分类： society

The Nation of Islam, one of the most influential Black religious and political movements in the United States, is mourning the passing of Khadijah Farrakhan, the long-time wife of the organization’s leader Louis Farrakhan. She died on June 27 at the age of 90, leaving behind a 70-plus-year legacy of service to the movement’s mission of Black self-reliance.

Affectionately known to followers as “Mother Khadijah,” she was far more than the spouse of the Nation’s leader — she was a foundational figure in the movement’s modern history. A formal statement released by the Shura Executive Council confirmed her passing, writing, “The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan with deep sadness yet with profound gratitude to Allah informs you that his beloved wife of 72 years, the First Lady of the Nation of Islam, Mother Khadijah has returned to Allah (may Allah be pleased).” The Farrakhan family has long been based in Chicago, where the Nation of Islam’s historic headquarters, Mosque Maryam, stands on the city’s South Side.

Born Betsy Ross, Khadijah married Louis Eugene Walcott — who would later become Louis Farrakhan — in Boston on September 12, 1953. Two years after their wedding, both she and her husband converted to Islam, after Louis was invited to join the movement by legendary civil rights and religious leader Malcolm X. Over the course of their 72-year marriage, the couple raised nine children together.

A commanding, respected leader in her own right, Khadijah made her own mark on the movement’s public advocacy. In 1997, two years after Louis Farrakhan organized the landmark Million Man March in Washington D.C., she took the stage at the Million Woman March in Philadelphia to address a crowd of thousands of Black women. In her memorable address, she argued, “A nation can rise no higher than its women,” adding, “We focus on women but cannot lose sight that we must rise as a family – men, women and children.”

To contextualize Khadijah Farrakhan’s decades-long contribution, it is necessary to trace the origins of the Nation of Islam itself. The movement was founded in 1930 by Wallace D Fard Muhammad, a traveling salesman who began preaching to Black communities in Detroit’s segregated neighborhoods. Fard Muhammad’s core mission was to “teach the downtrodden and defenseless Black people a thorough knowledge of God and of themselves,” blending Islamic teachings with a radical ethos of economic self-determination for Black Americans, and encouraging followers to cast off the names and cultural practices imposed during chattel slavery.

After facing repeated arrests and death threats from Detroit police over his teachings, Fard Muhammad disappeared, and his protégé Elijah Muhammad took over leadership of the movement, relocating its headquarters to Chicago. Under Elijah Muhammad’s direction, the Nation of Islam grew from a small congregation meeting in a rented storefront into a robust, interconnected network of independent Black-led institutions, including schools, a national newspaper, farms, and local businesses. This autonomous economic infrastructure grew from a core conviction: that Black prosperity must be built and seized by the community, rather than begged from the U.S. establishment.

The movement’s message of empowerment spread rapidly in the mid-20th century. Malcolm X joined the Nation in 1952, and his charismatic advocacy helped swell the movement’s membership to roughly 300,000 within a decade. When legendary boxer Muhammad Ali converted to the Nation of Islam in 1964, the movement gained global media attention and expanded its reach.

After Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, his son Wallace led a major restructuring of the organization, aligning it with mainstream Sunni Islam and abandoning the Nation’s historic Black nationalist infrastructure. Louis Farrakhan rejected this shift, splitting from the restructured organization in 1977 to rebuild the Nation of Islam in Chicago and revive its core mission of Black economic self-determination. It was this reborn, unapologetically independent movement that Khadijah Farrakhan nurtured and supported for more than 45 years.

In the days following her passing, memorial arrangements have been announced. Khadijah Farrakhan will lie in state on Wednesday and Thursday at Mosque Maryam, the Nation of Islam’s National Center in Chicago, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. A formal funeral service will be held at the same location on Friday at 11 a.m.

Opening with a lyrical verse from The Beatles’ *The Long and Winding Road*, this personal narrative weaves together the curious biology of steelhead trout, a cross-cultural educational journey, and the centuries-long pattern of Fujianese diaspora migration to tell a story of unexpected belonging and success.

To biologists, *Oncorhynchus mykiss* is a species of fish defined by remarkable adaptability. Some members of the species, known as resident rainbow trout, spend their entire lives in the small rivers and streams where they hatch. Feeding on insects, snails, and leeches, these homebound fish grow to modest sizes, boasting delicate mottled olive-green backs, silvery flanks, and a soft pink stripe along their sides. They are a favorite among fly fishermen, who relish the quiet challenge of coaxing these cunning, beautiful trout to bite a carefully presented dry fly or nymph.

But for other *Oncorhynchus mykiss*, the call of the open ocean proves irresistible. These anadromous variants, called steelhead, leave their birth streams as juveniles and venture into the open ocean to feed. Exposed to rich supplies of baitfish and krill, their growth explodes exponentially: anabolic hormones trigger a full physical transformation, their flesh turns a deep blood-red from krill carotenoids, and their bodies mature into large, powerful fish with gunmetal-gray backs and chrome bellies. By the time they return to freshwater to spawn, they resemble salmon in every meaningful way, prized by anglers for their brutal, acrobatic fights that test skill and endurance. This dual nature of *Oncorhynchus mykiss* – a single species that can choose between two entirely distinct life paths – becomes a powerful metaphor for the journey at the heart of this story.

Four years ago, the author, a Fujianese diaspora native, made an unconventional and widely questioned choice: he encouraged his son, Han Feizi Junior, a student at an English-dominant international school in Hong Kong, to apply to Tsinghua University, with no backup plan. At the time, this decision stood far outside the norm for graduates of Han’s school, who almost universally pursued degrees at Western institutions from Ivy League schools to Oxbridge. Mainland Chinese universities, even Tsinghua – one of the most prestigious in the country – were rarely considered by Hong Kong international school graduates.

Critics and concerned family friends were quick to question the plan: Han’s Mandarin was only functional, his academic profile fit the mold of a typical Western university applicant, and non-gaokao international and diaspora students at top mainland universities often carried a stigma of being less prepared than their peers who survived the gaokao, China’s grueling national college entrance exam. Many Han’s age applying to Tsinghua from Hong Kong were recent transplants from the mainland, with native-level Mandarin and academic foundations built in the mainland system. But the author saw the choice as an opportunity: Han would not only earn a degree in computer science, he would gain fluency in Mandarin and a first-hand understanding of modern Chinese society – a rare combination of skills in an increasingly interconnected world. Even the author, though, concedes he was partially guessing at the outcome, with no clear idea of what lay ahead for his son.

The journey did not start smoothly. After two weeks of COVID-19 quarantine, Han’s mother dropped him off at Tsinghua’s gates, and his first year was marked by struggle. The family feared they had made a catastrophic mistake. But gradually, things shifted: Han’s Mandarin improved in leaps and bounds, he grew accustomed to the academic rhythm of Tsinghua, he formed close personal relationships, and he began to lean into his strengths – strong organizational skills and disciplined time management – that set him apart. Professors welcomed him into their research labs, he published his first academic paper in an artificial intelligence conference, and by his senior year, he moved across campus with the confidence of any long-time student.

This past June 27, Han Feizi Junior graduated from Tsinghua University with a degree in computer science. The experiment worked far better than even the author had hoped. Far from the stigma that sometimes follows non-gaokao admits, Han gained everything the author promised: he achieved functional fluency in Mandarin and a deep, lived understanding of Chinese culture, exactly as the author predicted. He leaves as a perfectly bilingual, bicultural graduate with a strong quantitative background and proven research experience – exactly the rare, in-demand talent the author dreamed he would become, even if Han has no interest in following his father into investment banking.

The author goes on to draw a parallel between the anadromous life cycle of steelhead and the centuries-long migration pattern of the Fujianese people. One of China’s most widely dispersed diaspora communities, Fujianese can be found across every corner of the globe, from running small-town Chinese takeout restaurants in the United States to leading massive multinational business networks across Southeast Asia. But many have followed the anadromous path: leaving their adopted homes to return to their Chinese roots, just as steelhead return to their birth streams to spawn. The author’s own family carries this tradition: his great-grandfather, a patriarch, returned to Fujian from Indonesia after World War II to help rebuild the country, following in the footsteps of iconic Fujianese returnee Tan Kah Kee, founder of Xiamen University. Later generations left China again to build lives abroad, and now the great-grandson has returned to study at one of China’s top universities – part of a growing wave of diaspora youth choosing mainland higher education.

Closing the narrative, the author echoes two iconic meditations on paths home. Paul McCartney’s verse reminds readers that the long and winding road always leads back to where you belong, while Lu Xun’s famous observation on hope and roads notes that roads do not exist until many people walk them, turning an untrodden path into a clear way forward. For this anadromous graduate, and for a growing number of diaspora youth, the road to Tsinghua – once little-traveled – has become a well-worn path to success and belonging.

In the sun-dappled waiting room of Rajagiri Hospital’s hepatology clinic in Kochi, southern India, the air hangs thick with unspoken tension. Here, families grip tattered stacks of medical reports, their hopes pinned on the specialist inside, while patients weakened by end-stage liver disease wait quietly for a path forward. Few who enter this space would guess that the soft-spoken clinician greeting them is the same man who has upended India’s massive traditional medicine industry, sparked federal government inquiries, and become one of the most polarizing public figures in Indian healthcare.

Dr. Cyriac Abby Philips, known to over 300,000 followers on X as the outspoken “Liver Doc”, has built a reputation as a lightning rod for controversy since he began publicly challenging the safety and scientific validity of alternative and traditional Indian medicine. To his loyal supporters, he is a fearless defender of evidence-based care, shining a light on unregulated products that harm vulnerable patients. To his critics — which include thousands of alternative medicine practitioners, high-profile celebrities, and even India’s federal Ayush Ministry, which oversees traditional medicine — he is an abrasive, attention-seeking provocateur who disrespects India’s centuries-old cultural medical heritage.

Over the past six years, the backlash against Philips has been severe: he has faced 16 ongoing legal cases, been interrogated by police who traveled two days by train to question him over a social media post, and been the subject of two formal federal committee meetings convened solely to discuss his public criticism. Yet the man who confronts opponents with blunt, often uncompromising language online presents a far different face in person: calm, gentle, and deeply focused on the patients sitting across from his desk.

This combative online persona, Philips explains, is a deliberate choice, not a reflection of his true character. “They hate me. But they cannot invalidate the information I give,” he says without apology. “Sometimes you must make loud noises to be heard. I specially go after trolls, so they cannot deviate the attention from the message I am trying to give. If people think I’m rude or ill-tempered, even though it isn’t true, I’m willing to pay that price.”

Philips’ journey to this high-stakes public role was not one he ever planned for. Born into a medical family in Kerala — his father is one of the state’s most celebrated gastroenterologists — Philips initially dreamed of a career in writing and film, not medicine. He failed his first medical entrance exam, spent nine miserable months in a cramped residential coaching center, and only entered the field after a second attempt. It was not until his residency at a under-resourced 3,500-bed public hospital in Kolkata that he found his calling: watching overworked, under-resourced clinicians deliver compassionate care to desperate patients, he saw the profound human impact of medicine that he had never recognized before.

After training in hepatology in Delhi and returning to Kerala to help rebuild his family’s medical practice following a corporate takeover, Philips began to encounter a pattern of preventable harm that would shape the rest of his career. Time and again, he treated patients with severe liver damage caused by unregulated herbal remedies and homemade alternative treatments, marketed as safe and natural to millions of trusting Indians. One case that haunts him still: a six-year-old child brought to his clinic with acute liver failure after her family gave her a homemade herbal concoction to treat a common cold and fever.

That tragedy pushed Philips to formalize his research into the harms of unregulated traditional medicine. He immersed himself in the scientific and historical background of Indian alternative systems, published dozens of peer-reviewed studies documenting the link between traditional remedies and liver injury, and began sharing his clinical findings and research on social media to educate the public. When the Ayush Ministry disputed one of his published studies, he responded with a detailed, evidence-based rebuttal and continued his work. He has also led crowdfunded independent investigations into contaminated protein powders and low-quality generic drugs sold across India, and recently published a book documenting his experiences as a clinician.

Today, Philips limits his practice to just 25 patients a day — a fraction of the volume most of his peers see, a choice he made after the emotional toll of constantly caring for terminally ill liver patients and a near-fatal car crash while taking an urgent work call. Four years ago, he gave up drinking entirely, explaining that he could not ask his patients with alcohol-related liver disease to stop drinking if he continued the habit himself. Away from the clinic and social media, he is an avid gamer who prioritizes time with his wife and children, a far cry from his combative online image. His wife Teena, who has been with him since his residency in Kolkata, puts the difference simply: “He’s very patient… He’s not like that on social media. As a person, no.”

The personal and professional cost of Philips’ activism has been steep. He has spent millions of rupees on legal defense, despite some pro bono representation from sympathetic lawyers. A close colleague left India after being detained for questioning over a co-authored paper, and many researchers now refuse to be named on studies he publishes. He has received threats against his family, a burden that brings the fierce advocate to tears when he speaks of it, and he now takes constant safety precautions to protect his loved ones.

Still, Philips refuses to step back. For him, the work of informing the public about the risks of unregulated alternative medicine is worth any personal sacrifice. “Even before I started paying for legal expenses, I was already paying from my own pocket to analyse these medications,” he says. “The whole aspect of somebody being there for the public, letting them know the truth they would never know about — I think this is much more important than looking at your own safety and comfort.” “I want my children to remember me as somebody who stood for what he believed was right,” he adds.