Malcolm X's International Travel

Pilgrimage to Mecca
On April 13, 1964, Malcolm X departed JFK Airport in New York for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His status as an authentic Muslim was questioned by Saudi authorities because of his United States passport and his inability to speak Arabic. Since only confessing Muslims are allowed into Mecca, he was separated from his group for about 20 hours.[114][115]
According to his autobiography, Malcolm X saw a telephone and remembered the book The Eternal Message of Muhammad by Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, which had been presented to him with his visa approval. He called Azzam's son, who arranged for his release. At the younger Azzam's home, he met Azzam Pasha, who gave Malcolm his suite at the Jeddah Palace Hotel. The next morning, Muhammad Faisal, the son of Prince Faisal, visited and informed Malcolm X that he was to be a state guest. The deputy chief of protocol accompanied Malcolm X to the Hajj Court, where he was allowed to make his pilgrimage.[116]
On April 19, Malcolm X completed the Hajj, making the seven circuits around the Kaaba, drinking from the Zamzam Well and running between the hills of Safah and Marwah seven times.[117] Malcolm X said the trip allowed him to see Muslims of different races interacting as equals. He came to believe that Islam could be the means by which racial problems could be overcome.

Africa

Malcolm X visited Africa on three separate occasions, once in 1959 and twice in 1964. During his visits, he met officials, gave interviews to newspapers, and spoke on television and radio in Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Nigeria, Ghana, Guinea, Sudan, Senegal, Liberia, Algeria, and Morocco.[119] Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria invited Malcolm X to serve in their governments.[120]
In 1959, Malcolm X traveled to Egypt (then known as the United Arab Republic), Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana to arrange a tour for Elijah Muhammad.[121] The first of the two trips Malcolm X made ...

That same year, Malcolm went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The trip proved life altering. For the first time, Malcolm shared his thoughts and beliefs with different cultures, and found the response to be overwhelmingly positive. When he returned, Malcolm said he had met "blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers." He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration and a new hope for the future. This time when Malcolm spoke, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.

On April 13, 1964, Malcolm X left the United States on a personal and spiritual journey through the Middle East and West Africa. By the time he returned on May 21, he’d visited Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco and Algeria.
In Saudi Arabia, he’d experienced what amounted to the second life-changing epiphany in his life as he accomplished the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, and discovered an authentic Islam of universal respect and brotherhood. The experience changed Malcolm’s world view. Gone was the belief in whites as exclusively evil. Gone was the call for black separatism. His voyage to Mecca helped him discover the atoning power of Islam as a means to unity as well as self-respect: “In my thirty-nine years on this earth,” he would write in his autobiography, “the Holy City of Mecca had been the first time I had ever stood before the Creator of All and felt like a complete human being.”

It had been a long journey in a brief life.

Before Mecca: The Nation of Islam

Malcolm’s first epiphany first had occurred 12 years earlier when he converted to Islam as he was serving an eight-to-10-year prison sentence for robbery. But back then it was Islam according to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam—an odd cult whose principles of racial hatred and separatism, and whose strange beliefs about whites being a genetically engineered race of “devils,” stood it in contrast with Islam’s more orthodox teachings.

Malcolm X bought in and rapidly rose in the ranks of the organization, which was more like a neighborhood guild, albeit a disciplined and enthusiastic one, than a “nation” when Malcolm arrived. Malcolm’s charisma and eventual celebrity built the Nation of Islam into the mass movement and political force it became in the early 1960s.

Disillusion and Independence

But the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad turned out to be much less than the upstanding moral paragon he pretended to be. He was a hypocritical, serial womanizer who fathered ...