Nation of Islam

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nation of Islam began with a stranger preaching to African Americans in Detroit in July 1930. He gave his meetings three days a week, and they drew crowds of 7,000 to 8,000 people, most of them migrants from the American South. The man called himself Wallace Fard Muhammad. Within a few years he would be gone, leaving behind a movement that was more durable than he was.

  Who was this preacher, and where had he really come from? What did his listeners come to believe about God, race and the end of the world? How did a group that most Muslims reject draw in figures as famous as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali? And why do some people see the Nation as a source of dignity while others call it a hate group? The answers run through gods who die, a spaceship in the sky, a business empire, and a long struggle over what the movement was for.

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• 2. A Stranger From Mecca

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  Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican black nationalist, lived in the United States from 1916 to 1927 and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. His thinking gave the Nation its emphasis on black self-sufficiency and enterprise. The second major strand came from Noble Drew Ali, who founded the Moorish Science Temple of America in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913. He taught that African Americans should call themselves "Moorish Americans", reflecting what he saw as their link to the Muslim Moors of North Africa. The scholar Dawn Gibson described the Nation as principally "born out of a fusion" of these two movements. African American Christianity, Freemasonry and the Jehovah's Witnesses also left marks.

  Fard Muhammad told his Detroit audiences that he was an Arab from Mecca who had come on a mission to African Americans. He called them the "Nation of Islam" and said he wanted to restore their original faith. The Nation later taught that he was the latest Allah, born in Mecca in 1877 to a black Meccan and a white woman from the Caucasus Mountains. Being half-white, the Nation maintains, allowed him to move freely in white society.

  Outsiders have offered a different identity. The Federal Bureau of Investigation matched his fingerprints to those of Wallie D. Ford, a man with a record of arrests who had served a three-year sentence on drug charges. Ford was released in May 1929, a year before the preacher appeared in Detroit. FBI reports suggested he was a foreign national who had entered the country illegally in 1913. The Nation rejects the identification and claims the FBI forged the evidence. Critics outside the group have gone further and described Fard Muhammad as a petty criminal who swindled his followers.

  Whatever his past, he built institutions quickly. He wrote two manuals, the Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam and the Teaching for the Lost Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way. He set up an administration and a school system. He also created the Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary body for men, and the Muslim Girls Training School for women. In 1931 a disciple named Elijah Poole joined, and Fard Muhammad renamed him Elijah Muhammad and appointed him supreme minister. In 1933 Elijah Muhammad opened a new temple on Chicago's South Side.

  Trouble with the law followed the movement. In 1932 the Detroit Police Department arrested a Nation member for murder, then raided the headquarters and arrested Fard Muhammad, who was soon released. More arrests followed, and a September 1933 arrest in Chicago for disorderly conduct marks his last verified whereabouts. In 1934 he disappeared without warning his followers or naming a successor. In Chicago, the follower he had renamed was left to explain what had happened.

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• 3. Between Bible And Quran

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  "Islam is the natural religion of the Black Nation," Elijah Muhammad argued. That claim sat on top of a strange foundation, because the Nation has no holy text of its own. It draws on the Christian Bible and the Quran but reads both in ways that depart sharply from mainstream Christianity and Islam. Having arisen in a Christian-majority country, it condemns Christianity as a tool of white supremacy. Its members are commonly called "Black Muslims", and the Nation presents Islam as the reclaiming of a lost African American identity.

  The borrowings from Islam are easy to see. The Nation uses Arabic in its liturgy, recites the salah five times a day, and adopted a flag based on that of Turkey. Yet it does not accept that the Arabian leader Muhammad was God's final and most important messenger. Its teachings on God and the afterlife differ fundamentally from Muslim doctrine, and it gives familiar Islamic terms entirely different meanings. Mainstream Muslims generally call its theology heretical, a form of shirk. Some scholars have labeled it "quasi-Islamic", "Fardian Islam", "pseudo-Islam" or "nontraditional Islam".

  The Nation's God is a person. Each Allah is a flesh-and-blood black man rather than a spirit, and none is immortal. A typical Allah lives around 200 to 300 years before a successor takes over. Fard Muhammad is counted as the latest and is called "God in person". The Nation teaches that although he disappeared in 1934, he would live for another 409 years. Elijah Muhammad declared that Fard Muhammad had left the Earth but had left him behind as the messenger. Because the Nation professes one God while speaking of many, some readers interpret it as polytheistic.

  The Nation also holds that "God is man and man is God, that God has a presence inside human individuals." Black people are therefore a "nation of Gods". By following the Nation's teachings, adherents are told, they can recognize their inner godliness and discover psychic powers. Elijah Muhammad himself claimed telepathic abilities.

  Death carries no comfort in this system. "When you are dead, you are DEAD," Elijah Muhammad wrote, and he taught that no spiritual realm exists beyond the material universe. Heaven, the Nation says, is a lie that white Christians use to keep black people docile. The scholars Ana Belén Soage and Jason Eric Fishman call this theology "completely divorced" from mainstream Islam, where God is single, eternal and non-anthropomorphic. The Nation's account of how the first Allah came to exist begins in darkness.

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• 4. Original Race And Yakub

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  Seventy-six trillion years ago, in the Nation's telling, nothing existed but darkness. Then the first Allah willed himself into being, spending 6 million years shaping himself into the form of a black man. He went on to create the Sun and planets, along with fellow black gods who lived mostly on Earth but also on Mars. He and 23 others formed a ruling council of imams, 12 greater and 12 lesser. The Nation calls these beings "god-scientists". They belong to the "Original" or "Asiatic" race, divided into 13 tribes. Because the account makes humanity the creation of the first Allah rather than a product of evolution, it amounts to a distinctive form of creationism.

  One god-scientist rebelled. Sixty-six trillion years ago, the story goes, he tried to destroy the Earth with explosives, and the blast threw a chunk of its mass into orbit, where it became the moon. One of the 13 tribes was trapped there and died from lack of water. Of the 12 tribes left on Earth, the most resilient was the Tribe of Shabazz. They settled in Egypt's Nile Valley and around Mecca, a region the Nation calls "East Asia" because it believes Asia and Africa were once one continent. Elijah Muhammad claimed that their move into the "jungles of East Asia", meaning Africa, gave them Afro-textured hair. The Nation teaches that the Original Race was Muslim by nature, and that many members created heretical deviations such as Hinduism.

  In this framework "black" has a wider meaning than in most American usage. It covers everyone not of West European genetic origin, including Asians, North Africans and Native Americans. Even some Eastern Europeans, such as Albanians, are counted. Elijah Muhammad spoke of "black, brown, yellow and red" people together as "black mankind", set against the "white race".

  The origin of that white race is told through Yakub. The fullest version appears in Elijah Muhammad's 1965 book Message to the Blackman. Yakub is described as a black scientist and a child prodigy who, by the age of 18, had mastered everything Mecca's universities could teach. He attracted a following and caused trouble, so the Meccan authorities exiled him and 59,999 followers to Pelan, which the Nation identifies as the Mediterranean island of Patmos. There he ran a selective breeding program, and children judged too dark were killed at birth. Over several centuries, the Nation says, this produced a blonde, light-skinned people.

  The Nation teaches that this white race is degenerate, sub-human and without inner divinity, and that it is intrinsically prone to lying, violence and brutality. Elijah Muhammad repeatedly called whites "the devil". Various academic commentators have characterized these views as racist. According to the story, the whites sowed discord among black people and were exiled to the caves of "West Asia", meaning Europe. There, the account says, their attempts to restore their blackness produced apes and monkeys. The ruling Allah sent prophets to help them develop. The first was Musa, or Moses, who taught them to cook and wear clothes. Jesus too was a prophet sent to civilize them, and the Nation rejects the Christian belief in his virgin birth, his role as Messiah, and his crucifixion and resurrection.

  The Nation holds that the ruling Allah permitted the white race to rule the Earth for 6000 years, a period that ended in 1914. The purpose, it says, was for black people to discover humanity's capacity for evil and learn to defeat it. Under that rule the Tribe of Shabazz was enslaved and shipped to the Americas, where most forgot their true names, their Arabic language and their Muslim identity. Christianity, which the Nation labels "white man's religion", took their place. Louis Farrakhan later applied the framework to modern problems, claiming that the white establishment encouraged gang culture, flooded black neighborhoods with drugs and created AIDS. In this reading, the United States is Babylon, the city the Bible presents as a symbol of oppression.

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• 5. Mother Plane And Nation-State

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  Elijah Muhammad described it as "a small human planet". The Nation calls this vessel the Mother Plane, the Mother Ship or the Wheel, and teaches that it is the Merkabah described in the Book of Ezekiel, 1:4-28. Fard Muhammad, as Allah, lives aboard with many of his scientists, and smaller "baby planes" are docked inside it to travel to Earth. Louis Farrakhan has claimed that Elijah Muhammad never died and now lives on the ship. In 1985, Farrakhan said, he was teleported aboard it from Tepotzotlán in Mexico and discussed the Nation's future with Elijah Muhammad. Because spaceships feature so heavily in these teachings, scholars have compared the Nation to UFO religions.

  The Nation is millenarian, and the ship is central to its picture of the end. When the Mother Plane appears above the Earth, it will carry the righteous aboard. The baby planes will then bury bombs beneath the surface, and their detonation will wipe out the old, white-dominated order. The Earth's atmosphere will burn for 390 years and take another 610 years to cool. After that, the ruling Allah will return the righteous to a new black paradise. In The Supreme Wisdom, Elijah Muhammad wrote that "Peace, joy and happiness will have no end," promising the finest food and silk clothes interwoven with gold. The Nation has taught that the white elite know the end is coming, and that American space exploration and the Strategic Defense Initiative are futile attempts to shield themselves.

  Dates for the apocalypse have come and gone. In the early 1960s, Elijah Muhammad predicted it for 1965 or 1966. Farrakhan later said the Gulf War of 1990 would spark it, and Tynetta Muhammad expected it in 2001.

  On earth, the Nation's political program centers on black unity. It seeks to purge black people of any sense of white superiority or black inferiority, and it teaches instead that the black race is superior. It is also separatist and rejects integration, which put it at odds with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It criticized integrationists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, calling them "Uncle Tom Negroes".

  As compensation for the unpaid labor of enslaved ancestors, the Nation has called for a sovereign African American nation-state in the southern United States. Elijah Muhammad said the US should financially support it for 20 to 25 years. Farrakhan proposed that African countries set aside land for the diaspora, as reparation for West African complicity in the slave trade.

  The Nation rejects Pan-Africanism. "The Black man in Africa is our brother," Elijah Muhammad said, but "our central responsibility is with the Black man here in the wilderness of North America." Its origin myths name Mecca, not Africa, as the home of African Americans, and its writings treat Africa as the least desirable of the Original Asiatic lands. The scholar Michael Muhammad Knight argued that Elijah Muhammad "upheld white supremacist tropes" about African cultures, citing his complaint about "savage dress and hair styles" and his wish to "civilize Africa". At various points the Nation has even run a shadow ministry, serving as a prototype for governing the state it hopes to lead.

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• 6. Elijah And Malcolm

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  In September 1942, the FBI arrested 65 Nation members, including Elijah Muhammad, after many refused the military draft during the Second World War. He stayed in prison until August 1946, and his wife, Clara, largely ran the organization in his absence. Even so, he oversaw its growth into a multi-million dollar business empire of apartments, factories, farms and a small bank. He lived in Chicago's Hyde Park in a villa called The Palace, and spent winters at a ranch outside Phoenix, Arizona. Through his publications and speeches he gave the Nation's theology its distinctive form.

  Membership grew substantially in the latter part of the 1950s. In 1959 the FBI encouraged the media to attack the group, and the American press increasingly cast it as anti-American and black supremacist. The coverage backfired, because the attention helped recruitment. In 1962, Los Angeles police raided a Nation temple and one member was killed. In 1963, a schism at Temple Number 7 in Harlem produced a new movement, the Five Percent Nation of Islam.

  Malcolm X rose swiftly through the hierarchy in these years. In 1960 he launched the newspaper Muhammad Speaks, which reached a circulation of over 600,000. In 1963 he became the Nation's first national representative. His travels took him to Britain, where he met Michael de Freitas, who joined the Nation and formed a British branch. In March 1964, Malcolm X left to become a Sunni Muslim and then criticized Elijah Muhammad's extramarital affairs. He was assassinated in February 1965, and three Nation members were convicted of the killing the following year.

  The boxer Muhammad Ali had encountered the Nation in 1961. When he announced his membership in 1964, he drew significant criticism from the media.

  In 1972 the Nation bought the St. Constantine Greek Orthodox Church in Chicago and turned it into its headquarters temple, Mosque Maryam. By 1974 it had a temple, mosque or study group in every US state and in the District of Columbia. Relations with law enforcement stayed strained. A policeman was shot and killed in 1972 during a search of a Nation mosque in Harlem, and the FBI ran a renewed counterintelligence project from the late 1960s onward. Other American Muslim groups increasingly condemned the Nation as un-Islamic, and in 1973 Nation members killed seven of Hamaas Abdul Khaalis' Hanafi Muslims.

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• 7. Succession And Revival

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  Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, and his son Wallace D. Muhammad began what he called the movement's "Second Resurrection". He rejected many of the Nation's idiosyncratic teachings and steered it toward Sunni Islam. Temples became mosques and ministers became imams. The Fruit of Islam was disbanded, black nationalism was abandoned, and the ban on white members was lifted. He still wanted to raise the status of black people, and he invited African Americans to call themselves "Bilalians", after the 7th-century African Muslim Bilal ibn Rabah.

  The organization was renamed the World Community of al-Islam in the West in November 1976, then the American Muslim Mission in April 1978. Wallace Muhammad said his father had intended these changes and that Fard Muhammad had founded the Nation to introduce African Americans to Sunni Islam gradually. He also faced hard finances. In 1976 he estimated the Nation's net worth at $46 million but admitted to a severe cash flow problem, millions of dollars in back taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service, and losses on its farming. Most mosques accepted the reforms, but some rejected them and formed small splinter groups in Detroit, Atlanta and Baltimore. In 1985 he disbanded the American Muslim Mission and told followers to affiliate with their local mosques.

  Louis Farrakhan led the opposition. Born in the Bronx to Caribbean migrants, he had become minister of the Nation's Harlem Temple in 1964 and a national representative in 1967. In 1977 he and other disaffected members began rebuilding the Nation of Islam, and he presented himself as Elijah Muhammad's true successor. The revived group re-established the Fruit of Islam and bought much of its predecessor's property, including the Chicago Palace. In 1979 Farrakhan launched a newspaper, The Final Call, which had a circulation of 500,000 by 1994. The first convention came in 1981, and membership rose rapidly from the mid-1980s. The Nation built links in Africa, sought closer ties with Muslims worldwide, and opened its first British mosques in the 1990s.

  Farrakhan also kept adding to the doctrine. Masonic elements and numerology became important in his speeches. In the 1990s he was introduced to the Church of Scientology, and in 2010 he publicly embraced its system of Dianetics, urging members to undergo auditing from the Church.

  He pushed social outreach as well. In 1989 he launched a campaign against gang violence and helped persuade two of the country's largest gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, to sign a ceasefire in 1992. In 1995 he organized the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., the largest black demonstration in US history.

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• 8. Discipline And Judgment

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  Charles 2X and Charles 3X are not typos. Members are asked to drop names inherited from slave-owners, and from the mid-20th century the Nation encouraged using "X" as a surname, standing for an "ex-slave" and marking a lost ancestral name. Numbers separate members who would otherwise share a name. In the early years, Fard Muhammad charged $10 for bestowing a new name. Members are expected to obey the law, hold a job, stay punctual, avoid buying on credit and never gamble. Men typically keep their hair short, wear suits with ties or bowties, and go without beards. Women dress modestly, in long sleeves and no trousers, and are encouraged to cover their heads.

  Food is regulated too. "Meat was never intended for man to eat," Elijah Muhammad wrote in How to Eat to Live, urging followers to live mainly on fruit, vegetables and certain grains. Pork is forbidden, and the Nation discourages fast food, white flour and additives. He claimed that eating once every 24 hours would bring a life of 150 years, and eating once every seven days would bring 1,050 years. Alcohol, tobacco and recreational drugs are prohibited. Saviours' Day on the 26th of February, which members hold to be Fard Muhammad's birthday, is the most important date of the year and the occasion for the annual national convention.

  Economic independence is a doctrine in its own right. The Nation has created the Salaam restaurant chain, the Shabazz bakeries, the Fashahnn Islamic clothing range, the Clean 'N Fresh skin and haircare products, and Abundant Life Clinics. In 1985 it launched POWER, short for People Organized and Working for Economic Rebirth, to redirect black purchasing power toward black-owned businesses. Its slogan on land is "the farm is the engine of our national life." By the early 1970s it owned 20,000 acres in Michigan, Alabama and Georgia. In 1994 it bought 1,556 acres near Bronwood, Georgia, and established Muhammad Farms, with the stated hope of providing at least one healthy meal a day for every African American.

  The Nation also runs its own Muhammad Universities of Islam, mostly elementary schools, because it believes the public school system perpetuates white supremacy. Farrakhan has said the Nation needs to give black children "an education to make them Gods". Its gender teachings are conservative and patriarchal. Even so, Clara Muhammad led the group in the 1940s, and in 1998 Ava Muhammad became the first woman minister, heading Mosque Number 15 in Georgia.

  The Nation does not publish its membership, and no census exists. It reached approximately 8,000 under Fard Muhammad, and in 2007 the scholar Lawrence A. Mamiya suggested around 50,000. Recruiters call their efforts "fishing for the dead" and work through street-corner lectures, mass rallies and prison outreach. Malcolm X was among those recruited in prison. The historian Zoe Colley thought poor men were drawn by a chance to "reclaim their manhood and sense of pride".

  Judgments of the Nation split sharply. By the 1990s its influence among black youth far exceeded its membership and was evident among hip hop artists such as Public Enemy and Ice Cube. A 1994 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of African Americans who knew of Farrakhan viewed him favorably. The sociologist A.A. Akom said the Nation had a reputation for "speaking truth to power".

  Critics are equally firm. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP called the Nation a "hate group", and the Southern Poverty Law Center accused it of promoting an "innate black superiority over whites". The Anti-Defamation League and others have accused Farrakhan and the Nation of antisemitism. Farrakhan has promoted tropes about a Jewish cabal controlling the US government, banks and universities, and has called Judaism a "dirty religion". The Nation also built links with white far-right groups on the strength of a shared belief in racial separatism. George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party spoke at its 1962 Savior's Day rally. Muammar Gaddafi was for many years its most prominent foreign backer, and his government lent the Nation $3 million, interest-free, in 1972.

  In 2013 the scholar Priscilla McCutcheon noted that the Nation remained comparatively small yet had "a wide discursive reach."

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