Wallace Fard Muhammad

• 1. Introduction

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  Wallace Fard Muhammad, often written as W. D. Fard, founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit and then disappeared around 1934. A survivor of his earliest addresses recalled what he told his first listeners: "My name is W. D. Fard and I came from the Holy City of Mecca. More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time has not yet come." The sociologist Erdmann Doane Beynon later interviewed about two hundred families who followed him. He concluded that virtually nothing was known about the man. Even his name changed from one telling to the next. So who was this stranger who gathered a movement in the black neighborhoods of Detroit? What were the records of his earlier life, and why do they point in so many directions? And what happened when police, newspapers and eventually the FBI tried to pin him down?

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• 2. A Man of Many Names

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  On his World War I draft card, Fard described himself as a citizen of Afghanistan, born in Shinka. Yet in 1924, when he married Carmen Treviño, a woman of Spanish ancestry, he said he had been born in Madrid. The Nation of Islam traditionally held that he was an Arab from Mecca. Scholars report that he variously described himself as white, black, Spanish, Arab, Afghan and, on one occasion, Jewish. Other theories make him a white person born in New Zealand, or Syrian, Moroccan, Bosnian or Albanian.

  Many scholars look toward the Indian subcontinent. Fard reportedly spent time at the Ahmadiyya Mosque, a movement prominent in Pakistan. He used Quran translations by South Asian Muslims and gave his followers South Asian Muslim names. His teaching about the Tribe of Shabazz may be tied to the Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Pakistan.

  The Canadian scholar John Andrew Morrow calls Fard a "racial and ethnic chameleon." Morrow points to the severity of segregation and white supremacy in the America of that era. He asks a blunt question: "Why would Master Fard pass for white; who wouldn't?"

  The paper trail itself has been rewritten recently. The scholar A. K. Arian believed Fard reached Port Townsend aboard the SS Tremont in 1904 as Khanialam Khan, a tamale vendor in Oregon. In 2025, Kevin Morris and Anton Batey showed that this man later took the name Khan Alley. He died on the 19th of November 1958 in Lodi, California. They also found a manifest listing "Wallie Dad Khan," who sailed from Hong Kong to San Francisco on the SS Coptic in 1907. He was associated with tamale vendors, and Fard was known to have later used the name "Wali Dadd." Morris and Batey added that the brother Sher Khan was not the man who applied for American citizenship.

  The FBI joined the hunt decades later. A memorandum dated the 16th of May 1957 admitted that no concerted effort had been made to locate and identify Fard. It urged an exhaustive search, since Elijah Muhammad named Fard as the source of all his teachings. Agents searched under several aliases, including Ford. On the 17th of October 1957 they interviewed Hazel Barton-Ford, who had been Wallie Ford's common-law wife. She described him as a Caucasian New Zealander. They also learned that their son, Wallace Dodd Ford, born on the 1st of September 1920, had died in 1942 while serving in the Coast Guard. The search closed on the 15th of April 1958, because immigration records matched none of the aliases.

  The Bureau then turned to disinformation. On the 15th of August 1959, it gave the Chicago New Crusader a story calling Fard a "Turkish-born Nazi agent who worked for Hitler in World War II." Other FBI efforts linked him to the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World and the Black Dragon Society. A memorandum dated the 19th of February 1963 describes the research as part of efforts to disrupt and curb the growth of the Nation of Islam. In July 1963 the FBI told the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Examiner that Fard was really Wallace Dodd Ford. The paper ran the story under the headline "Black Muslim Founder Exposed As White." Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X condemned black newspapers that reprinted the accusations without asking the Nation of Islam to respond. An August 1963 FBI memorandum admitted that it could not verify his birthdate or birthplace. The trail that the Bureau followed ran back through California and into Oregon, where newspapers had been noticing a tamale vendor since 1908.

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• 3. Tamales and Trouble

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  In 1908, newspapers in Eugene, Oregon, reported that a tamale vendor named Fred Walldad, nicknamed "Fred the Turk," had acquired a small house on wheels for use as a food cart. At that point in American history, "Turk" simply meant a Muslim. On Halloween, local boys took the wheels off the wagon and dropped it. The prank broke Fred's dishes and eggs and injured Fred himself, and a wheel was stolen. By the following February he had sold the lunchwagon and moved to Cottage Grove, where he leased a restaurant and lodging house.

  By 1912, the same trade appears in Salem, Oregon. Newspapers described a vendor named Fred Dadd, a naturalized American originally from New Zealand, attending his first baseball game. In 1913, Fard wrote an announcement for the newspaper complaining about police harassment. A police committee investigated, and its report was adopted. The mayor then told the chief of police to let Dodd sell his wares.

  In 1914 came the first serious legal trouble. Fard was arrested for allegedly inducing Laura E. Swanson to leave her husband for him, and he was released on a 1,000-dollar bond. A report on the 23rd of March described the charge as "assaulting a married woman." On the 20th of April 1914, Dodd married Pearl Allen, a white-passing member of the Klamath people, in Multnomah County. The next day a jury acquitted him. The Capital Journal explained that cross-examination had shown another person was in the house, and that the complaining witness had not cried for help. The marriage did not last. Divorce proceedings began by the 30th of August, and on the 14th of November he was arrested for larceny, accused of stealing from Pearl. She gave birth to a son the following year. A DNA test in 2024 suggested the boy was more likely than not biologically unrelated to Dodd.

  Fard then moved to Los Angeles under the name Wallie Dodd Ford. There he owned a restaurant, "Wallie's cafe," at 803 W. Third Street. The Nation of Islam contests the claim that Wallace Fard Muhammad and Wallie Dodd Ford were the same person. Ford was arrested by Los Angeles police on the 17th of November 1918 on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. By 1920 he was living in the city as 26-year-old Wallie D. Ford with his 25-year-old common-law wife, Hazel E. Ford, born Barton. Their son, Wallie Dodd Ford Jr., arrived that year. Soon afterward Hazel discovered that Ford used many aliases and had been dishonest about other matters. She left him, and he is said to have grown depressed and begun abusing drugs and alcohol.

  A marriage certificate dated the 5th of June 1924 joined Wallie Dodd Ford and Carmen Treviño, a Mexican-born woman of Spanish ancestry, in Santa Ana, California. Ford was arrested on the 20th of January 1926 for violating the California Woolwine Possession Act. He was arrested again on the 15th of February 1926 under the State Poison Act. A Spanish-language paper in Los Angeles called him a "street politician." On the 12th of June 1926, he was sentenced to between six months and six years at San Quentin State Prison. He was paroled on the 27th of May 1929.

  The 1930 census lists a Fard living in Chicago, working as a clothing salesman. According to some accounts, he was known inside the Moorish Science Temple there as David Ford-el. He claimed, or some members took him, to be the reincarnation of the temple's founder, Drew Ali. When the temple rejected his leadership, he broke away and moved to Detroit. There he would find thousands of recent arrivals from the rural South, and a bundle of silks to sell them.

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• 4. Silks and Scripture

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  Followers cite the 4th of July 1930 as the day Fard first appeared in Detroit. He went door to door in the city's black section, selling Oriental silks. Many of his customers were families who had recently moved north from the rural South. He told them the silks were the same kind their ancestors had worn in Mecca, and presented himself as a traveler from that land. When families offered him food, he reportedly ate what was put in front of him. He then advised them to avoid certain foods and promised health benefits if they did. At their invitation he returned to teach, bringing guests.

  In those first house meetings, Fard used the Bible as his textbook. It was the only religious book most of his audience knew well. The historian Patrick D. Bowen writes that early ministers regularly cited Bible passages to prove their claims. Elijah Muhammad later said Fard knew the Bible better than the Christians who had grown up with it. Lomax described him as well-versed in scripture and teaching in the manner of a Southern Baptist preacher. Beynon observed that as Fard's prestige grew, he became bolder in denouncing white people. He began attacking the Bible's teachings in ways meant to shock listeners and push them to an emotional crisis.

  Fard taught poor Southern black families during the Great Northward Migration, when ideas of scientific racism were widespread. He urged them to start and own their own businesses, eat healthy food, raise families and refrain from drugs and alcohol. In 1938, Beynon published a firsthand account of his interviews with Fard's followers in Michigan in the American Journal of Sociology. From those interviews, he concluded that Fard lived and taught in Detroit from 1930 to 1934.

  Muhammad, Ali, Karriem and Fardan were among the new names Fard gave to converts as part of their initiation. He taught that the old surnames came from white slaveowners and should be dropped. The new names, he said, restored a person's original identity and exposed the lies that hid the origins of the so-called Asiatic Blackman. Scholars note that Noble Drew Ali of the Moorish Science Temple of America had already handed out the surnames El and Bey, and that the term "slave name" was used there too. After Fard's disappearance, Elijah Muhammad kept up the practice and added the letter X, standing for the unknown.

  Attendance at the house meetings grew until listeners were split into groups and taught in shifts. The community then contributed money to rent a hall and make it a temple, and the movement was known as the Allah Temple of Islam. The Quran was soon introduced as the most authoritative text. Fard prepared manuals of the faith, and followers memorized them word for word. Within three years the movement reportedly reached 25,000 members in Detroit, Chicago and other cities. Beynon put his own count nearer eight thousand. He also noted that Fard organized the group so well that he receded into the background, rarely appearing in his final months in the city.

  Clara Poole, later renamed Clara Muhammad, first met Fard's teachings through her in-laws. They gave her hope and a sense of new possibilities and new memories. After one service, Fard asked whether anyone knew Elijah Poole. Clara introduced the teacher and his message to her husband, Elijah Poole, who later became Elijah Muhammad.

  Around October 1932, Fard appointed 17-year-old Burnsteen Sharrieff Mohammed as his personal secretary, with the title "Reformer." She remembered Tuesday picnics for Muslims only, with dancing, games and especially baseball, and prizes for the winners. One contest was dancing with Fard while a full glass of water sat on his head. She was so nervous that he let her go, and another girl won the prize. Fard called his dance the Waltz and said it was original music. She also remembered his theology: that Black people were God, so when she prayed she pictured that great mass of people. Soon after she took her post, a killing would send Fard out of the city.

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• 5. Murder and Exile

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  On the 20th of November 1932, Robert Harris, who had received the name Robert Karriem from Fard, led James J. Smith into a room with a makeshift altar. Twelve adult witnesses were present, along with Harris's wife and children. Smith believed he was being inducted into the Allah Temple of Islam. Asked whether he would sacrifice his life for Islam, he nodded. Harris stabbed him in the chest and then beat him to death with an axle rod.

  Neighbors called the police, and Harris confessed. His words were: "I had to kill somebody, I could not forsake my gods." Police launched a manhunt for Fard and another leader, Ugan Ali, and questioned both after their arrest. Ali told the Detroit News, "The society cannot be blamed for anything he did." The paper falsely suggested the killing was tied to the practice of Voodoo. Fard and Ali acknowledged leading the Allah Temple of Islam but vehemently denied teaching human sacrifice. The psychiatrist David Clark examined them and recommended further observation. A judge agreed, and both men were placed in straitjackets and padded cells.

  Five days after the murder, with Fard and Ali still in custody, Elijah Muhammad led over two hundred members into the court building. Elijah was then known as Elijah Karriem. The protesters staged a demonstration on the main floor, and police spent a full day clearing them out. On the 25th of November, Harris was arraigned for first-degree murder and pleaded guilty. His bizarre behavior in court convinced witnesses he was insane. On the 6th of December, three psychiatrists testified that he was legally insane, and he was committed to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminal Insane. He died there on the 19th of June 1935.

  The two leaders were released on conditions. Ali promised to help disband the Allah Temple of Islam, while Fard agreed to leave Detroit forever. On the 7th of December 1932, police put Fard on a train to Chicago. The Allah Temple of Islam was officially dissolved, but a new organization, the Nation of Islam, soon replaced it. Elijah Muhammad took over from Ali.

  In January 1933, Fard slipped back into Detroit and held secret meetings with followers. He left for a few weeks, returned, and resumed preaching on street corners. Police recognized him, and on the 25th of May he was arrested, booked and photographed. He was released and ordered out of the city again.

  Fard gave his community the name "Nation of Islam" and built a formal structure around its fast growth. The Muslim Girls' Training and General Civilization Class taught women to keep house, clean and cook. Men were drilled by captains as the Fruit of Islam. A Minister of Islam presided over the entire movement.

  On the 26th of September, Chicago police arrested Fard as he addressed an audience in a rented hall. The next morning, Judge Dunn dismissed the charge of disturbing the peace and let him go. Fard then made a third secret trip to Detroit. This time he preached that poison bombs would soon destroy the white man.

  The University of Islam was Fard's alternative to the Detroit public schools for school-aged children. By January 1934, local truant officers had noticed the pattern of dropouts and alerted the authorities. On the 27th of March, the Detroit Free Press declared that the "voodoo cult" had been revived, and the city began legal action against the school. Police raided it and arrested Elijah Muhammad. At trial, the fifteen-year-old student Sally Ali testified, according to press reports, that she had been taught that beheading four devils would win her a free trip to Mecca and a button. She also said she had been taught that poison gas and fighting would destroy Caucasians in 1934. Elijah Muhammad was convicted of running an unlicensed school but released on probation. Rumors circulated that police wanted both Fard and his chief aide dead. Elijah fled to Chicago, and most Detroit residents never saw Fard again.

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• 6. Lessons and Borrowed Ideas

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  In 1933, Fard began signing his name "W. F. Muhammad," for Wallace Fard Muhammad, on lessons written that year and the next. Beynon summarized their substance in a single claim. Black men in North America, he wrote, belonged to the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen from the Holy City of Mecca 379 years earlier. They were the original people and the noblest of nations, whose language, nation and religion Caucasians had taken away. To recover them, they had to regain Islam, Arabic and a culture of astronomy and higher mathematics, especially calculus. They also had to avoid hogs, ducks, geese, possums and catfish, give up stimulants, especially liquor, and clean both body and home. In return, Allah would carry them back to the Paradise of Mecca. Fard's own lessons, however, place the traders in Africa rather than Mecca. The group also taught that white people were devils created by a scientist named Yakub through eugenics, and part of Fard's teaching involved admiration for Japan.

  Elijah Muhammad described his teacher's curriculum in his 1965 book Message to the Blackman in America. Fard taught him about the knowledge of self, of God and of the devil. The lessons also covered the measurement of the earth, the other planets, and the history of the moon. According to Elijah, Fard declared the doom of America for its evils, and promised to heal his followers if they submitted. He even said he would eat rattlesnakes to free them, if necessary.

  Fard's own writings strike a similar tone. In one lesson, he told his followers that their study fulfilled the prophecies of all the former prophets. He promised that Allah would separate them from the devils, destroy those devils, and make the "Poor Lost-Founds" the rulers. Modern Nation of Islam theology calls Fard "God in Person," the "Messiah" and the "Mahdi."

  Critics saw something else. During and after his life, some accused Fard of being a conman who used mystery and charisma to swindle poor black people. In their telling, he sold new Muslim names and stirred up racial animosity by copying pieces of other Muslim sects and ideologies.

  The Jehovah's Witnesses supplied what has been called the most obvious non-Islamic source for his teachings. A Detroit newspaper described Fard as teaching from "The Bible of Islam." In 2023, that book was identified as Deliverance! by Joseph Franklin Rutherford of the Watch Tower Society. Fard also recommended radio broadcasts by Rutherford, Frank Norris and other millennial preachers. Charles Taze Russell, the Jehovah's Witness founder, like Fard, read the year 1914 as the start of an apocalypse. Both groups told members to refuse compulsory military service. Both taught that souls were not immortal and that heaven and hell were states of life on Earth rather than allegories.

  The Moorish Science Temple of America shaped him as well. Both groups assigned new names, taught African Americans to see themselves as Asiatics, wore the fez, and met in temples rather than mosques. Freemasonry has also been cited, and Elijah Pool, later Elijah Muhammad, had been a Freemason before meeting Fard. Scholars note that the teachings of Marcus Garvey were popular in San Quentin during Fard's time there.

  Fard's reading list was broad. He encouraged students to read James Henry Breasted's Conquest of Civilization, Hendrick van Loon's The Story of Mankind and books on Freemasonry. He also recommended the writings of Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Jewish forgery promoted by Ford. Police found literature by the anti-Jewish preacher Gerald Burton Winrod.

  Morrow describes the result as rooted in "a wide variety of ideas from both East and West." His list includes Twelver Shi'ism, Sevener Shi'ism, Druzism, Shi'ite Extremism, Babism, Baha'ism, Yezidism, Ahmadism and Sufism.

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• 7. Vanishing Act

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  A letter from Mexico, received in March 1934, was Fard's last known contact with the Nation of Islam. Morrow speculates that Fard may afterward have tried to return to the United States under another name.

  No one knows what became of him or how he died. Although he was a naturalized citizen, he may have been forced to accept voluntary deportation. In 1932, the Escanaba Daily Press reported that he was awaiting an immigration hearing. It has been suggested that he used the alias Mohammed A. Khan, who was arrested in Gary, Indiana, on the 4th of December 1933 for violating immigration laws.

  After leaving Detroit, Fard visited Hazel Barton, the mother of his child, in Los Angeles. She recalled that he ate only one meal a day, which matches the practice he promoted in the Nation of Islam. He was driving a new car with California plates, its seats covered in white sheets. He left the sheets with her and said he was going "back to New Zealand."

  For decades after he vanished, Elijah Muhammad insisted that Fard was alive and well. Fard, however, suffered from diabetes and had to carry sugar packets. Morrow notes the possibility that he died not long after he disappeared.

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• 8. A Contested Legacy

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  Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam from 1934 to 1975, first heard Fard teach in 1931. He said the two became inseparable between 1931 and 1934, and that he felt "jailed almost" because Fard taught him day and night. A handwritten lesson by Fard describes twelve Leaders of Islam conferring about the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. One of them, Mr. Osman Sharrieff, argued that the Nation would not return to its original land without a thorough knowledge of itself. So they sent a Messenger of their own, and the Nation of Islam understands that Messenger to be Elijah Muhammad. Fard told his leaders to copy the answers of Minister Elijah Muhammad. One lesson closes by noting that it holds 40 questions answered by Elijah Muhammad on the 20th of February 1934.

  Scholars disagree about where Fard's divinity came from. Some argue that Elijah Muhammad created it. Morrow replies that Fard identified himself as God to Detroit police, and that the psychiatrists who examined him reported delusions of Godhood. Morrow also argues that Fard taught that devils were unbelievers of all races. Under Elijah Muhammad, he says, the doctrine that whites were devils took center stage.

  When Elijah Muhammad died in February 1975, his son Wallace, later Warith, became the leader and changed course sharply. Where his father had seen Fard as a physical manifestation of Allah, Wallace called him a human who "had his own designs on the black community." The group ended its annual Savior's Day celebration, turned its temples into mosques and its ministers into imams, and replaced black nationalism with Islamic anti-racism. It also disbanded the Fruit of Islam.

  In a 2000s interview, Warith Deen Muhammad recalled the break with his father. He had told Elijah that he could more readily believe Elijah was God than that Elijah's teacher was God, because that teacher was a white man and Elijah said white people were devils. When he asked his mother what Mr. Fard had told them, she answered: "No, he did not. In fact he told us to not even call him Prophet, said that was too big a title for him."

  Also in 1975, Wallace Muhammad suggested that his newly appointed Oakland imam, Muhammad Abdullah, was Fard. Abdullah later retracted the claim, though the scholar Fatimah Fanusie has argued that he was indeed Fard. Mainstream scholars reject the idea, noting that Nation of Islam teachings would make Fard 97 years old in 1975. Morrow quotes Abdullah as saying that Fard was a real, light-complexioned man from the Middle East who had been jailed. Abdullah added that Elijah Muhammad built up the legend to attract the western mind to Islam.

  In 1978, Louis Farrakhan and a small group of supporters set out to rebuild what they considered the original Nation of Islam, on the foundations laid by Fard and Elijah Muhammad. In 1979 they founded a weekly newspaper, The Final Call, with a column by Farrakhan. In 1981 they held their first Saviours' Day convention in Chicago and reclaimed the name Nation of Islam. In a 2000s interview, Farrakhan said that Fard, a man born on the 26th of February 1877, was not the originator of the heavens and earth. The event still falls on the 26th of February, and in 2020 it drew an estimated 14,000 participants. In 2007, membership was estimated at 20,000 to 50,000.

  Fard's teachings influenced Malcolm X, Clarence 13X and Muhammad Ali, and indirectly Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They also echo through hip-hop. Jay-Z and Jay Electronica reference him in "We Made It," Brand Nubian in "Wake Up," and Ras Kass in "Riiiot!" In 2020, Busta Rhymes and Rick Ross released a song titled "Master Fard Muhammad."

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