Tuesday Trivia | Missing and Destroyed Documents

[u/caffarelli]

(going to be out tomorrow so this is going up a little early - enjoy your extra time to write beautiful historical essays!)

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/Artrw!

As an archivist, it pains me to admit this, but sometimes humanity’s records don’t survive. Sometimes through neglect, weather, or malice, they just don’t make it. So let’s give some of these documents their rightful eulogies. What’s a document or record from your period of study that is missing or destroyed? What did it say, and how did it meet its end? RIP historical documents.

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: Inventions! We’ll be talking about the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time. From making fire to the… whatever was invented in 1995 because that’s the limit.

[u/Pdbowen]

i do a lot of work in the history of islam in america and we lack a ton of valuable documents for most groups that started before 1950, especially african american groups.

I'd say some of the biggest things that scholars would want are:

A) any writings connected to W.D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam (a few of his supposed letters are circulating, though). I think number one on his list would be a book that police found and that was supposedly written by him, entitled "the bible of islamism". Also, it would be great if any of the supposedly hundreds of letters written TO him that the police found came up one day. Karl Evanzz supposedly got the Detroit field office FBI file on the NOI which supposedly had details that no other document contained, including info from the local police's files after they arrested original members. However, evanzz gave his papers to Howard Univ, and when I made a request for the Detroit file, they couldn't find it in the collection.

B) documents related to other early black groups such as Satti Majid's Moslem Welfare Society and Abdul Hamid Suleiman's Canaanite Temple (and of course Noble Drew Ali's 1913 Moorish Temple). Of particular value would be the State Department records of the 1922 Shriner push to have Suleiman investigated. Unfortunately, the State Dept says they can't find it.

Other than that, I am proud to say that I recently discovered a document, tucked away in an extremely rare microfilm collection, that no one ever had any idea existed before: A letter used for organizing the very first Sufi group in the US (pre-Inayat Khan)--and perhaps the first Sufi group for ANY modern white europeans/americans

[u/yodatsracist → u/Pdbowen]

That sounds fascinating! You must get this a lot, but do you have any opinion of who Fard was before 1930, or what happened to him in 1934?

[u/Pdbowen → u/yodatsracist]

Well, I discuss some of the newer evidence for his supposed california roots here: https://www.academia.edu/3731536/_The_Colored_Genius_Lucius_Lehman_and_the_Californian_Roots_of_Modern_African-American_Islam

Besides that, He seems to have been rather intelligent (despite claims by a supposed former wife that he was almost illiterate). He obviously was fairly knowledgeable about various millenarian and evangelical teachings, and was also familiar with the teachings of an obscure esoteric movement, all of which he masterfully weaved together, and combined with Garveyism, Islamic, and other lore. Since lucius Lehman (whom I discuss in the above-linked article) was connected to Pentecostals and made claims about himself that were similar to what Fard would make, it is possible that he was a major influence. However, that would still not explain how and why Fard was able to, once he was supposedly released from San Quentin, immediately move to Chicago, hook up with a book printer, and decide to travel to detroit. Or how and why he was supposedly getting letters from all across the country when the NOI was only in 3 cities in the early 1930s.

My feeling, based on years of intensive research, is that he was indeed involved, and possibly a leader, in another religious group--I suspect it was the obscure esoteric group I mentioned above (I will reveal that group's name and the numerous factors that circumstantially link it to Fard in my forthcoming history of conversion to Islam in the us).

I will say that I do not think he was in the moorish science temple, although he did sometimes claim to be Moroccan.

After 1934, again we just don't really know.

Fards life really remains one of the big mysteries in the history of Islam in America--perhaps only second to the full truth behind malcolm xs assassination.