“The political failure of Malcolm X’s use of the language of human rights should not be attributed to conspiracy. It can be explained by the fact that it ignored the power of the state in which he and other African Americans lived and turned to a collection of states that had neither the power nor the authority to intervene”

(Asad, 2003: 144).[i]

One of the key themes that tends to surface in conversations around Malcolm X is universalism. Not only with his famous speech, in which he urged his audience to move the Black question from the realm of civil rights to that of Human Rights, but any assessment of his overall career tends to revolve around the issue of universalism (as opposed to particularism or relativism). The universal/particular dichotomy has already been indispensable to conversations around race concerning capitalism, nationalism etc.[ii] In fact, any formulation that centers on Malcolm X’s thematics, especially in the context of his “conversion to orthodox Islam” after Hajj, attempts to be an interpretation of the universalism that he supposedly achieved later in his career. While in political economy, the concept of universalism was imagined around capital, with race becoming a subordinate particular, in the context of law, Human Rights played the same role against race. This blog argues that Malcolm X’s political project, which came to be termed a call for universalism and became a failure, ought to be understood as an expression of incommensurability and separation. To elaborate, my intention is to argue that both the discourses of Human Rights and civil rights as the extension of American imperial function in the world, tend to regulate, control and censor the project Malcolm X imagined.

Challenging the dichotomy between universalism and relativism in his discussion on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Talal Asad argues that universalism and relativism are both discourses that can be intelligible only through an analysis of the American imperial state. Asad’s conviction of the United States as a leading force in the construction of the human as a right bearing subject in international law helps him to question such dichotomous constructions of Malcolm X and Luther King. What was supposed to differentiate Luther King from Malcolm X is his prophetic language, appealing to the redemptive sensibility of the American public. Asad writes, “to be redeemed and to redeem others was to restore an inheritance—the Judeo-Christian heritage in general and the American expression of it in particular. In this way, the prophetic language of the Old Testament was fused with the salvationist language of the New. To the extent that the civil rights movement presented itself as an instrument of redemption, its project became the moral restoration of the white majority” (Asad 2003: 146). In other words, such redemptive language as that employed by Luther King was anchored within a discourse expressed in civil rights.

The language of redemption of the Judeo-Christian heritage, however, is equally “universal”, as Asad himself acknowledges, in that it presupposes a civilizational unity one can call Judeo-Christian; a unity that sees Israel as the extension of the U.S.[iii] Similarly, Asad himself demonstrates how the very universalism of the idea of human was mediated through the secular moral project of the American nation-state. The language of redemption is central to the tradition of human rights, which makes Luther King’s efforts[iv] more meaningful compared to Malcolm X. This, by extension, implies that Malcolm X misses out on a “tradition” in the sense in which Asad used the term. What does it mean to say that Malcolm X missed a moral tradition he could have appealed to when he advocated for an international Human Rights discourse for the Black question whereas Luther King didn’t? To put it in Asad’s own words, “it can be explained by the fact that it ignored the power of the state in which he and other African Americans lived” (Asad 144). The catch here is “power”. By remembering Asad’s notion of power as capacity one can deduce it as the state’s capacity to respond to criticism. To reword it, the state is not only an entity of supreme command but also a tradition of discourse in which it presupposes a community that speaks to it in its own language. While it is not a moral one, as Asad made clear elsewhere, the state does not possess such a capacity in a vacuum, but through a temporality of power. Asad sees secularism as a temporality of power that capacitated the state to respond to its critics like Luther King. In this a way, the secular state aligns with Luther King’s appeal to the Judeo-Christian tradition of redemption, even though the state has a much larger project to undertake. The discourse of Human Right—the freedom of religion and property is the major hallmark of the same—and its globalization was this project.

In any case, as Asad reminded us often, a concept must always be understood in terms of its genealogy: that is to say, by tracing its uses across time. This is the footing on which Asad directs his investigation of the idea of the human in Human Rights. The human in the Human Rights only existed in its abstraction under the pretense of the natural state, which is therefore in need to be recognized within a temporality: the tradition of the secular. This can only be done by an analysis of what Human Rights do. In that sense, however, one cannot say that Malcolm X is by all means outside of that tradition, since his call for converting civil rights to Human Rights is recognized only within the grammar of the secular. But what is more important is the aspect of the failure, which defines Malcolm X’s career, as signaled by Asad. This failure marks an aporia in the grammar of the secular. What does the call for Humanrightization of the Black question entail, if not the proclamation of the failure?[v] I contend that the category of failure, the intelligibility of which is recognized within the temporality of the secular, also forebodes a moment of aporia. Constituted as the crisis of the secular, this aporia comes into existence as a generative possibility of conflict, not to extend the tradition of the secular, but only to expose it. In order to understand this, one has to really look at Malcolm X’s use of the idea of Human Right in relation to his travel around the third world countries. During his foreign trip, he emphasized his Pan African and Afro-Asian vision. In doing so, he attempted to displace the center of geo-political discourse occupied by the United States and stressed why a new world must be in Africa (Marable 2011: 167). Similarly, he thought that a discourse of Human Right in the context of a strengthening alliance among the third world countries in 60s could produce a different effect. This, by extension, implies that the question of race is no more a question moored within the temporality of redemption. Rather, it must be identified as an irreformable and irreconcilable formation underlying the project of American state. Just as Lenin identified imperialism as a class formation, for Malcolm X, it is a racial formation. Such a project ended up as a failure: not only because such reinterpretation of racial question as Human Right did not find allies among third world countries, but also because of the civil right movement’s call for redemption being powerful enough to thwart any such reinterpretation. Malcolm X thus has become the enemy of the state, not only of the white racists within America.

This conflict has nevertheless been sorted, so it was believed, through his autobiography, which rendered him as an ‘American hero’. This was helped by Malcolm X’s biographer Alex Haley’s omission of certain chapters from the publication of the famous The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). These chapters, auctioned and sold recently to New York Public Library, are titled “The Negro”, “The End of Christianity” and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”. Garett Felber notes that these chapters outline Malcolm X’s plans and strategies for Pan-African unity, including the conversion of Black Americans to Islam(Felber 2010: 40). This excision, according to Felber, entails a rendition of the figure of Malcolm X into a genre’ structure that satisfies the American sensibility (Felber 49). Felber writes, “Haley’s influence takes the politically and socially alien subject, a Muslim, revolutionary black nationalist, and Pan Africanist, and transforms him into something domestic and unthreatening through quintessential American image”( Felber 34). As Felber argues, it is not only Haley’s ‘political framework’ that played here, but also the very genre of autobiography, aligned with the sensibility of the time. One has to read these chapters to see what could have constituted an obstacle to the autobiographical construction of Malcolm X for the American public to read. However, it is evident both this censoring (of Malcolm X), which turned the civil rights movement into an ally of the secular state and the failure of Humanrightization of the Black question appear to question the frame of universalism/particularism often used to capture Malcolm X’s project.

The imagination of twenty million Black Muslims—as Blacks converting to Islam—seems to call into question both the notions of universalism associated with Islam as an abstract religion and the human as an abstract subject. What makes it aporetic is that his conception of Black Muslims refuses to be cast within the domesticity of the American nation state (domesticating race as a civil rights issue) or the global empire (fostering human rights as an international issue). In other words, as Asad rightly noted, the language of human rights invoked by Malcolm X is primarily not for making a moral appeal, less so for a legal remedy, but rather a declaration of war, and “it justifies why a war is necessary.” (Asad 142). War is probably the end of any dialogue. In this sense, however, Malcolm X’s call for the Humanrightization of the Black question appears to be more radical in the way in which it exposes an aporia: termed as the failure of his project. The failure, as I read it here, is not to be viewed as the failure of an aspiration for universalism because it was never a call for universalism in the first place. It became instead a call for incommensurability and separation aimed at exposing the aporia at the heart of the redemptive time of the secular.

(Thanks to Maria Siddiqui for going through the draft and giving comments).

Additional Reference

[i] Asad bases his analysis on Malcolm X’s famous speech titled “The Ballot or the Bullet”, found in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. G. Breitman, PP 34-35 (as quoted in Asad, 2003. 142).

[ii] One of the objectives of the project of racial capitalism is to address the problematic of universalism/particularism in the discourse of race in relation to capital. See Robinson (1983), Black Marxism.

[iii] This has been written about enough. For instance, see Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (2019: UChicago Press); Vibeke Schou Tjalve, “Judeo-Christian Democracy and the Transatlantic Right: Travels of a Contested Civilizational Imaginary”, New Perspectives, 29(4), 332-348.

[iv] Gaston however shows us a much wider usage of the discourse of Judeo-Christianity in the U.S. in the context of family values, racism, and human rights. The rhetorical usage of Judeo-Christianity ranges from advocating for violent resistance against white racism to being condemned as a white tradition. Gaston, (2019. 217, 218, 219).

[v] One might want to strip away the category of failure from the logic of progress where it appears only on the other side of success. Joel Kuhlin and Antony Paul Smith reminds us that “reading Malcolm X as a religious failure generally accords with the progress narrative that locates the NOI as a necessary, but in the end, insufficient step for Black Americans to come to Islam” (Kuhlin and Smith 2020. 31)

Author’s bio

Muhammed Shah Shajahan, a PhD candidate at Alliance for Social Political Ethical and Cultural Thought. He teaches Introductory Humanities: The Modern World at the Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech. Shah’s broader interests include religion, political economy, political-historical anthropology, and translation studies.