Moorish Science

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Moorish Science is an African American religious movement founded in the United States in the early twentieth century by Noble Drew Ali, who taught that the people called “Negro,” “colored,” or “Black” in America were in truth Moors — Asiatics descended from the ancient Moabites and the Moroccan empire, whose true nationality and religion had been stripped from them under slavery. Recovering that identity, in his teaching, was the precondition of recovering everything else: salvation began with a name. To be told one was a Negro was, in this account, to be held inside a fiction manufactured by the slaveholder — a word without a country, a people without a flag, a soul without a record of where it came from. To learn that one was instead a Moorish American, an Asiatic, was to step out of that fiction into a nationality that carried rights, an ancestry, and a divine standing. The teaching turned the question of race into a question of documentation, and answered it with a card.

Noble Drew Ali, founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America, in a 1925 portrait by R.O. Jones. — Collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 / public domain)

Drew Ali, from Newark to Chicago

Drew Ali was born Timothy Drew, by tradition on January 8, 1886, in North Carolina; he died in Chicago on July 20, 1929. The standard institutional narrative places the first organization in Newark, New Jersey, around 1913, under the name the Canaanite Temple. The movement that the wider public would come to know took shape after Drew Ali relocated to Chicago: a refounding around 1925 as the Moorish Holy Temple of Science, formally reorganized and incorporated as the Moorish Science Temple of America in 1928. By the late 1920s the temple had spread through the cities of the Great Migration — Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, the industrial Midwest — riding the same northward movement of Black labor that filled the storefront churches and the mail-order esoteric catalogs of the Black Belt at once.

Members of the Moorish Science Temple of America at their annual convention in Chicago, October 1928, with Noble Drew Ali standing in the front row. — Unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain, no notice)

Membership was marked, visibly and legally. Adherents took a surname suffix — “Bey” or “El” — appended to the name they already carried, so that an ordinary American name became the name of a Moorish national. They carried a Nationality and Identification Card, a small printed document declaring the bearer a Moorish American, a “citizen of the U.S.A.,” and a believer in the principles of love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice, sometimes bearing the crescent, the star, and the encircled numeral seven. The card was not incidental. In Drew Ali’s frame it did real work: it was the instrument by which a person stepped out of one nationality and into another, an act of legal self-creation performed with a piece of pasteboard. Members were directed to Islam as their ancestral faith — though the Islam of the movement was its own construction, assembled from American esoteric print and bearing little relationship to the doctrine, ritual, or scriptural language of the wider Muslim world. Drew Ali named the universal religion of all “Asiatic” peoples “Islamism,” and made it the birthright of the people he was renaming, without routing it through the institutions, the Arabic Qur’an, or the practices that elsewhere defined the faith.

Alongside the name and the card came a discipline. The Moorish American was to dress with dignity — the fez became the movement’s signature — to keep to a clean diet, to abstain from certain foods and from intoxicants, and to live in conspicuous obedience to the law of the land. Drew Ali’s teaching fused faith and citizenship so tightly that the scholar Spencer Dew has organized his study of the movement around the proposition that for Drew Ali citizenship was itself a form of salvation: to be a recognized national, protected by rights and standing upright before the law, was the worldly face of being redeemed. The Moorish American did not protest the American order from outside it; he claimed a place inside it by asserting a nationality the order would have to acknowledge.

The Circle Seven Koran

The movement’s scripture is a short volume Drew Ali compiled and titled the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, published in Chicago in 1927 with no commercial imprint. It is universally called the Circle Seven Koran, after the red numeral seven inside a blue circle on its cover — a sigil that became one of the movement’s emblems. It is not a translation of the Arabic Qur’an, and it does not pretend to the Qur’an’s structure or content. It is, rather, a forty-eight chapter assemblage, and the provenance of its parts has been collated in detail by textual scholars.

The bulk of the book was lifted, often verbatim, from two existing esoteric works. Chapters one through nineteen are adapted from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, a 1908 channeled “gospel” by the Ohio spiritualist preacher Levi H. Dowling, which narrated the unrecorded years of Jesus — his supposed travels and study in India, Tibet, Persia, and Egypt — as read by Dowling from what he called the Akashic records. Chapters twenty through forty-four are adapted from a Rosicrucian-Theosophical wisdom text that circulated in the period as Unto Thee I Grant and as Infinite Wisdom — a text whose own pedigree runs, through the occult-publishing milieu, back to The Oeconomy of Human Life, an eighteenth-century English manual of manners and morals by Robert Dodsley. Only the final chapters — roughly forty-five through forty-eight — are original to Drew Ali, and it is there that the specifically Moorish doctrine lives: the Asiatic nationality of the so-called Negro, the duty to the flag and the law, the warning against the divisions sown under slavery.

What this provenance shows is less a forgery than a method. The Circle Seven Koran is built from the same currents of American esotericism that filled the print culture around it — the channeled gospel of Spiritualism, the wisdom literature of Rosicrucianism, the mind-and-Spirit vocabulary of New Thought and the cosmic-evolution scheme of Theosophy. In the Chicago of the 1920s these texts moved through the same mail-order catalogs and storefronts — the De Laurence occult house chief among them — that sold conjure goods and grimoires to the same Black migrant readership that bought Drew Ali’s Koran. Compilation of this kind is, moreover, a familiar mode of scriptural making; many traditions have assembled their authoritative books from older matter. The point of the Circle Seven Koran was never to transmit Dowling or Dodsley but to refit them: to take the floating esoteric material of the age and clamp it onto a new frame in which the reader is an Asiatic Moor and the gospel is the recovery of that fact.

A reconstructed Islam and a usable past

The Islam of Moorish Science is best understood on its own terms before it is measured against any other. Drew Ali did not present a continuation of an inherited Muslim lineage; he presented a religion he held to be older and more universal than its sectarian forms — the native monotheism of all peoples of “Asiatic” descent, of whom American Blacks were one branch, cut off from the knowledge of themselves. Around this he gathered an Orientalist iconography drawn from the popular American imagination of the East — the fez, the crescent, the language of Moors and Asiatics, the figure of an Egyptian initiation — the same imaginary that the World’s Fair and the popular reception of the Arabian Nights had made available. Scholars have debated the proximate channels: connections have been argued to the Sufism-inflected and Ahmadiyya Muslim missions then active in the United States, to Freemasonry and the Shriner ritual culture with its own Moorish and Egyptian regalia, and to the Theosophical and numerological currents of the esoteric revival. The genealogy remains contested; what is not contested is that the result was a construction — an Islam built in America, for an American predicament, out of materials at hand.

The historical claims the movement made about Moorish descent — the Moabite ancestry, the Moroccan empire, the stripping of an Asiatic nationality under slavery — do not hold up as ethnography, and the scholarship that documents the compiled character of the Circle Seven Koran says as much without ridicule. But ethnography was not the work the claims were doing. For a people whose genealogies the records of slavery had deliberately broken — whose African origins were unrecoverable precisely because they had been erased as a condition of enslavement — Drew Ali offered a past one could stand on: an ancient name, a continent of descent, a religion older than the one imposed at the auction block, and a nationality that conferred dignity in the present. What its followers held was that race in America was a wound inflicted by mislabeling, and that the cure was historical and spiritual at once — to know oneself as Moorish, Muslim, and Asiatic was to be restored to a standing the records of slavery had denied.

Schism and lineage

The movement’s crisis came quickly. In March 1929 a rival within the temple, Claude Greene-Bey, was murdered in Chicago; Drew Ali was arrested in connection with the killing, and though released, he died on July 20, 1929, within weeks — the recorded cause tuberculosis bronchopneumonia, while community accounts long held that injuries sustained in police custody had hastened his death. The succession fractured. Charles Kirkman-Bey gathered one body of the membership; John Givens-El, by tradition Drew Ali’s chauffeur, claimed to be the prophet reincarnated and led another; further branches followed. Several of these rival formations persist, with living adherents who keep the name, the card, the fez, and the Koran.

A surviving Moorish Science Temple building on North Hoyne Avenue in Chicago, where branches of the movement continue. — Photograph via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Historians place Moorish Science at the head of a lineage. It was among the first movements to give African Americans an explicitly Islamic and Eastern self-image, and its example — the new name, the reclaimed nationality, the appeal to a suppressed ancestral religion — fed directly into later currents. Michael Gomez, in Black Crescent (2005), reads the Nation of Islam that Wallace Fard Muhammad launched in Detroit in 1930 as an improvisation built on the foundations of Moorish Science and of Garveyism — the doctrinal parent of a movement that would in turn give rise to the Nation of Gods and Earths in the 1960s. Moorish Science belongs, too, beside the other Depression-era Black religious movements of the urban North, such as Father Divine’s Peace Mission, that remade identity and community against the conditions of Jim Crow and the Great Migration. The borrowing it embodies ran in more than one direction: the Circle Seven Koran shows how thoroughly the Western esoteric revival, with its Theosophical, Rosicrucian, and New Thought vocabularies — the same milieu that produced white metaphysical churches like Divine Science — could be turned to the wholly different work of Black racial self-reclamation.

Scholarship and the textual record

The textual question — what the Circle Seven Koran is made of — has been settled in detail by independent collation. The line-by-line correspondences between the Holy Koran’s opening chapters and Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel, and between its middle chapters and Unto Thee I Grant / Infinite Wisdom, are laid out in the collations gathered at the Hermetic Library, which place the borrowed and the original passages side by side without polemicizing the act of compilation. The standard academic treatment of the movement is Spencer Dew’s The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which organizes its analysis around law and citizenship rather than around doctrine alone, reading Drew Ali’s project as an argument that recognition by the state — nationality, rights, the protection of law — was the very substance of redemption. Edward E. Curtis IV’s essay Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple, in the collection The New Black Gods (Indiana University Press, 2009), surveys the competing accounts of where the movement’s Islam came from and argues for a cultural-historical reading attentive to the American Orientalist imaginary; Curtis’s Islam in Black America (SUNY, 2002) places the temple within the longer history of African American Islam. Susan Nance’s How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream (UNC Press, 2009) supplies the wider reception context for the Moorish and Asiatic imagery on which Drew Ali drew. The 1927 Holy Koran itself, long out of copyright, has been digitized and is held in research collections, including the Library of Congress.

The historical claims the movement made about Moorish descent do not hold up as ethnography. What they did was furnish a people with a usable past, and the founder seems to have understood that this, and not chronology, was the point.

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