was not like the church sermons which are teachings that you receive but cannot consider true unless you have a strong faith. I started to tell myself, reiterating my name silently : Cassius Marcellus Clay. It was the name of a white man in Kentucky who owned my forefather ; the latter was given this name, which was given to my grandfather, too, then to my father and later to me.”

Clay continued : “I liked what I heard and wanted to learn more. I started to read the newspaper Muhammad Speaks every week. Furthermore, I started to attend such meetings and to listen to recorded speeches, among which is the speech entitled “The White Man’s Paradise is the Black Man’s Hell”. I respected Martin Luther King and all the defenders of Civil Rights, but I took another road.”

Some time after his regular attendance of the meetings organized by Elijah Muhammad’s community, Clay was introduced to his second teacher, a man by the name of Jeremiah Shabazz.

Shabazz said about himself that he was born in Philadelphia and grew up within a church. He first heard about Islamic teachings from a hairdresser who had been a prisoner with some Muslims in Virginia, who introduced him to some Islamic teachings. Shabazz related this : “I had never heard about Islam before, though I heard about the Muhammadan Community. The way this brother hairdresser talked to me seemed to me to be the truth, in spite of the fact that it was strange to me. At the end of 1961, I became a teacher in “The Nation of Islam” Community in the southern cities of the United States of America, such as Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida. All these regions were under my responsibility which my leader Elijah Muhammad entrusted me with. I had a central Temple for Da`wa in Atlanta, and I started travelling periodically from one city to another.”

Shabazz continued : “I was not there in the mosque of Mississippi when Cassius Clay came for the first time.” This clearly proves to us the contrary of what has been presented in films and some books, namely that Malcolm X was not his first teacher, and the first person who taught Clay the teachings of Elijah Muhammad’s Community was the leader of the Community in Miami then: Ishmael Sabakhan. Clay’s reaction to what he learnt was good. In the end, Shabazz was invited to meet Clay in Atlanta. Shabazz went there one week after this contact. He met Clay who told him that he liked what he heard about Elijah Muhammad’s teaching, and that he had never heard anything like it. He said that it was a new and strange thing, but it was the truth. During that meeting Clay told Shabazz that he was seriously thinking about becoming a Muslim.

Shabazz related the following : “After we heard Clay’s serious intention of becoming a Muslim, we started to talk to him continually and encourage him to attend all meetings. He reacted positively, but did not attend all the meetings; he attended only one meeting every week. Our teachings are different from those of Martin Luther King, for we deal with reality as it is and not with what everyone wanted it to be. We started to teach him our ideas about Allah and Islam.”

Shabazz continued : “We started to teach Cassius who did not have any problem with our teaching that the white man is very evil, he enslaves us and enslaved our ancestors, he will be sent to Hell – a woeful destiny ! Clay started to ask, during the sermon, about the fate of white children, saying : ‘What’s the fate of children ? Is a boy born a white devil like the white man ?’ So I started explaining things to him by answering his question. I told him that if a lion begets, its newborn won’t be anything else than a lion, for the lioness can’t give birth to a lamb. This was in 1961 when injustices abounded and justice was absent. You could, at that time, read any newspaper everyday and find that white policemen beat the skulls of blacks and set dogs on them to devour their flesh. What influenced Cassius most was our explanation to him that the person who did this was another kind of being, and not a human being as he supposed. These people can’t call themselves people of God while hurting others as the whites are doing to the blacks in America. Clay was just a young man at that time, but he was intelligent, he could distinguish right from wrong and see the truth in the teachings we offered to people. He was faced with the problem of worship, for he found it difficult to give up going to the church, as he grew up and was brought up within it. This was a big problem for him, but we helped him overcome it. We started to instil into him the images of injustice the blacks suffered from in the United States of America and hating the whites, as transgressors, oppressors and tyrants. Cassius saw how the white men treated blacks very badly; this is why he found that our teachings were true.

Similarly Cassius overcame the biggest complex black Americans were suffering from in the 50’s and 60’s, namely fear. He didn’t fear to be shot or hanged to death by the whites, but he greatly respected the power of the white man from the President downward. Cassius started to ask how to face the white man’s power and how to defeat him. We started to answer his question by stating that the white man can be defeated neither by false warnings nor by violence, but by God’s power. We started to read, for him, some verses of the Holy Qur’an which show that, though Allah’s followers are sometimes a minority and by the logic of material power are supposed to be defeated by their foes, Allah changes the course of the battle and they thus achieve victory with His assistance : “Then the party of Allah will be the victorious”. (Surat Al Maidah, Verse 56). It was such words which strengthened his faith in Allah and made him convert to Islam and believe in Allah’s help. This was the message Elijah Muhammad insisted on in his calling of the Blacks to Islam. Islam was the force with which they could vanquish the material power of the whites. As a result of the brainwashing they had been submitted to by the whites, the blacks did not believe that there was a power greater than that of the whites. It was not until the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and his calling them to Islam unveiled the truth for them and made them believe that Allah’s power was greater than that of the whites. Therefore, they had to embrace Islam so as to challenge the power of the white man, get rid of the fear in their hearts and replace it with the fear of Almighty Allah. Moreover, if they were sincere in their trust in Allah, and were loyal in their belief in Him, He would not let them down – He would grant them victory over their foes and support them. This is why they converted to Islam collectively and one by one.”