ABSTRACT
The Moorish-American Science Temple, founded by Noble Drew Ali (1866-1929) in New Jersey in 1913, spread to a number of other cities in the 1920s and outlived its founder's death, as this report from 1944 indicates. It supplied recruits to Garveyism, the black nationalist movement of the 1920s, and later for the Nation of Islam. Ali believed that African-Americans were the descendants of North Africans and of Asiatic origin. His version of Islam was consciously represented as the black man's religion, clearly distinct from the white man's faith, Christianity. As the description of the service reveals, however, the ritual of the group was culturally eclectic.
