“From Cairo to Cornell: The Malcolm X Effect of Momodou Taal”

At a time of global unrest and political upheaval, voices that bridge the gap between historical scholarship and frontline grassroots politics are becoming more crucial than ever. Momodou Taal, a Gambian-British PhD student at Cornell University reflects on this merge and his upcoming anthology, The Malcolm X Effect.

It reflects African history, Black internationalism, gender, Islam, Marxism, Pan-Africanism, political economy, and race. But Taal is not just an up-and-coming scholar — he is a committed activist whose journey from studying Islamic sciences in Cairo to being at the frontline for the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement marches to leading student encampments against the Gaza genocide on his campus makes him a unique and compelling figure in today’s fight for justice. For the closure of Black August 2024, Adama Juldeh Munu catches up with him in an exclusive to find out what it means to carry out the Malcolm X Effect.

Black August is a yearly commemoration and prison-based holiday to remember Black political prisoners and Black freedom struggles in the United States and beyond, and to highlight Black resistance against racial, colonial and imperialist oppression.

I am sitting at a table with a glass of homemade ginger beer at Kara Lounge, a restaurant that serves delicious Senegambian and West African food and beverages, in one of Istanbul’s busiest areas, Cihangir, which is nestled in the Beyoğlu district. This historic neighbourhood, which was named after Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent’s son, Şehzade Cihangir is known for its bohemian vibe and stunning Bosphorus views, diverse culinary scenes, eclectic architecture, lively cultural events, and community of artists and intellectuals. It seems a fitting place and homage to speak to 30-year-old Momodou Taal who like me is of West African and Gambian descent, and has a penchant for pan-African politics, and commentary- a person whom I have long wanted to speak to and had not up to this point, even though we run in very similar circles.

You might know him from his lively speeches at the recent pro-Palestinian encampment at Cornell University, but like many Black British Muslim millennials, I came across Taal a few years back when he was part of the auspicious Baraka Boys, a group of young British Muslim men whose podcast of the same name in the late 2010s, became a staple for lively debate and discussion on contemporary issues facing millennial and Gen-Z Muslims in the West. Made up of Islamic students of knowledge, artists and entrepreneurs of mainly African, African-Caribbean and Asian descent, the group delved into topics like anti-Blackness in the Muslim community, the state of Western Muslim artistry and…. pornography addiction. We were both in the UK during this time. But now, neither of us is ‘home’, Taal being in Cairo and me, being in Istanbul. “For me, Baraka Boys was a time, it was necessary but I think it is also nice seeing everyone doing their own thing. I still see parts of that time in myself.”

He was proud to be born in The Gambia and then moved to the UK when he was a child. Growing up he, tells me that he was a bit of a ‘wild one’, which he channelled into his one-time ambition to becoming a rapper. His stage name was MenTaal (a play on ‘mental’ and his surname). But like many other young Black men, he grappled with momentary self-hatred, which he says manifests differently in men than it does in women. (At the time), in London, he tells me, being Black was synonymous with being Jamaican and light-skinned, and being (continental) African was ‘not cool’. That’s something I can agree was a norm. “I remember looking at how I looked at myself through the ‘Who taught you to hate yourself’ speech of Malcolm X via YouTube. These are things that were being seared into me at the same time, and I had insecurities at the time.”

This is when he was gifted the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which now with hindsight seems like a rite of passage for the Black Muslim to be handed, to uncover the hardships the civil rights leader faced growing up in Nebraska, to his ‘Red’ days, to becoming a Black nationalist under the Nation of Islam, and his conversion to Islam while adhering to a more Pan-Africanist and globalist philosophy, right before he was assassinated in 1965. Taal was doing the former around the time that he became a ‘practicing Muslim’. He like many millenials of African or Asiatic history in Western countries like the UK, often speaks about belonging to a Muslim family but not fully adhering to or experiencing the fullness of Islamic practice. Fast forward to today, Taal believes that Malcolm X showed that religion is something to be engaged within the precincts of social change and that there has been perhaps no greater force. Taal says to me, “ I remember visiting his grave in upstate New York, and I was like, he’s been under the ground longer than he was ever on it, but his legacy, bringing people to Islam and radicalising people…if that’s not a friend of God, then what is?’.

Political and social change is not novel for, as Taal comes from (and I hope he excuses me for saying this) ‘political royalty’. His great-grandfather was Sir Dawda Kairaba Jawara, who was born in 1924, and was the Gambia’s first president from 1974 to 1994, when he was ousted. That lineage alone has attracted criticism online of Taal being part of Black Bourgeosie which he pushes back on. “I love this because this is what people try to get at, to say I am a Marxist but that I’m part of the ‘African elite’. It cracks me up. Long story short, my great-grandfather was the first president of the Gambia, he was conservative, and close to the West. Politics was the mainstay in my family and in conversations growing up. At the age of eight or nine, I loved watching the news. I found the performance of Prime Minister’s Questions for instance enamouring. My dad’s side was (made up of) radical pan-Africanists. They were responsible for bringing Kwame Toure to the Gambia, they spoke about Nkrumah, Lumumba and Sankara. I grew up hearing radical and establishment politics in conversations across both sides,” Taal explains.

At the same time, he faced a double consciousness of his own in a political sense, because, initially he was inspired to potentially delve into politics. Inspired by the election of former US President Barack Obama, as the country’s first Black president. He tells me that he wanted to become the country’s first Black Prime Minister and was inspired to get elected into the UK’s Youth Parliament, at a time when the Labour government was transitioning into a Conservative one. Race was so apparent ‘You are seeing the material conditions, and then the rhetoric of the immigrant’.

He believed that Islam enacts great social change and has the means to improve the conditions of Black people that he wanted to learn more about the religion from an academic and theological plane, after completing an undergraduate law degree, where he moved to Egypt to study at the prestigious Al-Azhar University and Markaz Imam Malik when he was 21 years old, to study Arabic and where he gained an ijaza or certification in Shariah law. He always had a love for Islamic jurisprudence which is arguably one of the more creative Islamic sciences, and how it translates into addressing issues that people in communities can experience across different areas. “I wanted to be an Islamic scholar to help young people. For better or for worse, we can talk about the institution of religion, but at the end of the day, there has not been a greater tool for social organisation than religion’.

An Islam that is aligned with Western-state projects is very alien to Momodou Taal, but if one looks at the historical record in North and West Africa, one will find that anti-colonial movements were rarely divorced from the scholastic class with individuals. Othman Dan Fodio who founded the Sokoto Caliphate in whose wars with Hausa rulers laid the groundwork for anti-European colonisation, or that of Senegalese Sufi leader and founder of the Mouride Brotherhood, Ahmadou Bamba, who was exiled several times by the French, and whose anti-colonial efforts were non-violent and rooted in spiritual resistance. And then there’s Imam Mukhtar al-Senussi, better known as Omar Mukhtar, a Libyan resistance leader in the struggle against Italian colonial rule in Libya. Or as I mentioned to him, Sierra Leone’s Bai Bureh, who was a Temne Chief drew up the Hut Tax War in 1898 to contest British governance. And that speaks to what Taal says is the universal language of the Qu’ran and Islam which continental African leaders and the movements they represented indicated.

‘The Quran claims that it is the revelation of God and that it should suffice mankind until the end of time, there should be nothing that occurs in the world that the Quran does not speak to, directly or by which the principles it establishes. Islam in West Africa is aligned with the religion’s fundamentals, but the urf or custom is taken into account when it comes to the practice of Islam.’

While Taal recognises that his alma mater, Al-Azhar, tried to engage with both classical and contemporary issues, there were moments that he struggled to deal with some of the racist tendencies exhibited by some of his classmates who for the most part were Western. “So our classes are divided by your school of thought, so in the Maliki classes, it’s mainly Black people. But you’d hear things like ‘don’t get married to an African woman’ or I’d hear from other classes that ‘Black women are not as desirable’. Knowing me, I wouldn’t let that slide. When I’d speak up in classes, other Western students, Asian or Arab, I thought they’d have my back, but they’re telling me ‘Why are you challenging the teacher, why can’t you just read the text? We were wanna get through the book.’ It allowed him to appreciate what he called the limitations of ‘traditional circles. Islam does not under any circumstance permit racism, but he could appreciate that Muslims are not always immune to certain social values that have racialised and demonised global majority communities.

This takes us to his time at Cornell University, where he is currently embarking on a PhD. His transition from a student of knowledge in Cairo to a Marxist academic in the United States provides a fascinating narrative of intellectual and personal evolution. A Malcolm X effect if you like. Where Malcolm’s direct meanderings with the political order, through the assassination of John F Kennedy and the start of his exile from the NOI, is not unlike the disillusionment that Taal faces, at a pivotal moment, the Racial reckoning of 2020. “The pandemic hit, and I was on Clubhouse, and I remember entering a room where people were speaking about Black liberation and radical politics, and I think that conversation was inspiring. I opened a WhatsApp group where students of Islamic law were speaking about issues that I did not want to speak about or focus on, and all this during the Black Spring of 2020, after George Floyd died. It’s not a critique of them, if that’s what gets your blood boiling, alhamdulillah. I wanted to be a part of a discussion and move it forward so I decided to take a PhD.

Cornell University had the first Africana Studies Department in the United States. This is distinctive from a Black studies programme because it deals with the diaspora, and in true- Malcolm X style, Taal was inspired by how his hero lectured a year before his infamous ‘Chickens Come Home to Roost’ speech that catapulted him out of the Nation of Islam into an exile that, also became a homecoming to mainstream Islam and pan-Africanism. A similar trajectory which Taal at this point. During his time, he engaged publicly in Black Lives Matter protests. Taal used to be a Black Nationalist but developed a more pan-African outlook over time. ‘It (Black nationalism) can have a myopic understanding of Blackness, that is specifically tied to geographical locations. But pan-Africanism comes from a recognition that Africa is the root’. Of course, there is specificity in how we see Blacknessnes based on our location, but the pan-Africanism I hold to recognises that Africa is still the root and that’s what binds us together.

One of the other intellectual junctures that he has embarked on is his insights into Marxism which he delves into with his Malcolm X Effect podcast, with topics across race, politics and social justice. It features interviews with academics, activists, and thought leaders who explore how Malcolm X’s legacy continues to shape contemporary discourse. It covers a wide range of topics including Black empowerment, Pan-Africanism, and the intersection of race and religion.

As Taal tells me, a guiding question for Taal has been ‘Why are Black people going through what they are going through’ particularly when it comes to material conditions. “Marx is not a prophet. He was divinely guided, but he has a critique of capitalism which up until has now been true. How can Africa be the resource-rich area in the world but is so poor? We have an analysis that is proven to be true.” This has at times brought him at loggerheads with many within the Muslim community, because it is a framework that sits outside of the traditional Islamic sciences. I came for the tea, and Momodou poured it. “I was not enough afraid of causing controversy. I was so fed up with traditional circles, that I wanted to make an exodus, and it had to be happened in such a way that people understood that I was doing things that were going to have people cancel me. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing to do, but it worked, he laughs. ‘Twitter is where people constantly beef. At least I was notorious for calling out scholars’ anti-Blackness. Having said that, his engagement with the Muslim scene is what he calls ‘more sincere’ and ‘more organic’. I don’t have the pressure because I am not trying to be a shaykh. Initially, when I did things that pissed people off, now it’s alright.

And the timing seems apt because the Palestinian Question has come up to the fore in a way that it hadn’t before. This is a concern that has for long been a preserve of Muslim communities globally, because of the region’s profound historical, cultural and religious significance, but also because the occupation of Palestinian land mirrors and echoes the colonisation and displacement of global Black and Brown majorities at the hands of Western nations- an instance that intersects with a key concern for Pan-Africanists. Taal explains that ‘Pan-Africanism can mean different things to different people, but there are nhe o distinctions between that and anti-zionism. What frustrates me is that up until 1991, Zionism was declared racism, and that was because of Black folk. So when I hear people say things like ‘Palestinians can be anti-Black’, I say that’s missing the point. The systems that oppress the Palestinians that oppress us. It’s in your interest to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iynjg-EK5U0

The Malcolm X Effect book is based on his 40-minute episode podcast, which started during lockdown. It is a mixture of essays from Momodou Taal and then conversations with some of his guests such as pan-Africanism, and how Islam resonates today. ‘I was a bit dismayed at the podcasting scene, especially the Black one. Look, get your bag, through entertainment or pranks, but I asked where are the podcasts that speak to Black people’s issues. Because political education is equipping people to understand and read their situations-radical politics- in an accessible way.’ It is a documentation of where Momodou is in his politics and the topics that he is wrestling with, the questions that people are going through. He presses that he does not have all the answers and that the podcast is a journey through his intellectual meanderings.

He is in a unique position to be able to do this, coming from both a continental-African and Black-British context, and now as a diasporan Black in a diasporan Black context in the United States. Producing a book like this from the helm of the United States is not accidental, when all eyes are on Western countries like the United States which has ramped up its unequivocal support for Israel in its genocidal onslaught on Gaza following the October 7 attacks.

‘We are in a pivotal moment. We are neo-liberal subjects, both Muslim and non-Muslim and this moment in Gaza has shown a mirror to the Western order of its brutality. We all thought the BLM moment was going to be a watershed, but I don’t want to overstate it, I hope there is an embrace of a better world. I hope people can reimagine a new world order, Taal says.”