Rise of the Moors: As police stand-off with armed group, experts get Moorish science wrong

A tense stand-off with a group of 10 armed men drew headlines over the July 4^th weekend, after a section of Interstate 95 in Massachusetts had to be shut down while police responded to the incident.

The incident began when a Massachusetts state trooper identified a group of men in military fatigues and carrying long guns on the side of the road filing two vehicles from gas cans. The trooper made contact and asked the men to provide licenses to carry firearms, which the men reportedly refused to provide.

After a stand-off lasting several hours, much of it documented on social media live-stream, the men were eventually arrested on a variety of weapons charges.

According to media reports, the men were members of an organization calling itself “Rise of the Moors” a splinter group founded on the precepts of the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA).

The government’s elimination of the category of Black Identity Extremism, and the willingness of counter-extremism experts and the media to misidentify Moorish science adherents as “right-wing” sovereign citizens, means there is little valuable analysis on groups of this type.

Moorish science, is a syncretic belief system founded by Timothy Drew (better known as Noble Drew Ali) in 1913 which incorporates elements of Ahmadiyya Islam, together with Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and the Pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey.

Drew, who is identified as the group’s “Prophet” authored the “Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America” in 1927, and the organization spread across the Northeast United States, until Drew’s death in 1929. Immediately following his death, the organization fractured, with many splinter groups surviving to this day.

The fundamental precept of Moorish science is that its adherents -who are almost exclusively black Americans- are not the descendants of imported slaves but rather members of a national/ethnic group known as Moors, allegedly descended from the ancient biblical Moabites.

Self-identified Moors are sometimes known to carry their own forms of identification and claim that they are not required to adhere to American laws because they are not American citizens, utilizing a variety of grammatical arguments as well as claims of legal “treaties” authored by the American founders, but subsequently betrayed by later American governments.

Because of this behavior many “counter-extremism” experts and law enforcement officials identify Moorish Science as a form of “sovereign citizen” ideology, but this is incorrect. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the sovereign citizen movement began in the 1970s and became fully developed in the 1980s. Sovereign citizens promote the idea that by using a variety of rhetorical and grammatical tricks a person can be a declared “sovereign”, and thus outside the purview of American law.

Moorish Science adherents began issuing Moorish identification cards (and in some cases refusing to abide by law enforcement orders) as early as the 1920s, as Susan Nance records in Respectability and Representation: The Moorish Science Temple, Morocco, and Black Public Culture in 1920s Chicago. Clashes with police became so commonplace that Drew ordered Moors not to display their ID cards in 1929 in order to avoid “confusion.” FBI records from the 1960s show investigations into the refusal of some Moorish-Americans to register for the selective service over disputes about their appropriate racial or ethnic categories.

While interactions between some Moorish science adherents and law enforcement can sometimes strongly resemble sovereign citizen interactions such as by refusing lawful orders, filming police, and engaging in various types of legal fraud and lawfare. As with sovereign citizens, there is often a pecuniary interest by Moorish science adherents in the sale of licenses and other documents.

However, it is more useful to understand Moorish Science in the context of black identity extremism.

It is obviously impossible for a movement created and developed 50 years prior to the founding of the sovereign citizen movement to be based on sovereign citizen ideology. If anything, it would be interesting to investigate ways in which the sovereign citizen’s movement may have adapted behaviors pioneered by Moorish science.

One of the leading Moorish Science groups publicly rejects the comparison:

We teach our people of their nationality and divine creed of Moorish Americans, and birthrights, to love instead of hate, and that we are part and partial of the said government and must live the life accordingly. The Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc does not teach nor indorse [sic] or support any “sovereign” theory, or groups.

Moorish science adherents do not claim to be “sovereign,” which is to say fully autonomous individuals not beholden to any law, but rather to be members of a separate and distinct nation. In this sense Moorish groups are better understood ideologically as being black separatists (although Moorish science adherents would typically dispute the use of the term black as an identity).

Wrongly identifying Moorish science as part of the sovereign citizen movement can result in failing to understand some of the more significant case studies of criminal activity and terrorism linked to Moorish groups.

Historically, Moorish science adherents who engaged in criminality have had links to street gang violence and drug trafficking. While the most notorious example is Jeff Fort-El, the co-founder of the Chicago gang the Black P. Stone Nation, other examples include the 1970s St. Louis drug cartel of Jerry Lewis-Bey, or more recently, 2014 Detroit drug kingpins Carlos and Eric Powell. In all three cases there were links to black nationalism and local politics. In most of these cases adherents were converted to Moorish science while already in prison on criminal charges.

Despite references to the “Holy Koran” and sometimes utilizing the term “Islamism” to describe their belief system, Moorish science adherents are not orthodox Muslims. During the height of the War on Terror, Moors were sometimes inaccurately identified as an African American Islamist sect.

It is true however that African Americans have been recruited into forms of radical Islam through Moorish science. Jeff Fort-El was arrested and convicted in 1986 for attempting to acquire an anti-tank rocket to engage in terrorism for hire on behalf of Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi. The most notorious Moorish science adherent turned terrorist was Clement Hampton-El, one of the architects of the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.  In 2006, a group of Moorish science adherents were arrested and convicted for plotting to bomb the Sears Tower.

While many self-identified Moors never engage in any violence or criminality, some of its members have provided fertile ground for recruiting for both by black nationalist and Islamist activity. The decision by the government to eliminate the category of black identity extremism can only have a profoundly negative impact on understanding this unique ideology.

Moorish science is a fascinating belief system which has played a foundational role in the formation of black separatism and radical forms of black identity in the United States for more than a hundred years. Totally negating that impact by implying that Moorish science is merely an adapted form of “sovereign citizens” ideology borders on a bigotry of lowered expectations.