The Farrakhan Phenomenon: Race, Reaction, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics.

• Author: Van Deburg, William L.

The old folk wisdom that opposites attract would certainly seem to apply to the spate of biographers who have chosen Louis Farrakhan as their subject. Recent book-length studies of the controversial Nation of Islam leader have been penned by the American Jewish Committee's chief legal expert on anti-semitism, a self-proclaimed "liberal-integrationist-feminist writer and sometimes integrationist and feminist activist," a Swedish anthropologist of religion, and the author of a guide to "etiquette in other people's religious ceremonies" To be sure, these are not exactly Islamic fellow travelers or brothers on the block. Some haven't even been able to wrangle a single fleeting interview out of the elusive Farrakhan. Nevertheless, they profess to know the man well enough to instruct other interested "outsiders" in the workings of contemporary black religious nationalism. Who are they trying to kid? No one, really. The best of these works (Mattias Gardell's In the Name of Elijah Muhammad), conscientiously seek balance and are based on extensive research in available documentary sources. At worst (Looking for Farrakhan by Florence Hamlish Levinsohn), they are still remarkably restrained and only occasionally approach the sensationalistic, axegrinding excesses one regularly finds in "unauthorized" celebrity biographies and tabloid journalism.

Robert Singh, an Oxford-educated political scientist on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh, contributes importantly to this rapidly expanding body of literature, but his study is marred by excessive name-calling and is made less than comprehensive by the author's inability to gain access to "insider" data. An admirer of Adolph Reed Jr., outspoken author of The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, Singh displays a similarly unsentimental and ultra-critical sensibility. Initially, this combative, take-no-prisoners style enlivens his commentary, but even those who agree that it is the scholar's sworn duty to repudiate Farrakhan for "the bigotry that he evinces and the manifest injury to racial comity that he causes" will question the need to use modifiers such as "demagogic," "reactionary," and "pernicious" so frequently. Space devoted to these barbs could have been used to provide additional information on Farrakhan's background -- covered in a more comprehensive fashion in Arthur J. Magida's Prophet of Rage -- and on the scope, content, and effectiveness of the Nation of Islam's economic and social action...