The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A centralized and hierarchical group committed to black nationalism, it focuses attention on the black African diaspora, especially on African Americans. While describing itself as Islamic and using Islamic terminology, its religious tenets differ substantially from orthodox Islamic traditions. Scholars of religion characterize it as a new religious movement.
The Nation of Islam teaches that there has been a succession of mortal gods, each a black man named Allah, of whom Fard Muhammad was the latest. It claims that the first Allah created the earliest humans, the dark-skinned Original Asiatic Race, whose members possessed inner divinity and from whom all people of color descend. It maintains that a scientist named Yakub then created the white race, a group that lacked inner divinity and whose intrinsic violence led them to overthrow the Original Asiatic Race and achieve global dominance. Setting itself against the white-dominated society of the United States, the NOI campaigns for the creation of an independent African American nation-state and calls for African Americans to be economically self-sufficient and separatist. A millenarian tradition, it maintains that Fard Muhammad will soon return aboard a spaceship to wipe out the white-dominated order and establish a utopia. Members worship in buildings, varyingly called temples or mosques. Practitioners are expected to live disciplined lives, adhering to strict dress codes, specific dietary requirements, and patriarchal gender roles.
Wallace Fard Muhammad established the Nation of Islam in Detroit. He drew on various sources, especially Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America and black nationalist trends like Garveyism. After Fard Muhammad disappeared in 1934, the leadership of the NOI was assumed by Elijah Muhammad, who expanded the NOI's teachings, declared Fard Muhammad to have been the latest Allah, and built the group's business empire. Attracting growing attention in the late 1950s and 1960s, the NOI's influence expanded through high-profile members such as the black nationalist activist Malcolm X and the boxer Muhammad Ali. Deeming it a threat to domestic security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked to undermine the group. Following Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975, his son Wallace D. Muhammad took over the organization, moving it towards Sunni Islam and renaming it the World Community of Al-Islam in the West. Members seeking to retain Elijah Muhammad's teachings re-established the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan's leadership in 1977. Farrakhan expanded the NOI's economic and agricultural operations and continued to develop its beliefs, for instance by drawing connections with Dianetics.
Based in the United States, the Nation of Islam has also established a presence elsewhere, with membership open only to people of color. In 2007 it was estimated to have 50,000 members. The Nation has also influenced the formation of other groups like the Five-Percent Nation, United Nation of Islam, and Nuwaubian Nation. Muslim critics accuse the NOI of promoting teachings that are not authentically Islamic. Other critics, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, have characterized it as a hate group that promotes racism against white people, antisemitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric.
Definition Scholars of religion classify the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a new religious movement. Elsewhere, they have labeled it an African American religion, a black nationalist religion, an ethnoreligious movement, a religious nationalist movement, a social movement, and a form of esotericism. Given that extraterrestrial spaceships feature prominently in the group's teachings, scholars have also highlighted commonalities between the NOI and UFO religions. More broadly, the sociologist of religion Susan J. Palmer characterized the Nation as forming part of a "Black cultic milieu" in which it coexists alongside other black-oriented new religions, including Rastafari, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and the Nuwaubian Nation.
The Nation of Islam has existed in two organizational forms: the first, founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad in the 1930s and lasting until 1975, and the second, established by Louis Farrakhan in the late 1970s. Certain differences exist between these forms, with Farrakhan's Nation adapting existing teachings and permitting a greater role for women. As an organization, the Nation is highly centralized, hierarchical, and authoritarian. Although some members privately violate the Nation's rules on personal conduct, and may not fully embrace all of the group's teachings, practitioners generally demonstrate a high degree of uniformity and conformity.
Relationship to Christianity and Islam
The NOI has no holy text of its own. Instead, it draws on the Christian Bible and the Quran yet provides profoundly different interpretations of these scriptures compared to those typically found in normative Christianity and Islam. Having arisen within the Christian-majority United States, the Nation condemns Christianity, presenting it as a tool of white supremacy. To the group, whose members are commonly called "Black Muslims", their identification with Islam provides an alternative to mainstream, Christian-dominated American culture.
In describing itself as Islamic, the NOI seeks to reclaim what it regards as the historic Muslim identity of the African American people. The group's second leader, Elijah Muhammad, argued that "Islam is the natural religion of the Black Nation." The NOI views itself as part of the Islamic world, and incorporates Islamic elements into its practices, including the liturgical use of Arabic, the recitation of —the obligatory prayer services recited by Muslims—five times daily, and the adoption of a flag based on that of Muslim-majority Turkey.
Despite this, the Nation has little in common with mainstream Islam. Its claims about the nature of God and the afterlife differ fundamentally from Muslim teaching; similarly, it does not accept the standard Islamic belief that the Arabian religious leader Muhammad was God's final and most important messenger. Although using standard Islamic terms, it gives these completely different meanings to those understood by most Muslims. Mainstream Muslims generally see the NOI as a movement that selectively adopts Islamic ideas but is not truly Islamic. From mainstream Islamic perspectives, its teachings are heretical, with its theology being shirk (blasphemy). Accordingly, some scholars of religion have characterized it as "quasi-Islamic", or referred to it as "Fardian Islam", "pseudo-Islam", or "nontraditional Islam".
History
Background Islam existed in North America prior to the formation of the United States. African Muslims were among the Spanish expeditions that explored the continent during the early modern period, and were also among the enslaved people transported there via the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries. Although Islam died out among African Americans in the generations following the American Revolution, this historical association influenced the emergence of groups like the NOI in the early 20th century.
Various older movements influenced the NOI, including African American Christianity, Freemasonry, and the Jehovah's Witnesses. However, the scholar of religion Dawn Gibson characterized the Nation as having principally been "born out of a fusion" between the Garveyist political movement and the Moorish Science Temple of America. Central to Garveyism was the Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who lived in the US from 1916 to 1927 and who formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). Garveyism gave the Nation its black nationalism, including its emphasis on black self-sufficiency and enterprise. The second key influence, the Moorish Science Temple, promoted an idiosyncratic religion that its followers claimed was Islamic. This had been established in 1913 by the African American Noble Drew Ali in Newark, New Jersey; he maintained that African Americans should refer to themselves as "Moorish Americans", reflecting what he believed were their connections to the Muslim Moors of North Africa.
Wallace Fard Muhammad
The NOI was founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad, who began preaching to Detroit's African Americans in July 1930. Fard Muhammad claimed to be an Arab from Mecca who had come on a mission to the African American people, whom he called the "Nation of Islam", to restore them to their original faith. Later, the Nation began to teach that Fard Muhammad had been the latest Allah (God). They claim he was born in Mecca on February 26, 1877, the son of a black Meccan and a white woman from the Caucasus Mountains. Being half-white, the NOI maintain, was necessary to allow Fard Muhammad to move freely in white society.
Outside the Nation, various theories have been proposed as to Fard Muhammad's identity. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) matched Fard Muhammad's fingerprints to those of Wallie D. Ford, who had a record of arrests and had served a three-year sentence for drug charges. Ford had been released in May 1929, a year before Fard Muhammad's appearance. FBI reports suggest he was a foreign national who entered the US illegally in 1913. The NOI reject Fard Muhammad's identification as Ford, claiming that the FBI forged this evidence.
Fard Muhammad 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 established the Nation's administration, its school system, and both the Fruit of Islam paramilitary for men and the Muslim Girls Training School for women. His following grew rapidly, with his meetings, held three days a week, attracting 7,000 to 8,000 people, mostly southern migrants. One of his most significant disciples was the African American Elijah Poole, who joined in 1931; Fard Muhammad appointed him supreme minister of the Nation and renamed him Elijah Muhammad. In 1933, Elijah Muhammad set up a new NOI temple on Chicago's South Side.
The early NOI faced problems from law enforcement. In 1932 the Detroit Police Department arrested an NOI member for murder. The police then raided the Nation's headquarters and arrested Fard Muhammad, but he was soon released. He would be subsequently arrested several further times, with his September 1933 Chicago arrest for disorderly conduct constituting his last known verified whereabouts. In 1934, Fard Muhammad disappeared without notifying his followers or designating a successor.
Elijah Muhammad's leadership
Elijah Muhammad then became head of the Nation, relocating its headquarters to Chicago, and transmitting his ideas through his publications and speeches. Under his leadership, the NOI's theology took its distinctive form; Elijah Muhammad claimed that Fard Muhammad had been the latest Allah, who had departed the Earth but left Elijah behind as his messenger.
During the Second World War, many Nation members refused the military draft, leading the FBI to arrest 65 of them, including Elijah Muhammad, in September 1942. Elijah remained imprisoned until August 1946, during which time his wife, Clara, largely ran the organization. Despite these set-backs, Elijah Muhammad oversaw the Nation's development into a multi-million dollar business empire incorporating apartments, factories, farms and a small bank. He himself lived at a villa named The Palace in Chicago's Hyde Park area, and in winter moved to a ranch outside Phoenix, Arizona.