The Nation of Islam

Abstract

Established in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, by W.D. Fard Muhammad (1893–?), the Nation of Islam (henceforth NOI) grew after World War II to be the most important and controversial Islamic new religious movement in the United States and the Anglophobe Black world. Tens of thousands, perhaps over one hundred thousand African Americans joined the movement, but it garnered the sympathy and tacit support of many more African Americans for its emphasis on Black pride and self-determination. By the 1970s, the number of NOI religious congregations numbered seventy, and its businesses generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue (Curtis 2006: 2–4). The NOI taught that Islam was the original religion of Black people stolen from them during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and beckoned them to abandon Christianity, which the movement said had bound them in both physical and mental chains. Introducing an original form of Islamic religion that interpreted historically Islamic traditions through the prophecies of its charismatic leader, Elijah Muhammad, the NOI advocated separate Black businesses, schools, neighborhoods, and a state. Though it used revolutionary theological rhetoric, it eschewed both war and violence. Instead, the NOI focused on achieving its goals through the reformation of Black American minds and bodies. Membership in the NOI required careful study and practice of Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, which combined Islamic themes with twentiethcentury metaphysical religion, including a belief in UFOs, to produce a version of Islam that included novel theological, cosmological, and eschatological doctrines as well devotion to a strict code of middle-class, socially conservative ethics (Curtis 2016). From an historically Islamic perspective, one of the most controversial of these teachings was the belief that W.D. Fard was God in the flesh, and that Elijah Muhammad was the Messenger of God—a claim that contradicted both Sunnī and Shīʿa Islamic traditions (Curtis 2006: 10–14). Though representing a tiny sliver of the global Muslim community, the men and women of the NOI played an outsized role in US politics as they voiced some of the fiercest and most effective opposition to US imperialism,