Egyptians also wondered if Ali really understood how to perform traditional Muslim rituals. At the Al-Hussein Mosque, he and his brother prayed barefoot on a carpet among 1,500 worshippers. Afterward, Ali was so moved by his experience that he announced he would make the pilgrimage to Mecca before returning home, though he never reached the Holy City. He also claimed that he wanted to learn Arabic, train Egyptian boxers, marry an Egyptian woman, and live near the Great Pyramids. Watching him pray during what seemed like inappropriate moments, with his palms facing the sky, shouting, “Allahu akbar,” left some locals questioning his sincerity.52
Near the end of his stay, he met Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. A passionate boxing fan, Nasser told Ali that he had watched his victory over Liston. Afterward, Ali said they talked for nearly forty minutes “about life, boxing, different things,” seemingly harmless topics. But given Nasser’s friendly relationship with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, State Department officials must have cringed when Ali told a reporter that everything he had read about Nasser in the United States was “nothing but lies. It is a shame how they tell lies about great people like Nasser.”53
While the State Department considered whether Ali might make more provocative statements, they soon realized that they no longer had to worry. After five weeks of traveling, he abruptly canceled the final leg of his trip. “I’m tired,” he said to a group of reporters at Kennedy International Airport. “People have been mobbing me. They’ve been killing me. Women and children were jumping off roofs, and people were coming straight out of the mountains to see me.”54
But Ali wasn’t embellishing when he said, “I was treated like a politician.” In Africa, he discovered a whole new world, one where people respected him as a black man and as a Muslim. His experience transformed him into a global icon, an international symbol of Black Power and anticolonialism. Reflecting on his journey, he realized that his worldwide celebrity came with tremendous responsibility. “Sometimes it scares me, all this fame, the world watches me, little children know me, old ladies,” he said. “Gotta set an example of good living, everybody knows me.” He could easily close his eyes and imagine all the black faces smiling at him, chanting his name. “You should have seen them pour out of the hills, the villages of Africa, and they all knew me. Everybody knows me in the whole world.”55
Chapter Sixteen
THE MUSLIM CHAMP
This hypocrite is going to get blasted clear off the face of the earth.
—ELIJAH MUHAMMAD ON MALCOLM X
Talmadge Hayer was the perfect man for the job. He had lived a life of dreams deferred, with festering sores that never healed. He came of age in the slums of Paterson, New Jersey, a depressed and broken city. By the 1960s the “Silk City” had frayed into a badland of poverty, crime, and urban decay. Walking the streets of Paterson, Hayer could see the “crumbs of civilization” all around him: broken glass scattered on the sidewalks, garbage-strewn alleys, “the burned-out shell of a tenement,” abandoned redbrick buildings that were once filled with noisy looms, hustlers loitering on corners, and the vacant stares of old men sitting on stoops, passing time until they had no more time to pass.1
He recalled later that in his early twenties, his “life started coming apart.” He committed petty crimes and eventually was arrested for disorderly conduct and possession of stolen firearms. Some of his friends who were convicted of more serious crimes went to prison and came out as converted followers of Elijah Muhammad. Curious about their transformations, he began reading about the Nation of Islam. Soon he became a regular at Mosque No. 25 in Newark. Transfixed by the rugged, uniformed soldiers standing in military formation, Hayer decided what he really wanted to be: a soldier in the Fruit of Islam. “Had their own army, man,” he said years later. “I thought we were going to fight this white, blue-eyed devil.”
The Fruit of Islam had been waiting for Malcolm X to return home from his trip abroad. Malcolm knew when he arrived at JFK International Airport on May 21, 1964, that his life was in danger. The Fruit had orders from the Supreme Captain. “Malcolm,” Raymond Sharrieff promised, “will soon die out.” Getty Images
After receiving his “X” in the fall of 1962, he embraced his role as a soldier in Elijah Muhammad’s army. But on one occasion, when a fellow brother violated Muslim law, Talmadge X zealously took matters into his own hands, violently punishing the man. Consequently, mosque officials suspended him. In exile, he realized that he had to do something to regain their trust and prove his loyalty to the cause.