The purpose of this project is to explore Malcolm X’s reception in the Middle East and Africa during his lifetime and until shortly after his assassination. As a first step towards that objective, contemporaneous sources from those regions are collected in this online archive.

Why explore Middle Eastern and African perspectives on Malcolm X?

The dominant narrative of Malcolm X’s life, reflected in major biographies, presents it as a series of transformations. The last of these transformations – from spokesman of the Nation of Islam to Sunni Muslim and internationalist – saw him turn toward the Middle East and Africa, spiritually and politically: He traveled extensively in both regions in 1964, performed the Hajj, addressed the Organization of African Unity in Cairo, and sought regional allies to ally African Americans’ struggle for civil rights with the global South’s struggle for human rights.

How Malcolm X was perceived in the Middle East and Africa has not been a focus of the existing scholarship. To explore his reception there, this project seeks to look at Malcolm X through the eyes of the regions he looked toward. The idea is to complement the predominant American perspective on Malcolm X with one that turns the subject by 180 degrees – “x180” for short.

This research note summarizes the interest in the Middle Eastern and African perspectives on Malcolm X and includes a literature review to show that they have not been considered in depth.

Focus on process

Central to this project is the process of exploring a new perspective. The first step in that process is to build a corpus by collecting and systematizing primary sources consisting of contemporaneous articles in multiple languages from newspapers and periodicals originally published in various countries of the Middle East and Africa. The period of observation is from 1950 through 1970 to broadly capture coverage of U.S. racial politics, of which Malcolm became one of the most visible figures in the international media, through posthumous coverage in the years following his assassination.

Read more about how this material is selected and systematized in the section The Archive.

Next step: Content analysis

Building out the archive with more material remains this project’s most immediate objective. In a second step, the collected material will need to be analyzed to explore whether the coverage Malcolm X received in the Middle East and Africa was substantial and substantive, i.e. whether he was reported on in meaningful volume, and if yes, whether his ideas were debated?

The analysis of a digital archive opens many potential avenues that can leverage methodologies from different disciplines. I am particularly interested in leveraging latest technology for that purpose.

The vast majority of records in this archive are articles in various languages from Middle Eastern and African daily, weekly or monthly publications, which were published between 1950 through 1969. (To add a visual element, a small number of pictures have been added showing key figures, primarily Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali a.k.a. Cassius Clay, most often in or together with a prominent figure from a Middle Eastern or African country.)

The material in this collection is a function of what I have been able to access and process and is not suggested to be representative of the coverage of Malcolm X generally. In fact, while some sources allow for a search of their complete archives, others have so far been probed only for key dates in Malcolm X’s life, such as when he visited a certain country.

Delimitation

Perhaps the biggest challenge of creating such a corpus is delimitation, i.e. what to include and what not. This archive employs a core-periphery approach. The core consists of all records explicitly mentioning Malcolm X and closely associated persons and entities, including  “Nation of Islam”, “Black Muslims”, and “Elijah Muhammad”, etc.

To this thematic core intended to capture coverage of Malcolm X is added peripheral material with inevitably fuzzy edges. Peripheral material is important to gauge relative interest: understanding how much attention Malcolm X received requires knowing how much attention the broader topic he represented, championed and was a protagonist of received.

This periphery consists of coverage of U.S. racial politics — articles about the Civil Rights movement, key protagonists like Martin Luther King, Jr., reporting on racial violence even when Malcolm X is not directly mentioned. Mentions of Muhammad Ali a.k.a. Cassius Clay – perhaps the single most internationally famous member of the Nation of Islam, are included only when his religious faith or affiliation with the Nation are mentioned; purely sporting coverage is excluded.

Even this limited collection suggests that racial politics in the United States did indeed receive broad attention in the Middle Eastern and African press during Malcolm X’s life. Along with the various U.S. presidents of that period, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were its most frequently covered protagonists.

Quantity vs quality

Understanding what was written is important, and so is how much was written. For this reason, all mentions of key terms are included, even when individually they sometimes yield limited insights. For example, Al Ahram’s short announcement “American Negro leader’s visit to Gaza” (8 August 1964) contains limited information and expresses no views about Malcolm X’s excursion to the Gaza strip. But the story on page five of that day’s issue represents one data point of the total coverage he received in the Middle East during his lifetime. Observing the volume of coverage across time and space complements the analysis of what was written – and what not.

Systematized records

The material has been systematized to include a title, date, publication, key words, etc. for each record. The titles, but not the actual text, of all records in languages other than English and French have been translated to English with the support of translation tools (Google Translate and Claude).

In cases where the precise day of publication is unknown, such as with monthly periodicals, the first day of the month in which the corresponding issue appeared is used as the publication date. For some pictures where only the year was known, midyear (30 June) was used as the date. Location refers to the country in which the publication was published.

Keywords

Records are tagged with keywords. While are self-explanatory, “negro(es)” is included because the term seems to have been widely used, particularly in English and Arabic, for African Americans, but not typically for Africans. In fact, in some Arabic publications the word (Arabic: zanji singular, zunuj plural) is a reliable search term to identify coverage of U.S. racial politics. For example, coverage of racial politics in the U.S. in the Egyptian Al Ahram began with an article on 11 August 1950 about an alleged Soviet plot to incite “American negroes” (zunuj ‘amrika) to revolt.

Identification of records on page

Most records refer to a specific article on what are often busy newspaper pages that also contain other articles. It is recognized that identifying the relevant article is not always easy. (In OCR-compatible files you can search the page using CTRL+F.)

In cases where one page of newspaper contains multiple articles of interest, each article represents a separate record in the collection.

As a teenager in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, Malcolm X appeared on shirts, hats and in music around me. Spike Lee’s film “Malcolm X” came out in 1992, the Nation of Islam organized its Million Man March on Washington in 1995. (I could have sworn that I once saw a picture of President Bill Clinton wearing a hat with an “X” on the front, but can not find it online.) At my parents’ suggestion, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

A few years later I learned about the basic tenets of Islam as part of my Arabic Studies major. It doesn’t take much expertise in Islamic doctrine to notice that what the Nation of Islam initially taught its members would have raised eyebrows among other Muslims. So I began to wonder: Did Muslims across the globe take note of the Nation of Islam? And more specifically, were they interested in Malcolm X, before and after he split from the Nation? Did they engage with his political ideas?

My career led me in a different direction, but I never fully let go of the question. Around 2015 I observed the uptick in new publications about Malcolm X, among them new biographies that clearly attracted interest, as reflected by the prizes they won. I scoured them for information about how the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X in particular, were received in Africa and the Middle East, the regions Malcolm X took the greatest interest in. It always seemed to me that the perspective of Middle Eastern and African observers, what they thought and wrote about Malcolm X, did not receive much attention.

To start addressing what I believe is an overlooked perspective on a historical figure that continues to attract interest, I began collecting contemporaneous texts from Middle Eastern and African countries.

I am interested in exploring collaboration, both on collecting material as well as its analysis. If you would like to discuss collaboration, have questions or comments about this project or the archive, please feel free to contact me: hello@x180.info