‘Malcolm X’ by Manning Marable

Thomas Powers reviews ‘Malcolm X’ by Manning Marable, in the London Review of Books – 25 August 2011.  I never read Autobiography of Malcolm X; I frankly I didn’t want to.  I will read this, though.

Did Malcolm Little really believe this?

Reginald reported that he had not only found but met God, whose correct name was Allah, and who inhabited the physical form of the Honourable Elijah Muhammad, a light-skinned black man with asthma from Georgia who understood everything.

Little, more than likely, understood injustice, power, ruling by fear and violence, so, he would have believed this point the deeds of devil white men.

Black men had been enslaved and deceived. History had been ‘whitened’ to expunge ancient black kings and civilisations.

Powers writes that Marable suggests that

…the Muslims he met on a trip to Mecca in 1959 were the first to tell him plainly that Islamic belief, the Shahada, accorded no special status to the Honourable Elijah Muhammad. The Quran was not ambiguous: ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.’ Elijah Muhammad’s claim was therefore false. All educated Muslims knew this…

MDPLS seems to have a copy.

The Thrill of Boredom

The Thrill of Boredom – NYTimes.com by Peter Toohey.

Existential boredom, it is claimed, can infect a person’s very existence with unrelieved emptiness, isolation and alienation. And it takes in many well-known conditions, evoked by such names as melancholia, ennui, mal de vivre, tristesse, taedium vitae, acedia, spiritual despair, existentialist “nausea” — and garden-variety depression.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary, it may also be evolutionary.

it acts as an early warning that certain situations may be dangerous to human well-being. It’s not unlike disgust, another emotion that helps humans prosper. Just as disgust stops you from eating what is noxious, so boredom, in social settings, alerts you to situations that can do no psychological good. Boredom, interpreted properly, might act as an alarm.