THE STORY OF THE MOORISH ORTHODOX CHURCH
In the year 1886 in the state of North Carolina in the United States, there was born a child named Timothy to one Drew family, a family of freed former slaves. From earliest childhood, Timothy had been possessed of a sense of being different, of being special. As he matured and became a young man, he found a career travelling with the circus, becoming a carnival roustabout and a performer, intelligent and well-liked. His travels took him far afield from the soil of his native North Carolina, leaving the North American continent and journeying through central, eastern and southern Europe and skirting the perimeter of the Mediterranean.
While in Egypt, the result of a chance encounter (or perhaps, a fated encounter), he was recognized by an adept of one of the ancient Mystery Schools of that country as a being of great psychic and moral power and of an extremely a high degree of spiritual evolution. Indeed, Timothy was seen to be an Avatar of the "Ascended Masters," and an earthly manifestation of him whom some have come to know as the "hidden Imam." A good many of his followers today believe Timothy - now known as "Noble Drew Ali" to be the earthly manifesation of the Godhead itself, known varously as Aten, Allah, Atum, Krsna or YHVH, among many others.
Many of Noble Drew Ali's (hereinafter, I will refer to the Messenger as NDA - peace be upon Him!) earliest disciples were of the African race, seeing in his beautiful personage the redeemer so long hoped for, in so many different forms, by all of the oppressed races of Earth. But, while bearing a message of joyous redemption for his African children, NDA held forth a doctrine of "elective affinity" by means of which all persons of all races could identify themselves with these first disciples, declaring themselves wedded to the destiny of NDA's elect "Nation of Moors," and by operation of the doctrine of elective affinity, becoming Moors themselves. Interestingly enough, since last NDA walked upon the Earth, science has all but confirmed a basis for such a doctrine of elective affinity - involving the study of the genetic composition of diverse Celtic and Moorish populations, as well as myraid etymological observations on the relation between the proper names "Eirann," "Iran," "Hibernia," "Iberia," "Berber," and "Barbary" as well as morphological linguisic studies of the relationship between the Berber, Celtic and paleo-Iranian (Avestan) tongues.
As was the case with so many religious and political movements launched to uplift the downtrodden and disenfranchised, the body founded by NDA - the Moorish Science Temple of America (which had been established in Newark, New Jersey in 1913) - was brutally suppressed by the U.S. Govenrment and its minions owing - putatively - to its prohibition of its members from taking part as combatants in the First World War.
For many years after, and following the ascension into Heaven of NDA, the Temple remained a hidden and despised remnant, all but forgotten. In the 1950's and 1960's however, with the coming into the fore of a determinedly Bohemian generation of "beatniks," homosexuals, "hippies," Jazz musicians, and other spiritually evolved but politically marginalized folk, and with the advances in recreational psychopharmacology made by Dr. Timothy Leary (inter alia), the Moorish faith and order found itself ripe for revival. A New York City jazzartist named Warren Tartaglia (known now to we Moors as Saint Walid al-Taha, another martyr. was the instrument of revival.
To learn more about this beautiful, old-new faith tradition, please visit the websites to which we have linked! |
