Founder: Wallace Farad and/or Fard (c. 1887-1934)
Of the many Muslim organizations in the United States, including those organizations that call themselves Muslim but may not be recognized as such by Sunni or orthodox Islam, the largest is the Nation of Islam (NOI). This is the only organization to generate mass appeal based on its own version of Islam’s teachings and championing of black nationalism which advocates the unity of all black people, emphasizing their distinctiveness from and superiority to whites (Taylor, 1998:177). The first significant Black Nationalist movement was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) founded in 1914 by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). Garvey, the inspiration behind the Rastafarian movement sought to build an African state on the African continent for all diaspora Black people.
NOI has historical links with several earlier religious movements that preached the message of Black Nationalism including the Moorish Science Temple founded in 1913 in Newark, New Jersey, by the African American Noble Ali Drew (1866-1922) from North Carolina. Drew believed that connections could be established between African-American and Oriental peoples, and claimed that he was a reincarnation of the prophet Muhammad, an event heralded by Garvey among others. In 1927, after moving to Chicago, he produced the Holy Koran ofthe Moorish Temple of Science. There are clear differences between this version of the Qur’an and the orthodox Qur’an, the former following more closely Levi Dowling’s Aquarian Gospel of 1911. Drew died mysteriously after being implicated in a murder that occurred during a struggle over the leadership of his movement.
Suffering even greater economic misery on account of the Depression (1929) and from racial discrimination African-Americans responded with considerable enthusiasm to the message of Wallace D.Fard (pronounced Fa-ROD) (c. 1887-1934), whose ethnic origins and rise to the leadership remain largely unknown, but who claimed to come from Mecca. Fard used the Bible, which he saw as a stepping stone to the Qur’an, as the basis for persuading his African-American listeners that Islam not Christianity was the true religion of Africa and Asia.
The NOI under Fard began organizationally as a House Church until a temple in the form of a hall was hired in Detroit and named the Allah Temple of Islam. Fard became increasingly anti-white and encouraged African-Americans to understand and appreciate the glorious history of the African-Asian races. The end of Fard’s leadership is as mysterious as its beginnings and as his own ethnic identity. He was arrested, imprisoned in relation to the conviction of a sacrificial killing by a member in 1932 and then ordered out of Detroit and eventually disappeared. Fard was later deified as Allah, and Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975), son of a Baptist minister from Georgia and one of Fard’s officers, controversially assumed the leadership and took the title of Prophet and ‘sole messenger of Allah’. A leadership struggle soon followed and the movement split, some members moving with Elijah Muhammad to Chicago where he became known as ‘Spiritual Head of Muslims in the West’, ‘Divine Leader’ and ‘Reformer’. His ministers referred to him as ‘The Messenger of Allah to the Lost Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America’. He named his faction ‘Muhammad’s Temples of Islam’.
In 1942 Elijah Muhammad was imprisoned for preaching that African-Americans had an obligation not to serve in the Armed Forces, and while in prison he began what became one of the NOI’s principal activities, the conversion of prisoners and former prisoners. It was in prison that Malcolm Little, alias Malcolm X Shabazz, from Omaha, Nebraska, also son of a Baptist minister, was converted and recruited in 1947. This former Garveyite, later to be appointed by Elijah Muhammad as his personal assistant, experienced the worst of racism as he witnessed the Ku Klux Klan burn down his father’s home when he was six years old, and later encountered his father’s dead body mangled by a train on the railway tracks.
While Elijah Muhammad aimed his message mainly at African-Americans Malcolm X sought to turn the NOI in to a thoroughgoing Black Nationalist movement by involving Africans everywhere. A long running dispute with Elijah Muhammad concerning the propriety of the comment made on the assassination of President John F.Kennedy in 1963 by Malcolm X eventually led to the latter withdrawing and founding the Mosque Inc and its secular counterpart the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm X’s perception of whites changed as a result of his travels to Mecca and elsewhere which convinced him that they were not intrinsically racist. He was assassinated in February 1965, one of the assassins being a member of the NOI.
The transition to a more orthodox Muslim community by the NOI came with the confirmation, after much wrangling and opposition, of Wallace D. Muhammad as the successor to Elijah Muhammad who died in 1975. The changes involved giving the NOI a new name, the ‘World Community of al-Islam in the West’, calling ministers imams, and reducing Fard’s status from Allah to that of an ordinary mortal. Wallace also placed less stress on the ideology of Black Nationalism. These reforms created further division with Louis Farrakhan (b. 1933), then an imam, from the Bronx, New York, leaving the movement with the intention of reconstituting the old NOI. Though other factions also emerged to restore the NOI Farrakhan, who has acquired a reputation for anti-Jewish rhetoric and who is strongly opposed to Christianity, though not to Black Christians, has done most to refashion the movement in line with the teachings of Elijah Muhammad.
NOI teachings are many and complex, and the following is but the briefest of summaries. The teachings are as they were formulated under Elijah Muhammad and those which Louis Farrakhan was determined to uphold in the 1970s when he rejected Wallace D.Fard’s reforms. At the core of these teachings there is a distinctive cyclical notion of God who is not considered to be immortal. Every 25,000 years one God dies and passes on his knowledge and ‘godship’ to another. There is a ‘God of gods’ and the idea that different gods perform different functions, one creating the sun, another, the moon, and so on. Gods resemble human beings and like the Greek gods and the Traditional gods of Africa they marry, enjoy normal human pleasures and make mistakes, such as marrying a non-African woman. The first God was a man and all Gods are ‘Blackmen’ (Taylor, 1998:190). Human beings are divided into two races one black and one white, the former being self-created, and the ‘Original Man’ and the ‘maker and owner of the universe’. The authentic, original religion of the Black race was Islam, and all Black men are ‘god’. Allah is the supreme Blackman and, therefore, God of gods. Black people are believed to be the ‘descendants of the Asian black nation and of the tribe of Shabazz’ (Taylor, 1998:190). The beginning of all of this was sixty trillion years ago. Whites, who are evil by nature, were invented by a Dr Yakub, of the black race, and were taught to rule that race. Their religion is one of self-interest, and their rule will last for 6,000 years.
The millenarian (see Millenarianism) theme is strongly present in the teachings on the ending of white dominance, and, it is important to note, it is pacific in content. White rule will end with the arrival of a prophet sent by Allah—prophets are sent frequently by Allah—to predict ‘the coming of God’ who will appear at the ‘end of the world’ which is understood by NOI to mean the ‘end of the white race’. Although there has been some reinterpretation of Fard as God, originally Allah is believed to have come to Wallace Fard from Mecca on 4 July 1930 and from that point on Fard took the place of Allah, and Elijah Muhammad became his prophet in the place of the Prophet Muhammad. It was Elijah’s mission to teach Africans the ‘knowledge of Self, which is the essence of their redemption, their real identity as members of the Nation of Islam, their true place of origin Asia/Africa, their true God, Allah, and their true religion Islam. In authentic millenarian fashion, all of this is taught in relation to this world, with little speculation about the afterlife.
The NOI provides unusual example of religious change this time from heterodoxy to a more orthodox position, and back again, in contrast with the transition undergone by the Worldwide Church of God/Armstrongism in relation to mainstream Christianity. This notwithstanding, the NOI is now considered more orthodox than in the days of Ali Drew and Wallace Ford, and with greater orthodoxy has come an increase in membership. The NOI has grown from a small group of some eight thousand African Americans in the 1950s to around two million members today.
