Very early on a Monday morning in September, Reuben Johnson-Bey left his home in Washington Heights to pick up the buffalo fish. As he’s done nearly every September for the last 50 years, he drove north through the south side hunting for deals. He spotted a sale at Fish #1 on Stony Island. “If you see a bargain, capitalize on it,” he likes to say. He bought 30 pounds, taking his time to look for a razorback variety that’s pulled from the Mississippi down in Arkansas and piling them into coolers. “I’m not the only person who’s acquired the buffalo fish over the years, but usually the members do like for me to get it,” he says. “I have a pick for the right type.”
New members are rare, and Johnson-Bey doesn’t make it easy to join. “We see a lot of visitors who first heard about Islamism while they were institutionalized,” he says. “Now, I have nothing against your past if you are up-front with me and tell me exactly when and why you were in the institution. But I have seen visitors who seem chiefly interested in receiving financial support. There are no handouts here. If you knock on the temple doors and I smell alcohol on the breath, or the eyes aren’t clear, and you’re not properly dressed in slacks and a jacket and preferably a tie, I will ask you to return at a later date.” Temples in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., have kept membership numbers between 50 and 100 by proselytizing in prisons. Temple No. 9 doesn’t do that. “We have true treasures at this temple, sages who hold a wealth of information about the days in the Prophet’s time and this that and the other,” Johnson-Bey says. “I will not allow just anyone to enter these doors.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Services start at 7:30 on Friday nights. Members know Johnson-Bey is a stickler for punctuality, so if he finds himself sitting alone on the stairs at 8, he knows no one is coming. On some nights it’s just him and Queen Sheba, a woman who lives in an apartment next door. Her family is famous in the organization; her father, Gilbert Cook-Bey, was a first-generation convert who opened the temples in Philadelphia and Detroit. “If all of her family were to show up, they alone would fill this entire building,” Johnson-Bey says. “Some nights Sheba and I sit on the steps, give some of the members a little extra time, what with winter travel and so on and so forth. We get to telling stories of people we both knew, old sages who are no longer with us. Oh my, we do laugh. When it looks like no else is coming, we sing a few hymns, shut the lights off, and go home.”
Not much is known about Timothy Drew before he became Prophet Drew Ali. He was born in North Carolina in 1886, possibly to a Cherokee woman and a Moroccan Muslim father, or maybe to freed slaves. A framed picture of him hangs from the gold domed altar of Temple No. 9. He looks tall and thin, unremarkable except for the belted silk robe and tall fez he’s wearing. The Moors’ version of his life story says he left home at 16 and joined a band of Gypsies who took him overseas to Egypt, Morocco, and the Middle East. In Morocco he was approached by the high priest of a mystical Egyptian cult who recognized him as the latest reincarnation in a line of prophets including Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad. The priest gave Drew a book that he said was a lost section of the Koran, and when Drew returned to the States he called it the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America. It says, “The last Prophet in these days is Noble Drew Ali, who was prepared divinely in due time by Allah to redeem men from their sinful ways; and to warn them of the great wrath which is sure to come upon the earth.”
The service closes with three of four members stepping up to the podium to read pages of the Holy Koran out loud and give their interpretation. Parts of Drew’s book are taken from obscure Christian texts; the bulk of it is lifted almost word for word from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, published in 1908 by an esoteric Ohio preacher named Levi Dowling. It describes Jesus’s travels in India, Egypt, and Palestine during the 18 years of his life the New Testament doesn’t account for—proof, Moors say, that Jesus and his followers were Asiatic. (Drew did leave out Dowling’s descriptions of the “fair haired, blue eyed” Jesus.) At the podium some members draw parallels between Jesus’s trials and their own lives, talking about how they quit smoking or left a bad marriage or kept their children out of gangs. Listeners from the pews shout out “Preach, brother!” and “Islam!” Johnson-Bey likes to talk about his grandfather—how the family was dirt poor but through hard work and with the Prophet’s guidance, Reuben Frazier pulled the family up.
In September 1928 the first Moorish convention was held at Unity Hall. The Defender reported that 3,000 attended the gala event, including black Chicago politicians and judges who came at Drew’s invitation. Less than a year later Drew unexpectedly died in a follower’s south-side apartment; the cause of death was never made public. Some Moors claim he’d been violently beaten by police who questioned him after the murder of one of his estranged disciples. Another told the Defender, “The Prophet was not ill; his work was done and he laid his head upon the lap of one of his followers and passed out.”
He was 20 when he moved into their apartment, on a stretch of Orleans that would later be enveloped by Cabrini-Green. He thought his stay would be short, but six months later he married Cora Patton-Bey, a young woman he’d seen at League meetings. Reuben Jr. was born a year later. They got an apartment a couple blocks away from the Moorish Science Temple’s home office at 1104 N. Sedgwick. He took a dollar-an-hour job at Montgomery Ward and she worked at a health clinic. At the time Temple No. 9 met in a hall on Orleans rented from a moving company called Howell Brothers. The congregation bought its current home in Ukrainian Village from an order of Buddhist monks in 1984, holding bake sales and rummage sales to raise funds.
