Hope, Indiana, is a tiny farming town about an hour southeast of Indianapolis. It’s always been overwhelmingly white and generally poor, so it’s somewhat incredible that Johnson-Bey’s grandfather, Reuben Frazier, owned not one but two farms there in the early 1920s. He raised corn, beans, spinach, oats, chickens, pigs, sweet peas, and 12 children. “I could listen to grandpa talk all day long,” Johnson-Bey says. “He had a strong voice, and he loved to talk, but he never used any profanity. Now, here was a person you could admire. At the crack of dawn he’d set out to hoe the corn rows, and I’d set out there before grandpa and start pulling up the weeds ahead of him. He never said a word about it, but I knew he noticed. Everything on our table, we raised ourselves. None of my siblings were around grandpa the way I was. They didn’t sweat blood on that farm the way I did.”
Ten years before Johnson-Bey was born, in 1935, his uncle Curtis, who was working as a migrant laborer in Canada, heard about a young black man known as Prophet Drew Ali who’d founded something called the Moorish Science Temple, which preached racial pride. When Curtis got back to the farm, he told the family what he’d heard. This was five years before the Nation of Islam was founded, and the name Marcus Garvey didn’t yet mean anything in Hope. Reuben Frazier looked into it and found out there was a small branch in Indianapolis. He learned that although Drew Ali’s new religion promoted racial pride to a congregation that was entirely black, it didn’t advocate for blacks. In fact, it didn’t believe black people existed at all.
Not much is known about Timothy Drew before he became Prophet Drew Ali. He was born in North Carolina in 1886, possibly to a Cherokee woman and a Moroccan Muslim father, or maybe to freed slaves. A framed picture of him hangs from the gold domed altar of Temple No. 9. He looks tall and thin, unremarkable except for the belted silk robe and tall fez he’s wearing. The Moors’ version of his life story says he left home at 16 and joined a band of Gypsies who took him overseas to Egypt, Morocco, and the Middle East. In Morocco he was approached by the high priest of a mystical Egyptian cult who recognized him as the latest reincarnation in a line of prophets including Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad. The priest gave Drew a book that he said was a lost section of the Koran, and when Drew returned to the States he called it the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America. It says, “The last Prophet in these days is Noble Drew Ali, who was prepared divinely in due time by Allah to redeem men from their sinful ways; and to warn them of the great wrath which is sure to come upon the earth.”
Drew claimed that blacks in America were sinfully ignorant of their true racial heritage. They were all descendents of the Moors, a Moroccan Muslim tribe that conquered Spain in the seventh century and spread Islam to Europe. He started dressing in Moorish fashion: fezzes and feathered turbans and silk robes, with a curved sword at his side. When the Moors’ descendents were brought to America in slave ships, he said, white slave owners systematically hid the truth of their noble origins and renamed them “black,” “colored,” and “Negro.” Just as bad, these “so-called blacks” forgot Islam and took up “the false god of the Europeans.” Drew had been dispatched by Allah to eradicate the “slave marks” from blacks in America. His job was to inform them that their true name was not black, colored, or Negro, but Moorish-American, and return them to Islam—or Islamism, as he called it.
This was well before most Americans had even heard the words Islam, Koran, or Muslim. The first documented mosque on American soil wasn’t built till 1915, by Albanian immigrants in Maine. And anyone with a little knowledge of Islam—the one associated with Muhammad and Mecca—who heard of Drew’s Islamism must have been greatly confused. Drew’s followers call themselves Muslims and greet each other by turning their palms forward and saying, “Islam!” They face east when praying, regard Friday as their holy day, and call their god Allah and their leader Prophet. But the similarities to mainstream Islam end there. Moorish-Americans drink alcohol and eat pork. They don’t pray five times a day or travel to Mecca, and their religious book deals more with Jesus than Muhammad, who gets just two mentions toward the end. In his Koran, Drew claimed Marcus Garvey was merely his forerunner, like John the Baptist spreading the gospel before the arrival of Jesus.
At Friday night services at Temple No. 9, men and women sit together on pews facing a podium at the back of the room. Men wear fezzes and suits, women wear silk turbans and modest dresses. Some women wear shalwar khameez, embroidered tunics from the Indian and Pakistani stores along Devon. Drew called all dark- and olive-skinned people around the world Asiatic and and all whites Europeans, and he said Moors ought to show solidarity with other Asiatics.
At the start of the service, members stand and face east to recite the Moorish prayer: “Allah the Father of the universe, the Father of Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Justice. Allah is my protector, my guide and my salvation by night and day through his Holy Prophet Drew Ali. Amen.” They return to their seats and a minor sheik or sheikess reads the Divine Constitution and By-Laws, Drew’s rules governing meetings and everyday conduct. They’re simple but long, directing husbands and wives to care for their families, members to come to meetings on time, and everyone to get along. Moors read it out loud at the beginning and end of every function, great or small. Then they sing a hymn or two from the Moorish songbook, which has a lot of familiar Christian tunes reworked for Moorish needs, like “When Drew Ali Goes Marching In.”
The service closes with three of four members stepping up to the podium to read pages of the Holy Koran out loud and give their interpretation. Parts of Drew’s book are taken from obscure Christian texts; the bulk of it is lifted almost word for word from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, published in 1908 by an esoteric Ohio preacher named Levi Dowling. It describes Jesus’s travels in India, Egypt, and Palestine during the 18 years of his life the New Testament doesn’t account for—proof, Moors say, that Jesus and his followers were Asiatic. (Drew did leave out Dowling’s descriptions of the “fair haired, blue eyed” Jesus.) At the podium some members draw parallels between Jesus’s trials and their own lives, talking about how they quit smoking or left a bad marriage or kept their children out of gangs. Listeners from the pews shout out “Preach, brother!” and “Islam!” Johnson-Bey likes to talk about his grandfather—how the family was dirt poor but through hard work and with the Prophet’s guidance, Reuben Frazier pulled the family up.