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NATION OF ISLAM
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7351 South Stoney Island Ave.
Chicago, IL
60649
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Phone :773-324-6000
URL :http://www.noi.org/
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- Afrocentric organization founded in 1930 by Wallace Dodd Fard
- Early leader Elijah Muhammad taught that the white race was created 6,000 years ago by a renegade black scientist named Yakub
- In the 1950s, Malcolm X brought the organization to prominence
- In the mid-1960s, Louis Farrakhan assumed control of the organization
- Farrakhan has spoken out against “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers”
In the most recent issue of the Nation of Islam’s publication The Final Call, Minister Louis Farrakhan condemned the United States for seeking “to change Islam, to make Islam suitable and non-threatening to Western hegemony over the entire world.” “[T]he war is not just against brutal dictators,” he said. “The war, at the root, is against Islam. The government will not admit to that, but I see signs. In Iraq, when the Shiites asked for a popular election, knowing that they are 60 percent of the population of Iraq, they said they wanted an Islamic government. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, ‘We will not have any of that.’ If they want an Islamic government that’s not democratic, America will not tolerate that. . . . But I say to you that there’s no way that I, as a Muslim, could countenance my children or grandchildren fighting a war against fellow believers in any part of the world.” Farrakhan further impugned the U.S. government for supporting “the State of Israel on Palestinian lands.” Such denunciations of America and Israel have typified the rhetoric emanating from the Nation of Islam for decades.
The Nation of Islam (NOI) was founded in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace Dodd Fard, an itinerant salesman. Various identities have been discovered for Fard: the FBI traced him to Portland under the name Wallie D. Ford; Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad referred to him as Wallace D. Fard, of Mecca. His common-law wife claimed his real name was Fred or Wallace Dodd of New Zealand; different Muslim writers have given an Arab version of his name, Wali Farad; and one theory claims that he was a renegade rabbi from New York named Arnold Josiah Ford.
Fard’s movement, building on the honorably conceived if woefully executed Afrocentricism of Marcus Garvey and the visionary lunacy of Timothy Drew’s Moorish Temple of Science, was based on traditional Islamic teachings augmented by, and interlaced with, obscure mathematical, Gnostic, and heretical accretions, including an identification of all blacks as first, Asiatic, and second, God. This message resonated among American blacks who had migrated north, seeking to escape racial oppression and rural poverty; the Depression had eradicated the nascent prosperity that the industrial jobs of northern cities had initially afforded.
One of Fard’s earliest converts was Elijah Poole, a grade-school dropout and alcoholic Georgian who had moved to Detroit in 1923. By 1931, Poole had become known as Elijah Muhammad, and upon Fard’s disappearance in 1934, he became head of the NOI. Various theories have been set forth about Fard’s disappearance. He had left Michigan in 1933 and settled in Chicago. According to some, he died after being beaten while in the custody of Chicago police, but later newspaper accounts report that he returned to New Zealand after first visiting an ex-wife in Portland.
Elijah Muhammad moved to Washington, D.C. in 1935 and promptly began proselytizing for the NOI in different cities throughout the U.S. He claimed that Fard was actually Allah, the reincarnation of Jesus, the prophet the world had been awaiting for the last 2,000 years, and the Son of Man. Muhammad was arrested in 1942 for refusing to register for the military draft; he urged all Muslims to resist fighting against the Fascist threat, and openly favored the Japanese as Asiatic heroes resisting white oppression.
In 1965, Muhammad published a 300-page book titled Message to the Blackman in America, in which he explained that Allah had originally created the black race before all others, followed sequentially by the brown, red, and yellow races. The white race, said Muhammad, was created some 6,000 years ago, not by Allah but by a renegade black scientist named Yakub. According to Muhammad, the process by which Yakub created whites involved extracting the “brown germ” from the “black germ” and in turn, grafting whites. In Muhammad’s view, “the whole Caucasian race is a race of devils . . . the evil and murderous race.”
Muhammad retained effective control over the NOI for 44 years, but by far the most visible spokesman of the movement was Malcolm X. Convicted of robbery in 1946, he converted to the NOI in 1947 and, upon his parole in 1952, began working for Muhammad as an organizer. Malcolm was responsible for a considerable increase in NOI membership. In 1964 Malcolm made a hajj to Mecca, which led him to reject his formerly held notion that all whites were evil. He embraced a species of revolutionary Marxism which was not overtly racist, and this attitude shift put him at odds with Muhammad. Also in 1964, Malcolm publicly revealed that Muhammad had impregnated several of his teenage secretaries, in blatant violation of Muhammad’s own admonitions against sex outside of marriage (two of Muhammad’s secretaries filed paternity suits against him).
When Malcolm made these revelations, an anathema was pronounced on him and he was suspended from his post as the leader of the Harlem mosque. He was replaced by Louis Farrakhan, who was outraged at what he perceived as Malcolm’s traitorous disloyalty. Ten weeks before Malcolm was assassinated, Farrakhan denounced him in the NOI newspaper Muhammad Speaks. “Only those who wish to be led to hell, or to their doom, will follow Malcolm,” Farrakhan wrote. “The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape, especially after such evil, foolish talk about his benefactor; such a man is worthy of death.” On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was killed in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom by three gunmen with ties to the NOI.
As recently as 1993, Farrakhan tried to justify Malcolm X’s assassination when he said in a speech, “Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with [Malcolm] like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? A nation has to be able to deal with traitors and cut-throats and turncoats.” In May 1995, however, Farrakhan spoke for the first time in repentant tones about the slaying, and he admitted to having “helped create the atmosphere” that led to it. “I may have been complicit in words that I spoke leading up to 21 February,” he said. “I acknowledge that and regret that any word that I have said caused the loss of life of a human being.” Immediately thereafter, however, he named the U.S.government as the real villain that had fomented zeal and bitterness inside the NOI’s ranks.
Malcolm X was by no means the only person toward whom Farrakhan has openly aimed menacing words. In 1984, for example, Farrakhan publicly threatened Milton Coleman, a black Washington Post reporter, with death. He portrayed Coleman as a traitor for having revealed that Jesse Jackson, in a conversation with campaign aides, had referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” “One day soon we will punish you with death,” Farrakhan said to Coleman.
Upon Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, his son Wallace Deen Muhammad took over the movement and attempted to integrate it with mainstream Islam. This attempt eventually led to a schism within the NOI; at present three organizations, one in Baltimore, one in Atlanta, and one in Detroit, claim to be the authentic NOI, but by far the most recognized group is that headed by Farrakhan, headquartered at the Mosque Maryam in Chicago. Farrakhan initially rejected the integrationism favored by Wallace Deen Muhammad and his successors, although unlike Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan has not called for the creation of a separate black state, and in 2000 he did meet with Wallace Deen Muhammad about a possible rapprochement of the NOI with mainstream Islam.
Farrakhan has a long, well documented history of venom-laced references to the “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers” who purportedly decimate America’s black community from coast to coast. He has referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion,” and to Adolf Hitler as “a great man” – though he later claimed that he had meant only that Hitler was “wickedly great.”
At a November 2003 speech in Chicago, Farrakhan said, “This Koran says that the Jews have altered the word of God out of its place. They did not want the masters of the people to know what Jesus really said, what Moses really said, because then you wouldn't have a yardstick [by which] to measure their deviations.” A month earlier, he told Jews, “I don’t like the way you leech on us. See, a leech is somebody that sucks your blood, takes from you and don’t (sic) give you a damn thing.”
Notwithstanding Farrakhan’s ugly rhetoric, in the early 1990s the NAACP, under the leadership of then-executive director Benjamin Chavis, entered into a “sacred covenant” with the Nation of Islam; Chavis, who would later join the NOI and change his surname to Muhammad, pledged never to “forsake Mr. Farrakhan as my brother.” In September 1993, spokesmen for the Congressional Black Caucus likewise announced, in front of a large audience, that they too had joined in a “sacred covenant” with Farrakhan and the NOI.
Farrakhan despises the United States and has consistently condemned virtually its every foreign and domestic policy. He opposes U.S. aid to Israel; opposes the war in Iraq; opposes the Patriot Act; has been critical of President Bush’s overall response to 9/11; is critical of plans to employ NATO forces as peacekeepers in Iraq; and in one 2004 press release, urged young men to resist any proposed military draft. He insists, however, that his anti-white, anti-American positions are overstated by a hostile, Jewish-dominated press. |
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