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A review by lpm100
The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America by Jacob S. Dorman
4.0
Book Review
The Princess and the Prophet
4/5 stars
"Wordy description of ridiculousness beyond words."
*******
This is the second of these books by Jacob Dorman that I have read, the first being the Jewish analogue to this one.
Of the book:
-259 pages of prose (reads more like it is 518 pages)
-17 chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion
-15 pages per chapter average
-≈725 citations; 2.8 per page
Good, but more than just a bit *overwrought* with detail. (259 pages of writing could have probably been shortened to about 170. I appreciate that it took him 20 years to write the book, but still.)
Just because you *can* write 259 pages about such a topic does not mean that you *should.*
********
In one very important way, the topic is old wine in new bottles: In the first of his books, "Chosen People," Dorman showed lacking-in-direction black Americans appropriating and repurposing aspects of Judaism to make a religion to answer the questions that they needed. (Who says appropriation isn't a two-way street?)
In this book, it shows them appropriating disparate elements of Islam into what started out as Moorish Americans (of whom there are a few left).
For all the world, this wordy book seems to say that:
1. Around the turn of the last century, circuses were big business in America.
2. People like PT Barnum would pick up random Eastern elements and put them in their circuses and sell them to people as genuine who knew no better. (They might not, for example, see anything wrong with the title "Ishmael, the renowned priest of Buddha - - a Hindoo juggler." [p.100])
3. When somebody (say a Noble Drew Ali) needed a gimmick in order to sell in order to get followers, he had a ready-made bag of tricks that he had learned from working in the circus.
It is interesting how many of these leaders of different religions have been entertainers/hucksters:
-Wentworth Arthur Miller (the first Hebrew Israelite) was a boxer and huckster.
-Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister and was a child actor and later escapist / magician. (He worked for the circus and picked up a lot of Muslim imagery likely there.)
-Louis Farrakhan/Louis Eugene Walcott was a calypso singer.
*******
I think that the whole book could be abstracted in probably 4 points.
1. There are a whole bunch of ideas that exist somewhere at some point in time. For simultaneously every reason in the world and none at all ideas a, b, & c exist (as opposed to x, y, & z).
2. Some enterprising black entertainer-- who probably wants to get out of doing some type of daily job (old theme and present theme, p. 65) - - repackages them in such a way that he gets some followers.
In these particular cases, there are elements of Islam coincidentally involved.
3. Maybe the original new religion used ideas a, b& c... And over some amount of time and with some amount of churn, an offshoot will incorporate elements b, c, d & z. (Louis Farrakhan is referred to as "Honorable Minister" and the Nation of Islam has prayer meetings on Sunday? Hmmm...... A minister and Sunday prayers. Where have I seen that before?)
4. There is a lot of the standard black affinity for the obsessive politicizing of E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G., and so there is no surprise that these religious experience have heavy political overtones.
That's it. I just saved you several hours and a good chunk of change to buy this book.
In this case, they have black people appropriating scattered elements of Islam along the route Moorish<--->Shriners<---> Nation of Islam<--->Mainstream Sunni Islam. (Reversible arrows because people slip back and forth.)
What else? There have been so many "big things" that were going to lead black people to Paradise/Mecca/Jerusalem, I wonder (faintly) what value it adds to write ONE MORE book about foolish dreams.
Islamic:
--Black Moorish (200 people at the 2007 National Convention)
--Nation of Islam (13,500 members; 3% of all black Muslims)
--Shriners (a circus act repurposed as a political movement?)
--Political Islam
--Ahmadiyyism (p.140)
--Prislam
Counterfeit Jewish:
--Hebrew Israelites.
--Rastafarians
Secular:
--Garveyism (still alive today as Pan-Africanism)
--The Civil Rights movement
--Prislam
--The woke movement
Seems like almost anything EXCEPT getting trained in a saleable skill to secure income. (BT Washington noticed this over a century ago.)
Second order thoughts/questions:
1. It seems uncomfortably frequent that every time someone is trying to sell a bill of shoddy goods, and they need a stupid mark.... their first point of contact is black people.
The sellers could just as easily be black as white--as proven by Noble Drew Ali (charging sick black people a week's salary to sell them saltwater. [p.129])
(p.175) One of the corrupt Chicago machine politicians (Insull) was very happy to buy black people's votes, but he wouldn't actually hire any of them to work for him at his many utility companies.
Yet another corrupt politician (p.209) was happy to buy black votes and then subsequently move all the criminal enterprises to black neighborhoods.
These events were a century ago, but the resonances of Fabulous White People who see black people as bargaining chips /self actualization therapy for their emotional issues are so common as to be cliche. (Said Fabulous White People also don't even know any black people, as a rule.)
2. To talk about religion independently of some specific race/temperament of people is to talk of the sound of one hand clapping.
--The Jewish version of mysticism (Hasidism) looks completely different from the African version; Even though Islam and Christianity sprang from Judaism, the Foundational Religion (Judaism) is a lot more concerned with legal bickering / jurisprudence/ minutae than the Offspring Religions: and seems a religion to serve the cranky/fractious/litigious Jewish temperament and not the other way around.
3. The Civic-mindedShriners are a very positive force for good. (They have raised something like $1 billion dollars just this year for children's hospitals.)
The focus of the Moorish temple was also "personal hygiene, patriotism, and public manners. "(p.160)
4. (p.252). Does Dorman admit as much as that his explanations are Texas sharpshooter like? ("Sometimes religious movements take a long time to develop, and we cannot really understand and act or movement until a century has passed....")
It almost defeats the purpose of his establishing the specific path that these various religious movements took: had they taken any other what difference would it have made?
5. I'm surprised that Dorman does not have to go into hiding after writing a book like this: if a Moorish American read this book and was honest with himself, the only conclusion that he could reach is that his entire mode of being owes its existence to a repurposed minstrel/circus show.
If you want banality, folks, here it is.
Interesting to look at, but I just could not live it.
6. Mysticism is a thing that seems to pop up when people are suffering somewhere and they need a closer connection with The Divine.
-Jewish mysticism really got cooking a couple of hundred years ago in eastern europe, and that is a very small fraction of the long Jewish history. (The Baal Shem Tov was 300 years ago.)
-Mysticism reinvented itself in Haiti, and it is still ongoing with voodoo practitioners. (Haiti has been an absolutely miserable place to live from the very first day.)
7. Jesse Jackson is not new. (He is the long-dead Melvin Chisum of today.) He does an elaborate dance to extort money from guilty white people, but the beneficiaries are only his family / babymamas. (p.176)
8. "Ozymandias," revisited.
So many men who were so powerful back in their day, and all of them are dead and forgotten-- only waiting to be rediscovered by some author writing a book about an obscure religious movement. (For instance, I was not able to find a single picture of Melvin Chisum--the right hand man of the powerful Samuel Insull.)
9. For people who imagine that religion is something that will be stamped out with the genesis of a Progressive Society - - think again: As we see here, people make up completely new religions, and what's more is that they have the exact same mental architecture as older religions-- only with slightly different specific symbols.
Chapter Synopses:
1. Walter Brister / Noble Drew Ali cut his teeth as a child entertainer, and this was a popular line of work for young black people at the time.
2. There's always been an element of mysticism in certain Islamic movements.
3. Characterization of a subset of voluntary associations:
4. Chapter describing the difficult economic circumstances in the United States after a financial crisis around 1893. It was the beginning of US imperial ambitions.
5. Introduction to Walter Brister ("Armmah Sotanki"), and characterization of the circus as it would have appeared to his eyes.
6. More details of the strange / chaotic mixing of various Eastern cultures into circus fodder.
7. Black performers made a good living pretending to be Zulu Africans or Jews or Arabs or whatever they could successfully convince the audience of. But, eventually circuses came to an end and black performers had to look for other lines of work.
8. Enter John Walter Brister / Noble Drew Ali, who was reborn after faking his own death and made a living as a huckster/spiritual healer / "professor" in between trips to jail (for selling fake remedies and practicing medicine without a license).
9. Chicago has been a Corrupt and Troubled City for a LONG time. At least a century.
10. The 2% of Old Settler blacks that lived in Chicago were fine-- until the arrival of many times more uncouth, unwelcome Southern blacks (p.159) . (This echoes Thomas Sowell's book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals.") There was some crime before they came, and even more after they arrived.
11. The second chapter detailing the corruption of Chicago Machine Politics--and especially Samuel Insull and Melvin Chisum. (They're just so corrupt, I can't imagine that anybody thought a single chapter would do.)
12. Noble Drew Ali's "Circle 7 Quran" was copied from "The Aquarian Gospel... " by the Christian mystic Levi Dowling. (Chapters 1-19). And the remnant (Chapters 20-25) was some extraction from "Unto Thee I Grant." (The text claims to be an English text dating back to 1760 that was translated from Tibetan-->Chinese-->English and obtained from the Dalai Lama.)
In fact, the book that is certainly NOT quoted in the "Circle 7 Quran" is the Real Quran.
There also appears to be lots of racial revanchism that is baked in.
13. Third chapter detailing corrupt Chicago's political machine. (I guess the first two just weren't enough.) Things that seem like they are out of an action movie: assassinations in the street in broad daylight for the mayorality of a city.
14. Internal politics, corruption, assassinations and infighting of the Moorish Science Temple that ultimately led to Noble Drew Ali getting himself killed. (Foreshadowing a lot of the Nation of Islam's politics.)
Also, the clearest characterization of the same: semi-literate, academically deficient, otherwise exceptionally shrewd leader.
15. Suspicious death of Noble Drew ali, and speculation about who among his many murderous/corrupt contacts might have been to blame. Near instant unraveling of the racketeering operation known as Moorish Science Temple of America. The Moorish people were also pioneers in Prislam.
Epilogue. Elijah Muhammad showed up on the scene shortly after the death of Noble Drew Ali and formed the splinter group Nation of Islam by repurposing existing Moorish symbols. Wallace Fard showed up claiming to be The reincarnation of Noble Drew Ali.
New words
Terpsichorean
Odalisque
Coon shouter
Callithump
Rhizomatic
Calumny
Verdict: It's generally worth the read at $5 (2022 prices).
Number one take away message (in case you didn't already know): if you see some people trying to sell a mass movement to Black people, RUN AWAY.
The Princess and the Prophet
4/5 stars
"Wordy description of ridiculousness beyond words."
*******
This is the second of these books by Jacob Dorman that I have read, the first being the Jewish analogue to this one.
Of the book:
-259 pages of prose (reads more like it is 518 pages)
-17 chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion
-15 pages per chapter average
-≈725 citations; 2.8 per page
Good, but more than just a bit *overwrought* with detail. (259 pages of writing could have probably been shortened to about 170. I appreciate that it took him 20 years to write the book, but still.)
Just because you *can* write 259 pages about such a topic does not mean that you *should.*
********
In one very important way, the topic is old wine in new bottles: In the first of his books, "Chosen People," Dorman showed lacking-in-direction black Americans appropriating and repurposing aspects of Judaism to make a religion to answer the questions that they needed. (Who says appropriation isn't a two-way street?)
In this book, it shows them appropriating disparate elements of Islam into what started out as Moorish Americans (of whom there are a few left).
For all the world, this wordy book seems to say that:
1. Around the turn of the last century, circuses were big business in America.
2. People like PT Barnum would pick up random Eastern elements and put them in their circuses and sell them to people as genuine who knew no better. (They might not, for example, see anything wrong with the title "Ishmael, the renowned priest of Buddha - - a Hindoo juggler." [p.100])
3. When somebody (say a Noble Drew Ali) needed a gimmick in order to sell in order to get followers, he had a ready-made bag of tricks that he had learned from working in the circus.
It is interesting how many of these leaders of different religions have been entertainers/hucksters:
-Wentworth Arthur Miller (the first Hebrew Israelite) was a boxer and huckster.
-Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister and was a child actor and later escapist / magician. (He worked for the circus and picked up a lot of Muslim imagery likely there.)
-Louis Farrakhan/Louis Eugene Walcott was a calypso singer.
*******
I think that the whole book could be abstracted in probably 4 points.
1. There are a whole bunch of ideas that exist somewhere at some point in time. For simultaneously every reason in the world and none at all ideas a, b, & c exist (as opposed to x, y, & z).
2. Some enterprising black entertainer-- who probably wants to get out of doing some type of daily job (old theme and present theme, p. 65) - - repackages them in such a way that he gets some followers.
In these particular cases, there are elements of Islam coincidentally involved.
3. Maybe the original new religion used ideas a, b& c... And over some amount of time and with some amount of churn, an offshoot will incorporate elements b, c, d & z. (Louis Farrakhan is referred to as "Honorable Minister" and the Nation of Islam has prayer meetings on Sunday? Hmmm...... A minister and Sunday prayers. Where have I seen that before?)
4. There is a lot of the standard black affinity for the obsessive politicizing of E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G., and so there is no surprise that these religious experience have heavy political overtones.
That's it. I just saved you several hours and a good chunk of change to buy this book.
In this case, they have black people appropriating scattered elements of Islam along the route Moorish<--->Shriners<---> Nation of Islam<--->Mainstream Sunni Islam. (Reversible arrows because people slip back and forth.)
What else? There have been so many "big things" that were going to lead black people to Paradise/Mecca/Jerusalem, I wonder (faintly) what value it adds to write ONE MORE book about foolish dreams.
Islamic:
--Black Moorish (200 people at the 2007 National Convention)
--Nation of Islam (13,500 members; 3% of all black Muslims)
--Shriners (a circus act repurposed as a political movement?)
--Political Islam
--Ahmadiyyism (p.140)
--Prislam
Counterfeit Jewish:
--Hebrew Israelites.
--Rastafarians
Secular:
--Garveyism (still alive today as Pan-Africanism)
--The Civil Rights movement
--Prislam
--The woke movement
Seems like almost anything EXCEPT getting trained in a saleable skill to secure income. (BT Washington noticed this over a century ago.)
Second order thoughts/questions:
1. It seems uncomfortably frequent that every time someone is trying to sell a bill of shoddy goods, and they need a stupid mark.... their first point of contact is black people.
The sellers could just as easily be black as white--as proven by Noble Drew Ali (charging sick black people a week's salary to sell them saltwater. [p.129])
(p.175) One of the corrupt Chicago machine politicians (Insull) was very happy to buy black people's votes, but he wouldn't actually hire any of them to work for him at his many utility companies.
Yet another corrupt politician (p.209) was happy to buy black votes and then subsequently move all the criminal enterprises to black neighborhoods.
These events were a century ago, but the resonances of Fabulous White People who see black people as bargaining chips /self actualization therapy for their emotional issues are so common as to be cliche. (Said Fabulous White People also don't even know any black people, as a rule.)
2. To talk about religion independently of some specific race/temperament of people is to talk of the sound of one hand clapping.
--The Jewish version of mysticism (Hasidism) looks completely different from the African version; Even though Islam and Christianity sprang from Judaism, the Foundational Religion (Judaism) is a lot more concerned with legal bickering / jurisprudence/ minutae than the Offspring Religions: and seems a religion to serve the cranky/fractious/litigious Jewish temperament and not the other way around.
3. The Civic-mindedShriners are a very positive force for good. (They have raised something like $1 billion dollars just this year for children's hospitals.)
The focus of the Moorish temple was also "personal hygiene, patriotism, and public manners. "(p.160)
4. (p.252). Does Dorman admit as much as that his explanations are Texas sharpshooter like? ("Sometimes religious movements take a long time to develop, and we cannot really understand and act or movement until a century has passed....")
It almost defeats the purpose of his establishing the specific path that these various religious movements took: had they taken any other what difference would it have made?
5. I'm surprised that Dorman does not have to go into hiding after writing a book like this: if a Moorish American read this book and was honest with himself, the only conclusion that he could reach is that his entire mode of being owes its existence to a repurposed minstrel/circus show.
If you want banality, folks, here it is.
Interesting to look at, but I just could not live it.
6. Mysticism is a thing that seems to pop up when people are suffering somewhere and they need a closer connection with The Divine.
-Jewish mysticism really got cooking a couple of hundred years ago in eastern europe, and that is a very small fraction of the long Jewish history. (The Baal Shem Tov was 300 years ago.)
-Mysticism reinvented itself in Haiti, and it is still ongoing with voodoo practitioners. (Haiti has been an absolutely miserable place to live from the very first day.)
7. Jesse Jackson is not new. (He is the long-dead Melvin Chisum of today.) He does an elaborate dance to extort money from guilty white people, but the beneficiaries are only his family / babymamas. (p.176)
8. "Ozymandias," revisited.
So many men who were so powerful back in their day, and all of them are dead and forgotten-- only waiting to be rediscovered by some author writing a book about an obscure religious movement. (For instance, I was not able to find a single picture of Melvin Chisum--the right hand man of the powerful Samuel Insull.)
9. For people who imagine that religion is something that will be stamped out with the genesis of a Progressive Society - - think again: As we see here, people make up completely new religions, and what's more is that they have the exact same mental architecture as older religions-- only with slightly different specific symbols.
Chapter Synopses:
1. Walter Brister / Noble Drew Ali cut his teeth as a child entertainer, and this was a popular line of work for young black people at the time.
2. There's always been an element of mysticism in certain Islamic movements.
3. Characterization of a subset of voluntary associations:
4. Chapter describing the difficult economic circumstances in the United States after a financial crisis around 1893. It was the beginning of US imperial ambitions.
5. Introduction to Walter Brister ("Armmah Sotanki"), and characterization of the circus as it would have appeared to his eyes.
6. More details of the strange / chaotic mixing of various Eastern cultures into circus fodder.
7. Black performers made a good living pretending to be Zulu Africans or Jews or Arabs or whatever they could successfully convince the audience of. But, eventually circuses came to an end and black performers had to look for other lines of work.
8. Enter John Walter Brister / Noble Drew Ali, who was reborn after faking his own death and made a living as a huckster/spiritual healer / "professor" in between trips to jail (for selling fake remedies and practicing medicine without a license).
9. Chicago has been a Corrupt and Troubled City for a LONG time. At least a century.
10. The 2% of Old Settler blacks that lived in Chicago were fine-- until the arrival of many times more uncouth, unwelcome Southern blacks (p.159) . (This echoes Thomas Sowell's book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals.") There was some crime before they came, and even more after they arrived.
11. The second chapter detailing the corruption of Chicago Machine Politics--and especially Samuel Insull and Melvin Chisum. (They're just so corrupt, I can't imagine that anybody thought a single chapter would do.)
12. Noble Drew Ali's "Circle 7 Quran" was copied from "The Aquarian Gospel... " by the Christian mystic Levi Dowling. (Chapters 1-19). And the remnant (Chapters 20-25) was some extraction from "Unto Thee I Grant." (The text claims to be an English text dating back to 1760 that was translated from Tibetan-->Chinese-->English and obtained from the Dalai Lama.)
In fact, the book that is certainly NOT quoted in the "Circle 7 Quran" is the Real Quran.
There also appears to be lots of racial revanchism that is baked in.
13. Third chapter detailing corrupt Chicago's political machine. (I guess the first two just weren't enough.) Things that seem like they are out of an action movie: assassinations in the street in broad daylight for the mayorality of a city.
14. Internal politics, corruption, assassinations and infighting of the Moorish Science Temple that ultimately led to Noble Drew Ali getting himself killed. (Foreshadowing a lot of the Nation of Islam's politics.)
Also, the clearest characterization of the same: semi-literate, academically deficient, otherwise exceptionally shrewd leader.
15. Suspicious death of Noble Drew ali, and speculation about who among his many murderous/corrupt contacts might have been to blame. Near instant unraveling of the racketeering operation known as Moorish Science Temple of America. The Moorish people were also pioneers in Prislam.
Epilogue. Elijah Muhammad showed up on the scene shortly after the death of Noble Drew Ali and formed the splinter group Nation of Islam by repurposing existing Moorish symbols. Wallace Fard showed up claiming to be The reincarnation of Noble Drew Ali.
New words
Terpsichorean
Odalisque
Coon shouter
Callithump
Rhizomatic
Calumny
Verdict: It's generally worth the read at $5 (2022 prices).
Number one take away message (in case you didn't already know): if you see some people trying to sell a mass movement to Black people, RUN AWAY.