Born: 1946
Title: Supreme Grand Secretary Treasurer (S.G.S.T.)
Temple: Temple No. 1 — Chicago, Illinois
- One of the longest-serving and longest-living members in the Moorish Science Temple of America’s recorded history
- Nearly seven decades inside the Moorish Science Temple of America — unbroken, without deviation
- Supreme Grand Secretary Treasurer under Supreme Grand Sheik and Chairman E. Braswell Bey
If you are searching today for proof that your ancient identity survived — that the nationality stripped from your ancestors was guarded, transmitted and restored whole against every force that tried to erase it — her life is that proof.
Raised Inside the Teachings
Sister Patricia Newton El did not come to the Moorish Science Temple of America through searching. She was brought into it before she could speak in full sentences — present at Temple meetings by the age of 3, long before she was old enough to formally join.
She joined formally at approximately 10 years of age, around 1956 — raised in the suburbs of Chicago by her aunt, Sister Pearl Leftwich El, the woman she called “Mama” and the single most formative force of her life.
Sister Pearl Leftwich El had found Drew Ali’s teaching through a chance encounter at her west side Chicago cafeteria, where men and women in fezes and turbans told her of Noble Drew Ali — a man who had come and gone before she ever knew his name.
“You mean there was a prophet and I didn’t know about it?” she said.
She went to a meeting. She joined. She never looked back. Whatever she walked out of that meeting carrying, she brought home and made it permanent.
In Sister Pearl Leftwich El’s house, Noble Drew Ali’s words were not studied. They were embodied.
Every morning without exception, before anyone left for school, the Moorish American prayer was said by herself and her sisters (including Sis. D. O’Neal Bey) — there was no leaving without it. Every night, the children gathered and read instructions from the Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a passage, sometimes a full chapter, the length determined by what Sister Pearl Leftwich El required that evening.
The word “hate” did not exist in that home. Love was not aspirational. It was structural.
Sister Newton El did not grow up learning about Drew Ali’s teachings — she grew up inside of his teachings…
The way a child grows up inside a language — naturally, until it is all she knows.
The Records, the Safe and the Letters
With no car, Sister Newton El rode the bus with her mother and sisters — from the suburbs into the city, to 4813 South Langley on Chicago’s South Side.
That address was the home of Sister Dealia Mealy El, widow of Supreme Grand Sheik and Chairman E. Mealy El — a woman who stood as the last guardian between Noble Drew Ali’s founding records and those who wanted to seize them…
Sister Dealia Mealy El held Noble Drew Ali’s original correspondence — letters written to him, letters written in his hand — locked in a large safe inside a closet in her home. She never discarded a single piece. She protected those records with everything she had.
The children who passed through that house knew the closet was completely off limits. They also knew, in the wordless way children absorb the gravity of adult life, that what was inside it carried a weight most people never get to feel.
Sister Patricia Newton El was in those rooms. In time, she was permitted to hold those letters in her hands.
That is a credential no academic institution can confer…
Holding the Faith Alone
There were no Moslem peers in the suburbs. Her friends were Christians, and some of their parents kept them at arm’s length from her — she didn’t believe in God, they said.
She did. She had never not believed.
She knew exactly who she was, what she carried and why it mattered. Sister Pearl Leftwich El had driven that clarity deep: do what is right, not what others do.
The isolation was not a wound. It was a proof.
This is the inheritance she carries — and the inheritance that most of her people were never given. The identity that slavery tried to bury, the nationality that was stripped and replaced with slave names like Negro, Black and Colored,
And the ancient truth that was hidden behind centuries of miseducation. Sister Newton El never lost it. She grew up with it pressed into her daily life before she could read, before she could choose, before the world had a chance to tell her she was something less…
A Life in Service
Sister Patricia Newton El serves as Supreme Grand Secretary Treasurer of the Moorish Science Temple of America under Supreme Grand Sheik and Chairman E. Braswell Bey — a title that places her among the most senior officers of The Moorish Science Temple of America..
Her faith, as she has described it, was never in danger of breaking. Not because the world made it easy, but because it was never held apart from life long enough to be threatened by it. It was the life. It remains the life.
If you are searching for the ancient roots that were stripped from your people, Sister Patricia Newton El stands as evidence that they were never completely surrendered by those who kept Noble Drew Ali’s teachings alive — and that your true nationality, your history, your name, has been returned over a century ago…