Malcolm X and Blackamerican Islamic Liberation Theology

Research output

Complete citation

Poljarević, Emin. “Malcolm X and Blackamerican Islamic Liberation Theology.” Islamic Horizons 50, no. 4 (July–August 2021).

Status

Published

Publication type

Public scholarship / commentary

Overview

This article presents Malcolm X as a formative voice in Blackamerican Islamic liberation theology. It asks how his religious transformations, political discipline, and international outlook joined Islamic commitment to the struggle against racial domination. The article traces Malcolm’s movement beyond the Nation of Islam’s separatist theology while retaining his uncompromising diagnosis of white supremacy and his insistence on Black dignity, self-determination, and moral reform. His pilgrimage and travels widened the scale of his analysis, connecting the condition of Black Americans to anti-colonial and human-rights struggles across the world. The article argues that Malcolm’s theology was not an abstract system but a practical form of ethical and political reasoning shaped through conversion, study, worship, organisation, and public speech. Its contribution is to locate Malcolm X more clearly within modern Islamic intellectual history and to identify his enduring significance for Muslim liberation theology.

Research question or central concern

How did Malcolm X transform Islamic faith, personal discipline, and resistance to white supremacy into a practical Blackamerican liberation theology?

Main argument, approach, and contribution

The article argues that Malcolm X joined spiritual transformation to collective struggle, producing a practical Islamic liberation theology centred on dignity, justice, moral reform, and international solidarity.

Keywords

Malcolm X; Blackamerican Islam; Muslim liberation theology; white supremacy; dignity; political theology