Circus, Shriners, and Fairs, Oh My: Orientalism in American Popular Culture and the Rise of Twentieth-Century Black Islam

The part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition that had the largest impact on American culture was not the sober fair grounds but the more sensuous exhibits of the “Midway Plaisance,” which included belly dancers, mosques and imported “natives” in a “Tunisian Village,” a “Moorish Palace,” a “Cairo Alley,” a “Persian Palace,” and a “Street in Constantinople” populated with Turkish Jews. It was at the fair that African American Prince Hall Freemasons formed their own version of the “Shriners,” an Orientalist fraternal order founded in 1872 New York City that called itself the “playground of Masonry” and adopted the fez and various legends about Islam and the Orient. The black Shriners, or Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, would provide the costume and much of the regalia and legends that former circus performer Timothy Drew used in fashioning himself into Noble Drew Ali, founder of the Moorish Science Temple and precursor to the Nation of Islam. While scholars have usually narrated the 1893 Exposition as a didactic apology for racist imperialism, and while much of the literature on Black Muslims has placed inordinate emphasis on antebellum enslaved Muslim communities, the Near Eastern exotica of the Midway Plaisance created a recalcitrant, multiracial space in the midst of segregated America and demonstrates that turn-of-the-century Orientalism played a critical role in the rise of alternative African American religions.