The Princess and the Prophet

November 25, 2019
Dorman (Chosen People), a professor of history at the University of Nevada, combines a picaresque account of the enigmatic John Walter Brister with a kaleidoscopic history of the origins of the Nation of Islam in this complicated history that argues the Nation of Islam grew out of the Moorish Science Temple of America. Brister was a black child musician in the late 19th century; he went on to perform as the “Hindoo Wonder Worker” and “Egyptian Adept” in circuses, before becoming the self-proclaimed prophet Noble Drew Ali. Dorman asserts that Brister-as-Ali realized America was enchanted with “Orientalism” as he performed magic shows in the guise of a Hindu, and persuasively argues that Ali used this interest in exotic ancestry as a way to appeal to descendants of slaves. He championed trading African identities for Moorish, or Arab, ones that were more agreeable to white audiences. Against the backdrop of Chicago’s Jazz Age, Dorman tracks Ali’s founding, along with his lion-tamer and snake-charmer wife, Eva, of the Temple as a formal Muslim fraternity, whose core members went on to create the Nation of Islam. While Dorman often gets bogged down in a litany of names and dates, this remains a remarkable study.

Starred review from January 1, 2020

Dorman (history & core humanities, Univ. of Nevada, Reno; Chosen People) explores the roots of Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), along the way questioning the conventional trajectory of Gilded Age influences. After outlining temple founder Walter Brister's early life, Dorman details how Brister adopted the name Noble Drew Ali and established the MSTA in the early 20th century. The narrative follows the fortunes and misfortunes of Ali and his wife, Princess Sotanki, as they set the standards for American-Muslim culture. Along the way, the couple continued to leverage Chicago's political machine to wield wealth and power, leaving a long-standing influence on Chicago politics. Dorman suggests that African American notions of Islam were not directly inherited from enslaved people of Muslim descent as often assumed, but were a result of American ideas of the so-called Orient as well as the African American culture of the early 20th century. The final chapter touches on Ali's legacy as it pertains to both MSTA and the Nation of Islam. VERDICT A captivating reinterpretation of Muslim-American heritage. Spanning religion, history, and sociology, this will appeal to readers across these subjects.--Muhammed Hassanali, Shaker Heights, OH

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2019
A corrective portrait of an early-20th-century chameleon who became an influential Muslim leader. In this dense social history, Dorman (History and Core Humanities/Univ. of Nevada; Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions, 2013) takes a largely nonjudgmental view of Noble Drew Ali (1886-1929), the controversial founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a forerunner of the Nation of Islam. Despite the author's evenhanded approach, Ali emerges as a con artist of unusual audacity. In a prodigious feat of detective work, Dorman discovered that Ali was actually the circus magician Walter Brister, who faked his death in 1914 with the help of his wife, Eva, only to reappear years later and establish the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago. Styling himself as the Prophet Noble Drew Ali and Eva as the Grand Sheikess, he claimed to be the reincarnation of Muhammad and preached that black Americans "were in fact Asiatics of Islamic Moorish descent." He flouted the law repeatedly: He had four wives simultaneously and was arrested for statutory rape, practicing medicine without a license, and the murder of an associate (a charge he beat, possibly by bribing the police). He made enough enemies that his death, officially attributed to tuberculosis and other causes, led some people to suspect he'd been poisoned. Dorman devotes much space to the antecedents of "Moorish Science"--e.g., Freemasonry, the Shriners, and "Orientalist tropes" like harems--which makes for a slow-paced narrative but one with a deep social context. He also finds Ali's legacy in the fezzes worn by some rappers and in other pop-cultural outcroppings. At the end, he concludes that even if all the allegations about his subject are true, "there was something noble about Noble Drew Ali." Given that Ali was credibly accused of murder and child rape, the special pleading suggests that the author stumbled into the biographer's trap of falling in love with a subject who requires the clearer eye he shows elsewhere in the book. A flawed yet erudite narrative about the founder of a precursor of the Nation of Islam.

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Starred review from February 1, 2020
While most Americans are familiar with the Nation of Islam, the story of its antecedent, the Moorish Science Temple, founded by a Black performer on Broadway who became Prophet Noble Drew Ali, is less well known. Opened in Chicago in 1925, Moorish Science had much in common with such white secret societies as the Shriners and Masons, with its emphasis on mystical, faux Oriental rituals. Yet for African Americans, the appeal was less about magic than about racial pride and anticolonialism. In the face of intense white racism, Ali gave African Americans a noble origin story, reenvisioning his people as Moors, an Asiatic race with a glorious past and a revolutionary future. He had reinvented himself, as well, from a child performer in a pickaninny band to a Hindoo magician in a Wild West show, who then, according to Dorman, faked his own death and reemerged as an Islamist healer and prophet. Ali's genius was in blending the craze for Orientalism and Muslim religious trappings with anti-imperialism and the self-reliance ethos of Marcus Garvey. Moorish Science gave its Black members a sense of cultural pride, community, and political power. Two of Ali's acolytes, Wallace Fard and Elijah Poole, developed these concepts into the Nation of Islam. A fascinating work of historical reinterpretation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)