A Weekend with the Five-Percenters

By Michael Muhammad Knight

I’m swelling devils’ melons for my man Fard Muhammad
--Gravediggaz, “Graveyard Chamber”

My rhyme torments MCs with the fear of God/you’ll be cursed like Fard, and struck by the iron rod
--RZA/Bobby Digital, “Mantis”

The Nation of Gods and Earths (commonly known as the Five-Percenters) was founded in 1964 by Clarence “Puddin’” Smith, who became Clarence 13X and is now known as Father Allah. Malcolm X had thrown him out of the Nation of Islam, allegedly because he liked to throw dice—though another story says that Clarence was removed for questioning Master Fard’s divinity.

But once out of the fold he didn’t have to listen to Elijah or Malcolm or anyone anymore so he went the holy heretic way—like al-Hallaj who screamed, “I am the Truth!” and suffered a grisly murder for it—changing his name to Allah, calling Harlem his Mecca and Brooklyn Medina, still playing craps, preaching on street corners to high-school and junior-high kids, telling fourteen-year olds that as Original Black Asiatic Men they were all Gods because Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm, Head made A.L.L.A.H., getting arrested for assault and marijuana possession in front of Hotel Theresa at 2090 7th Avenue, doing a year in Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and finally getting shot down on June 13th, 1969.

The Gods get their popular nickname from an emphasis on Master Fard’s old doctrine of percentages: that eighty-five percent of the population (the blind, deaf and dumb) allow themselves to be exploited by ten percent (the bloodsuckers) who manipulate them with religions of a nonexistant “mystery god,” which leaves five percent of society to be the Poor Righteous Teachers: the Gods and Earths.

There’s some Qalandar shit in there—by the 1960s Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam had swelled into a million-dollar industry led by old men with big houses, but Father Allah took the deen and brought it back to the streets.

As with Sufism, the Nation of Gods and Earths is a culture of poets. Their influence on modern hip-hop is immeasurable. When you hear things like “word is bond,” that’s Five-Percenter talk; as is “dropping science” and “ciphers.” When someone calls someone else “G,” that’s short for God—even if noone knows it anymore.

I began corresponding with Intelligent Tarref Allah at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, NY. “Intell,” as family and friends called him, joined the NGE in 1994 while at Rikers Island and was the plaintiff in a historic federal court decision (Marria v. Broaddus) allowing incarcerated Gods and Earths the right to practice their religion. Up until that point, correctional facilities regarded them as a violent gang.

We had been going back and forth for a while. Intell told me that he maintained a vegan diet and was enrolled in a Writer’s Digest correspondence course. He planned on writing his memoirs, tentatively titled The Autobiography of God.

I asked him about his concept of the devil.

“We teach that white people are devils,” he replied, “and that includes you.” So in my next letter, I asked Intell if this could offer anything to one of Yacub’s People. He replied that some devils have already accepted the truth of their nature. There was Ida Hakim, a white woman who studied with Silas Muhammad’s offshoot of the NOI, and Dorothy Fardan, author of Message to the White Man and White Woman in America: Yacub and the Origins of White Supremacy.

But the real jaw-dropper: back in the beginning of the Five-Percenters, among what are called the “First Born,” Clarence 13X had a white student. He named him Azreal, after the angel of death, and said that he was in charge of the “inhabitants of hell,” meaning Caucasians. From what Intelligent Tarref Allah had heard, Azreal maintained a circle of four or five whites, referred to as “Muslim Sons,” to whom he taught the Supreme Alphabets and Supreme Mathematics.

I arrived in Harlem on Friday, just in time for jumaa prayers at Masjid Malcolm Shabazz with the bulbous green dome. This mosque had once been the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 7 but was now run by Warith Deen’s community. I checked my bag at the door and walked up a flight of stairs to the prayer hall. A brother gave me a plastic grocery bag for my shoes. I walked in right-foot-first to find security guards in suits and ties positioned throughout the mosque. One pointed to an open space in the back row so I went and did my sunna. When I sat down he came over and had me sit closer to the brother on my side. I looked around and found myself the only white guy but felt alright since we were all Sunni there, this was the Islam of Malik Shabazz. The imam’s khutbah was long and went all over the place, quoting not only from the Quran but also the New Testament and even Elijah Muhammad but most of the time he read directly from a Warith Deen speech. Doctrine-wise it was Sunni but he used old terms from the Nation of Islam like “trickster” and “grafted minds” without their racial connotations.

Muslims are usually discouraged from saying anything during a khutbah but the women in back kept yelling things like “tell it, brother imam!” and “Allahu Akbar!” like it was a Baptist Muslim Church while donation buckets were passed around with “SACRIFICE” written on them. The imam kept going on, and for a moment I zoned out in contemplation of the green curtains and white walls, the sounds of traffic and a lonely saxophone on the street corner below, and the monumental history of this place: Malcolm X was imam here in the 50s and 60s, Louis Farrakhan was imam here in the 60s and 70s and this was where Clarence 13X gave karate classes to the Fruit of Islam—that big green dome was like Harlem’s Dome of the Rock, holy to three traditions: Warith Deen Sunnism, the Nation of Islam and Five-Percenters. Playing the role of Abraham, the common father of them all, would be none other than W.D. Fard—who had wanted to build a temple in NYC because “very wise men” would someday arise there.

We stood up and prayed, after which we did an additional funeral prayer for the recently deceased Miami imam who brought Cassius Clay to the deen, introduced him to Malcolm X and always hosted Sister Clara when she came to town.

As I drove up to the Allah School my mix-tape just happened to hit NOFX’s “Kill all the White Man” and with right hand on the wheel in my left I clutched my turba made from clay off the grave of Imam Ridha, Imam Riza, Imam RZA…

Maybe half a dozen Gods stood in front of the Allah School building in a circle. “Building” in Five-Percenter talk meant anything positive, usually a conversation, where you built on your knowledge. I ducked in past them and said peace to the God inside.

“Hands out of your pockets,” he said. I complied and told him that I was looking for Azreal, so he led me back out and into the yard on the side, and there was a middle-aged Caucasian digging in the dirt. “Azreal!” the God shouted. “He’s here to see you, do you know him?”

“Yeah,” said Azreal. And the God left us to build.

“Peace,” I told Azreal. “My name is Michael, and I was building by mail with Intelligent Tarref Allah, and he said that Father Allah had a white student named Azreal so I came down here hoping I could find you—“

“My middle name is Michael,” said Azreal. He asked how I came to knowledge of the Nation and I started on a whole big spiel about Fard when he interrupted me to say, “there’s already a new W.D. Fard, and he’s got blonde hair and brown eyes.” So I just

looked at him to explain some more but he only added, “and he’s four years old.”

“And he’s the new W.D. Fard?”

“Hey,” he said like we were about to cut a deal. We were. “Ten bucks’ll get me some equality, you know what equality is? Ten bucks’ll get me some earth. So you help me with some earth and I’m yours for the rest of the day.” So I gave him ten bucks and we walked up the street towards Malcolm X Boulevard. “You turn right at the corner and wait for me,” said Azreal. “These are West Indians, some of them are First Borns. I don’t want them thinking I’m a cop.” So I turned right, Azreal turned left and after awhile he came out with his equality.

We sat on a bench outside the St. Nicholas projects and I whipped out my notepad to jot down all of Azreal’s magnetic (“magnetic is what you get when you build with Supreme Truth”), but he told me “right now, instead of writing I need you to be my eyes.” So I looked out for cops while he rolled the equality and licked the paper. “Father Allah’s the one who taught me to smoke,” he said with a philosopher’s puff. “And he taught me how to bring out the sun when it rains. One time there was a blizzard and he blamed me for it.”

Now that he had his equality, the first thing I wanted to know was how Azreal ever found himself mixed up with the Five-Percenters. He started off telling me about spending his youth in psych wards fighting guards, getting “two hundred Jack Nicholson specials” and staging daring escapes (“I drove away in the cook’s car”) on through to all the atrocities that would follow, right up to a few nights ago when some teenage boys sicked their pitbull on him. He showed me a long scar going all the way down his right calf and said that it was from kicking through a chicken-wire glass window—and he sprained that same foot jumping off a fence, and then lost a toe for some other reason. It all started because his real name was John Kennedy, and when the chickens came home to roost in 1963 he just went all kinds of nuts.

The guards at Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane were all KKK or American Nazi Party and they didn’t like John Kennedy’s name, so they beat the shit out of him and then sent inmates into his cell, two at a time. After two weeks of that they gave him an eight-week Thorazine coma.

When he woke up, fellow inmate Clarence Smith came to him and said, “You are a righteous man.”

“He told me who he was,” said Azreal, “and after that I’d turn down parole. I didn’t want to be outside, I knew I was getting the truth right there.” Azreal then told me about when the Father was killed, how he knew he’d “go home” and “he had nothing left to give us but his life.”

“Who killed Father Allah?” I asked.

“Nixon. Nixon put a hit on him.”

“Where is he buried?”

“He was cremated. His ashes were scattered at Mount Morris Park. I got my mom’s ashes—Mam in a Can, you know—and when I die, my ashes and her ashes are going out there too.”

“Do you know what happened to Master Fard?”

“It’s a mystery. It’ll always be a mystery. But do you know who his first student was, even before Elijah?”

“Who?”

“J. Edgar Hoover.”

“No shit?”

“I heard that from a First Born out in Medina.” I mentioned Malachi Z. York’s claim that Fard was an FBI agent, and Azreal replied that York was at Matteawan at the same time as himself and Father Allah. “But York kept to himself,” he said, “and tried to steal the Father’s teachings, make ‘em his own,” and York was now a convicted pedophile anyway.

Azreal pointed to his brain and said he had all the stories in there. He had once written his three-part autobiography but burned the only copy because he was afraid of it falling into the wrong hands. “If you have it in here,” he said with another point at his head, “you don’t need it on paper.” He showed me the 13 tattooed on his arm. “The Father went home on Friday the 13th, June 1969, and his name was Clarence 13X, and one plus three equals Culture or Freedom. Everything leads back to the Father.”

“Is the white man the devil?” I had to ask.

“The Father said that the worst devil is the black devil, because the Gods don’t see him coming.” He smoked and almost choked on it. “But you know, I can say that I’m Allah because I wasn’t taught by a man or prophet or anything. I’m First Born; the Father was right there in front of me. We can all be angels, you know, but I believe we can be more.”

“Intell told me that there are other white Five-Percenters—“

“Sure. There was Ariel, he had lots of money. He was into coke. He’d go to the Caribbean and party with all the Wu-Tang…but then he got in a car accident, and he was only Wisdom Culture. He was Knowledge Born when he began building, and Wisdom Culture when he went home.” He paused to smoke. “And there’s a white rapper in Florida.” He paused again, this time in consideration of something. “You know,” he said, “somebody in the Five-Percenter paper wrote that ‘Eminem is the Azreal of rap.’ That really offended me, you know? I was really insulted. I’d never say those kinds of things about my mother that he does.”

Then of course there was the new four-year old W.D. Fard, whose father was a “light-skinned man of understanding” and whose mother was Polish. “So they named him W.D. Fard,” said Azreal. “He’s a little kid, about this high. He’s got blonde hair and brown eyes. His sister’s the same way.” Azreal told me that he bought the new W.D. Fard a blue t-shirt bearing the likeness of Father Allah, but it was so big that the kid could only wear it as a night-shirt.

Then Azreal told me that he was going to be John Kerry’s running-mate. “Kerry needs a shot in the arm,” he said, “and I’m the man to do it—and I can get a lot more votes in the minority community than he ever could.”

“Have you been in contact with him?”

“Not yet. It’s not my time yet. But just our names alone would be a shot in the arm: Kerry-Kennedy. You see?”

I watched him build and smoke and sometimes cough, and he showed me all his scars and I knew that Azreal was meant to be Azreal and that’s all I can really say about him, death-angel with the keys to Heaven and Hell, the only one who can come and go as he pleases, the Devil who met God in a mental institution…being Azreal takes a lot more guts than being any of these Career Muslims like Ingrid Mattson or a Career Enlightened Kafr like John L. Esposito. I even concocted an amazing daydream of Azreal hanging around outside the CAIR office waiting to stick Hooper with a crowbar for his Prince Talal riyals, just so he could give it all to the Nation.

We walked around, ran into some Gods on another bench and built with them for a minute before going back to Allah School. Whenever Azreal introduced me to a God he made sure to say that I was a Muslim who had been to Pakistan and was building with Intelligent Tarref Allah and that Intell had told me about him. I eventually took my leave of Azreal, drove downtown and crossed the bridge into Medina (Brooklyn) to find the Ansar Allah’s mosque. The Ansar Allah community no longer existed since Malachi Z. York made the hijra to Georgia and built his pyramids in the woods, but I figured at least the masjid that he built would still be there. Maybe it was purchased by another group and continued to function as a mosque of some kind.

But when I got to 719 Bushwick, the domes and minarets were all gone, and it didn’t look anything like the pictures I had seen. I went to the All Eyes on Egypt bookstore next door and the woman told me they were remodeling. I asked a gentleman if it was true that Farrakhan’s men scared York away and he said, “If anything, it was the Sunnis.”

Malachi Z. York claimed that the “original” Fard (whose real name was said to be Abdul Wali Farrad Muhammad Ali) was killed at San Quentin, only to be replaced by an “imposter” who then founded the Nation of Islam. According to York, this imposter Fard worked for both the FBI and Nazis.

I slept at a rest-stop off I-87 and woke up around ten Saturday morning. That afternoon I went to Napanoch.

Driving through the mountains on my way to a state prison called for Johnny Cash with all his outlaw songs and prison songs, but even that led me to contemplate Master Fard—Johnny Cash recorded an album live at San Quentin, but Fard knew what it was like behind the bars.

At the visitors’ center they made me empty my pockets and take off my shoes before going through the metal detector. You can’t bring any of this, said the guard. Phone, camera, keys, pens, wallet—put it in the lockers outside. I had an Ibn ‘Arabi book for Intell but the guard said it was too late in the day to give an inmate anything, so I locked that up too. Then I had to fill out all the paperwork for a first-time visitor.

I read the signs on the wall. Physical contact was limited to an embrace and/or kiss at the beginning and end of the visit. Hands must be visible at all times. The guards opened a door. Once I stepped through that and it closed behind me, they opened the next door. And then I was in a room of families and kids and men in green pants. I handed my sheet to the man at the desk and sat at a table. Intell came through wearing a yellow kufi.

It’s hard to have a real conversation in that situation; your time is limited, so you talk extremely fast. You say everything you need to say on a topic and then let the other person say everything he or she needs to say, and then you reply in the same manner and on it goes until the clock runs out. When visiting hours were over Intell wished me a safe drive and I huddled through the door with all the wives and kids and then waited for the next door to open. I unlocked my stuff and walked out past a whole mess of women, one of them standing against a railing with tears streaming down her face, her eyes looking somewhere far away.

As I drove off it occurred to me to get a picture of the building so I pulled over and stood on top of my car with my cheap disposable camera. Then some guards drove by and told me to get down. They pulled over and had me stand by my car while they made some calls.

One guard, who seemed a nice enough guy, told me that it was against the law to photograph a state prison.

“The rationale,” he said, “is that you may be trying to provide information about the facility to someone on the inside who could try to escape.”

We’re going to detain you, he said. It’s a maximum security prison, whole different ballgame. So we stood around making small talk about the weather until another guard came by, examined my camera and then said I could go.

Back in my car, I turned the ignition and Johnny Cash’s “San Quentin” came on blaring loud enough for the guards to hear. San Quentin, I hate every inch of you…

When I drove away I felt something different in my face, like the muscles I’d use in smiling couldn’t work if I had wanted them to. It was a weird sobering sense that I’ve only felt after funerals. Soon I was back in the mountains with gusts of air blasting in from all four of my car windows, watching the sunlight peek through thick walls of trees, feeling things inside but not feeling them with any kind of gusto or spunk as all of that had been drained out of me.

I stopped at New Paltz to get some food. New Paltz was a college town with streets filled with hippies and some pop-punks all standing around like they were posing for album covers. I went to the SUNY campus to go online and find out if I was anywhere near Matteawan.

Turns out, it was maybe half an hour away.

The New York State Lunatic Asylum for Insane Convicts was originally opened in 1855, in Auburn. It moved to Matteawan in 1892, renamed Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and phased out in the 1970s to become Fishkill, a medium-security general confinement facility.

To get there I had to drive past Downstate Correctional and that was some serious evil with tall fences and coils of razor-wire placed everywhere possible. At Fishkill I drove up a hill and saw a pond and some geese and learned that I couldn’t get close enough to actually see the building, it was all off-limits. I wondered if those geese knew where they were.

It all reminded me of the time that my friend Crazy Dave drove me to the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center so I could see where the Son of Sam used to stay. He pulled us right up to the place. It was surrounded by two mesh fences—the outer one curving inward at the top, the inner one covered with giant stretched-out Slinkies of razor-wire. We saw some guys moping around on the other side. “From here you can’t even tell which ones are the real nuts,” said Dave. “Dude, look at those fences.”

“They’re pretty severe.”

“I could climb it.”

“The one on the inside? With the razor-wire?”

“I know for a fact that I could climb that fence.”

“You’d get cut up to shit.”

“Yeah, bro. True grit, right there.” With that he drove on out, making crazy faces at the security van and then checking to the rear-view to see if it’d follow us. “NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IT’S LIKE,” he sang in his most tender forlorn croon, “TO BE THE BAD MAAAAN…”

Saturday night I took a break from the Gods to hang with filmmaker Cihan Kaan at a party in somebody’s house. Cihan had spent all day auditioning for the lead in his next project, and it was time to unwind. He was like a real-life taqwacore—a Turkish Sufi kid in his Crass t-shirt walking around this Brooklyn backyard, talking to girls and beer-pong players and watching a game of drunken fast-pitch wiffleball. He’d point at a dude and be like, have you ever heard of such-and-such band and when I’d say no he’d just go ahead and say “well, that guy right there is the bass player.” Then I met the hacker who shut down Yahoo! for a day, and he didn’t seem too comfortable with me knowing about it. I sat in a lawn chair and just watched the whole scene since my weekend was too bizarre for me to really connect or relate to any of these kids. I listened to two guys talk about a pills-for-porn trade and complain that the party was a sausage-fest, nearly every girl was with someone and the handful that weren’t all moved together in a pack. There was this cool guy in a black derby hat and wifebeater shirt, knowing the role he was meant to play. I went inside the house where it was desolate and sank into a leather couch, going into my bag for the Ibn ‘Arabi book that I wanted to give Intelligent Tarref Allah. I kicked my feet up on a glass table covered with sprinklings of leftover equality and trendy-shit magazines whose covers promised articles on “THE NEXT WAVE OF CELEBRITY DESIGNERS.” Two girls came in and sat on the couch across the room. Then Cihan found his way in and sat next to me to ponder the possibilities of anything popping off with them.

“There’s something going on here,” he said, with a quick glance in their direction.

“Is there?”

“I think there is. They’re over there and we’re over here, you know?”

“I’m in no frame of mind for it,” I told him. “I’ve been living in my car and haven’t changed my clothes in seventy-two hours, what am I going to say to these fuckin’ girls with their Gucci bags?”

“It doesn’t even matter,” he said. “Confidence is like eighty-five percent of it.” So from there I said that eighty-five percent of it was deaf, dumb and blind, and we started building on some Sufi shit relating to the Bektashis or Naqshbandis or Jerrahis, I don’t even remember which but Cihan had seen some amazing things in his time. He had this incredibly involving story from when he went to the Southwest with a girl and all sorts of crazy things went down revolving around a black dog with blue eyes that kept popping up at random places and the Navajo tales of a creature called the skin-walker that could assume animal forms and kill you. I looked at him with all the authority I could muster and said the dog was the devil and I could back it up with hadiths. His story was legitimately awesome and it made sense that something like that would happen to him, since he was diving deep into Sufi thought beforehand. Sometimes when you project enough energy out there, the world just reacts to it and gives you something back. At least I’ve found it to be like that, from time to time. Maybe it was the magnetic from building with Supreme Truth but who am I to say? Then two guys with more ambition than us came over to the girls and sat on either side of them, cracking jokes and making playful contact. So that was the end of that. We made our way out and ended up eating at a Pakistani restaurant at three in the morning, talking over kabobs about the great Muslim Punk Scene and how it’ll all pop off someday.

In the subway station I had begun building a little on the Mathematics, trying to do something with my little baby-knowledge—being twenty-six years old, my physical degree was Wisdom Equality but two plus six equals eight and the attribute of Build or Destroy, meaning that everything you did either built or destroyed, adding positive or negative to the cipher. That about summed up my whole past year.

Sunday morning I drove back to Harlem with Ghostface Killah in the tape deck, parked my car on 129th and walked to the Allah School to find Azreal mopping the floor. I told him that I tried going to Matteawan and he reminded me that they were all KKK and American Nazi Party there. I told him that I was almost arrested at Napanoch and he said that “once you start really building with the Gods, you’ll find yourself getting ‘almost arrested’ all the time.” We went into the yard and built. Azreal put on a suit over his yellow Gods shirt and green shorts. I gave him a pair of clean socks from my bag. Then another of Yacub’s People showed up; he said he was from Sweden and doing his grad research on Afro-American religion. He went with us to get Azreal some equality at the same place as the day before. On the way back we passed the Nation of Islam’s Masjid Muhammad #7 and shook hands with bow-tie brothers on the front steps. From the sidewalk I could hear a taped Farrakhan speech playing inside—that Farrakhan, he could really drive a point home when he wanted. Azreal asked a brother if we could have gone in. The brother said that it was too crowded, but if we had asked earlier, it would have been okay.

“I don’t like using who I am to get into places,” Azreal told me, “but I like opening the door for others.” Back at Allah School we sat in front and shared greetings of peace with all the Gods and Earths who walked by—Azreal, the Swedish kid and me, three Caucasians occupying space in front of the Allah School of the Five-Percenters, Azreal teaching me the Supreme Alphabets, nobody having a problem with us.

“We don’t teach pro-black or anti-white,” said an older God. “We teach pro-righteousness and anti-devilishment.” Intell had said the same thing when we were building by mail.

Then a Five-Percenter tour group walked by and stopped in front of Allah School, the guide explaining how this place came to be. Azreal told me that the tours stopped at all the historic places—the elevator where Father Allah was victim to an unsuccessful assassination attempt (“it’s a new elevator now…you used to be able to see the bullet-holes”), the Hotel Theresa, Mount Morris Park which was home to the first Universal Parliament when thousands of Gods greeted the Father on his return from Matteawan, and also the place where his ashes were scattered. The tour group consisted of pilgrims from all over the country, here to see their Arafat and Mina, their Cave of Hira, their Mountain of Light, their Badr. Harlem really was a Mecca. Azreal got up, grabbed a broom and swept the sidewalk in front of Allah School.

In Harlem you can see a belief system at its beginning. Today, June 13th, 2004 was only the thirty-fifth anniversary of Father Allah’s going home and you could still find Gods from the First Born walking around telling it as it was—no less than Sahabas for their time. There’s even an Ahlul-Bayt, I guess you can call it, of Father Allah’s living children and grandchildren. I tried to imagine some fourteen hundred years ago or whatever it was when Islam was that young and Muslims were the Poor Righteous Teachers, a lowly five percent on the fringe of society.

Azreal, the Swede and I went back to the St. Nicholas projects so Azreal could elevate. We found a bench full of Gods and Azreal built with them. Azreal could talk and talk and talk, fueled by a genuine love for the Nation, and these Gods half his age sat and listened respectfully. He showed us this spin-move that Father Allah taught for when someone had a gun on him and told the story about a time when he stood in front of Allah School with Father Allah and Old Man Justice and asked, “if you’re the Father, and Justice is the Son, then what am I…the Holy Ghost?” to which Father Allah and Old Man Justice laughed so hard that it brought all the young Gods outside wanting to know what was up.

The Show and Prove was just across the street at Harriet Tubman Learning Center. Inside it was almost like a smaller ISNA convention and too crowded to really get around so I bought a couple shirts and went back out to watch Gods build on the sidewalk. I met a God from Pittsburgh who offered to help me achieve knowledge, but he warned that it’d be a serious journey. Then I met Saladin, a God from Niagara Falls! So I told him I was from Buffalo and we exchanged numbers. I had to know whether Buffalo had been renamed, since Gods gave the map a flavor of mythopoeia by renaming all the boroughs and cities: Harlem of course being Mecca and Brooklyn Medina, Queens was the Desert and the Bronx was Pelan, New York itself was Mecca or Now Why, New Rochelle was Now Rule, Poughkeepsie was Power Kingdom and it spread across the land…New Haven, Connecticut was New Heaven, Philadelphia was Power Hill, Pittsburgh was Power Born, Chicago was C-Medina, Milwaukee was Cream City, Atlanta was Allah’s Garden, Dallas was the Sudan, Seattle was Morocco, Los Angeles was Love Allah, San Francisco was West Asia…Saladin told me that he heard one God give Buffalo the name of Bethlehem, and he called Niagara Falls Atlantis.

As I stood around in front of the Show and Prove taking it all in, they gave me nothing but love and warmth. There wasn’t so much as one dirty look. Gods and Earths greeted me with “peace” and I’d give it back. .

I don’t understand how the Five-Percenters came to be so demonized as a “hate group.” If someone wants to quote a teaching or rap lyric to prove that the Gods and Earths teach hate, build on this: a blue-eyed devil can walk in the front door of the Allah School in Harlem easier than some Muslim women can enter the front doors of their mosques.

A few Gods asked my name and whether I had done my 120 lessons. I’d say that I had just started building with Azreal and had been corresponding with Intelligent Tarref Allah, trying to learn about the Five-Percenters so I could build on Master Fard. I’d get into my whole obsession with Fard and how I considered myself almost a Fardiyya Sufi and they all replied with “that’s peace.” One God took the time to explain that Fard’s father was named Alphonso Allah and he had been selected by “twenty-three wise scientists” in Mecca to have a son who would go to the West and find the Lost Tribe of Shabazz.

“And Master Fard Muhammad met with Franklin D. Roosevelt face-to-face,” he told me, “and Franklin D. Roosevelt even said to him, ‘trying to save your people is like putting a pair of pants on an elephant.’” When the God asked my name I said Mikail, the Arabic for Michael though I pronounced it Urdu-style, which was only my old Sunni name anyway.

Sarah from the Daughters of Hajar was interested in checking out the scene, so she came through and we stayed outside just talking to random Gods. Every now and then Azreal would pop up wanting a dollar for another beer. By the time we left to find a place for Azreal to elevate again, he wasn’t walking too well but he could sing and dance and tell stories about elevating behind the Apollo with Sam Cook and Patti LaBelle, and he’d point to me and call me his “Caucasian angel,” which I guess I was since Mikail was the only angel besides Jibril to be mentioned by name in the Quran—and if the devil’s just a fallen angel, maybe there’s a chance he can go back. Azreal/John Kennedy reminded me that his middle name was Michael, and he knew how to stop the rain.

We walked back to the Show and Prove and Azreal quickly disappeared in the mass of Gods and Earths. It was hard to keep track of him because he quite literally knew everyone there and made the rounds from circle to circle, building all over the place.

Last time I saw Azreal, I told him I’d write a book about him someday. He said we could all play ourselves in the movie—we didn’t need to be actors since his name broke down into “As Real” and he was as real as it got.

Michael Muhammad Knight is author of The Taqwacores, a novel available through the legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.