Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A centralized and hierarchical organization, the NOI is committed to black nationalism and focuses its 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 teaches that there has been a succession of mortal gods, each a black man named Allah, of whom Fard Muhammad is 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, the "Mother Plane" or "Mother Ship", 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 be 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 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 has continued to develop the NOI's beliefs, for instance by drawing connections with Dianetics, and expanding its economic and agricultural operations.

Based in the United States, the Nation of Islam has also established a presence abroad, 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 and the 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 black supremacist hate group that promotes racism towards white people, antisemitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric.

Definition

Scholars of religion typically classify the Nation of Islam (NOI) as a new religious movement.Template:Sfnm Elsewhere, they have labelled it an African American religion,Template:Sfnm a black nationalist religion,Template:Sfnm an "ethno-religious movement",Template:Sfnm a "religious nationalist" movement,Template:Sfn a social movement,Template:Sfnm and a form of esotericism.Template:Sfn Given that extraterrestrial spaceships feature prominently in the group's teachings,Template:Sfnm scholars of religion have also highlighted commonalities between the NOI and UFO religions.Template:Sfn More broadly, the sociologist of religion Susan J. Palmer characterised 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.Template:Sfn

The name "Nation of Islam" has represented two distinct organizations: the first was established by Wallace Fard Muhammad in the 1930s and existed until 1975, after which the second group was created by Louis Farrakhan in the late 1970s.Template:Sfn Farrakhan's second Nation has differences from its predecessor,Template:Sfnm reflecting how the Nation's teachings have shifted over its history.Template:Sfnm As an organization, the Nation is highly centralized,Template:Sfn hierarchical,Template:Sfnm and authoritarian.Template:Sfn Although there are members who privately break the Nation's rules on personal behavior and lifestyleTemplate:Sfn—and who may not implicitly adhere to all the Nation's teachingsTemplate:Sfn—in general the group's practitioners display a high degree of uniformity and conformity.Template:Sfn

Relationship to Christianity and Islam

The flag of the Nation of Islam is a white crescent and star on a red background.Template:Sfn The group calls this flag, which is based on that of Turkey, "the national".Template:Sfn

The NOI is influenced by Christianity and Islam although offers profoundly different interpretations of their central scriptures, the Bible and the Quran;Template:Sfnm it has no holy text of its own.Template:Sfn Having arisen from within the Christian-majority United States, the Nation denigrates Christianity,Template:Sfn presenting it as a tool of white supremacy.Template:Sfnm For the group—whose members are commonly called "Black Muslims"Template:Sfnm—their Islamic identity offers an alternative to mainstream, Christian-dominated American culture.Template:Sfn

In describing itself as Islamic the NOI seeks to reclaim what it regards as the historic Muslim identity of the African American people,Template:Sfn with the group's second leader, Elijah Muhammad, stating that "Islam is the natural religion of the Black Nation."Template:Sfnm The Nation sees itself as part of the Islamic world,Template:Sfn and Islamic elements in its practices include the use of the Arabic language, prayers five times a day, and the adoption of a flag based on that of Muslim-majority Turkey.Template:Sfn

Despite this, the Nation has little in common with mainstream forms of Islam.Template:Sfnm It does not adhere to the Five Pillars of Islam,Template:Sfn makes claims about the nature of God and the afterlife which differ fundamentally from Muslim teaching,Template:Sfn and does not accept the standard Islamic belief that the Arabian religious leader Muhammad was God's final and most important messenger.Template:Sfn Although using standard Islamic terms, it gives these completely different meanings to those understood by most Muslims.Template:Sfn Mainstream Muslims generally see the NOI as a movement that selectively adopts Islamic ideas but is not truly Islamic.Template:Sfn From mainstream Islamic perspectives, its teachings are heretical,Template:Sfnm with its theology being shirk (blasphemy).Template:Sfnm Accordingly, some scholars of religion have characterised it as "quasi-Islamic",Template:Sfn or referred to it as "Fardian Islam",Template:Sfn "pseudo-Islam",Template:Sfn or "nontraditional Islam".Template:Sfn

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.Template:Sfnm It is estimated that, at the time of the American Revolution in the 1760s–80s, approximately 15 percent of enslaved Africans and African Americans in the new United States were Muslim.Template:Sfn Although Islam probably died out among the African American community over subsequent generations,Template:Sfnm this historical association influenced the emergence of groups like the NOI in the early 20th century.Template:Sfnm

The Moorish Science Temple of America, whose members are pictured here in 1928, was a key influence on the Nation of Islam

The Nation formed in the 1930s, when large numbers of African Americans were migrating from southern states to northern cities.Template:Sfn Within that context, various groups emerged that would influence the NOI. In particular, the scholar of religion Dawn Gibson characterised the Nation as having been "born out of a fusion" between the ideas of Garveyism and the Moorish Science Temple of America.Template:Sfn Central to Garveyism, and thus a major influence on the NOI, 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).Template:Sfnm According to the scholar Zoe Colley, Garvey's "UNIA provided the cultural bedrock for the NOI".Template:Sfn It was from Garveyism that the Nation took its black nationalism,Template:Sfn including its emphasis on black self-sufficiency and enterprise.Template:Sfn

The second key influence on the Nation was the Moorish Science Temple, an organization also promoting an idiosyncratic religion that its followers claimed was Islamic.Template:Sfnm This had been established by the North Carolina-born African American Noble Drew Ali in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913.Template:Sfnm Drew Ali claimed that he was the reincarnation of both Jesus and Muhammad,Template:Sfn and 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.Template:Sfnm In addition to Garveyism and the Moorish Science Temple, further influences on the Nation's development included African American Christianity,Template:Sfn Freemasonry,Template:Sfnm and the Jehovah's Witnesses.Template:Sfnm

Wallace Fard Muhammad

Wallace Fard Muhammad in a 1933 mug shot

The Nation of Islam was founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad, who began preaching his ideas among Detroit's African Americans in July 1930.Template:Sfnm 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.Template:Sfn The Nation has since taught that Fard Muhammad was the latest Allah (God) himself.Template:Sfnm They claim he was born in Mecca on February 26, 1877,Template:Sfn the son of a black Meccan named Alphonso and a white woman from the Caucasus Mountains named Baby Gee.Template:Sfn Being half-white, the NOI maintain, was necessary to allow Fard Muhammad to move freely in white society.Template:Sfn

Outside the Nation, various theories have been proposed as to Fard Muhammad's true identity.Template:Sfn 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 in San Quentin Prison for drug charges. Ford had been released in May 1929, a year before Fard Muhammad's appearance.Template:Sfnm FBI reports suggest he entered the US illegally in 1913.Template:Sfn The NOI reject Fard Muhammad's identification as Ford, claiming that the FBI forged this evidence.Template:Sfn There have also been suggestions made that, on his release from prison, Fard had joined the Moorish Science Temple of America and subsequently established his Nation as a breakaway faction.Template:Sfn

Fard Muhammad's following grew rapidly.Template:Sfn He held meetings three days a week which attracted 7,000 to 8,000 people,Template:Sfn mostly southern migrants,Template:Sfnm and some ex-members of the Moorish Science Temple.Template:Sfn 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,Template:Sfnm also urging his followers to listen to Jehovah's Witness and Baptist fundamentalist radio sermons.Template:Sfnm He established a bureaucratic administration within the Nation, its own system of schools, and both the Fruit of Islam paramilitary wing for men and the Muslim Girls Training School for women.Template:Sfnm

In 1931, an African American named Elijah Poole became Fard Muhammad's disciple.Template:Sfn Poole had been born the son of a Baptist preacher in Bold Springs, Georgia in 1897,Template:Sfn but relocated to Detroit in 1923;Template:Sfnm joining Garvey's UNIA,Template:Sfn he worked in industrial plants before becoming unemployed amid the Great Depression.Template:Sfn After Poole joined the NOI, Fard Muhammad gave him the new name of Elijah Karriem,Template:Sfnm later appointing him supreme minister of the Nation and renaming him Elijah Muhammad.Template:Sfn In 1933, Elijah Muhammad set up a new temple on Chicago's South Side.Template:Sfn

The early NOI faced problems from law enforcement. In 1932 the Detroit Police Department arrested an NOI member for a murder which they claimed was a human sacrifice.Template:Sfnm The police then raided the Nation's headquarters and arrested Fard Muhammad, but he was soon released.Template:Sfnm Subsequently, he would be arrested several further times; his September 1933 arrest for disorderly conduct in Chicago would be his last known verified whereabouts.Template:Sfn In 1934, Fard Muhammad disappeared without notifying his followers or designating a successor.Template:Sfnm Rumors spread that he had moved to Europe or that he had been killed, either by the police or by former followers.Template:Sfn

Elijah Muhammad's leadership

Elijah Muhammad, who took over the Nation after its founder's disappearance

With Fard Muhammad gone, Elijah Muhammad became head of the Nation.Template:Sfnm Under his leadership, the NOI's theology took its distinctive form;Template:Sfn Elijah Muhammad claimed that Fard Muhammad had been the latest Allah, and had departed the Earth but left him behind as his messenger.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad relocated the NOI's headquarters to Chicago,Template:Sfnm and transmitted his ideas through various publications and hundreds of speeches.Template:Sfn

During the Second World War, in which the US fought Japan, the FBI began monitoring the Nation;Template:Sfnm FBI informants reported pro-Japanese sentiment being expressed at its meetings.Template:Sfnm Many Nation members refused the military draft and in September 1942 the FBI arrested 65 NOI members, including Elijah Muhammad, for doing so.Template:Sfnm Elijah remained imprisoned until August 1946,Template:Sfnm during which time his wife, Clara, largely ran the organisation.Template:Sfnm 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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Elijah Muhammad's residence in Chicago, termed The Palace

The NOI's membership grew substantially during the latter part of the 1950s.Template:Sfnm In 1959, the FBI encouraged the media to attack the group;Template:Sfn that year, a documentary about the Nation, The Hate that Hate Produced, brought growing awareness of the group to the American public.Template:Sfnm The US press increasingly framed the NOI as anti-American and black supremacist,Template:Sfn with the civil rights movement largely presenting it as evidence for the harmful effect that poor race relations were having in the US.Template:Sfnm This negative criticism nonetheless gave the group significant attention and assisted its recruitment.Template:Sfn Further press attention came in 1962, when Los Angeles police raided one of the Nation's temples, during which one member was killed and seven injured.Template:Sfn Additional issues for the group arose in 1963, when a schism in the Nation's Temple Number 7 in Harlem, New York City led to the creation of a new movement, the Five Percent Nation of Islam.Template:Sfnm

One of the NOI's most significant members in this period was Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little, he discovered the Nation while in prison; following his 1952 release, he rose swiftly through its hierarchy.Template:Sfnm In 1960, he launched the newspaper Muhammad Speaks, which reached a circulation of over 600,000,Template:Sfnm and in 1963 he became the Nation's first national representative.Template:Sfnm He also travelled internationally; in Britain, he met with Michael de Freitas, who joined the Nation and formed a British branch.Template:Sfn Another prominent NOI member was the boxer Muhammad Ali. He encountered the Nation in 1961 and received significant media criticism after announcing his membership of the group in 1964.Template:Sfn

Malcolm X's subsequent pilgrimage to Mecca resulted in encounters with white Muslims which helped shift his views of white people.Template:Sfnm In light of these experiences, in March 1964 he left the Nation and became a Sunni Muslim.Template:Sfnm He began denouncing Elijah Muhammad's extramarital affairs and accused the Nation of holding back the revolutionary potential of African Americans.Template:Sfn In February 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated,Template:Sfnm with three NOI members convicted of the killing the following year.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> There was press speculation that the Nation's leaders were complicit,Template:Sfn something which damaged the group's reputation;Template:Sfn recruitment declined in the latter half of the 1960s.Template:Sfn

In 1972, the NOI bought the St. Constantine Greek Orthodox Church in Chicago and transformed it into their headquarters temple, Mosque Maryam.Template:Sfn By 1974 it had either a temple/mosque or study group in every US state and in the District of Columbia.Template:Sfn Relations with law enforcement remained strained; in 1972, a New York City policeman was shot and killed during a search of a NOI mosque in Harlem.<ref name="ANNE BARNARD">Template:Cite web</ref> The group continued to face opposition from the FBI, which engaged in a renewed counterintelligence project to destabilise it from the late 1960s.Template:Sfn This included sowing discord between the Nation and the Black Panther Party, encouraging incidents in which Black Panthers attacked NOI newspaper sellers.Template:Sfn

A difficult relationship also persisted with the larger American Muslim community. Although Elijah Muhammad drew greater elements from Sunni Islam into the NationTemplate:Sfn—and undertook the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 1959, 1967, and 1971Template:Sfn—other American Muslim groups increasingly condemned the Nation as un-Islamic.Template:Sfn Conflict developed between the NOI and other African American-majority Muslim groups.Template:Sfn In 1973, NOI members killed seven of Hamaas Abdul Khaalis' Hanafi Muslims, five of them children; the Nation's leadership denied sanctioning the attack.Template:Sfnm

Wallace Muhammad and the NOI's transition to Sunni Islam

In 1975, Elijah Muhammad died and was succeeded by his son, Wallace D. Muhammad.Template:Sfnm Wallace Muhammad had had a strained relationship with his father; while imprisoned in the early 1960s he had moved closer to Sunni Islam and subsequently left the Nation before re-joining in 1974.Template:Sfnm As leader, Wallace Muhammad launched what he called the movement's "Second Resurrection".Template:Sfnm

Rejecting many of the Nation's idiosyncratic teachings, Wallace Muhammad increasingly aligned the group with Sunni Islam.Template:Sfnm "Temples" were renamed "mosques", while "ministers" were renamed "imams".Template:Sfnm The Fruit of Islam was disbanded, with Wallace calling it a "hooligan outfit".Template:Sfnm Black nationalism was abandoned,Template:Sfnm and the ban on white people joining the Nation was lifted.Template:Sfnm Wallace Muhammad claimed that the Nation's old belief that the white man was the Devil referred only to mental whiteness, a state in rebellion against Allah.Template:Sfn He nevertheless retained a focus on raising the status of black people,Template:Sfn inviting African Americans to call themselves "Bilalians" after the 7th-century African Muslim, Bilal ibn Rabah.Template:Sfnm

In November 1976, the Nation was renamed the World Community of al-Islam in the West and in April 1978 the American Muslim Mission.Template:Sfnm Wallace Muhammad claimed that these changes were in accordance with his father's intentions;Template:Sfn he stated that he was in contact with Fard Muhammad and that the founder had established the NOI to gradually introduce African Americans to Sunni Islam.Template:Sfnm Most mosques accepted Wallace Muhammad's reforms but some rejected them,Template:Sfn establishing small splinter groups in Detroit, Atlanta, and Baltimore.Template:Sfnm In 1985, Wallace Muhammad disbanded his organization, telling his followers to affiliate instead with their local mosques.Template:Sfnm<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Louis Farrakhan's revival

Louis Farrakhan, who re-established the Nation of Islam after leaving Wallace Muhammad's group in 1977

Leading the opposition to Wallace Muhammad's reforms was Louis Farrakhan, who, with other disaffected members, began rebuilding the Nation of Islam in 1977.Template:Sfnm Born in the Bronx to Caribbean migrants, Farrakhan had been a nightclub singer prior to joining the original Nation in 1955.Template:Sfnm In 1964 he had become minister of the NOI's Harlem Temple and in 1967 a national representative.Template:Sfn Under Wallace Muhammad's leadership, Farrakhan was relocated to Chicago, widely seen as a demotion.Template:Sfnm

Farrakhan presented himself as Elijah Muhammad's true successor;Template:Sfn his followers described Wallace Muhammad's leadership as "the Fall".Template:Sfn Farrakhan's NOI spent the first several years focusing on rebuilding,Template:Sfn re-establishing the Fruit of Islam,Template:Sfnm and buying much of the property owned by its predecessor, including the Chicago Palace.Template:Sfnm In 1979, Farrakhan launched a newspaper, The Final Call,Template:Sfnm which by 1994 had a circulation of 500,000.Template:Sfn In 1981, Farrakhan's Nation held its first convention,Template:Sfnm and its membership began to increase rapidly in the mid-1980s.Template:Sfn

Although criticising Wallace Muhammad's wholesale embrace of Sunnism, Farrakhan introduced elements of mainstream Islam into his Nation.Template:Sfn He also added further novel developments; Masonic elements and numerology came to play an important part in his speeches.Template:Sfn He claimed that in 1985, while at Tepotzotlán in Mexico, he was teleported aboard the Mother Plane spaceship and there met with Elijah Muhammad—who was not really dead—to discuss the Nation's future.Template:Sfnm During the 1990s, Farrakhan was introduced to the Church of Scientology and in 2006 he was honoured at the Church-sponsored Ebony Awakening Awards.Template:Sfn In 2010, Farrakhan publicly embraced Scientology's system of Dianetics and encouraged NOI members to undergo auditing from the Church,<ref name="Scientology">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="Scientology1">Template:Cite news</ref> further arguing that auditing was a method whereby whites could be purified of their inherent badness.Template:Sfn

Farrakhan's Nation expanded its international network, building links in Africa,Template:Sfnm and seeking a closer relationship with Muslims globally.Template:Sfn By the late 1990s, Farrakhan's NOI opened its first mosques in Britain.Template:Sfn Back in the US, the 1980s and 1990s saw growing numbers of rap and hip hop artists promote the Nation's message,Template:Sfn despite Farrakhan's criticism of the thematic use of sex, violence, and drugs in these genres.Template:Sfnm Concerned by gang violence, especially among African American youths, in 1989 Farrakhan launched his "Stop the Killing" campaign.Template:Sfn He played a key role in getting two of the country's largest gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, to sign a ceasefire in 1992.Template:Sfn Farrakhan also organized the 1995 Million Man March through Washington, D.C. to counter negative portrayals of black manhood. This proved the largest black demonstration in US history.Template:Sfnm

Beliefs

Theology

The sociologist of religion David V. Barrett noted that the Nation's theology is "very distinct" and "extremely detailed".Template:Sfn The Nation provides conflicting statements about its theology; although it professes commitment to the monotheistic idea of a single God, its discourse refers to multiple gods,Template:Sfn meaning that it can be interpreted as polytheistic.Template:Sfn

In the NOI's view, each Allah (God) is not an incorporeal spiritual entity but a flesh-and-blood person.Template:Sfn These Allahs are anthropomorphic,Template:Sfn taking the form of black men,Template:Sfnm which was the shape that the first Allah consciously adopted.Template:Sfn In Nation teaching, the Allahs are not immortal,Template:Sfnm instead typically living for around 200 to 300 years.Template:Sfn They have varying abilities and degrees of power,Template:Sfn with each taking over following the death of their predecessor,Template:Sfn after which they rule for a cycle in history.Template:Sfn The Nation regards its founder, Fard Muhammad, as the latest of these Allahs,Template:Sfn or "God in person".Template:Sfnm He is deemed the first to have attained the same powers as that of the earliest Allah, namely the ability to return the universe to its primordial darkness and then recreate it.Template:Sfn The Nation teaches that although this founder disappeared in 1934, he would live for another 409 years.Template:Sfn

Reflecting a belief in the inner divinity of humanity that is common among North America's black-oriented new religions,Template:Sfn the Nation also promotes the idea that "God is man and man is God, that God has a presence inside human individuals."Template:Sfn Accordingly, the NOI teaches that the black race, in its natural state, is divine,Template:Sfn a "nation of Gods",Template:Sfn with Elijah Muhammad espousing the view that "all Muslims are Allahs".Template:Sfn According to the NOI, "knowledge of self" is key for black people to realize their inner divinity.Template:Sfn The NOI thus maintains that by following its teachings, its adherents can recognize their inner godliness.Template:Sfn In doing so, it stipulates, black people will also recognise that they have psychic powers;Template:Sfn Elijah Muhammad for instance claimed telepathic abilities.Template:Sfn

The Nation of Islam's theology is "completely divorced" from mainstream Islam.Template:Sfn In the latter, God is a single, monotheistic entity, one that is eternal and non-anthropomorphic;Template:Sfn Islam also stresses that there is a fundamental ontological divide between humanity and God, which is at odds with NOI teaching.Template:Sfn Similarly conflicting with mainstream Islam is the NOI's claim that there is no afterlife;Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad wrote that "when you are dead, you are DEAD".Template:Sfnm Notions of Heaven, the Nation claims, are a lie used by white Christians to keep black people docile.Template:Sfnm Instead, Elijah Muhammad taught that there is no spiritual realm beyond the material universe.Template:Sfnm

Cosmogony and the Tribe of Shabazz

Young male members of the Nation of Islam in San Francisco, California in 1994

The Nation teaches that in the beginning there was nothing but darkness. Then, 76 trillion years ago, the first Allah willed himself into being, taking 6 million years to form into his desired appearance: that of a black man.Template:Sfnm This color chosen was a reference to the blackness from which he had emerged.Template:Sfn The first Allah then created the Sun and the planets,Template:Sfnm as well as fellow black gods, who lived predominantly on the Earth but also on Mars.Template:Sfn Of these, the first Allah and 23 others formed a council of ruling imams: 12 greater and 12 lesser.Template:Sfnm Each of these imams would take a turn being the ruling Allah for one cycle each.Template:Sfn

The NOI refers to these early individuals as "god-scientists".Template:Sfn They are part of what it calls the "Original" or "Asiatic" race,Template:Sfnm a people who were divided into 13 tribes.Template:Sfn The Nation labels these people "black",Template:Sfn describing them as having dark skin as well as smooth, straight hair, closely resembling dark-complexioned Arabians or South Asians rather than Sub-Saharan Africans.Template:Sfn In portraying humanity as the creation of the first Allah, rather than a product of evolution, the Nation endorses a unique form of creationism and believes dinosaurs to be a hoax created by white scientists.Template:Sfn

A male member of the Nation, selling the group's newspaper, in 2015

According to Nation teaching, one of the god-scientists was a renegade and, 66 trillion years ago, tried to destroy the Earth with explosives. The resulting explosion forced a chunk of the Earth's mass into orbit, where it became the moon.Template:Sfnm One of the 13 tribes was trapped on the moon, where they died due to lack of water.Template:Sfn The Nation also maintains that 15,000 years ago, the god-scientists wrote down knowledge of the future in a text, the Mother Book, parts of which have passed down in the Torah, Gospels, and Quran.Template:Sfn

Of the 12 tribes that remained on Earth, the most resilient was the Tribe of Shabazz,Template:Sfn who settled in Egypt's Nile Valley and the area around Mecca in the Arabian peninsula.Template:Sfnm The Nation calls this region "East Asia",Template:Sfn reflecting its belief that Asia and Africa were once a single continent.Template:Sfn It was because they moved into the "jungles of East Asia" (i.e. Africa), Elijah Muhammad claimed, that members of this Original Asiatic Race developed Afro-textured hair.Template:Sfnm The Nation teaches that the Original Race were Muslims by their intrinsic nature, but that many created heretical deviations such as Hinduism;Template:Sfn some of those who broke Islamic rules were exiled to North America, where they became the continent's native population.Template:Sfn

For the Nation, everyone not of West European genetic origin is a descendant of the Original Asiatic Race.Template:Sfnm In contrast to understandings of race held by most Americans,Template:Sfn for the Nation, "black" does not simply mean those of Sub-Saharan African genetic descent, but all people of color, including Asians, North Africans, and Native Americans.Template:Sfnm Even some Eastern Europeans, such as Albanians, are considered descendants of the Original Asiatic Race.Template:Sfn Elijah Muhammad for instance referred to "black, brown, yellow [and] red" people as collectively constituting "black mankind", which he then juxtaposed against the "white race".Template:Sfn

Myth of Yakub

The NOI promotes a story about a figure known as Yakub.Template:Sfn The story received its fullest exposition in Elijah Muhammad's 1965 book Message to the Blackman.Template:Sfn In this narrative, Yakub was a black scientist; a child prodigy, by the age of 18 he had learned everything that Mecca's universities had to teach him.Template:Sfnm He attracted a following but caused trouble, leading the Meccan authorities to exile him and his 59,999 followers to Pelan, the Mediterranean island of Patmos.Template:Sfnm

On Pelan, the NOI claims, Yakub engaged in a selective breeding program to create the white race. This entailed breeding new children, with those who were too dark killed at birth and their bodies fed to wild animals or incinerated. Over several centuries, Yakub's experiments created a blonde, light-skinned people, the white race.Template:Sfnm The Nation maintains that most white people are unaware of their true origins, but that such knowledge is held by senior white Freemasons.Template:Sfnm The NOI teaches that, as a group of people distinct from the Original Asiatic Race, the white race are degenerate,Template:Sfn sub-human,Template:Sfn bereft of divinity,Template:Sfn and intrinsically prone to lying, violence, and brutality.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad repeatedly referred to whites as "the devil".Template:Sfnm Various academic commentators have characterised these views as racist.Template:Sfnm

According to the Nation's teachings, Yakub's newly created white race sowed discord among black people, and thus were exiled to live in the caves of "West Asia", meaning Europe.Template:Sfnm In this narrative, it was in Europe that the white race engaged in bestiality;Template:Sfn their attempts to restore their blackness resulted in the creation of apes and monkeys.Template:Sfnm To help the whites develop, the ruling Allah sent prophets to them, the first of whom was Musa (Moses), who taught the whites to cook and wear clothes.Template:Sfnm According to the Nation, Jesus was also a prophet sent to civilise the white race.Template:Sfnm The group rejects the Christian belief that Jesus was a unique manifestation of God, that he was the Messiah, was the product of a virgin birth, or was crucified and resurrected.Template:Sfn

White rule and antisemitic conspiracism

In the Nation's teachings, the ruling Allah permitted the white race to rule the Earth for 6000 years.Template:Sfnm The whites subsequently began to dominate the world,Template:Sfn using treacherous tactics that the Nation calls "tricknology".Template:Sfnm The group maintains that the ruling Allahs allowed this so that black people would discover humanity's inner potential for evil and learn how to defeat it, thus enabling them to realize their inner divine capacity.Template:Sfn According to this teaching, the period of white rule came to an end in 1914.Template:Sfnm

During the era of white rule, the Nation states, the whites enslaved the Tribe of Shabazz, shipping many of them to the Americas through the Atlantic slave trade.Template:Sfn The NOI claims that most enslaved blacks forgot their true names, their Arabic language, and their Muslim identity, instead embracing Christianity,Template:Sfn which the Nation labels "white man's religion".Template:Sfnm The group deems Christianity a tool of white supremacy used to subjugate black people,Template:Sfnm and expresses the belief that the oppressed (African Americans) and the oppressors (European Americans) cannot share the same god.Template:Sfn The Nation claims that in their enslaved state, black people have lost their morality by engaging in sinful behaviour such as fornication and drinking alcohol,Template:Sfn something encouraged by the whites.Template:Sfn In making this argument, the NOI equates the United States with the city of Babylon as presented in the Bible.Template:Sfnm

The Nation thus understands the modern subjugation of African Americans as part of an ancient white conspiracy.Template:Sfn The group interprets many of the problems facing African Americans in this light; Farrakhan for instance claimed that the white establishment encouraged a black gang culture to provide an excuse for the police killing of black youths,Template:Sfn that they flooded black-majority areas with drugs,Template:Sfn and that they created AIDS to exterminate black people.Template:Sfn The Nation is also critical of US aggression towards countries with non-white and Muslim majorities,Template:Sfn and in keeping with its ethos has adopted an anti-Zionist position regarding Israel.Template:Sfn

Farrakhan on a 2016 visit to Tehran, Iran; Farrakhan has repeatedly been accused of antisemitism

For Elijah Muhammad, white Jews were regarded as part of the white race and thus not intrinsically worse than other whites.Template:Sfn Instead, he suggested that Orthodox Jews, by following the laws set down by Moses, had raised themselves to a higher spiritual level than other whites.Template:Sfn In later years, accusations of antisemitism were repeatedly made against both Farrakhan and his NOI.Template:Sfnm Farrakhan promoted antisemitic tropes about a Jewish cabal controlling the US government, banking systems, universities, and entertainment sector.Template:Sfn Elsewhere, Farrakhan called Judaism a "dirty religion",Template:Sfnm and described Adolf Hitler as a "very great man".Template:Sfn

Similarly, at a Kean College speech in 1993, NOI representative Khalid Abdul Muhammad referred to the "Jew-nited Nations" in "Jew York City" and stated that the Jewish people deserved Hitler.Template:Sfn NOI spokespersons have made claims linking Jews to conspiracy theories about vaccines, with the NOI health minister Abdul Alim Muhammad accusing Jewish doctors of injecting blacks with AIDS,Template:Sfn and NOI official Ishmael Muhammad claiming that Jews were receiving different COVID-19 vaccines from other people.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The group has also espoused the claim that Jews were disproportionately responsible for the Atlantic slave trade, promoting these ideas in its anonymously authored book from 1991, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.Template:Sfnm

Eschatology and the Mother Plane

The NOI is millenarian,Template:Sfnm believing that humanity is living in end times.Template:Sfn It propounds a distinct eschatology drawing on the Book of Revelation.Template:Sfn Central to its view of the apocalypse is a large spaceship, known as the Mother Plane, the Mother Ship, or the Wheel,Template:Sfnm and which members usually refer to using female pronouns.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad described this as "a small human planet",Template:Sfn claiming that it is half a mile in diameter.Template:Sfnm The Nation teaches that this vessel is the Merkabah that appears in the Book of Ezekiel (1:4–28).Template:Sfnm It maintains that Allah and many of his scientists live in a magnificent city on the Mother Plane, from which they monitor humanity;Template:Sfn Farrakhan has claimed that Elijah Muhammad never died but is resident aboard this ship.Template:Sfn The Nation teaches that there are also smaller vessels, "baby planes", docked inside the Mother Plane and that these travel to Earth.Template:Sfn Sightings of these baby planes, as well as the Mother Plane itself, are used to explain reports of unidentified flying objects.Template:Sfn

The Nation teaches that a period of deteriorating racial tensions will culminate in the apocalypse.Template:Sfn NOI members have repeatedly claimed that this apocalypse is imminent; in the early 1960s, Elijah Muhammad was predicting that it would occur in 1965 or 1966,Template:Sfn Farrakhan later stated that the Gulf War of 1990 would spark it,Template:Sfn while Tynetta Muhammad thought it would occur in 2001.Template:Sfn According to Nation teaching, the apocalypse will come when the Mother Plane appears above the Earth and transports the righteous to live aboard it.Template:Sfn It will then use the baby planes to bury bombs beneath the Earth's surface, which on detonation will wipe out the old, white-dominated order.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad once stated that "There will be no such thing as elimination of all white people from the earth", for those who embrace Islam "can be saved".Template:Sfn The NOI has taught that the white ruling elite are aware of this forthcoming apocalypse and that the US exploration of space and the Strategic Defense Initiative are futile attempts to protect themselves against the Mother Plane.Template:Sfnm

According to this account, after the bombs explode the Earth's atmosphere will burn for 390 years and spend another 610 cooling down.Template:Sfn Once the Earth has returned to a habitable state, the ruling Allah will return the righteous to live on the planet, in a new black paradise.Template:Sfnm In his book The Supreme Wisdom, Elijah Muhammad claimed that after the apocalypse, "Peace, joy and happiness will have no end."Template:Sfn He added that those living in this perfect society will eat the finest food and wear clothes of silk interwoven with gold.Template:Sfnm

Black nationalism and separatism

Ideologically, the NOI is black nationalist.Template:Sfnm Scholar of religion Mattias Gardell commented that the idea of black unity is "at the very core of the NOI ideology".Template:Sfn The group seeks to empower black people by giving them a positive self-identity, purging ideas they may have of white superiority and black inferiority.Template:Sfn Instead, it espouses a cosmology in which the black race is superior and the white race inferior.Template:Sfnm Black people are therefore presented as Allah's chosen people.Template:Sfn

The Nation is black separatist,Template:Sfnm rejecting the integration of black and white people.Template:Sfnm This racial separatism put the NOI at odds with the mainstream civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.Template:Sfn The Nation was critical of African American activists who promoted racial integration, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,Template:Sfn regarding them as "Uncle Tom Negroes".Template:Sfnm The Nation's position that self-defence was a moral obligation for African Americans similarly differed from the civil rights movement's focus on non-violent opposition to racial discrimination and segregation.Template:Sfnm Some commentators have associated the Nation with the Black Power movement that emerged in the late 1960s,Template:Sfnm and the Nation claimed that it inspired the latter phenomenon.Template:Sfn

The NOI has called for the creation of a separate, sovereign African American nation-state in the southern part of what is currently the United States,Template:Sfnm with Elijah Muhammad stipulating that the US should financially support this new country for 20 to 25 years.Template:Sfnm This is presented as compensation for the unpaid labor of their enslaved ancestors.Template:Sfn Farrakhan has also suggested that the countries of Africa should set aside land on that continent for the African diaspora, characterising this as a reparation for the complicity of West African states in the Atlantic slave trade.Template:Sfn Gardell suggested that any nation-state formed under the Nation's leadership would be theocratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian.Template:Sfn

Unlike the Garveyites and Rastafari who emphasise links between the African diaspora and Africa itself, Elijah Muhammad and the NOI have instead focused their attention on the African diaspora in the Americas.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad stated that "where as the Black man in Africa is our brother, our central responsibility is with the Black man here in the wilderness of North America".Template:Sfnm The group reject a specifically Pan-African ideology,Template:Sfn and rather than treating Africa as a homeland, the Nation's origin myths present Mecca as the original home of African Americans.Template:Sfn Nation writings portray Africa itself as the least desirable of the Original Asiatic lands,Template:Sfn with the scholar of religion Michael Muhammad Knight arguing that Elijah Muhammad "upheld white supremacist tropes" about African cultures.Template:Sfn The latter for instance complained of Africans' "savage dress and hair styles,"Template:Sfn forbidding NOI members from imitating them,Template:Sfn and stating that it was the Nation's job to "civilize Africa".Template:Sfn

Gender and sexuality issues

Women members of the NOI at a Savior's Day meeting in 1974. A women's outfit incorporating a headpiece and full-length garment covering the arms and legs was introduced in the 1930s, intended to preserve the wearer's modesty.Template:Sfn

The NOI's teachings on gender are conservative and patriarchal,Template:Sfnm promoting strict gender roles.Template:Sfn Seeking to restore black manhood,Template:Sfn the Nation expresses great concern regarding the emasculation of black men, attributing this attitude to the failure of black men to prevent white men's sexual assault of black women over the centuries.Template:Sfn

Emphasis is placed on the family unit,Template:Sfn with the Nation maintaining that the security of the black family is ensured when its members adhere to their gendered responsibilities.Template:Sfn The group is critical of the historically matrifocal focus of many African American families, instead stressing the importance of a male family figurehead.Template:Sfn Men are encouraged to be economic providers for their family;Template:Sfnm women to be caretakers of the household and the children.Template:Sfnm Outsiders often perceive the Nation's women as victims of male oppression,Template:Sfn and some ex-Nation women have complained of a controlling and repressive atmosphere in the group.Template:Sfn

The NOI's leadership is overwhelmingly male.Template:Sfn Despite this, Clara Muhammad led the group while Elijah Muhammad was incarcerated between 1942 and 1946,Template:Sfnm and during the 1990s several women rose to senior positions;Template:Sfnm in 1998 the Nation appointed its first woman minister, Ava Muhammad, as head of Mosque Number 15 in Georgia.Template:Sfnm Women have also been allowed leadership in the Muslim Girls Training group and in the NOI's schools and businesses.Template:Sfn Various NOI women have played an active role in their communities,Template:Sfn sometimes challenging established gender norms in the organization.Template:Sfn

Ava Muhammad (left, photographed in 2014), was the NOI's first female minister

The NOI strictly enforces heterosexual monogamy among its members and encourages sexual abstinence prior to marriage.Template:Sfn Despite the group's formal opposition to polygyny, Elijah Muhammad had sexual relations with multiple women and Farrakhan has referred to these as his "wives".Template:Sfn The group has claimed that this was permitted because Elijah was God's messenger.Template:Sfn Nation members are encouraged to wed other members,Template:Sfn although marriage to non-members is permitted.Template:Sfnm The NOI stipulates that followers should only marry other black people,Template:Sfnm although marriage between Native, Latino, and African Americans is accepted.Template:Sfn Marrying whites is taboo,Template:Sfn with the group claiming that sex with white women emasculates black men.Template:Sfn

Men and women are discouraged from forming friendships with each other.Template:Sfn Instead, members seeking to court each other are expected to inform the captain of their local Fruit of Islam or Muslim Girls Training branch about their intentions.Template:Sfnm Men found to have beaten their wives are temporarily suspended from Nation membership.Template:Sfn Divorce is discouraged but not forbidden.Template:Sfnm NOI members are encouraged to have children, with Farrakhan also encouraging adoption.Template:Sfn Children are expected to study hard, avoid street culture, and respect their elders.Template:Sfn

The Nation criticises birth control methods as the white establishment's attempt to lower the black birthrate,Template:Sfnm although does not ban their use,Template:Sfn and Farrakhan expressed support for abortion in cases of rape, incest or where the woman's life is endangered.Template:Sfnm Same-sex relationships are condemned as immoral.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad complained that schools, jails, and prisons were "breeding dens of homosexuals,"Template:Sfn while Farrakhan banned gay men from his Million Man March, bringing accusations of homophobia.Template:Sfn

Practices

Services, prayer, and celebration

A Nation of Islam mosque in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, 2005

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the NOI's places of worship were called both temples and mosques,Template:Sfnm although the latter term was consistently favored under both Wallace D. Muhammad and Farrakhan.Template:Sfn These were each numbered in order of their foundation.Template:Sfn As well as serving a religious function, these mosques can also be used as community centers, banks, schools, and child-care facilities.Template:Sfn The figure leading a mosque is called the captain and will be a member of the Fruit of Islam subgroup.Template:Sfn

Those attending meetings will sometimes be searched by members of the Fruit of Islam or the Muslim Girl's Training group, who look for weapons and for objects like cosmetics and cigarettes which are disapproved of.Template:Sfn After this, attendees are seen to their seats,Template:Sfn usually rows of benches.Template:Sfn The sexes are segregated during worship; women on the right and men on the left.Template:Sfnm The tone of Nation services is sombre and quiet.Template:Sfn Services typically begin with the statement "As-salamu alaykum" (peace be upon you), with the congregation responding "Wa 'alaikum As-salam" (and also upon you).Template:Sfn Meetings at the mosque are both opened and closed with prayers,Template:Sfn and the Nation's "national anthem" may be played.Template:Sfn A lecture is provided by a minister,Template:Sfn who may also read verses from either the Bible or Quran.Template:Sfn

Members of Nation of Islam applaud during Elijah Muhammad's annual Saviors' Day message in Chicago in 1974

In the late 1950s, Elijah Muhammad published a prayer manual outlining how his followers should pray five times a day.Template:Sfn This involved an ablution beforehand,Template:Sfn typically involving washing the hands, face, and ears, symbolically associating physical cleanliness with the purification of the body more broadly.Template:Sfn Women are expected to cover their heads while praying.Template:Sfn Elijah Muhammad stipulated that these prayers should be in English, although commented that in future he would explain how to do so in Arabic.Template:Sfn In later articles, he explained that his followers should face towards Mecca as they pray, symbolising their journey toward the restoration of black greatness.Template:Sfn

The most important date in the Nation's year is February 26, Saviors' Day, which members believe is the birthday of Fard Muhammad.Template:Sfnm This is the date on which the organization holds its annual national convention.Template:Sfn Under Farrakhan, the Nation introduced a second Savior's Day each year, on October 7, to mark the birth of Elijah Muhammad.Template:Sfn In the 1990s, Farrakhan's Nation also introduced an annual event called the World's Day of Atonement or Holy Day of Atonement, held over the course of October 15 and 16; this is characterised by fasting, prayer, and reconciliation.Template:Sfnm In addition to marking festivals, NOI members are encouraged to make the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca;Template:Sfn Elijah Muhammad himself did so three times.Template:Sfn

Lifestyle

Members of the Fruit of Islam at Chicago's Bud Billiken Parade in 2015

The Nation requests that, as a declaration of mental emancipation, new members change any names inherited from slave-owners who possessed their ancestors.Template:Sfnm This is not considered necessary if the new member has a name that is already African in origin.Template:Sfn In the NOI's early years, Fard Muhammad bestowed new names on followers for a $10 fee.Template:Sfn During the mid-20th century the Nation began encouraging the use of "X" as a surname, symbolising what they regarded as the African-American's identity as an "ex-slave" and also as a marker for their lost ancestral name.Template:Sfn As this results in many individuals having the same name, numbers are added before the X to differentiate members (i.e. "Charles 2X", "Charles 3X").Template:Sfnm

The NOI encourages its followers to live highly disciplined and structured lifestyles;Template:Sfn this conservative and ascetic approach has led to followers being called "Black Puritans".Template:Sfn Nation members are encouraged to obey the law,Template:Sfnm to seek gainful employment,Template:Sfnm to always be punctual,Template:Sfn to avoid buying on credit,Template:Sfn and to never gamble.Template:Sfnm They are also urged not to rely on state welfare payments, with the Nation arguing that these undermine the African American community's ability to be self-sufficient.Template:Sfn

Male members typically cut their hair short, sometimes shaving the head entirely, and do not usually wear beards.Template:Sfn This signifies their willingness to abide to the Nation's strict rules and their renunciation of much personal choice.Template:Sfn They are expected to wear suits with either ties or bowties;Template:Sfnm those who are part of the Fruit of Islam wear military-style uniforms,Template:Sfn sometimes accompanied by a fez.Template:Sfn Women are commanded to dress modestly;Template:Sfnm they are not permitted to wear trousers,Template:Sfn are expected to wear long sleeves,Template:Sfn and are encouraged to cover their heads.Template:Sfnm Cosmetics and the chemical or heat-based straightening of hair is also discouraged.Template:Sfn

Dietary requirements

Bean pies are associated with the Nation and Elijah Muhammad encouraged their consumption.Template:Sfn

The NOI teaches that practitioners should keep fit and maintain a healthy diet,Template:Sfnm as part of which it espouses strict dietary rules.Template:Sfn These were outlined by Elijah Muhammad, who claimed to have received them from Fard Muhammad.Template:Sfn

Vegetarianism is encouraged, although not obligatory,Template:Sfnm with Elijah Muhammad writing that "meat was never intended for man to eat".Template:Sfn In How to Eat to Live, Elijah Muhammad urged his followers to subsist primarily on fruit, vegetables, and certain grains, and to choose lamb if they must eat meat.Template:Sfn Pork is explicitly forbidden on the traditional Muslim grounds that pigs are deemed unclean.Template:Sfnm Other discouraged foods include dried fruits,Template:Sfn white flour,Template:Sfnm additives,Template:Sfn and fast food.Template:Sfn Although its own produce is not wholly organic, the Nation is supportive of organic food and the avoidance of genetically modified crops, insecticides, and pesticides.Template:Sfn

The NOI also encourages followers to avoid foods associated with the slave culture of the US, such as cornbread, catfish, and collard greens, deeming this cuisine to be undignified and unhealthy.Template:Sfnm Concerned about obesity and diabetes among African Americans, Elijah Muhammad urged his followers to restrict their caloric intake, ideally by eating only one meal a day.Template:Sfnm He claimed that this would extend the human lifespan, asserting that those who ate only once every 24 hours would live for 150 years and that those who ate once every seven days would live for 1,050 years.Template:Sfn Members are also encouraged to conduct regular three-day fasts,Template:Sfn and to fast during the daylight for the entirety of December.Template:Sfn The NOI also prohibits the use of alcohol,Template:Sfnm tobacco,Template:Sfnm and other recreational drugs.Template:Sfnm In addition, it advises that followers avoid the use of vaccines,Template:Sfn typically deeming them part of a white conspiracy to deplete populations of color.Template:Sfn

Economic and educational independence

The interior of a Nation-owned bakery in Oakland, California

Espousing economic nationalism,Template:Sfn the Nation follows the ideas of earlier thinkers like Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey in emphasizing the construction of African American infrastructure as a means of community empowerment.Template:Sfn The Nation has created many companies,Template:Sfn including the Salaam restaurant chain, the Shabazz bakeries, the Fashahnn Islamic clothing range, the Clean 'N Fresh skin and haircare products, and Abundant Life Clinics.Template:Sfn These businesses provide income for the NOI and help tackle African American unemployment.Template:Sfn

Since the 1980s, the Nation has also sought government contracts,Template:Sfn and in 1988, it established the Security Agency Incorporated to provide Fruit of Islam patrols for clients.Template:Sfnm In 1985 it launched its POWER (People Organized and Working for Economic Rebirth) project, designed to redirect black purchasing power toward black-owned businesses.Template:Sfnm It also seeks the collective economic advancement of African Americans through individual achievement;Template:Sfn various women members have created their own businesses, sometimes run from the home.Template:Sfn Some of its African American anti-capitalist critics have derided the Nation's economic approach as black capitalism.Template:Sfnm Farrakhan has responded that while socialism appeals to him, capitalism is the only feasible road to economic empowerment for African Americans.Template:Sfn

The Nation prioritises land ownership to increase food production and autonomy for African Americans;Template:Sfn a commonly used slogan among the NOI is that "The farm is the engine of our national life."Template:Sfn It established a farm in White Cloud, Michigan in 1947,Template:Sfn and by the early 1970s owned 20,000 acres of farm land in Michigan, Alabama, and Georgia.Template:Sfn In 1991, Farrakhan's Nation launched its Three Year Economic Savings Plan, asking followers to send them $10 a month over the three years, money that would collectively allow the group to buy more farmland.Template:Sfn As a result, in 1994 it purchased 1,556 acres near Bronwood, Georgia, there establishing Muhammad Farms.Template:Sfnm Much of the produce grown there is distributed to NOI mosques around the country.Template:Sfnm The NOI hopes to establish a system of black-owned farms through which to feed 40 million black people,Template:Sfn with the stated aim of providing at least one healthy meal a day for every African American.Template:Sfnm NOI members also own urban gardens in various US cities.Template:Sfn

The NOI is highly critical of the US school system, believing that it has a Eurocentric focus and perpetuates white supremacy. To this end, the Nation has established its own educational system.Template:Sfnm As part of this it has formed Muhammad Universities of Islam; most of these are elementary schools, although a few also offer secondary education.Template:Sfnm These emphasize science, mathematics, black history, Arabic, and NOI doctrine;Template:Sfn Farrakhan has said that the Nation needs to provide black children with "an education to make them Gods".Template:Sfn In these schools, boys and girls are taught separately;Template:Sfnm pupils are only given two weeks of vacation each year.Template:Sfn Combating the idea that academic achievement entails "acting white", the Nation has sought to associate hard work in school with pride in being black.Template:Sfn

Civic engagement

Members of the Fruit of Islam in 1974

The Nation has a longstanding record of involvement in civic, economic, and political activities.Template:Sfn In certain areas with high African American populations, the NOI has engaged in door-to-door campaigns to raise awareness about local pollution,Template:Sfn provided services that public institutions do not,Template:Sfnm and used the Fruit of Islam to patrol neighborhoods as a community watchdogTemplate:Sfn—especially to stop drug-dealing.Template:Sfn These efforts have helped to integrate the Nation with the larger African American community and brought praise from within it.Template:Sfn

Although the scholar of religion Stephen C. Finley maintained that the NOI is "first and foremost a religious community,"Template:Sfn the scholar Edward E. Curtis IV stated that the Nation is "both highly religious and political at the same time",Template:Sfn while Gardell noted that the group "formulated emphatic political demands".Template:Sfn The NOI has nevertheless urged its members to avoid mainstream electoral politics;Template:Sfn throughout most of his leadership, Elijah Muhammad instructed his followers not to vote.Template:Sfnm Later, Farrakhan backed Jesse Jackson's 1984 campaign to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate,Template:Sfnm and in 1990 three NOI candidates stood for election in the US.Template:Sfn Although many outsiders have presumed the NOI to be a revolutionary movement,Template:Sfn it has not sought to foment political revolution or violent social change, instead focusing its emphasis on shifting the consciousness of its members, encouraging them to focus on personal moral improvement, family building, and economic productivity.Template:Sfnm

Organization

Leadership and financing

Mosque Maryam in Chicago, the headquarters of the Nation of Islam

The Nation is highly hierarchical in its organization,Template:Sfn being headquartered at its Mosque Maryam in Chicago.Template:Sfn By the 2020s, it was governed by an executive council of 13 members, a number that may allude to the original 13 tribes of humanity in NOI belief.Template:Sfn It also consists of ten ministries: for Spiritual Development, Agriculture, Education, Information, Health, Trade and Commerce, Defense, Justice, Arts and Culture, and Science and Technology.Template:Sfn During its history it has also operated a shadow ministry, forming the prototype for the governance of the future state it hopes to lead.Template:Sfn Within the group's senior ranks, family ties are important; various members of Elijah Muhammad's family were for instance married to members of Farrakhan's family.Template:Sfn

Responsible for the group's national security is the supreme captain, one of the most powerful roles in the organization.Template:Sfn Security is largely provided by the Fruit of Islam, a group of men who are trained in military protocol, wrestling, boxing, and judo.Template:Sfnm Expected to strictly follow the Nation's rules, the Fruit are tasked with protecting NOI leaders, temples/mosques, and other NOI property.Template:Sfn The Nation has also established Muslim Girls Training for women, whose members receive lessons in domestic skills and self defense tactics.Template:Sfnm

The NOI says that its finances come primarily from donations and its businesses.Template:Sfn At the start of the 1960s, it was reported that members were expected to donate a set part of their earnings to the group each year; as of 1952, this reportedly constituted a third of a member's annual income.Template:Sfn In 1976, Wallace Muhammad estimated the Nation's net worth to be $46 million, although revealed it had a severe cash flow problem, owed millions in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, and was making a loss with its agricultural operations.Template:Sfn Although the Nation does not disclose the extent of its financial resources,Template:Sfn in the 1990s its assets were estimated to total $80,000,000.Template:Sfn

Press and media

From its early days, the Nation used print media to promote its ideas, including the magazines Muhammad Speaks and The Final Call.Template:Sfn Muhammad Speaks—which was published from 1961 to 1975Template:Sfnm—included contributions not only from Nation members, but also from various African American leftists.Template:Sfn Members were encouraged to sell these magazines on street corners or sometimes door-to-door in African American-majority areas.Template:Sfn These sellers were given sales quotas to fulfil and were sometimes punished if they failed to meet them.Template:Sfn The Nation's first magazine aimed at women, Righteous Living, appeared in the early 1990s.Template:Sfn Other media outputs have included shows on radio stations,Template:Sfn videos,<ref name="USNWR20110705">Template:Cite news</ref> and various websites and social media accounts.Template:Sfn

Domestic and international affiliations

Gaddafi was the Nation's most prominent international supporter; Farrakhan stated that "we will always love him, admire and respect him and stand up and speak on his behalf".Template:Sfn

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nation had links with Satokata Takahashi, a Japanese man promoting pro-Japanese sentiment among African American groups.Template:Sfnm Takahashi lived with an officer of the Nation and also married a former member.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad declared that Takahashi was teaching African Americans that "the Japanese were brothers and friends of the American Negroes".Template:Sfn During the Second World War, in which the US fought Japan, many Nation members expressed pro-Japanese sentiment and refused the draft, stating that they would not fight people they regarded as fellow members of the Original Asiatic Race.Template:Sfn

Under Elijah Muhammad, the Nation established relations with various Muslim countries.Template:Sfnm In 1957, Malcolm X organized a conference on colonialism attended by delegates from Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, and Morocco,Template:Sfnm while Elijah Muhammad met with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1959 and the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1972.Template:Sfn For many years, Gaddafi was the Nation's most prominent international supporter and assisted them in various forms.Template:Sfn His government gave the Nation a $3 million interest-free loan in 1972 to purchase its Chicago South Side centre,Template:Sfnm and another $5 million interest-free loan in 1985 to fund its black enterprise program.Template:Sfnm It later offered Farrakhan's Nation $1 billion, which the US government sought to block.Template:Sfnm<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> On taking control, Farrakhan also pursued links with various Muslim-majority countries,Template:Sfn visiting Ghana and Libya in 1985,Template:Sfn and embarking on a larger tour of Africa and the Middle East in 1996, meeting with leaders including Gaddafi, Ghana's Jerry Rawlings, Nigeria's Sani Abacha, South Africa's Nelson Mandela, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.Template:Sfn On that tour, he also attended annual celebrations of the Iranian Revolution in Tehran;Template:Sfnm he visited Iran again in 2018.Template:Sfn

Like Garvey's UNIA before them, the Nation built links with white nationalist and other far-right white groups on the basis of their shared belief in racial separatism.Template:Sfnm Malcolm X revealed that the Nation had held meetings with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the American Nazi Party (ANP).Template:Sfn The ANP's leader George Lincoln Rockwell attended an NOI rally in Washington, D.C. in 1961 and then spoke at the Nation's St Savior's Day rally in Chicago in 1962.Template:Sfnm Links with the white far-right continued under Farrakhan's Nation, with Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance donating money to the Nation in 1985 and expressing approval of its separatist aims.Template:Sfnm During the 1980s, the Nation also had a supportive relationship with the British National Front as the latter's Strasserite leadership were endorsing a united front against multi-racial society.Template:Sfn By the 1990s, the Nation collaborated with members of the far-right LaRouche movement as part of their shared opposition to the US-led Gulf War.Template:Sfnm These links have not prevented some white far-right opposition to the NOI; in 1993 the Fourth Reich Skinheads were revealed to have plotted to kill Farrakhan.Template:Sfn

Demographics

The Nation does not publish the size of its membership,<ref name=MacFarquhar/> and there have been no censuses to determine a reliable number.Template:Sfn Under Fard Muhammad's leadership, it reached a total of approximately 8,000 members,Template:Sfn while by 1960 its membership was being estimated at between 30,000 and 100,000.Template:Sfn In 2007, the scholar of religion Lawrence A. Mamiya suggested that there were then around 50,000 members of the Nation.<ref name=MacFarquhar/> At various points, the Nation has had a high turnover of membership,Template:Sfn with many converts having left the movement,Template:Sfn sometimes developing into Sunni Muslims.Template:Sfnm

While based in the US, the Nation has also established either a presence or influence among African diasporic communities elsewhere;Template:Sfn in 2006, the scholar Nuri Tinaz suggested that the Nation "may have" up to 2,000 members and sympathisers in the United Kingdom.Template:Sfn Despite its focus on African Americans, since the era of Elijah Muhammad it has also made efforts to recruit Latino and Native Americans.Template:Sfnm As of 2009, Latinos were estimated to comprise over 20 percent of the Nation's membership, although some complained of facing ethnic prejudice within the organisation.Template:Sfn

In its early decades, the Nation's appeal was strongest in poor African American neighborhoods,Template:Sfn but over the course of the 20th century the NOI's membership became increasingly middle-class.Template:Sfnm Gardell suggested that this was partly due to the Nation's focus on hard work and rigid morality, which helped improve the economic situation of its members, coupled with the broader growth of the African American middle class in this period.Template:Sfn He also believed that the changing class composition, and with it a less hostile attitude to white-dominant American society, assisted the shift to Sunnism under Wallace Muhammad in the 1970s.Template:Sfn

Conversion

The NOI refers to its proselytising efforts as "fishing for the dead".Template:Sfn To this end, the Nation holds regular open meetings, mass rallies, street-corner lectures, and prison outreach,Template:Sfn seeking new recruits in "jails and penitentiaries, pool halls and barbershops, college campuses and street corners".Template:Sfn It has used books by Elijah Muhammad, radio broadcasts, and audio-recorded speeches to promote its message.Template:Sfn Through this, it has sought to attract unemployed, disenchanted black youth,Template:Sfn as well as those disaffected with Christianity.Template:Sfn

Nation of Islam members proselytising at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London, March 1999

The NOI's recruitment efforts have proven particularly effective among drug addicts and incarcerated criminals.Template:Sfnm The Nation was active in prison ministry by the 1950s, with its numbers of imprisoned followers rising steadily in the latter part of that decade;Template:Sfn many members, including Malcolm X, were recruited while in prison.Template:Sfnm Farrakhan stepped up the prison ministry in the 1980s in response to the growing incarceration of young black men under Ronald Reagan's presidential administration.Template:Sfn By the early 1960s, prison authorities were raising concerns that the NOI was exacerbating racial tensions in prisons.Template:Sfn Some incarcerated members have claimed to have experienced discriminatory treatment from prison authorities because of their religion,Template:Sfnm and in certain cases have filed legal action as a result.Template:Sfn

Various motivations have led people to join the Nation.Template:Sfn Some members for instance reported that joining helped them with their low self-esteem or depression;Template:Sfn the historian Zoe Colley thought that the Nation appealed to men living in poverty by offering them the "opportunity to reclaim their manhood and sense of pride".Template:Sfn Ula Y. Taylor, a scholar of African American studies, suggested that female members were attracted by the Nation's offer of a "stable family life" and the opportunity to get involved in "the development of a new black nation".Template:Sfn The Nation also attracted followers with its offer of a separate schooling system where African American children would not suffer the racism found in the mainstream public school system.Template:Sfn

Reception and influence

The logo of the Nation on its property in Indianapolis, Indiana

At the start of the 21st century, Barrett called the NOI "one of the most visible and controversial black religions",Template:Sfn while in the 1990s Gardell termed it the "most renowned and controversial" of the African American Muslim groups.Template:Sfn According to the black studies scholar Malachi D. Crawford, the NOI became "perhaps the most influential African American religious community in the twentieth century".Template:Sfn

Various groups have broken from the Nation during its history, including Clarence 13X's Five-Percent Nation,Template:Sfnm Silas Muhammad's Original Nation of Islam,Template:Sfn and Solomon Muhammad's United Nation of Islam.Template:Sfn The NOI has also influenced the development of other religious movements, including the Nuwaubian Nation,Template:Sfnm whose founder and leader, Dwight York, claimed that Elijah Muhammad had heralded his own arrival much as John the Baptist heralded the arrival of Jesus in Christian belief.Template:Sfn Influences from the NOI have also been argued for the Word of Faith movement.Template:Sfn

The black studies scholar Priscilla McCutcheon noted that although the NOI remained comparatively small, it had "a wide discursive reach",Template:Sfn while in 1996 Gardell commented that its influence among black youth "far exceeds" its membership.Template:Sfn Among those influenced by it have been hip hop and rap artists like Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Kam, The Skinny Boys, and Sister Souljah.Template:Sfn The Nation has cultivated a sense of pride among many African Americans,Template:Sfn and its role in confronting gang violence, drugs, and poverty within African American communities has earned it respect.Template:Sfn The sociologist A.A. Akom opined that the NOI had a reputation among African Americans of "speaking truth to power";Template:Sfn a 1994 Time/CNN poll found that two-thirds of African Americans who knew of Farrakhan viewed him favorably.Template:Sfn Similarly positive assessments of the Nation have been observed among black communities in Britain.Template:Sfn

Despite reticence from the Nation itself during much of its history,Template:Sfnm the group has been the subject of much scholarly attention.Template:Sfn Initial research, largely undertaken by historians and sociologists in the late 1950s and 1960s, was often hostile or dismissive; research influenced by disciplines like religious studies and gender studies followed later.Template:Sfn

Opposition and criticisms

Both black and non-black people have criticised the Nation.Template:Sfn These critics often believe that its founder, Fard Muhammad, was a petty criminal out to swindle his followers.Template:Sfn Outsiders to the Nation have often seen its teachings as illogical and irrational,Template:Sfn with scientists having labeled its mythological accounts as pseudoscience,Template:Sfn and historical and scientific errors having been highlighted in its leaders' claims.Template:Sfn

The group has repeatedly been accused of stirring up anti-white racial hatred,Template:Sfn as for instance in Khalid Abdul Muhammad's Kean College speech where he stated that White South Africans should be given 24 hours to leave their country, with any remaining after that point being killed.Template:Sfn The Nation has been labelled a "hate group" by the likes of the NAACP's Roy Wilkins,Template:Sfnm as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which accuses it of promoting black supremacism and anti-LGBT rhetoric.<ref name="Nation">Template:Cite web</ref> The SPLC's characterisation of the group has in turn been criticised as being inaccurate and inflammatory by Finley.Template:Sfn

The NOI has also been accused of antisemitism by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),Template:Sfnm<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> an organization that has placed the group under surveillance, lobbied against it, and attempted to block its enterprises.Template:Sfn Four Jewish organizations withdrew their sponsorship of the Parliament of World Religions when it invited Farrakhan to speak,Template:Sfn while Jewish student groups have picketed Farrakhan's speeches on university campuses.Template:Sfn Far-right Jewish groups have gone further; the Jewish Defense League organized a 1985 "Death to Farrakhan" march,Template:Sfnm while the Jewish Defense Organization included Farrakhan on its kill list.Template:Sfn

Mainstream Islamic groups maintain that the Nation's members are not really Muslim.Template:Sfn Most mainstream Islamic organisations in the US have distanced themselves from the Nation,Template:Sfnm as have smaller Muslim groups like the Ahmadiyya.Template:Sfnm Elijah Muhammad dismissed these objections by claiming that the "Old Islam" of his critics was "led by white people".Template:Sfn Farrakhan responded to such rejection with his own critique of the Islamic world, accusing it of racism, of being obedient to the US government, of engaging in sectarian violence, and of excessively relying on the hadith rather than the Quran.Template:Sfn

References

Sources

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Further reading

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External links

• Template:Official website
• Nation of Islam profile at the World Religion and Spirituality Project (WRSP)
• Messenger Elijah Muhammad Web Resources Center, Online books, audio, and video
• Nation of Islam-affiliated Final Call newspaper website
• Official Website of the United Kingdom Branch of the Nation of Islam
• Federal Bureau of Prisons Technical Reference Manual on Inmate Beliefs and Practices
• FBI file on the Nation of Islam