A captivating reinterpretation of Muslim-American heritage. Spanning religion, history, and sociology, this will appeal to readers across these subjects.
Dorman’s contribution to this story is the revelation of Drew Ali’s pre-Moorish identity. By means no less forensic than spotting a birthmark in an archival photo, he identifies Drew Ali as Walter Brister, a former cornetist and child star ... Dorman, a sometimes digressive storyteller with a redeeming knack for keeping one amused and amazed, is a historian at the University of Nevada, Reno. His intent is not to discredit Moorish Science but to demonstrate the cultural ingenuity of early African-American Muslims ... The story of Drew Ali’s apotheosis may be vaudevillian, but his influence endures.
... makes a signal contribution to understanding African-American Islam ... Mr. Dorman places the MSTA firmly in its cultural milieu, and here things get really interesting.
Dorman combines a picaresque account of the enigmatic John Walter Brister with a kaleidoscopic history of the origins of the Nation of Islam in this complicated history ... While Dorman often gets bogged down in a litany of names and dates, this remains a remarkable study.
Despite the author’s evenhanded approach, Ali emerges as a con artist of unusual audacity. In a prodigious feat of detective work, Dorman discovered that Ali was actually the circus magician Walter Brister, who faked his death in 1914 with the help of his wife, Eva, only to reappear years later and establish the Moorish Science Temple in Chicago ... Dorman devotes much space to the antecedents of 'Moorish Science'—e.g., Freemasonry, the Shriners, and 'Orientalist tropes' like harems—which makes for a slow-paced narrative but one with a deep social context ... Given that Ali was credibly accused of murder and child rape, the special pleading suggests that the author stumbled into the biographer’s trap of falling in love with a subject who requires the clearer eye he shows elsewhere in the book ... A flawed yet erudite narrative about the founder of a precursor of the Nation of Islam.
