Heard you might be coming home, just got bail
Wanna go to the mosque, don’t wanna chase tail
It seems I lost my little homie, he’s a changed man
Hit the pen and now no sinnin’ is the game plan

- Tupac Shakur

Pools of empty light regularly dot the endless concrete corridors of the Norfolk Prison Colony. They illuminate a lifeless pattern that glows only with the promise of another tomorrow dictated by the clockwork routine of prison life. There’s no warmth found in these pools of light.

But in one of them, you can find hope. At least for fifty-eight minutes out of every hour.

For the other two minutes of each hour Malcolm X waits in his bed while feigning sleep to avoid the regular patrol of the prison guard. Once the guard passes, X slips out of his bed and back into the pool of light cast into his prison cell by an unblinking corridor light, and opens a book back up.

The first book he reads is the dictionary, he copies down words on its first page and then silently reads them back to himself. This takes Malcolm X the entire night. Then, after months of painstakingly building a vocabulary, he begins to read the works of H.G. Wells, of Gregor Mendel, of Mahatma Gandhi, and of W.E.B. Du Bois. He reads histories, novels, science fiction, and fables. Malcolm X, a man who came of age on the race-divided and crime-rich innercity streets of America, gains his education on the concrete floor of his prison cell. He reads, he learns, and he begins to question.

And then one day, his brother comes to visit.

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It’s during this visit that Malcolm X is introduced to the religion of Islam. Although this isn’t Islam in its original and authentic form, far from it. The Islam that Malcolm X’s brother brings to him is something of an offshoot, it’s a unique and American sect of Islam that in a way follows the pattern of Mormonism – a unique and American sect of Christianity.

The version of Islam that Malcolm X is brought to has, like Mormonism, its own unique mythology. A mythology that’s wrought with scientific fallacies, historical impossibilities, and genetic absurdities. But what’s more telling is that the beliefs expounded by Christians in the Church of Latter-Day Saints and Muslims in the Nation of Islam are both rooted in a sense of outside persecution. And while persecution for the Mormons came from other Americans who also considered themselves Christians but who resented the Mormons’ cultish secrecy and their leader’s quirky predilection for marrying multiple underage wives, persecution for members of the Nation of Islam came from the Devil himself.

For who but the Devil would’ve trafficked in flesh that was cut off from its native land and then raped so brutally so many millions of times that its own identity was forgotten? Who but the Devil would teach this flesh to hate its own kind – its language, its customs, and the very color of its own skin? Who but the Devil would try to bring that flesh to a religion which taught that God looked nothing like it, but instead that God in fact looked just like the Devil? A religion that told that flesh that heaven, escape from its condition, would only come after death while the Devil created its own heaven here on earth from that flesh’s toil?

And who but the Devil himself would keep the poorest and least of that flesh caged behind bars so it would remain deprived, oppressed, and ignorant?¹