Noble Drew Ali

Timothy Drew was born on the eighth of January 1886 at Sampson County in eastern North Carolina, the son of Richard Drew — a railway brakeman of mixed African, Cherokee and Moroccan descent — and Frances Drew. The Drew household claimed descent from a Moroccan sailor who had married an enslaved woman of Sampson County in the late eighteenth century. He left Sampson County at sixteen as a railway worker and worked through his twenties on the Atlantic Coast Line and on the merchant marine, travelling to North Africa around 1910 — the details of the journey are preserved only in the oral tradition of his subsequent movement.

He returned to the United States around 1913 and founded that year at Newark, New Jersey, the Canaanite Temple — the earliest of the bodies that would within a decade become the Moorish Science Temple of America. He moved the principal temple to Chicago in 1925 and took the title Noble Drew Ali — Prophet of the Moorish Science Temple. He published in 1927 his foundational scripture, the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America — a sixty-four page text in seven chapters bound in red leather, drawn from sources including the 1908 esoteric work Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ of Levi H. Dowling and from rephrasings of the Quran.

His teaching held that the descendants of slaves brought to the Americas from Africa were not Negro nor Coloured nor Black but Asiatic Moors of Moroccan descent — heirs to a heritage that had been deliberately suppressed by the slave system. Members of the Temple were instructed to add the surname El or Bey to their names, to take Moroccan dress in religious observance, to abstain from European alcohol and tobacco, and to observe the five daily prayers turned toward Mecca. The Temple grew from the founding Newark congregation to an estimated thirty thousand members across fifteen cities by 1928.

He died in Chicago on the twentieth of July 1929 at forty-three, in circumstances that have remained the subject of dispute. Cause of death was recorded as tuberculosis; oral tradition holds he died from injuries sustained in police custody.

He is honored here as the founder of organised African American Islamic religious life.