The most referenced meeting point with Malcolm X, for Muslims who could not see him alive to preach in Detroit, pray in Cairo, or debate in Oxford, is The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Countless narratives credit the book as their entrée into Islam, a primer of sorts to conversion, whereas others cite his life story as a guide to understand the socio-political reality of living a racialized religion under empire. In the digital media age, his speeches and visage have gained even greater circulation and, in turn, use in contemporary Muslim life.
A lesser regarded site of encounter with Malik El-Shabazz (1925-1965), popularly referred to by his earlier name Malcolm X, is the gravesite that he shares with Dr. Betty Shabazz (1936-1997), his collaborator and wife. There, a small plaque bearing their two names sits flush with the grass of a manicured field in Ferndale Cemetery, located a half hour north of New York City. Quiet visitations are made by groups and individuals throughout the year but on May 19, Malcolm’s birthday, dozens and sometimes hundreds make pilgrimage for an annual ritual commemoration over the graves. Those unable to reach the suburban cemetery will visit select sites in Harlem and its surrounding neighborhoods to be able to meet Malcolm through a more indirect physical encounter than the grave.
This paper argues that the shared grave and key sites in northern Manhattan constitute a funerary complex, in the historical global tradition of revered Muslim saints and scholars, that is actively used by Muslims and others to form and maintain a spiritual relationship with Malcolm X and show reverence to Betty Shabazz. Those sharing Malcolm’s religious and socio-political vision at his time of death erected the grave and established visitation practices to create the benefit of an embodied and material encounter with their religious leader. In the following decades, I argue the gravesite was expanded formally and informally to include nearby sites such as his place of martyrdom, now the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, and Masjid Malcolm Shabazz, formerly Mosque #7, where he preached in the Nation of Islam.
The material dimensions of this argument rest on the work of Engseng Ho and others who argue that “burial is a place-making project” that “establish[es] pilgrimage as an important form of travel” to a “point of return.” While Ho is describing a Muslim diaspora across the Indian Ocean with genealogical links to Yemen, Malcolm’s grave is an anchoring point for Muslims otherwise rendered placeless by the historical and modern effects of white supremacy, Islamophobia, and (neo)imperialism that continuously deny them the right to and comfort of home. Grave visits activate the marked grave and its complex, creating the possibility for a “dynamics of signification,” both in individual encounters and in the ritualized birthday pilgrimage that makes explicit moral claims on visitors to carry on the El-Shabazz legacy.
The paper also engages with literature on the metaphysical dimensions of grave visitation to argue that the El Shabazz grave complex is an “access point” to spiritual power and guidance for its Muslim pilgrims. This links the paper’s investigation to larger discourses within Islam about the embodied baraka of holy figures, from the Prophet’s mosque in medina to scholar’s tombs and saint shrines across the globe. The Qur’anic universe is one populated by human and non-human beings for whom the veil between this world and the next is thin, readily allowing for engagement between the living and the dead through dreams or other signs. In the annual pilgrimage, non-Muslim religious specialists from Yoruba and other indigenous African religious traditions also perform ritual acts to contact and connect with the El Shabazz ancestors laid below.
Following Jesko Schmoller, I assert that Muslims who participate in El Shabazz grave visitations, even with contentions around its permissibility, maintain an ontological assumption that the dead are in active relation with the living. Furthermore, as Verena Meyer argues in her work on modernist Indonesian Muslims, interactions at the graves are a form of remembrance that transforms the past into a “living present and prophetic script for the future.” Visits are not about extracting museum-like information about Malcolm X, readily available in the Autobiography or YouTube recordings but are a means to “access a pious predecessor’s power and knowledge in the present and to interpret and transform the present and the future.”
The final aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the diverse group of friends, collaborators, and followers who established the grave, pilgrimage ritual, and later sites of the El Shabazz funerary complex were intentional in setting a moral tone of inclusivity and solidarity for all those committed to Malcolm’s vision for truth and justice. Women were central to this process, including notably Betty Shabazz, later interred there; Ella Baker, Malcolm’s own guide, champion, and sister who founded the annual pilgrimage; and Yuri Kochiyama, who fought for what would become the Shabazz Center. Dr. Shabazz continued to walk on the path she made with Malcolm for the decades she outlived him, and her presence and power became part of the grave site in her death. In addition, religious affiliation is not a requirement for collaboration or admission, as claims to Malcolm’s legacy extend broadly across religious, ethnic, and national identity, including the diverse leaders who co-organize and run the annual pilgrimage.
Primary evidence for this paper is taken from historical media and primary sources on the funeral arrangements for Malcolm and later Dr. Shabazz; the creation and continuation of the annual birthday pilgrimage; the renaming of Mosque #7 for Malcolm Shabazz; and the decades-long fight to create would become the Shabazz Center in Washington Heights, Manhattan. Ethnographic research from the 2010s and early 2020s of individual grave visits and the annual pilgrimage provide further firsthand accounts of the “powerful dynamics of signification” that create identity and community around the legacy of El Shabazz for Muslims, but also for overlapping and other communities inspired by their encounter with someone they consider full of spiritual power.
Malcolm and Betty Shabazz’s grave in Westchester, New York, as well as key sites in northern Manhattan constitute a funerary complex, in the global tradition of revered Muslim saints and scholars. Individuals visit throughout the year but on May 19 hundreds make pilgrimage and perform a ritual commemoration. The grave and visitation practices were created to activate an embodied, material interaction of reverence and relation to Malcolm and later Dr. Shabazz. I argue that Muslims who participate in visitations, even with contentions around its permissibility, maintain an ontological assumption that the dead are in active relation with the living. Visitations are then an interaction where remembrance brings the past into the present, activating the knowledge and spiritual power of ancestors to transform the self and the world. Finally, the open, collaborative nature of this site creation, including women’s leadership, has contributed to the continued multifaith nature of this religious site.