I should mention that my hatred of the NOI comes from experience as a teacher in a high school in which black muslims wanted to separate the separate the black kides out and then separate them into boys and girls periods in order to lay out their gender roles for them.
Your arguments here seem somewhat similar to ones presented on this list by Kenny Mostern. He has a book coming out from Cambridge Univ Press on black identity politics. YOu may want to look for it.
Here are some replies:
1. Malcolm X never led the NOI; as Clayborne Carson has revealed, Malcolm X cooperated with the KKK in terrorizing SNCC. He then broke from the NOI. His positive political economic vision never really got beyond black shopkeeper radicalism, though he made references to the need for guerilla warfare in the South and appeals to the United Nations. I don't think much positive would have come out of either.
2. As Sonia Sanchez has argued, the collapse of the Panthers and its after school programs may have contributed to the creation of a vacuum filled by gangs and drug dealing. But now that we know of the horrific sexism and violence within the Panthers--see for example Elaine Brown's bio--I have trouble with your call for their revival. I don't think Social Change should be led by Ministers of Defense, Culture, Politics--dressed in leather pants and high boots. Those accoutrements may have their uses in other contexts but not politics.
3. I think West's decision to dialogue with Farrakhan on the behalf of sisters is paternalistic and unjustifiable. If he had used his standing to say that he would not participate unless the presence of women was guaranteed, then he would have won my respect--as did Robin Kelley. Now he seems to me an opportunist. By the way, I have seen and known the effects of purdah and its ideology; you may want to check out David Mandelbaum's *Women's Seclusion and Men's Honor: Sex Roles in North India, Bangladesh and Pakistan*.
4. You refer to my rants/claims. Would you kindly reproduce my rants that you think require further elaboration? Have you read Marable's or Reed's history of the NOI?
5. You don't get it, the NOI is systematically racist. It echoes the racist right's explanation for why blacks are to be found disproportionately among the poor or the imprisoned. It believes in the existence of deeply different races. It provides racist explanations for the slave trade; it scapegoats ethnic businessman and by attributing behavior (overcharging) to them due to their ethnicity, it sets the stage for them to be replaced by black businessman who will indeed to do the same thing: overcharge in the hood.
6. The NOI is not a self defense group to the extent that its main victims have been dissident black muslims.
7. If you want to understand why a million men showed up to the Farrakhan spectacle, then you should ask why many walked away as he began his numerological analysis; we can talk about how leaders can be made by media attention--positive or negative; we can talk about the nature of the first protest in which people participated to protest themselves; we can assess its long term consequences. We should also entertain the possibility Paul Gilroy has mentioned: as members of modernity, black people are also susceptible to the aesthetics of fascism. Actually in his DuBois book, Reed shows this to the case in Houston Baker's discussion of black culture.
8. I'm leaving aside the question of cultural relativism for now--partly because I don't understand what you are getting at
Rakesh