MALCOLM IN THE DESERT

Sharing life lessons from her father.

A year before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, disillusioned by its leader, Elijah Muhammad, who was having sex with his young secretaries. Malcolm decided to embark on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and, as his daughter relates in this slim but bighearted book, the journey was transformative. “Here was Malcolm again,” she writes, “compelled to examine the last twelve years of his life and the heavily editorialized brand of Islam he had practiced. He was vulnerable, a beginner on the path, being pushed to rediscover the depth of his sincerity.” A Muslim who has also made the pilgrimage to Mecca, Shabazz quotes a Yoruban proverb in describing Malcolm’s state of mind when he arrived in Mecca: “In order to find your way, you must first become lost.” Being lost, she writes, brought on “a rupture and an opening”—“a striking moment of freedom” that let Malcolm move beyond “the anger that fueled him, the pain that shaped his political life, and then discover something deeper.” That something deeper was, as she beautifully phrases it, “the blossoming of his compassionate heart.” In Mecca, as he “walked alongside thousands of other pilgrims, he was no longer defined by his marginal status as a Black man in America, or even by his rebirth as Malcolm X.…Here, he was becoming el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm in the desert, one expression of being in the infinite parade of beings, all equal before God.” Shabazz wrote her book as a “practical resource”—for instance, she includes simple yet endearing advice on nestling amid pillows and a soft blanket to journal. Ultimately, she hopes her father’s “remarkable growth journey” will inspire people today in “a moment of so much acute suffering around the world.” His life is proof, she writes, that “No matter who you are…transformation is always possible.”

A personal perspective on a momentous figure brims with brightness and fellow feeling.