In her 1978 autobiography, Empress Farah Pahlavi recounted how the Iranian regime had taken on a goodwill project by sponsoring “four children of every race”: “one small black child from Africa, a small Canadian Indian, a small Iranian white child, a small Japanese.”Footnote ¹ If the empress’s selection of an Iranian child as the epitome of whiteness strikes one as unusual today, that is just one clue as to the well documented liminal racial construction of “Middle Easterners”: Iranians, Turks, Arabs, Kurds, and so on. Under Reza Shah, the Pahlavi dynasty heavily propagated the myth that Iranians were “Aryans,” that is, the original white people.Footnote ² Even the global discrediting of white supremacist rhetoric in response to the horrors of Nazism after World War II did not prevent his son, Muhammad Reza Shah, from crowning himself “Aryamehr” or “the light of the Aryans.” Since the nineteenth century, however, Western race scientists, US immigration and naturalization laws, and opinion leaders sometimes declared Iranians to be white and sometimes non-white, depending on the contingencies of the moment.

The first two chapters of this book have demonstrated how comparison and personification, mobilizing ideas about gender, race, and class, became useful to an international cast of scholars, diplomats, and opinion leaders who sought to understand and explain Iran and Türkiye in the twentieth century. The focus was mainly on the two countries’ ruling regimes. Chapter 1 examined how Iran and Türkiye were understood through comparisons targeting their founding fathers, Reza Shah and Atatürk. Chapter 2 analyzed how comparativism linked modernization theory and feminized aesthetics in representations of Iran’s last empress, Farah Diba Pahlavi. This chapter shifts the focus to individuals and groups who did not have control over the state. Specifically, I examine how Islamist dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s in Türkiye, Iran, and the United States mobilized race and religion in their comparative critiques of authoritarian modernization and, in so doing, transformed Islamism into a critical interlocutor on racial justice. I use the term Islamism broadly here to describe thinkers and movements advocating a larger role for Islam in the civic sphere. My analysis focuses on state-centered dissidents who sought to influence the political process and reorganize the prevailing regime’s relation to Islam, whether by revolution, as in the case of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, or by electoral organizing, as in the case of Necmettin Erbakan in Türkiye.

In the two decades before the Iranian revolution, Islamism’s politics were in flux and contradictory across state borders. During this period, US policymakers generally considered the religion an ally against “Godless” Soviet Communism.Footnote ³ At the same time, a loose network of mostly male intellectuals and activists were paying renewed attention to Islam’s racial politics, using theological language to advocate antiracism and anti-imperialism. The post-World War II proliferation of discourses about racial equality, Third Worldism, and global publicity around Black Power intersected with earlier racialized understandings of Islam as the antagonistic Other to “the West.” Islamically oriented thinkers began to conflate Prophet Muhammad’s Abyssinian companion Bilal ibn Rabah (c. 580–640), who was the first person to formulate and perform the call to prayer, with anti-imperialist Black Muslim figures such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. By the end of the decade, West Asian aspirations to whiteness, such as those articulated by the empress, were fully strained under an invigorated civilizational understanding of Islam that linked race, religion, and politics. This ascendant ideology was constructed transnationally through strategic comparisons between Iran and Türkiye and in triangulation with the US empire.

The shifting racial politics of Turkish and Iranian Islamism illuminate the unofficial dynamics of comparison under US hegemony and contribute to our understanding of the global long sixties. Published scholarship examining connections forged between Black American Muslim thinkers and Muslim intellectuals and activists outside the United States has largely focused on what Alex Lubin has called the “Afro-Arab Political Imaginary.”Footnote ⁴ This formulation (“Arab”) excludes Iran and Türkiye, the two counterrevolutionary, pro-US regimes of West Asia. Türkiye and Pahlavi-era Iran are also missing from Sohail Daulatzai’s description of “a Muslim International,” which denotes the loose revolutionary networks forged between Black American radicals and Third World Muslim activist-intellectuals.Footnote ⁵

The exclusion of Türkiye and (to a lesser extent) prerevolutionary Iran from global histories of Third Worldist and/or Islamic dissent is not surprising. In the early twentieth century, both Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Reza Shah sought to undo Orientalist visions that racialized their peoples as non-white and argued that they were comparatively different from what Europeans and Americans had come to call “the Middle East.”Footnote ⁶ Despite the serious differences in the two regimes, the ruling classes of both countries partially tethered their aspirations to whiteness to secularization, in this case, the tempering and control of Islam by the state.Footnote ⁷ Both countries aligned with the United States in the Cold War, joining its defense pacts. Thus, they found themselves transformed, in the shah’s colorful metaphor, into “America’s wife” and “concubine,” competing for the fickle affections of “the leader of the free world.” Other analogies were even less flattering. In a 1952 Council of Foreign Relations meeting, for example, Princeton University scholar Lewis Thomas argued Türkiye’s staunch pro-Western status had made Arab-majority nations see the country as “a sort of ‘White man’s n*****.’”Footnote ⁸

This chapter delineates the forgotten connections between Black American Muslim figures and Turkish and Iranian dissidents, complicating the easy comparativism that pits Türkiye and Iran against Arab-majority states. I begin with a history of relevant racial formations, tracing how Turkish, Iranian, and Arab aspirations to whiteness connected to the racialization of Islam in Europe and the United States. I then examine the politico-religious classifications of West Asians as “nonwhite” in the theology of the Nation of Islam (NOI), an influential African American Muslim group founded in 1930, in contrast to West Asians’ de jure whiteness in US law. Tracing the proliferation of Islamist works on racial justice after World War II, I demonstrate how and why references to Bilal ibn Rabah found particular resonance in the texts of devout Turkish, Kurdish, and Iranian intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s.

The chapter ends by linking these ideological developments to foreign policy. I demonstrate how gharbzadegi discourses critical of westernization merged with political anti-Americanism, as some devout intellectuals began advocating for dis-alignment from “the West.” Iranian revolutionary thinkers such as Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini used Kemalism and Atatürk as comparative foils to Muslim power, misrepresenting the history of Turkish foreign relations in the process. At the same time, reimagining Islam as a muscular, anti-Western force paved the way for Türkiye’s outreach to America’s Black Muslims following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (1974) and the resulting US arms embargo (1975–1978). In 1976, under a new coalition government featuring leftists and Islamists, Türkiye hosted the heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali and broadly publicized the famous Muslim boxer’s support for its militant Cyprus policy. This public relations coup presaged the better-known outreach from Iranian revolutionaries to Black Americans during the Iranian hostage crisis (1979). The transnational vision of antiracist, anti-imperialist, and confrontational Islam made these policy maneuvers legible across nation-state boundaries.

Maybe White and Likely Not: The Turkish and Persian “Races” under Comparativism

Understanding how a transnational cast of thinkers reconfigured Islam’s racial politics in the 1960s and 1970s requires delineating the liminal space West Asian ethnicities have long held in the European and Euro-American racial imagination. Across the world, few official endeavors have been as dedicated to categorizing and fixing race as the US immigration and naturalization laws, which held that only “free white persons” could become US citizens from 1790 until 1952. Any immigrant applying for naturalization had to pass the whiteness test. Thus, when West Asians began to move to the United States in larger numbers toward the end of the nineteenth century, they generated an archive of court cases discussing their racial status.

Of course, Iranians, Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and so on, are not inherently “white” or “non-white”; no one is. Racial classifications are context-bound cultural constructs. In my “Islam and America” class, I drive this point home by having my students hold a mock trial on whether their professor (yep, that’s me) is white or non-white. First, the students read historical court cases determining whiteness and eligibility for naturalization. I then randomly assign them to support one position or the other and stand there, answering questions as they hold a mock trial, which ends with a closed vote determining my racial status. In addition to making me feel extremely self-conscious, this interactive lesson elicits several points. First, the students realize that, as a social construct, race intersects with multiple other social formations such as religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and politics.Footnote ⁹ Second, they learn that while racial categories are “made-up” ideological constructs, racial classification comes with real-world, material, psychological, and societal effects. The shifting positioning of West Asian communities within and outside the boundaries of whiteness demonstrates both the lability of racial categories and the high stakes involved for those who do not make the cut.

Empress Farah Pahlavi’s recounting of four racial categories in her 1978 memoirs largely aligned with internationally accepted anthropological knowledge. Between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, European and US scientists identified four main racial groups of humans (Caucasian or White; Negroid or Black; Mongoloid or Yellow; and American or Red). Many also regularly included a fifth category, called Malay/Brown, to refer to the indigenous peoples of Oceania.Footnote ¹⁰ According to the linguist and ethnologist A. H. Keane, whose works the US courts occasionally consulted to determine eligibility for naturalization, most West Asians belonged to various divisions within the Caucasic group. “Arabs” were Semitic, and “Persians” were “proto-Aryans.”Footnote ¹¹ Turkic peoples, as members of “the yellow or Mongolian race,” were an exception to the predominantly Caucasic West Asia. However, Keane and other scholars noted that the Turks of Asia Minor had absorbed so “much Aryan and Semitic blood” in their march westward that they had lost most of their original racial characteristics.Footnote ¹² Their non-Indo-European language remained the only clue to their “yellow” roots.

Western scientists specializing in race largely agreed on these assessments; however, the US courts did not always stick to supposedly scientific categories when making their decisions. Instead, they mobilized a plethora of religious, political, and “civilizational” arguments, considering whether the applicant would fit well within the imagined US body politic. This “common man understanding” of Americanness was often narrower than the prevailing scientific consensus.Footnote ¹³ Therefore, whether experts classified them as “Caucasic” or not, the whiteness of West Asians remained far from settled.

Comparativism suffused US courtrooms as it did race science; however, religion and politics held a much larger role in the comparisons US case law generated. For example, In re Halladjian (1909) declared Armenians white, partially because “by reason of their Christianity, they generally ranged themselves against the Persian fire worshipers, and against the Mohammedans, both Saracens and Turks.”Footnote ¹⁴ In Dow v. United States, too, the Syrian applicant’s Christianity gave him an edge, bolstering the comparative scientific categorization that Arabs “belong to the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race, thus widely differing from their rulers, the Turks, who are in origin Mongolian.”Footnote ¹⁵ In In re Najour (1909), the court granted a Christian Syrian applicant whiteness, citing Keane’s work and rejecting the opposing claim that being “a subject of the Sultan of Turkey” had made the applicant “Asiatic.”Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, Turkishness (i.e., supposedly being of “Mongolian” origin) and Islam as the imagined “enemy” of Western civilization operated as powerful and overlapping racial/political clues.

The comparisons were more complicated for Iranians. While Arab and Armenian Christian applicants contrasted themselves with “Persian fire-worshippers” to prove their whiteness, South Asian applicants connected themselves to Iran to insist on their “Aryan” roots. In such arguments, Iranians figuratively operated as “racial hinges,” to cite the powerful metaphor of Neda Maghbouleh, opening and closing the doors to whiteness.Footnote ¹⁷

In short, West Asian Christians could become officially white in the United States and gain citizenship benefits through a comparativism that set them apart from the Muslims who may have been from the same town. This “common man understanding” had little support in the era’s race science, but it did cohere with civilizational visions that aligned Christianity, the West, and whiteness.

Outside the courtrooms, The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy (1920) by white supremacist US historian Lothrop Stoddard epitomized the civilizational merging of race, religion, and politics. In this popular book, Stoddard divided the world into various civilizations and argued that the peoples of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia belonged to the “Brown” race. His categorization allowed for phenotypical and chromatic differences within this group and was built mainly on politics and religion; the Brown world had Islam and long-standing resentment of the White Man in common.Footnote ¹⁸ On the book’s original cover, a turbaned shadow of a man, wildly waving a rifle and climbing to the top of the earth, represented Brown people, following a stereotypical African man wielding a spear and a stereotypical Chinese man brandishing a sword.

Anthropologists did not broadly adopt Stoddard’s “Brown” categorization based on confrontational religion. However, the designation reflected “the common man understanding” of Muslims. Here, as elsewhere, race operated via “belief in the embodiment of culture,” even though the category referred to a color (“Brown”).Footnote ¹⁹ This type of civilizational thinking, merging race, religion, and masculine militancy, would manifest repeatedly in understandings of the so-called Middle East throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first.

The apex of Western imperialism and race science coincided with the founding of the modern Turkish and Iranian nation-states.Footnote ²⁰ Given the European domination in knowledge production, translated categories influenced Iranian and Turkish understandings of race and nationhood. In Iran, the state-aligned elite thoroughly embraced and heavily promoted the “Aryan myth,” claiming Persia as the original home of whiteness. As noted in the introduction, the Aryan myth was influenced by European anti-Muslim racism and anti-Semitism and connected to the Pahlavi state’s valorization of Iran’s pre-Islamic past. The myth mistakenly extrapolated from language to race, contrasting “Aryan” Persian-speakers with “Semitic” Arabs and “Asiatic” Turks.Footnote ²¹

Iranian historians readily reproduced racialized visions of Turks and Mongols as barbaric members of the “yellow” race.Footnote ²² A 1934 English-language biography produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs drove the myth home by insisting Reza Shah was of “pure” Persian ancestry, in not-so-subtle contrast to the deposed “Turkic” rulers of the Qajar dynasty.Footnote ²³ The new Iranian state hitched its national identity so firmly to this ethnic contrast that when a French newspaper reported Hitler’s Germany had declared Türkiye an “Aryan” power in 1936, it precipitated a diplomatic crisis.Footnote ²⁴ The report was a hoax – Germany had identified the country as a “European” power, not an “Aryan” one – and had no policy implications. However, the Iranian regime’s protests demonstrated the comparative and triangulated nature of race thinking in Türkiye–Iran relations, even during this golden age of “blood brotherhood” between Reza Shah and Atatürk (Chapter 1).

In Türkiye, the Kemalist regime had its own racial agenda: Disproving international research that claimed Turks were non-white. Atatürk specifically assigned his adopted daughter, historian Afet İnan, to study and contest the categorization of Turks as “Asiatic.”Footnote ²⁵ Of course, European and US scholars often acknowledged that the Turks of Asia Minor had mixed too extensively with “Caucasians” to be considered fully “Mongoloid.” This consensus had even entered US case law; the In re Halladjian (1909) decision objected to the claim that “the Turks have never comingled with Europeans, nor can it be said with any truth that they are descendants of Europeans.”Footnote ²⁶ However, relief in hybridity was not enough for a new nation-state that had denounced the pluralist Ottoman past and sought proud, ancient roots.

An obsession with pre-Islamic Turkic culture and anti-Arab sentiments colored Turkish claims to whiteness. Under a new fanciful mythology, nationalist Turkish anthropologists claimed Turks had descended from a white Central Asian race and had been the ancestors of Europeans as well as the creators of “all ancient civilizations.”Footnote ²⁷ To justify this thesis, Turkish authors cited and incorporated the work of European linguists and anthropologists, who were implicitly considered the arbiters of whiteness. “Whiteness,” as Murat Ergin explains, thus “ended up being a dominant yet silent social category that defined Turkishness and linked Turkey to modernity.”Footnote ²⁸

Although neither Atatürk nor Reza Shah discarded Islam as their critics have long argued, their secularization measures, bringing religion under state control and supervision to varying degrees, clearly had racial aspects. For Reza Shah and, to a considerable extent, for his heir Mohammad Reza Shah, resurrecting the glories of Aryan Persia meant underplaying the influence of Islam, Arabs, and Turks on Iranian civilization; for Atatürk and his followers, being European meant appearing European in garb, comportment, and, as much as possible, in physiognomy. Explicitly racial language became rarer in Türkiye as elsewhere after World War II; however, colorism and classism remained merged in the middle-class Turkish imagination through the mediating ideology of secular modernity.Footnote ²⁹ Atatürk’s fair features (“blonde hair, blue eyes,” as countless nationalist poems recount adoringly) have remained a central part of the mythology of Turkish whiteness, along with a continuing preoccupation with “modern” clothes, light skin, hair, and eye color.Footnote ³⁰

Since the first West Asian applicants had gained the official status of whiteness in the United States on account of their Christianity, the status of Muslim immigrants from the region remained uncertain until later in the century. Given the 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration act, which severely restricted immigration from outside Central and Northwestern Europe, and the US courts’ ability to mobilize “common man understanding” of race, Muslim applications were unlikely to have met with success between the wars. In 1942, the first ever case of a Muslim Arab applying for naturalization declared Arabs to be “non-white” because they were “a part of the Mohammedan world.”Footnote ³¹ This merger of race, religion, and politics demonstrated the continued purchase held by civilizational theories like Stoddard’s. However, in 1944, the court ruled in favor of another Muslim Arab applicant, arguing that the political interests of the United States “as a world power” required loosening the racial categories.Footnote ³² Nazi atrocities had discredited state racism; competition with the USSR over the alliances of decolonizing nations required the US ruling elite to shift away from the open espousal of white supremacist ideology.Footnote ³³ In 1952, with the African American Civil Rights movement gaining traction and the Cold War in full swing, identifying the race of West Asian Muslims became largely moot in an institutional sense, as a new law stripped the “racial prerequisite” clause for naturalization. The 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration Act then banned racial discrimination in immigration and naturalization.

With the rise of the Cold War, denizens of Türkiye and Iran came quite close to being considered white in the US public imagination. During this period, Türkiye and Iran experienced increased inclusion within Western structures. Türkiye, for example, attained membership of NATO in 1952. While “the West” in the Cold War diplomatic context operated primarily as a marker of foreign policy alignment, Turkish elites did not ignore the term’s civilizational and racial connotations; many felt NATO membership had made them “a part of the West” in more ways than one.Footnote ³⁴ Iran’s full alignment with the United States, on the other hand, came after the US-led coup of 1953, which removed the neutralist Prime Minister Mossadegh from power and allowed Mohammad Reza Shah to have complete control over the country. Once again, US foreign policy doctrines influenced the racialization of Türkiye and Iran’s people as the two nation-states became allies of “the West” against “the East,” redefined partially on political terms.

With the 1977 census, the official racial designation of Turks, Iranians, Arabs, and other peoples from West Asia and North Africa residing in the United States became fixed as “White/Caucasian: a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”Footnote ³⁵ Middle Eastern whiteness, however, could not be taken for granted. It remained liminal, comparative, and deeply connected to international relations. While eclipsed by official theorizations of Islam as a friend to the West due to its supposed anti-Communism (Chapter 5), the racialized vision of Islamic civilization as a defiant counterpoint to “the West” continued to circulate in the United States, even influencing Islamic theology among the United States’s urban Black communities.

Muslim/Eastern/Black: West Asia and North Africa in African American Islam

The history of Islam in the United States is deeply interwoven with race and politics. A considerable percentage of the people kidnapped from West and Central Africa and forcefully brought to the United States were Muslims.Footnote ³⁶ Some, such as the Fula Islamic scholar Omar ibn Said, prince and commander Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori, and the noble hafez Ayyuba Suleiman Diallo captured national and international attention with their intellectual pursuits and freedom struggles.Footnote ³⁷ The publications of Pan-Africanist educator Edward W. Blyden also popularized the idea of Islam as an African religion. His Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1887), for example, highlighted Islam’s anti-imperialist potential in comparison to Christianity.Footnote ³⁸ Blyden praised Islam for inculcating dignity, pride, and “superior manliness,” unlike Christianity, which, he claimed, came infused with white supremacy and stupefying teachings on meekness.Footnote ³⁹ Referencing Bilal ibn Rabah as well as great Black Muslim scholars and commanders, Blyden popularized the idea of Islam as a defiant, antiracist religion, which “merges all distinctions in one great brotherhood.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Building on the popularity of Blyden’s ideas, the organized (re)adaptation of Islam by African Americans came in the early twenty-first century with the founding of the Moorish Science Temple (MST) in 1913 by Noble Drew Ali. From the beginning, the MST did not differentiate between race and religion, viewing religion as a racial doctrine and vice versa. MST teachings asserted that African Americans were not “negroes” but “Moorish” peoples, “olive-skinned” members of the Asiatic race, which included Asians and Indigenous Americans.Footnote ⁴¹

This merger of race and religion had political implications at a time when the Sultan/Caliph of the Ottoman Empire claimed the spiritual leadership of all Muslims. In his The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, which differed drastically from the Qur’an, Ali urged a spiritual reorientation toward Islam’s founding city of Mecca, then in Ottoman hands: “Turks are the true descendants of Hagar, who are the chief protectors of the Islamic Creed of Mecca; beginning from Mohammed the First, the founding of the uniting of Islam, by the command of the great universal God–Allah.”Footnote ⁴² Noble Drew Ali thus connected Muslims of African descent in the Americas to Islamic civilization across the ocean. This overlapping of race, religion, and geopolitics through an imagined “Muslim world” was not unique to US-based Black Muslims and could be found in the era’s pan-Islamist thought worldwide.Footnote ⁴³

The NOI, the most influential Black Muslim organization of the twentieth century, was founded in 1930 as an outgrowth of the MST by the enigmatic Wallace Fard Muhammad (also known as Wallace D. Fard), a traveling salesperson who claimed to be of Arab and Meccan origin. Influenced by earlier Pan-Africanist movements such as Garveyism, the NOI focused on community uplift, encouraging healthy habits, strong families, and economic independence. Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad (formerly Elijah Poole), who succeeded Fard in 1934, the group developed a unique theology based on the idea that Islam constituted the natural religion of “the original man,” that is, the Black man, out of whom all other races had developed. Clashing with established Islamic doctrine, Elijah Muhammad claimed his teacher Fard had been Allah (God) in human form, which made Elijah Muhammad “the Messenger of Allah.” His role was to awaken and uplift American Blacks, whom he referred to as “the Asiatic Black man.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Elijah Muhammad’s teachings followed a line of racial/civilizational thinking that saw world affairs as signs of God’s plan. Specifically, NOI theology prophesied the end of White Christian power, demanded a separate land for those of African descent within the United States, and preached the unity of the darker races.

Multiple religious, political, and scientific developments influenced Elijah Muhammad’s teachings. Sherman A. Jackson has convincingly noted their overlap with “Black Religion,” that is race-conscious theology that responds to the circumstances of enslavement, white terror, and segregation. “Black Religion,” according to Jackson, applies to multiple African American religious formations and is distinguished by its protest orientation: The central and most enduring feature of Black Religion is its sustained and radical opposition to racial oppression.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This vision of confrontational religion, which also colored Western perceptions of Islam as having “spread by the sword,” made Islam a likely choice for a defiant religious stance. Ahmadiyya missionaries, who had established active missions in the Midwest in the 1920s and had brought with them claims about Islam’s inherent antiracist, antislavery stance, also impacted NOI theology.Footnote ⁴⁶ NOI teachings turned eugenics – still ascendant in the early twentieth century – on its head, arguing that a Black scientist named Yakub had generated the white race through a series of grafting and breeding experiments. The influence of science fiction, on the other hand, manifested in beliefs that “a Mother Plane” was circling the earth and would wreak vengeance on white oppressors.Footnote ⁴⁷

NOI avoided electoral politics, but the implications of an influential Black Muslim organization unwilling to swear allegiance to the United States put it on the authorities’ radar. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hounded the NOI, as it did all effective Black organizations and individuals. Elijah Muhammad was imprisoned between 1942 and 1946 for encouraging his followers to evade the draft. He was deeply sympathetic to the Japanese as a non-white people challenging white power – a pattern that would resonate in NOI publications’ approach to most of America’s non-European antagonists. NOI membership dwindled while its leader was in prison. However, the organization rose to global prominence in the 1950s and 1960s with the help of Malcolm Little, a “hustler turned rebel,” who would soon take on the name Malcolm X.Footnote ⁴⁸ Converting in 1948 while in prison, Malcolm X rose quickly within the NOI ranks as a true believer and mesmerizing public speaker. He led Harlem’s Mosque No. 7, organized multiple other temples nationwide, and set the foundation for the organization’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks.

Elijah Muhammad’s claim that the White man’s rule was coming to an end built on the popular idea that World War I had exposed the weaknesses of so-called white civilization.Footnote ⁴⁹ A similar belief – that the demographic superiority of the oppressed non-whites threatened Western dominance – also appeared in alarmist white supremacist tracks, such as Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color. While the likes of Stoddard considered this possibility a calamity, Elijah Muhammad interpreted it as a long-overdue divine punishment for Europeans’ sins of slavery and imperialism. As an NOI minister, Malcolm X even jotted down a reference to Stoddard in his lecture notes when he explained the apocalyptic elements of NOI theology as not the end of the world per se but of the White, Western, Christian world.Footnote ⁵⁰ These terms were essentially equivalent in NOI dogma, as were Black, Eastern, and Muslim.

At a time when leaders of the Civil Rights movement were seeking equality and integration within the preexisting structures of the United States, NOI’s Black Muslims considered African Americans “a nation within a nation.” Therefore, they claimed independence from the United States and sought connections with the rest of the non-white world. NOI doctrine’s disdain for race-mixing also differentiated them from the ascendant Civil Rights ideology and led Muhammad to consider cooperating with domestic white supremacist terror organizations, such as the KKK and the American Nazi party.Footnote ⁵¹

NOI’s Black nationalism developed in a complex postwar environment of decolonization and the Cold War. The US Cold War consensus that had cleaved the world into two, imagining no alternatives to USSR-led global Communism and US-led global Capitalism, clashed with the national aspirations of many in the Global South. Third Worldism as a political movement saw peoples who had been the target of Western imperialism seek political, economic, and cultural destinies that were distinct from the East–West conflict in the Cold War.Footnote ⁵² The 1955 Bandung Conference marked a high point of Third Worldism, also known as Asian–African Internationalism, endorsing the principles of self-determination, antiracism, and mutual collaboration. The non-aligned movement, in turn, advocated for neutrality in the Cold War, and several prominent postcolonial countries, such as India under Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, Indonesia under Sukarno, and Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser connected the two movements.Footnote ⁵³ Egypt, as a Muslim-majority African nation with an illustrious ancient past and a defiant modern leader who had stood up to “the West” by nationalizing the Suez Canal (1956), held special religious and political symbolism for America’s Black Muslims.Footnote ⁵⁴ Senegalese Muslim scholar Cheikh Anta Diop’s publications on the Blackness of Ancient Egyptian peoples and their foundational role in human civilization also influenced Malcolm X.Footnote ⁵⁵

Decolonization in the world coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, accelerating “a transnational exchange of liberation discourses.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional, was followed by the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956), challenging segregation in public transportation. Despite parochial depictions of the Civil Rights movement as the long-awaited perfection of the American experiment in democracy, the US ruling class conceded to civil rights demands partly due to concerns about America’s role in the new world order.Footnote ⁵⁷ As noted, this reasoning allowed a Muslim Arab to naturalize as white in Ex Parte Mohriez (1944).

As the 1950s transitioned into the 1960s, disillusionment with the realities of neocolonialism, the violent white backlash to the civil rights movement, and the ravages of the Vietnam War led to the ascendance of radical ideologies questioning the US liberal Cold War consensus. Transnational connections between Third Worldism and aspirations of Black liberation within the United States strengthened.Footnote ⁵⁸ This period also proved a boon for movements that challenged the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of much Civil Rights activism, such as the NOI. The charismatic NOI minister Malcolm X soon came to represent the defiant Third Worldist spirit of the 1960s in the US and world media.

Minister Malcolm X’s fiery speeches reconfigured the African American freedom struggle on global, world-historic terms and closely aligned it with Third Worldism. For example, he explained NOI’s separatist doctrine by referencing Algeria’s struggle for independence from France: “The Algerian Moslems rejected integration with the French. Throughout Africa and Asia, the cry today is not for integration, but separation, independence, and freedom.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1959, the young minister had the opportunity to visit multiple Muslim-majority countries as a representative of Elijah Muhammad and forge important connections, particularly with Egypt’s Nasser. FBI records show Malcolm X claimed he would visit Türkiye and several European countries as well. However, his short trip included stays in Ghana, Sudan, Nigeria, Iran, Syria, and Egypt.Footnote ⁶⁰ Illness prevented him from proceeding further to complete the Hajj. In describing his experience for the Pittsburgh Courier, Malcolm X focused on “Muslims in Egypt and Africa,” claiming a racial unity based on color, appearance, and defiant religion.Footnote ⁶¹ In this piece and when showing clips from his travels at a NOI meeting, Malcolm X referred to the lands he visited as “home.”Footnote ⁶²

Malcolm X was becoming a global figure in more ways than one. While he was away, the documentary The Hate That Hate Produced propelled him to fame, bringing increased attention to Black Muslims and additional celebrity status and clout to the young minister within and, increasingly, outside the United States.

In 1959, the NOI leader Elijah Muhammad also visited multiple Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia, with an itinerary that included stops in Türkiye, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. A meeting with Nasser was particularly significant for his purposes, deepening the connections between the NOI and the nationalist Arab leader. During this trip, Muhammad participated in Umrah – an off-season ritual visit to the holy city of Mecca. Ignoring the timing difference, NOI organs referred to the leader’s Umrah as “Hajj” and used it to confirm Elijah Muhammad’s Islamic credentials. Muhammad referenced the Hajj rituals in racialized terms, emphasizing the blackness of the veil covering Islam’s holiest site (Kaaba) and the black stone that forms the focus of circumambulators’ adoration.Footnote ⁶³

NOI rhetoric overlapped Whiteness, Christianity, and the West as Elijah Muhammad considered the peoples of Muslim-majority nations to be non-whites. When in 1963, the NOI banned all white observers from its meetings, Muhammad included a rather haphazard list of exemptions from the policy: “This does not include the Turkish people, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, those of Pakistan, Arabs, Latin Americans, Egyptians and those of other Asiatic Muslims and non-Muslim nations.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He clearly agreed with a KKK leader, whose letter he later reproduced in his magnum opus, The Message to the Black Man in America (1965), that Islam was a “religion for dark people.”Footnote ⁶⁵ By this account and at least partially due to their religion, Turks, Arabs, and Iranians were not white, regardless of their official status in US law.

The political corollary to this expansive non-whiteness was the belief that these nations were all potential allies to the Black American cause – honorary Blacks. The NOI’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, regularly reported on all decolonizing and/or Muslim-majority countries, connecting Black Americans to the world’s “darker nations.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Muslim-majority African nations defying “the West,” such as Egypt and Algeria, held primacy in the NOI’s visions of a muscular Afro-Asian Islam. Saudi Arabia, despite being a political counterweight to Nasser’s version of Arab nationalism, was revered as the keeper of Islam’s holiest cities. Persia appeared in NOI cosmogony as a legendary place near heaven, once placed on Earth in “the Holy Land of Arabia.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Muhammad Speaks also covered Modern Iran as a Muslim-majority land making strides in development.Footnote ⁶⁸

Türkiye also held a unique place in NOI teachings, having once been a great Muslim empire that challenged European power. Here, older ideas about Turks as the warlike swords of Islam found new political purchase. “The Muslims of Turkey were placed at the border with the swords drawn,” explained Malcolm X in one of his religious lectures, “that is not to let the devil out to spoil civilization.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In another sermon, Malcolm X expanded upon this idea, connecting Ottoman–European relations to the colonization of the Americas:

This mythology connecting Turks and the Pilgrims via Thanksgiving was, in fact, inaccurate: The Ottomans did not adopt the fez until the early nineteenth century and did so as part of an extensive set of modernization reforms.Footnote ⁷¹ However, Malcolm X correctly hinted at how the European newcomers conceived of the Americas in Old-World terms. After all, Spain’s so-called discovery of the Americas was preceded by its consolidation of Christian politics with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims and prompted by a perceived need to avoid trade routes controlled by Muslim empires.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, Captain John Smith, the leader of England’s first successful colony in North America, claimed to have been captured by Turks before his well-known Indian captivity narrative.Footnote ⁷³ Thus, Malcolm X identified how Europeans translated preexisting ideologies of racial-religious aggression to the indigenous lands they conquered. Within NOI theology, these histories were tightly bound through an overlapping logic of racialized religion.

Unlike modernization theory, which envisioned a tempered role for religion (especially for Islam) on the road to development, NOI’s powerful civilizational vision held on to essentialized religious differences with significant political corollaries. Malcolm X, at least, seemed to keep faith that Türkiye could be realigned and become “the sword of Islam” once again. After his falling out with the NOI, Malcolm X had the opportunity to make the Hajj in 1964, utilizing his significant international contacts within Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Ghana. During his time in the holy city of Mecca, Malcolm X met Kasım Gülek of the Turkish Parliament. A US-educated member of the Atatürk-founded Republican People’s Party (CHP), Gülek was a leading contributor to the Cold War-era tempering of Turkish secularism, which I explore in depth in Chapter 5. According to the full text of Malcolm X’s travel diary in the Schomburg archives, Gülek introduced Malcolm X to Amin al-Husseini, once the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He also took the opportunity to emphasize the robust Turkish participation in the Hajj: “The Turkish MP was very proud because the contingent from Türkiye (he claimed) was the largest, 50,000 – over 6,000 buses.”Footnote ⁷⁴

The editors of the published version of the diary gloss over this interchange, summarizing it as a “scrambled note from Malcolm about which he said some people say Turkey is not religious, yet, they had the largest contingent, a diplomat stated, than any other nation or ethnic group.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Yet Malcolm X considered this fact significant enough to repeat in the first paragraph of a separate letter, arguing that the Turkish participation in the Hajj “refutes the western propaganda that Turkey is turning away from Islam.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Although X no longer abided by NOI theology at this point, he would not have forgotten his past lectures on Türkiye’s historical significance. With this note, he seemed to assume that turning away from or toward Islam would have political implications for Türkiye’s “Western” alignment.

Malcolm X’s famous open letter from Hajj, reporting how he ate, prayed, and slept next to Muslims who were white in appearance, is often interpreted as his shifting toward a more universalized and less racialized theology.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, Islam and non-whiteness were clearly still connected in his mind as he wrote his travel diary. Much like his ex-mentor Elijah Muhammad, who had found the color of the Black Stone at Kaaba significant, Malcolm X took this parenthetical note on one of the Hajj activities he undertook alongside Gülek and others: “We cast stones at the devil (a white monument).”Footnote ⁷⁸

It is perhaps ironic that the Black Muslims projected Islam as the archenemy of “the West,” utilizing the dominant ideology of an earlier era at a time when the US foreign policy elite was reconceptualizing Islam as a potential ally against “Godless” Communism. Nevertheless, the idea that Islam and the West were distinct civilizations destined to clash due to their essential, racialized differences was far from extinct across the world. In fact, with variations on this theme, devout West Asian intellectuals were beginning to challenge their modernizing ethnonationalist, pro-Western regimes.

(Un)confrontational Religion: Westernization Critique and Cold War Alignments

Devout Turkish intellectuals of the 1960s – whenever they commented on foreign relations – did not see a contradiction between their critiques of Kemalist authoritarian modernization and Türkiye’s political alignment with “the West” in the Cold War.Footnote ⁷⁹ Within the flourishing Islamist magazine sector, conservative Turkish authors such as Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904–1983), Nurettin Topçu (1909–1975), and Sezai Karakoç (1933–2021) disseminated extensive critiques of the United States, focusing on racism, economic injustice, and social mores. However, the political prescription emerging out of such critiques was to merely limit cooperation beyond the technical and military arenas.Footnote ⁸⁰ Through his influential Büyük Doğu magazine, famous Islamist intellectual Kısakürek argued that Türkiye must reclaim its Islamic character in order to be able to collaborate as equals with anti-Communist America. Only then, he wrote in 1959, could “the Turkish and American flags, one with so many stars and the other with just a star and crescent, representatives of two separate words, separate but always together … be drawn to the skies, side by side.”Footnote ⁸¹

With the election victory of the Democrat Party (DP) over the Atatürk-founded CHP in 1950, the coexistence of pro-US and pro-Islamic politics in Türkiye became officialized. Although DP did not undo the preestablished structures of state control over religion, maintaining and strengthening the Atatürk-founded Directorate of Religion (Diyanet), its rule opened up additional space for Islam in the public sphere. One of the party’s first acts was to revoke the Kemalist decree that the call to prayer be in Turkish instead of Arabic, reconnecting the country to Muslims worldwide. At the same time, the DP regime oversaw Türkiye’s entry into the pro-Western Baghdad Pact in 1955.

Even when a 1960 military coup interrupted Turkish democracy, the alignment of pro-Islam and pro-US policies appeared secure. The junta did not change Türkiye’s pro-US Cold War stance or reverse DP-era religious policies. Before the military relinquished power to the civilian sphere in 1961, its leaders rewrote the constitution in line with worldwide liberal trends that allowed Turkish Islamist discourse to flourish alongside other non-mainstream ideologies, left and right.Footnote ⁸² In 1965, the Justice Party (AP), an inheritor of DP policies, came to power. As a pro-US center-right party, it maintained a smaller Islamist contingent within its ranks until the Islamist group split off under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan in 1970.

Despite strong NATO ties, Türkiye’s position as a model student of modernization, and a parade of pro-Western elected politicians and military leaders, US–Türkiye relations in the 1960s did have serious hiccups. One central disagreement was over the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which had gained independence from Britain in 1960. Once under Ottoman rule, Cyprus had a minority Turkish and majority Greek population. Upon independence, an ultra-nationalist Greek faction seeking unity with the Greek mainland began to persecute the Turkish community. Flare-ups of communal violence repeatedly brought Türkiye’s military and elected politicians to high alert. On July 5, 1964, President Johnson sent a strongly worded letter against intervening in Cyprus to the Turkish Prime Minister, generating outrage against the United States across the political spectrum. Concerns regarding the hidden strings of US aid packages also marred relations.Footnote ⁸³ However, throughout the 1960s, militant anti-Americanism remained largely the domain of the secularist left.Footnote ⁸⁴ Türkiye’s Islamist thinkers repeatedly sided with the United States and against Communism, only critiquing select aspects of US culture and foreign policy.

In not challenging Türkiye’s pro-US political alignment, Turkish Islamists of the 1960s differed from key Iranian figures, such as Ayatollah Khomeini, who had begun to add anti-US political prescriptions to his anti-westernization critiques. Quiescent during the Anglo-American coup against nationalist Prime Minister Mossadegh, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rose to prominence with the 1963 protests against the shah’s “White Revolution” and the 1964 Iran–US Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which gave US personnel rights of extraterritoriality, making them unaccountable to domestic laws. Khomeini’s sermons began to combine gharbzadegi critique with political anti-Americanism during this period. In his famous 1964 speech, he rejected comparativism between the capitalist United States and the communist USSR in the forming of Iranian foreign policy, undermining the idea that Islam should be an ally to the former: “America is worse than Britain, Britain is worse than America and the Soviet Union is worse than both of them. Each one is worse than the other; each one is more abominable than the other. But today, we are concerned with this malicious entity, which is America.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Khomeini’s fiery speeches inciting people to rebel against the shah’s domestic and foreign policies led to his exile to Türkiye in 1964, where he developed deeply negative views about Kemalist secularism. Although Khomeini stayed in Türkiye for only around a year, moving on to exile in Najaf, Iraq (1965–1978), he mentioned the country multiple times as a negative foil to the ideal Islamic society in his speeches. Reports from the era note his discomfort with Turkish women’s clothing choices.Footnote ⁸⁶ A less well-known trope includes his reference to Atatürk statues, which depict the leader with his finger pointing westward. Khomeini insisted this meant the “evil” Atatürk was saying, “all that we have comes from the West.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Atatürk’s admiration for French Enlightenment thought notwithstanding, such statues reference the Turkish independence war, in which Atatürk, then known as Mustafa Kemal, led the nationalist resistance forces and commanded them to repeal the invading British-sponsored Greek army.Footnote ⁸⁸ They are commonly known as “first target” (ilk hedef) statues due to Mustafa Kemal having given the command, “Armies, your first target is the Mediterranean. Onward!” (Figure 3.1). Khomeini’s reading of this statue almost completely reversed its meaning, as the cleric used a well-known Turkish symbol of anti-imperialism to make a point about West worship. With this interpretive sleight of hand, he was able to connect Kemalist secularism to Türkiye’s contemporary pro-Western political orientation.

Figure 3.1 A famous statue of Atatürk, built in 1932, stands in the coastal city of İzmir and points to the Aegean as a military target. Khomeini misinterpreted such “first target” statues and referenced them in his speeches to connect early republican secularism to Türkiye’s pro-Western orientation in the Cold War.

Photo © iStock Unreleased / Getty Images.

Khomeini’s faulty reading of the statute ignored that Türkiye’s dominant foreign policy orientation during Atatürk’s reign had been neutralism. As Amit Bein has convincingly demonstrated, the early Turkish republic did not have an exclusively Western tilt but instead collaborated closely with the USSR and engaged fully with the rest of West Asia and North Africa. The belief that Atatürk-era diplomacy turned away from the East stems from Cold War-era developments being “projected back to the early republic” and from the careless rhetorical slippages made between Western-facing domestic reform and pro-Western foreign policies.Footnote ⁸⁹ Ironically, and to different ends, Khomeini’s comparison of confrontational Islam with supposedly subservient secularism took part in these ascendant Cold War-era readings of Kemalist diplomacy. With this rewrite of Turkish history, Khomeini was able to link gharbzadegi to international relations.

For Iranian Third Worldist sociologist Ali Shariati, as well, critiquing Atatürk meant connecting westoxication to foreign policy and attacking the Pahlavi regime. Holding a Ph.D. in sociology from the Sorbonne in Paris, Shariati shared a vision of the Ottoman Empire as “the sword of Islam” with Khomeini, Western Orientalists, and the US-based NOI. “The Ottoman Empire,” he wrote, had once been “the center of the world power of Islam” but came to suffer from the “stinking and monkey-like disease of westernization” in a period of stagnation and defeat.Footnote ⁹⁰ With the founding of modern Türkiye, its Islamic glory was replaced with the pathetic “epic of being Turk.” Thus, its new points of pride became aping the West in all manners, from the alphabet to bathroom habits. From this state of westoxication, Shariati argued, it was only natural that the Turkish army, which had once made Europe tremble with fear, would turn into “a pawn of Western capitalism and a mercenary guardian of colonial interests in the East.”

While westoxication critique connecting foreign and domestic policy pervaded dissident Iranian thought, it appeared less often in Black Muslim publications. In fact, throughout the 1960s, NOI leaders generally refrained from criticizing Muslim-majority countries, even those aligned with the United States as Türkiye, Iran, and Pakistan were.

Of course, neither Türkiye nor Iran held as much importance for Black Muslims as Egypt, Algeria, or even Saudi Arabia, which was technically neutral in the Cold War but increasingly seen as a US asset. Egypt’s Nasser, in particular, embodied the kind of defiant Muslim leadership NOI leaders idealized, so when he sided with Greece over Türkiye in the Cyprus conflict, Muhammad Speaks referenced Nasser’s opinions to signal the correct Black Muslim stance on the issue.Footnote ⁹¹ The Republic of Cyprus was a crucial player in the non-aligned movement. Türkiye’s civilizational past may have held some theological purchase in NOI sermons, but it would not be enough to challenge this political clue for most readers.

In 1964, Khomeini highlighted Turks’ participation in the Hajj in “relatively larger numbers,” much like Malcolm X had done, but claimed the Turkish government’s secularism had foreclosed solidarity with Cypriot Turks.Footnote ⁹² “They separated religion from the state in Turkey with the result that now, when some of the Turks are killed in Cyprus, there is not one Muslim who expresses sorrow,” he argued, “You may only find one person who expresses sorrow, someone like an old akhound (cleric) like me.” Muhammad Speaks gave no such reasoning. Nasser siding against Türkiye implied by shorthand that the conflict would not be read through the Muslim/Eastern/Black versus Christian/Western/White binary that otherwise dominated the newspaper’s foreign affairs coverage. Similarly, despite some lip service from a 1965 meeting of the Muslim Congress, Türkiye failed to rally most Muslim-majority nations to its side at the UN General Assembly.Footnote ⁹³

Malcolm X’s September 1962 letter to a Sudanese student who had criticized NOI theology in the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier offers insight into why the NOI’s leadership did not openly denounce the Western alignments and secularization policies of Muslim-majority states. In a personal letter to the author, Yahya Hawari, Malcolm X argued that, since all Muslims were brothers, minor disagreements had to stay within the family and not be aired out for “the white man” to exploit.Footnote ⁹⁴ This corresponded with NOI’s racialized view of Islam. In a letter to the Courier, however, X accused Hawari of having become “Westernized” as a result of staying too long in the United States.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was also typical: Black NOI spokespeople sometimes mobilized arguments reminiscent of West Asian gharbzadegi discourse when fielding opposition from immigrant Muslims. When NOI teachings, particularly the status of Elijah Muhammad as a prophet and the group’s racialized Islam, were challenged by Muslims from countries that Americans naturally considered to be a part of “the Muslim world,” NOI spokespeople, including Malcolm X, noted that they were even more devout than those born to the religion. Malcolm X, for example, lectured: “Just with the limited knowledge that we now have we can stand the Arabs on their heads: though they are still too proud to recognize us even as their equals.”Footnote ⁹⁶ In such moments, Black Muslim thinkers came close to critiquing West Asian and North Africans’ aspirational whiteness and connecting it to their neglect of Islam.

Gharbzadegi rhetoric primarily entered NOI publications in the writings of American Muslims with immigrant origins. Abdul Basit Naeem, a Pakistani immigrant and long-time contributor to Muhammad Speaks, was vocal on this subject. In his introduction to Elijah Muhammad’s 1954 Supreme Wisdom, Naeem wrote:

Naeem’s argument was civilizational and essentializing. He posited Islam as “a way of life” clashing with “the West’s fashion.” By adopting Western ways, US-aligned Muslim-majority countries such as Iran, Türkiye, and Pakistan were self-destructing, selling their identities in exchange for foreign aid. In contrast to them, Elijah Muhammad was growing Islam in “the mightiest of Western countries.” According to Naeem, this fact alone proved that Allah was on his side.

Naeem’s chief role in the NOI was to lend Islamic legitimacy to Elijah Muhammad’s claims for a Western audience that still believed, in the evocative words of Zareena Grewal, that Islam was “a foreign country.”Footnote ⁹⁸ His identity as a Pakistani immigrant was significant and regularly highlighted in his Muhammad Speaks columns. He even weighed in on the issue of the Blackness of Islam in a piece he wrote for the newspaper in which he investigated the question, “Are there white Muslims?”Footnote ⁹⁹ Here, Naeem hedged his bets, noting that Muslims cannot be classified by race as they are all part of the same Islamic brotherhood. At the same time, he noted, if color blindness indeed ruled the world of Muslims, white people attempting to make the Hajj would not be so scrupulously investigated at Mecca. This connected to Elijah Muhammad’s own argument that his visit to Mecca had proven his Islamic credentials. It also aligned with the NOI doctrine that connected Muslim/Black/Eastern while setting whiteness in a suspect category apart.

Liberal Cold War integrationism and modernization theory could only provisionally eclipse long-standing racialized understandings of Islam. The transnational idea of Islamic civilization sharply contrasted “Islam” to “the West” and saw it as a potential fount of indigenous knowledge practices and lifeworlds that could counter modern ills. Flourishing rhetoric about Islam’s egalitarian racial politics – the focus of the next section – formed a significant part of these claims.

Recalling Bilal: (Re)constructing Antiracist, Anti-Imperialist Islam

The horrors of World War II, worldwide decolonization, the US civil rights struggle, and the plight of Palestinians sparked renewed interest among Muslims on the topics of race and racism. As antiracism gained a boost from UN- and UNESCO-based efforts to discredit racism from a scientific point of view, devout Muslim intellectuals focused on countering racism on Islamic terms. Perhaps one of the most famous early endeavors in this arena was the international bestseller, The Eternal Message of Muhammad (1946) by the Egyptian diplomat and founding secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam (1893–1976). Azzam’s book refuted racism with examples from the Qur’an, the Prophet’s reported sayings (hadith), and early Islamic history. Notably, however, Azzam did not mention Bilal ibn Rabah (580–640), the once-enslaved Abyssinian companion of the Prophet, who would come to exemplify Islamic antiracism throughout the 1960s and beyond. Translated into multiple languages, the book also made it into the hands of Malcolm X, who had the opportunity to meet its author during his famous 1964 Hajj.

In Türkiye, the American civil rights struggle took up significant space in the news media, with the United States Information Agency (USIA) personnel sending urgent reports about the need to “offset” damaging news about white supremacist terror.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For the Islamist magazine sector, the ascendance of antiracism meant increasing rhetoric about Islam’s racial politics, which were imagined as free of race prejudice.

In 1956, for example, the Turkish religious magazine Din Yolu published a long-form essay by Ragıp Akyavaş comparing Western racism to the pluralist ethic of Islam and the Ottoman Empire. The piece titled “The Stoned Civilization” responded to the attacks (including stoning) on Autherine Lucy Foster, the first Black student at the University of Alabama. Pointing to white supremacist violence, Akyavaş condemned Western civilization via comparison: “Machine civilization is one thing, and soul civilization is another. On this account, us Easterners are a lot more civilized than they are.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Significantly, Islam clinched Akyavaş’s self-identification as an “Easterner” despite Türkiye’s somewhat ambivalent geographic position and political commitment to “the West.” His condemnation of American racism built on a long international history of East–West comparativism that cast the East as moral/spiritual and the West as materialist.Footnote ¹⁰² This argument channeled a Traditionalist view of civilization, explored in depth in Chapter 5, arguing that the East must reclaim its spiritual heritage to heal the damage caused by West-powered modernity.Footnote ¹⁰³ Of course, Akyavaş’s Islamist civilization talk quietly glossed over Muslims’ (including Turks’) historical participation in racialized slavery and the modern republic’s spotty record on questions of race and ethnicity, including its forced assimilation of Kurds.

Authors like Akyavaş regularly referenced Bilal ibn Rabah, often called Bilal Habeşi or Hz. Bilal in Turkish, as proof that Islam was essentially free of racial prejudice. Of course, Hz. Bilal was already well known and respected by the world’s Muslims. In Türkiye, a sixteenth-century masjid dedicated to him stands in Mersin, commemorating his visit to Asia Minor with Caliph Omar. However, Islamist reporting on the American Civil Rights movement increased references to Hz. Bilal in the popular press. Editorials highlighted his origins and status as the first enslaved African person to accept Islam.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The first ever Turkish language biography of Hz. Bilal, translated from Arabic, was published in 1967.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Original works by Turkish authors – a short play and a biography – followed in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The 1976 US-made movie about Prophet Muhammad’s life, The Message, further boosted the importance of Bilal Habeşi among Islamist circles.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Given the interwar-era interruption in Islamic knowledge production in the country, the antiracist Islam of 1960s and 1970s Türkiye often resurrected the works of Muslim scholars of the late Ottoman and early Republican eras, such as Babanzade Ahmet Naim Bey (1872–1934), Mehmed Akif Ersoy (1873–1936) and Said Nursi (1878–March 23, 1960). Part of the Empire’s Islamist intelligentsia, these authors had used antiracism to fight separatist and ethnonationalist movements straining Ottoman unity, such as Arab nationalism and, later, pan-Turkism. Inaccessible to a new generation unfamiliar with the Arabic alphabet, these publications found new life in the multiparty era’s relatively more relaxed public sphere. In 1963, for example, Babanzade Ahmet Naim Bey’s collected articles, “Race Claims in Islam” (1916), were republished as a small booklet titled Islam Has Banned Racism.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Naim Bey was a learned Islamic scholar of Kurdish origin from Baghdad, then under Ottoman rule. His articles arguing against Arab ethnic nationalism made him one of the first Ottoman intellectuals to speak out against racism and ethnic discrimination from a Muslim perspective. He employed a multipronged approach to attacking racism via Islamic literature, citing the Qur’an, hadith literature, the Prophet’s farewell sermon, and early Islamic history. Prominent among the earliest Muslims and close companions of the Prophet, he noted, were Salman-i Farsi (Persian), Suheyb-i Rumi (Roman), and Bilal Habeşi (Abyssinian).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The religion of Islam, he claimed, operated like a miracle in mixing into “one dough” various ethnic and racial groups who accepted it. In contrast, racism was a deceptive cancer exported from Europe in the nineteenth century; its manifestation in the Ottoman Empire, therefore, was deeply connected to westernization, specifically, the practice of taking the most harmful things from the West.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Writing as a Turkish-speaking Kurd, Naim Bey warned that this exported sickness could lead to the death of the ummah or the Muslim community.

Bediüzzaman Said-i Nursi, an influential Kurdish cleric and educator whose writings spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the first multiparty era, also significantly advanced antiracist Islamist polemics. Much like Naim Bey, Nursi’s initial advocacy against racism and ethnonationalism began in an environment in which Ottoman intellectuals sought to counter the influence of nationalist movements among the empire’s Arab populations and limit the harmful effects of Pan-Turkism. Nursi used Islamic texts and history to argue against Arab chauvinism, pointing to Hz. Bilal as one of the Prophet’s renowned non-Arab companions.Footnote ¹¹¹ Such arguments held renewed resonance for the early Cold War era, in which Türkiye found itself in political opposition to Arab nationalism, personified by Egypt’s Nasser.

Like Naim Bey, Nursi held a civilizational vision of Islam that would be above all national, ethnic, or racial attachments. In 1925, he refused to join the Sheikh Said rebellion against the Kemalist regime, arguing that Turks had been the “flag bearers” of Islam for centuries and that, as Muslims, Turks and Kurds were siblings who should not fight against each other. “The sword” was to be used only for “outside enemies.”Footnote ¹¹²

Nursi also considered racism a Western illness spread by conspiracy: “Nationalism or ethnic differences have been unleashed in this century, particularly by devious European officials following the well-known principle of divide and rule.”Footnote ¹¹³ For all his antiracist rhetoric, Nursi was not above anti-Semitism in blaming Jews for fanning Muslim disunity.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Although Nursi spoke out against European imperialism in the early twentieth century, his Islamic antiracist, anti-westernization arguments did not imply political anti-Americanism in the mid-century. He was a vocal anti-Communist and staunch supporter of the pro-American DP. He wrote a letter of congratulations to Prime Minister Menderes for signing the Baghdad Pact in 1955. Among other reasons, he believed the pact might counter racism and promote unity among Muslims.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Elsewhere, he called the United States “a wonderful country working seriously on the side of religion.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ When he passed away in 1960, Nursi represented the general political bent of a new generation of Turkish Islamists, who supported Türkiye’s pro-US alignment, even as they used Islamist critiques of racism to score civilizational points over their powerful ally.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Due to a dedicated group of student followers, Nursi’s life and works continued to be influential after his death.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Moreover, attention paid to Islamist antiracism only increased in the 1970s, a time of immense political instability in Türkiye. Throughout the decade, various splintered and reborn political parties struggled to come to power, forging fraying coalitions, even as the militant left and the fascist right fought their politics out on the streets. In 1970, some followers of Nursi and members of the Naqshbandi Sufi movement split from the leading center-right party, eventually forming the National Salvation Party (MSP) under the Islamist leadership of Necmettin Erbakan.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Other Nursi followers united under Fethullah Gülen, forming the hizmet (service) movement and employing more clandestine methods to build power and influence, as explained in Chapter 5.

A key catalyst keeping racism and antiracism in the limelight was the founding of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in 1969. MHP’s paramilitary wing, nicknamed the Gray Wolves, targeted intellectuals on the left, massacring Kurdish and Alevi communities in bouts of terror. It is, therefore, doubly significant that Naim Bey and Nursi, whose Islamic admonishments against racism found broader publication during this decade, were both Kurdish. By valorizing these thinkers, Türkiye’s Islamists stood against MHP-style Turkism, even as they subtly preached accommodation through a vision of Muslim brotherhood to would-be Kurdish revolutionaries.

In Iran, Islamist critiques of the regime’s Western aspirations also came to target racism as an imperialist ploy to divide “the Muslim world.” In addition, critics attacked pro-Aryan rhetoric as a Pahlavi tool to estrange Iran from Islam. Khomeini’s speeches against racism from an Islamic perspective, for example, demonstrated that comparing Türkiye and Iran was not the endpoint of his gharbzadegi polemics. Instead, Khomeini constructed a defiant, imagined “Muslim world” that could withstand attacks on Muslim sovereignty everywhere, from Kashmir to Palestine, by sheer numbers. “There are no Arabs and non-Arabs, Turks and Persians; there is only Islam and unity under Islam,” he argued.Footnote ¹²⁰ Racism in this context was a Western conspiracy aimed at usurping the wealth of Muslim-majority lands.

Khomeini’s influential student Morteza Motahhari applied antiracist Islam to the question of Iranian nationalism with his Mutual Services of Iran and Islam (1960), attacking the Pahlavi-promoted Aryan myth. His monograph was designed as a rebuttal of a best-selling work of Iranian history, Two Centuries of Silence (1957) by Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub, which contrasted an exquisite pre-Islamic Persian culture with “the savage darkness” that followed Iran’s conquest by Arab Muslims.Footnote ¹²¹ Motahhari, in turn, argued that while Iranians were Aryan by “race and heredity,” emphasizing this fact would bring them closer to “the imperialist West.” Instead, he advocated that Iran’s national ideology be grounded in religion and the cultural mores and institutions built over the last centuries, making “Arab, Turk, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese Muslims” Iranians’ true relatives.Footnote ¹²² As such, Motahhari demonstrated how culture and religion could function as technologies of race, forging bonds that did not overlap with biological theories but directly impacted “action and policy.”

In arguing against racism, Motahhari used examples of racial and ethnic intermixing from the Prophet’s family and companions, mentioning Suhayb al-Rumi, Salman al-Farsi, and Bilal ibn Rabah by name. Like Khomeini, he underplayed Shia–Sunni differences, claiming Shia beliefs were fully embedded in the Qur’an and the hadith – not markers of resistance to Arabs as claimed by many Persian nationalists. Motahhari’s message, however, contained its own dose of Shia–Sunni comparison: He claimed that converting Iranians had welcomed “the Islamic message of justice and equality,” which, he believed, was most fully realized by Shiism.

Ali Shariati was similarly inclined to find an exceptional striving for justice and equality in Shiism.Footnote ¹²³ He, too, tempered this sectarianism with a dose of antiracism. In his teachings, which charged early Islamic figures with revolutionary symbolism, Shariati wrote about the Prophet’s family and the Shia imams but also foregrounded Salman al-Farsi and Bilal ibn Rabah.

In his brief but impactful piece “Yes, That’s How It Was, Brother,” Shariati wrote of a visit to the unmarked graves of the enslaved builders of the pyramids in Egypt and argued that Prophet Muhammad had been different from all leaders because he was the paragon of racial and class justice: “Some of those who became leaders of his followers were: Bilal, a slave and son of a slave whose parents were from Abyssinia, Salman, a homeless person from Persia, owned as a slave, Abu-Zar, the poverty stricken and anonymous fellow from the desert, and lastly, Salim, the slave of the wife of Khudhaida and an unimportant black alien.”Footnote ¹²⁴

Here as elsewhere, Shariati connected racial and economic oppression and promoted Islam as an indigenous source of knowledge and action against their intersections. It is no accident that the left-wing American journal Race and Class picked this essay to republish in 1979 to explain the successes of the Iranian revolution. In the foreword to the piece, Professor Mansour Farhang introduced English-speaking readers to Shariati’s ideas, which combined “western radical thought with Shi’ite tradition and doctrines.”Footnote ¹²⁵ This connected Iranian opposition to the shah to the struggles of people of color and poor people worldwide.

There was some precedent for this vision of solidarity. As recent works by Ida Yalzadeh and Manijeh Moradian demonstrate, in the late 1960s and 1970s, protesting the US-aligned shah allowed Iranian students to forge interracial collaborations across American campuses, undermining aspirational whiteness and “making Iranians more deportable.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet has similarly identified an “Anti-Aryan Moment” in Iran and among the diaspora during this period, as a generation of dissident intelligentsia “shunned Aryan discourses and found meaning instead in the stories of dispossessed Blacks in Africa and America and in the anti-colonial struggles of the Third World.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Although this turn away from state-sponsored Aryan ideology did not need to have an articulated Islamic component, being equally compatible with Marxist Third Worldism, Islam appeared as an indigenous fount of knowledge that could undo the suspect taint of Westernness found in other ideologies. Of course, this illusion of Islamic authenticity and purity was just that: an illusion. As I explain in depth in Chapter 5, Political Islam had transnational roots transcending any East–West divide.

Orientalists, Islamists, and Black American Muslims were not the only ones constructing Islam as the defiant antithesis to “the West” in all matters. The influential Afro-Caribbean intellectual Franz Fanon wrote in a 1961 letter to Shariati that Islam seemed to hold “both an anti-colonialist capacity and an anti-western character.”Footnote ¹²⁸ This was the muscular Islam, a religion, a civilization, and a political alignment, that Stoddard had once identified as “Brown.” By the end of the 1970s, Türkiye’s invasion of Cyprus (1974), the resulting US arms embargo (1975–1978), and the Iranian hostage crisis (1979) would demonstrate the political uses of this gendered and racialized construct and link West Asian Islamists to America’s Black Muslims beyond the rhetorical.

Finding Bilal: Muhammad Ali Fights for Türkiye

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian-American activist and journalist Ali Muhammad Baghdadi wrote for the Middle East Report section of Muhammad Speaks, criticizing US foreign policy, Zionism, and US-aligned Muslim leaders such as the shah.Footnote ¹²⁹ In 1973, Baghdadi argued that although Türkiye and Iran “claim to be Muslim states,” they were, in fact, “two strongholds of US imperialism in the Middle East,” collaborating with Israel, “the enemy of all Muslim and African people.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In a civilizational framework that racialized religion and set “Islam” against “the West,” Turks’ and Iranians’ claim to be Muslim were suspect due to their governments’ pro-US, pro-Israeli foreign policies. This view, equating true Islam with political dealignment from the United States, could already be found in the sermons and speeches of influential Iranian dissidents, including Khomeini and Shariati. It also became more and more common in Turkish Islamism in the 1970s. As the Erbakan-founded National Outlook movement grew, its calls for political and economic dealignment merged with the pre-existing Islamic argument that racism was a disease exported from the West.Footnote ¹³¹ The 1975 Islamist bestseller Batılılaşma İhaneti (The Treason of Westernization) also linked West-facing modernization and pro-Western foreign policies.Footnote ¹³²

The mid-1970s was a period of reorientation for the NOI under the new leadership of Warith Deen Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s son and successor. After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, W. D. Muhammad brought the organization in line with Sunni doctrine, strengthened connections to West Asia and North Africa, and reemphasized the symbolism of Bilal. The NOI rebranded as “the Bilalian Community” and later “the World Community of Al-Islam in the West” (1976–1977). Its news organ became Bilalian News.Footnote ¹³³ Thus, America’s most influential Black Muslim organization and West Asian Islamists found themselves closer than ever regarding theology, doctrine, and symbolism. When the Cyprus crisis turned Türkiye into the bete noire of the mainstream American public, Turks found their champion in the new NOI. The climax of this realignment came in October 1976, when the Bilalians’ new leader W. D. Muhammad, and the community’s most famous celebrity, the world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, visited Türkiye.

After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Muhammad Ali became the most well-known representative of Black Islam in the United States. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in 1942, Ali converted to Islam in 1961 and announced his new name – given to him by Elijah Muhammad – after his 1964 championship win. In a highly publicized incident, Ali refused induction into the US military in 1966, citing racial and religious reasons for not fighting the Viet Cong. He was stripped of his title and prevented from competing for several years. While a negative campaign against him raged in the mainstream US press, Ali became a hero to critics of US imperialism everywhere. His image was electrifying in Africa’s newly independent states and across Muslim-majority communities worldwide. He had become, in the words of a 1974 Turkish book on him, “the symbolic warrior of all Muslims.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Ali’s clash with the US government coincided with years of friction between Türkiye and the United States, challenging Türkiye’s status as a model modernizing state and acquiescent US ally. In 1964, when Ali first won the title and shed his “slave name,” Türkiye was in the news regarding the communal violence in Cyprus, with the infamous “Johnson letter,” warning the country against intervening. When Nixon’s war on drugs kicked into high gear in the 1970s, disagreements on Türkiye’s right to cultivate opium for the medical market rattled the alliance.Footnote ¹³⁵

Then, on July 20, 1974, the military junta government in Greece organized a coup in Cyprus, intending to absorb the island into its territory. In response, Türkiye rapidly invaded the island, which lay about 43 miles from its shoreline. The resulting war led to the collapse of the right-wing dictatorship in Athens. However, it boosted the domestic popularity of Türkiye’s own beleaguered coalition government, led by the leftist prime minister Bülent Ecevit and the Islamist deputy prime minister Necmettin Erbakan. The Turkish offensive extended into August, with the army capturing around 40 percent of the island. This led to the de facto division of the island between Turkish and Greek portions. It also generated a new refugee crisis and gained Türkiye an enormous amount of ill will in the US public sphere.

The Cyprus invasion shook the Turks’ provisional whiteness, already damaged by the opium debate, to the core, reanimating half-dormant visions of invading Asiatic hordes. The Turkish government had named the extension of the Cyprus campaign “Operation Atilla,” and the Greek-American lobby made much of the name’s connections to the Huns, “the Scourge of God.”Footnote ¹³⁶ About a century and a half ago, the mainstream American press had rallied support for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire via vivid racial and religious rhetoric.Footnote ¹³⁷ Once again, a Greek–Turkish conflict over land and political rights appeared as a civilizational battle between Christians symbolically connected to the dawn of white, Western civilization and non-white Muslims, a “savage people” who had “contributed nothing to the human race and its civilization.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Despite the extensive history of mixing between Greek and Turkish peoples, religion became racialized, and the US public sphere became awash in a new wave of Islamophobia. Cartoons featuring dark, hook-nosed, scimitar-wielding Turks brought to mind older civilizational visions of Turks as “the sword of Islam” and echoed racist anti-Muslim imagery from the 1973 Arab Oil embargo.Footnote ¹³⁹

Türkiye was militarily victorious in Cyprus, and the Kissinger State Department had let its actions stand. Yet, the country instantly lost the publicity war: The US Congress, urged on by large Greek- and Armenian-American lobbies and hoping to wrest foreign policy control away from the executive branch, was organizing to “make Turkey pay.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In October 1974, the US Senate voted to cut off all military aid to Türkiye. President Ford vetoed the decision.Footnote ¹⁴¹ On February 5, 1975, Congress passed an arms embargo, banning all weapon sales to the country. Meanwhile, Türkiye’s leaders accelerated the search for alternative sources of military equipment and threatened to close US military installations and bases, putting immense pressure on the Cold War security apparatus.Footnote ¹⁴² On July 25, 1975, Türkiye took control over the twenty-one US bases and military installations in the country and froze their operations.Footnote ¹⁴³

Kissinger and Ford scrambled to find a way to reverse the embargo, which they considered to be against US foreign policy interests. It was not an easy task: Türkiye lacked an effective lobby or immigrant voting block in the United States.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ While the non-aligned movement closed ranks behind the Greek Cypriots, Libya and Pakistan expressed support for Türkiye, making the country more likely to lean into the civilizational idea of the Muslim world.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Iran’s Mohammad Reza Shah declared he was “steadfast in his support of Turkey.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Fearing a weakened NATO, the shah sent supplies to the Turkish air force and signed a five-year defense industry deal.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ However, Turkish policymakers sensed he was enjoying the shift in power dynamics, which seemed to confirm his “belief that he and his nation were superior” to all others in the region.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

At the urging of Erbakan’s Islamist coalition party MSP, Türkiye began reaching out to the Saudi-sponsored Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and US Black Muslims to garner support for its Cyprus operation.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ According to Minister Hasan Aksay of MSP, the idea of contacting American Muslims originated with the founder and leader of the party, deputy prime minister Necmettin Erbakan.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ A mechanical engineer with ties to Türkiye’s robust Naqshbandi-Khalidi Sufi community, Erbakan had long argued for de-aligning Türkiye from the West, urging the regime to leave NATO and abandon its attempts to integrate with the European Community.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Under his directive, Foreign Minister İhsan Sabri Çağlayangil traveled to the United States and contacted Warith Deen Muhammad, who was then in the process of reforming the NOI toward mainstream Sunni teachings. Muhammad reportedly told Çağlayangil he and Muhammad Ali would like to visit as Muslims, as opposed to political representatives, and soon accepted an invitation from the Turkish Directorate of Religion.Footnote ¹⁵²

The NOI organ Muhammad Speaks had mostly ignored the bloodshed in Cyprus throughout the 1960s and leaned toward the Greek side in reporting on non-aligned policy and Nasser’s stance. The August 23, 1974, issue of the newspaper, however, was sympathetic to Türkiye, quoting “one knowledgeable observer” who argued the country “can hardly be blamed for the tough attitude that gained her most of what she wanted both on the ground and in negotiation – securing ample safeguards for her kinsmen outside her area of operation.”Footnote ¹⁵³ The larger text was more nuanced, but the author’s appreciative tone in reporting the quote amounted to celebrating a muscular foreign policy in the name of kinship ties.

A “tough attitude” and success on the battlefield was certainly something Türkiye’s leaders believed they shared with Muhammad Ali. On October 30, 1974, Ali defeated heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman in Zaire for the famous “Rumble in the Jungle.” During an interview with the popular centrist Turkish newspaper Hürriyet before the battle, Ali posed with the Turkish flag, accepted the gift of a Qur’an, and announced he wanted to visit Türkiye (Figure 3.2).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Following his victory, he posed with Turkish military officers, who had come to watch him, saying the Turkish flag had brought him good luck. The NOI flag, reportedly modeled on the Turkish one, also sported a white crescent and star over a red background.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ According to Hürriyet, Ali also told his Turkish fans that he “admired” the country’s victories in Cyprus.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Figure 3.2 World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali posing with the Turkish flag on the pages of the centrist newspaper Hürriyet in June 1974.

Photo credit: Hürriyet – Mehmet Biber.

In a national environment that made anti-Americanism “common sense” across the political spectrum, Turks were readier than ever to de-emphasize aspirational whiteness and see Ali as one of their own. Turkish folk songs praised him for standing against US imperialism, for being “as powerful as a Turk” and “as brave as a Turk,” and connected the Black American sports idol and the Turkish nation through a vision of righteous violence.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The Islamist magazine Yeniden Milli Mücadele connected Türkiye and the boxer through the trope of confrontational religion: “The sound of Muhammed Ali’s fist has a meaning, like the sound of the sword in Turkish raids.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ It also argued Ali was moving in “the tradition of Bilal Habeşi.”

An emphasis on similarity reined in non-Islamist Turkish reporting, as well. A column titled “Our Ali” in Hürriyet linked Ali to Turks via religion, politics of masculine defiance, and racialized civilization rhetoric. The author noted that Turks loved heroes, using a word (kahraman) associated with the Turkish army, but currently lacked them in the international sports arena. Into this gap had come Muhammad Ali, “who said ‘I love Turks,’ who had his picture taken with our flag, who gave his heart to our religion, whose name is similar to ours.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Ali spoke more extensively about Cyprus to the Turkish press on May 30, 1976, reportedly arguing Türkiye had been right in its actions and that the US Congress was falsely beholden to “a handful of Greeks.” Instead, he noted, they should hear the voice of the more numerous “40 million Black Americans.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Of course, it was unclear where most Black Americans stood on the Cyprus issue, but Ali constructed them as natural allies to a Muslim Türkiye. Clearly, the old NOI’s well-established overlap between race, religion, and political solidarity still held some purchase in this new era.

On October 1, 1976, two days after defending his title against Ken Norton, Muhammad Ali came to Türkiye and met with Turkish leaders, again declaring his support for Turkish actions in Cyprus. His visit renewed rhetoric around Islamic antiracism and Bilal Habeshi.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The American Embassy noted the attention Turks paid to “Muhammad’s statements that the NOI and its large-circulation publications would be exerting their influence in the United States on behalf of Turkish and Turkish Cypriot causes.”Footnote ¹⁶² The report also mocked Erbakan’s attempts to score the boxer’s visit as a victory for his own political party.

While in Istanbul, Muhammad Ali made international news by announcing his retirement from boxing to dedicate himself to promoting Islam at the urging of his spiritual leader, W. D. Muhammad. Muhammad, who preceded the boxer in holding meetings with high-level Turkish politicians, promised to bring the Cyprus issue to the attention of his congregation. Upon his return to the United States, the leader told Bilalian News that Türkiye was “great, in every sense of greatness.”Footnote ¹⁶³

Türkiye’s outreach to African American Muslims demonstrated how the idea of “the Muslim World” and Islamic anti-racism had become centerpieces of the country’s lobbying efforts as the Cyprus crisis spiraled into warmaking and sanctions. A connected tactic was boosting Türkiye’s participation in international Islamic organizations such as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Türkiye–OIC relations before the 1970s had been shaky, particularly due to the country’s collaborations with Israel and internal political debates regarding the potential damage to laicism.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Soon, however, its diplomats began trying to establish strategic similitude between the Cyprus crisis and Israel/Palestine as issues hinging on racial and religious oppression. The country’s vote favoring the 1975 UN resolution 3379, which declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” symbolized the winds of change.

In May 1976, the MSP organ Milli Gazete endorsed Islamic antiracism in preparation for the upcoming Istanbul meeting of the OIC. The newspaper reprinted the 1965 UN resolution on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and prepared informational columns on all member states.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The leader of Turkish Cypriots, Rauf Denktaş, spoke at the meeting, drawing parallels between the conflict over the divided island and Palestinian lands.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ These efforts resulted in an OIC resolution expressing support for the rights of Turkish Cypriots and led to increased Turkish participation at high levels of OIC governance.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In the United States, W. D. Muhammad also expressed support for Turkish Cypriots’ demands for political independence, particularly after personally attending the Islamic Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs in 1979.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Race/Religion/Politics in the Iranian Hostage Crisis

The parameters of Türkiye–US–Iran comparativism shifted yet again at the end of the 1970s. As Iran convulsed in revolutionary change, US leaders became concerned about the potential loss of a comparable ally in the region. The United States quietly lifted its arms embargo against the country in response to the events in Iran, even though the Cyprus crisis still awaited resolution.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Bilalian News, deeply sympathetic to the Iranian revolution in its early stages, also reported positively on its potential for raising Türkiye’s political and economic fortunes.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

On November 4, 1979, radical Iranian students took over the US embassy in Tehran, demanding the return of all Iranian assets and the shah – then receiving cancer treatment in the United States – and calling for an absolute end to US interference in Iran’s internal affairs. The dramatically televised hostage crisis all but ensured that American anti-Muslim racism would hone in on Iran and Iranians. Anti-Iranian discourse and hate crimes flared across the country. The United States implemented its first “Muslim ban” since the repeal of the racist laws of the early twentieth century, halting new visas to Iranians.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Black Muslim leader W. D. Muhammad maintained nuance as he expressed his opposition to “the capture and holding of US Embassy personnel,” while relating that members of his community were “fraternally supporting the just Islamic reforms of the Iranian people’s revolution.”Footnote ¹⁷² Türkiye’s center-right president, Süleyman Demirel, criticized hostage-taking through religious language, arguing, “It is one of Islam’s traditions not to harm the envoy.Footnote ¹⁷³ The Islamist MSP’s organ Milli Gazete, however, expressed support for the students’ actions and Khomeini’s views in its coverage and editorials.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

Milli Gazete editorials underplayed Sunni–Shia differences and claimed that secularist Turks’ support for the ethnically Turkic Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari over Khomeini was a manifestation of the type of racism that had broken up the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ One of Iran’s leading senior clerics and the source of emulation for millions of Iranians of mostly Azeri origin, Shariatmadari had also opposed the shah. However, he stood against Khomeini’s plan for the guardianship of Islamic jurists, advocating a more pluralistic system. While the Turkish regime’s preference for Shariatmadari over Khomeini had political reasons, belief in ethnic similitude did facilitate contact and boost positive reporting. During his first visit to Tehran after the revolution, Ahmet Gündüz Ökçün, the Turkish minister of foreign affairs affiliated with the laicist Republican People’s Party (CHP), followed his meeting with Khomeini with an unscheduled visit to Shariatmadari, then under house arrest in Qum. Turgut Tülümen, Turkish ambassador to Iran, reported that while the first meeting confirmed high-level Türkiye–Iran ties, it subjected Turkish representatives to Khomeini’s anti-laicist rhetoric. The second took place over the objections of the Iranian regime but involved hugs, conversation in Turkish, and “a holiday atmosphere” (bayram havası).Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Race thinking was operational in many other ways throughout the Iranian revolution, including in the revolutionary cadres’ outreach to Black Americans. The new regime’s antiracist credentials gained a boost when it severed diplomatic relations with Apartheid South Africa.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ On November 18, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the release of all women and Black hostages at the US embassy. He explained the actions by saying, “Islam reserves special rights for women” and that Black Americans could not be responsible for US imperialism as they lived in the United States “under oppression.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ His son Ahmad Khomeini made a speech connecting the Iranian and Black struggles via political similitude as acts standing against oppression.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Iranian consulates reported on an outpouring of letters of appreciation from Black Americans in the wake of the decision.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The move was also immediately legible to the Turkish Islamist press, with Hicret magazine referencing Malcolm X’s autobiography and Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) – also a bestseller in Iran – in its coverage of the events.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Muhammad Ali was sympathetic to both Iranian demands and the hostages’ plight. He offered to exchange places with the hostages and, later, to stage a fight in Iran to help free the remaining captives.Footnote ¹⁸² The students refused the offer, repeating their demand for the return of the shah. However, this did not mark the beginning or the end of Iranian Islamists’ interest in Black Americans or Black Muslims.Footnote ¹⁸³ The Islamic revolution increased the rate of African American conversion to Shiism, supporting the ascendant belief that Shiism constituted the most protest-oriented interpretation of Islam.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ American-born Blacks such as journalist Merzieh Hashemi, activist Imam Abdul Alim Musa, and Dawud Salahuddin, the assassin known for murdering Khomeini’s opponent Ali Akbar Tabatabai, traveled to postrevolutionary Iran and vocally supported the regime.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ In 1984, the Islamic Republic of Iran became the first country in the world to issue a stamp of Malcolm X. Produced to honor the fight against racial discrimination, the stamp depicted Malcolm X wearing an old-fashioned white robe and performing the call to prayer, visually merging the US-born Black leader with Bilal ibn Rabah.

In his 1988 The Satanic Verses, the diasporic Indian author Salman Rushdie hinted at the complications of this merger. In this infamous postmodern novel, perhaps most well known for drawing the ire of Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie constructed a Black American figure called Bilal X. Bilal X works as a muezzin and propagandist, using US technology as well as American-inflected protest to push against “Yankee imperialism”:

Rushdie’s depiction of Bilal X (a clear Third Worldist merger of Bilal ibn Rabah and Malcolm X) hints at the complex history this chapter has traced. In Rushdie’s novel, through the advances of communications technology, Bilal X’s voice is “transmuted into the thunderous speech of the Imam himself.” Indeed, the idea that Islam was the religion of racial justice and anti-imperialism developed by fits and starts through transculturation and strategic comparativism. In the 1960s and 1970s, unofficial American world-making spread through international media and influenced the racialization of Islamist politics across multiple countries, including within US-allied countries with long traditions of West-facing modernization and aspirational whiteness. Bilal ibn Rabah had long been significant to Muslim antiracist and antinationalist polemics as one of Prophet Muhammad’s esteemed non-Arab companions. By the end of the 1970s, however, his image had fully merged with the US Black struggle and Islamist anti-Americanism.

Islam’s reconfiguration as the religion of racial justice was theological as well as political, allowing for new interpretations of ancient texts through postcolonial, antiracist lenses. As “a weapon of the West turned against its makers,” this ideological formation mirrored the Orientalist racialization of Islam and promised to replace the US-led comparativism of modernization theory with an Asian-African brotherhood imagined on non-hierarchical terms. However, Muslim dissidents’ racial blindspots and masculinist commitments complicated the emancipatory vision.

Coeval with the rise of a new brand of muscular, Islamic anti-Americanism was the re-racialization of Turks and Iranians in the American media. Muhammad Ali reportedly claimed that Erbakan was the first “white leader” to embrace him, seemingly breaking from the earlier NOI doctrine that equated Muslim, Eastern, and Black.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ However, just as the newly reformed World Community of Islam in the West was willing to accept the existence of white Muslims and perhaps count Turks among this group, the US media and public were starting to view “the Middle East” and Islam in increasingly racialized ways. Although West Asians retained their official designation as “Caucasian,” Hollywood presented Islam as a racialized, gendered signifier of dangerous Otherness. In the next chapter, I examine how the rise of what some have called “Islamic feminism” sought to counter both anti-Muslim racism and the patriarchal policies of the hardline Islamist and laicist regimes that ruled post-1980 Iran and Türkiye.