Ilyasah Shabazz Is Reclaiming the Humanity of Malcolm X

By 1964, Shabazz describes her father as a man whose foundations had been shaken. He had devoted himself to building an organization. He had worked to create schools, temples, curriculum and economic structures. Then the principles and relationships that had shaped that work began to fracture.

There were also threats. Against him. Against his family. Against his children.

And then came the pilgrimage. Shabazz sees Malcolm’s journey to Mecca as more than an important episode in his biography. She sees it as a moment when a young man carrying extraordinary pressure was given space to sit with himself. To think.

To feel. To reconsider. Her father traveled to what she calls the land of the Quran, the Bible and the Torah and returned with an expanded belief in what human beings might be capable of together. She says he came back with faith that people across racial lines could confront injustice as “one brotherhood.”

The transformation did not make him less committed. It deepened the way he understood that commitment. That is part of what Shabazz wants readers to encounter in Malcolm in the Desert. The book is not only an account of something her father experienced.

It asks the reader to undertake an examination of their own. How accountable am I? How loving am I? What is my responsibility to other people?

What does my humanity require of me? For Shabazz, spiritual development and public responsibility cannot be easily separated. Going inward matters because eventually, a person must decide how they will return to the world.

Tamira Chapman and Porscha Burke join Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz inside the historic Shabazz Center for a conversation about Malcolm X, Dr. Betty Shabazz, faith, family and the responsibilities of legacy.

One of the most revealing questions in the conversation concerns prayer. Malcolm X once described praying as one of the hardest things he had ever done. Shabazz believes she understands why. She describes a childhood in which her father was encouraged by his parents to believe in himself before his world was violently disrupted.

His father was killed. His mother was institutionalized against her will. The family home was lost. The children were separated.
Then came racism, humiliation and the constant denial of dignity. “That’s a lot of pain,” Shabazz says. Surviving that pain required something. She calls it “false armor.”

The protection people construct when vulnerability feels dangerous. In her telling, Malcolm’s early life became partly a story of running from an identity that had once been rooted in family, values and purpose. Prison forced him to stop. There, Shabazz says, he had to confront what he had been avoiding and return to the values that had surrounded him before his family was torn apart.

Prayer required another surrender. “I think to pray meant that you had to become vulnerable,” she says. It meant facing the painful parts of his humanity instead of covering them. That idea extends beyond her father.

Shabazz speaks openly about her own periods of grief and depression. After the death of her mother, she continued working and functioning without initially recognizing what was happening inside her. A therapist told her that she had a tendency to intellectualize difficult experiences. She kept moving.

Then she read a book and began recognizing herself in its description of depression. She noticed how often she returned home and went to bed. She realized she was not as fine as she had told herself she was. So she began forcing herself up and out.

The lesson mirrors something she sees in her father’s transformation. Sometimes strength is not the ability to keep pain hidden. Sometimes strength begins when the armor comes off.