Black Muslims

Black Muslims, followers of a predominantly black religious organization in the United States who profess Islam as their faith. They advocate economic cooperation and self-sufficiency and enjoin a strict Islamic code of behaviour governing such matters as diet, dress, and interpersonal relations. Members follow some Islamic religious ritual and pray five times daily. The Nation of Islam is the most prominent organization within the Black Muslim movement.

The group's origins are found in two black self-improvement movements that began shortly before World War I: the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded (1913) by Prophet Drew Ali, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded (1914) by Marcus Garvey. When Ali died, leadership of his movement passed to Wallace D. Fard. In 1930 Fard founded a temple (later known as a mosque) in Detroit; that was the actual beginning of the Nation of Islam. Fard, who used a variety of names (including Walli Farad and Master Farad Muhammad), is called God, Allah, or the Great Mahdi by Black Muslims.

The branch of the Nation of Islam in Chicago was founded in 1933. In 1934, after the mysterious disappearance of Fard, the leader of the Chicago mosque became the Nation's leader. He was Elijah Muhammad, known as Holy Prophet and Messenger of Allah, who had originally been named Elijah Poole and was born in Sandersville, Georgia, in 1897. Until his death in Chicago in 1975, Muhammad was the supreme leader of the Nation of Islam. In the 1960s his supremacy was challenged by Malcolm X, head of the New York mosque, but Malcolm X was shot and killed in 1965 by men said to be Black Muslims.

Formerly, Black Muslims held that the white person is “the Devil”, who enslaves all non-whites, and advocated the establishment of a separate Afro-American homeland in the United States. Wallace D. Muhammad, who succeeded his father Elijah Muhammad in 1975, played down black nationalism, admitted non-black members, and stressed strict Islamic beliefs and practices. In the late 1970s, however, a dissident faction, led by Louis Farrakhan, assumed the original name Nation of Islam and reasserted the principles of black separatism. In 1992 the group led by Wallace Muhammad took the name Muslim American Society, and Wallace Muhammad took the name Warith Deen Mohammed. The Muslim American Society adopted traditional Sunni Islam beliefs and embraced the idea of being part of a multicultural society.

In the early 1990s Farrakhan became an increasingly controversial figure. He was quoted as calling Judaism a “gutter religion” and referred to Adolf Hitler as a “great” man. Although Farrakhan’s defenders later attempted to clarify that he was using the term in the sense of “historically significant”, his controversial remarks on the radio and at press conferences were widely condemned by other black leaders. In 1995 Farrakhan organized the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. to draw attention to the plight of black men in the United States. In February 2000 he reconciled with his longtime rival Warith Deen Mohammed as part of a reported effort by Farrakhan to move the Nation of Islam closer to the mainstream of Islamic belief and practice.

At the beginning of the 21st century, most experts agreed that a majority of African-American Muslims in the United States belonged to the Muslim American Society. The Muslim American Society also welcomes Muslim immigrants to the United States to its ranks. It remains critical of many of the beliefs of the Nation of Islam, such as the contention that the group’s founder, Wallace Fard, was the Great Mahdi, or saviour.