What was truly revolutionary about the Islamic concept was its transethnic, nonracial character. Islam is primarily defined by a series of actions and obligations that all believers follow. In theory, differences in native language, race, ethnicity, geography, and social class become irrelevant. Indeed, from the beginning, individuals of African descent have become Muslims (literally, “those who submit” to God). Muhammad had encouraged the emancipation of African slaves held by Arabs; his first muezzin (the individual who calls believers to prayer) was an Ethiopian former slave named Bilal.
Over time, the religious pluralism of the ummah—the transnational Islamic community—gave way to an exclusive monotheism. After the Prophet’s death, Jews and Christians were perceived to be excluded from the community; centuries later, Islamic legal scholars would divide the entire world into two, the dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and the dar al-Harb (House of War), or those who oppose the believers.
By the eighth century, Islam dominated northern Africa, soon penetrating the Sudan and, in West Africa, the sub-Saharan regions. The Arab elite within this growing Muslim world had a long tradition of slavery, and over the centuries millions of black Africans were subjugated and transported to what today is the Middle East, northern Africa, and the Iberian peninsula. There were, however, many prominent examples of black converts to Islam who came into power in the Muslim world—such as Yaqub al-Mansur, the twelfth-century black ruler of Morocco and parts of what are today Portugal and Spain. Several great Islamic empires dominated West Africa from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. As European states colonized the Americas and the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, they ultimately transported about fifteen million chattel slaves into their respective colonies. A significant minority were Muslims: of the approximately 650,000 involuntarily taken to what would become the United States, Muslims made up about 7 or 8 percent.
During the nineteenth century, a series of black intellectuals from the Caribbean and the United States were attracted to Islam. This was an era of evangelical Christianity, and social Darwinism, which promoted religious and scientific justifications for white supremacy. People of African descent increasingly became attracted to Islam as an alternative to Christianity. By far the most influential black intellectual of the period was Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912), who came to the United States from the Danish West Indies as a candidate for the Presbyterian ministry. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which permitted blacks to be arrested and deported to the slave South, Blyden left for Liberia in 1851. During the next sixty years he had an extraordinary career as a scholar, traveler, and diplomat.
Blyden’s contributions to Malcolm Little’s spiritual and political journey were threefold. First, long before W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Blyden argued that the black race possessed certain spiritual and cultural strengths, a collective personality, uniting black humanity throughout the world. During the 1960s, this insight would form the basis for what would be called “black cultural nationalism”—a deep pride in African antiquity, history, and culture, together with the celebration of rituals and aesthetics drawing upon Africa and the black diaspora.
Second, long before Garvey, Blyden had envisioned a program of “Pan-Africanism”—the political and social unity of black people worldwide—leading to a strategy of group migration back to Africa. Blyden was convinced that conditions for American blacks would eventually become so oppressive that millions would return to the land of their ancestors. His writings on Pan-Africanism paved the way for the back-to-Africa movement among Southern blacks in the 1890s, and provided the intellectual arguments for Garveyites a generation later.
His most original contribution, however, was to link Pan-Africanism with West African Islam. In his classic 1888 treatise, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, he argued that Christianity, despite its Middle Eastern origins, had evolved into a distinctly European religion that was discriminatory and oppressive. He insisted that among the world’s great religions, only Islam permitted Africans to retain their traditions with integrity.
By the early twentieth century, the first significant religious organization in the United States that identified itself as Islamic was the Moorish Science Temple of America. The group’s founder, a North Carolina–born African American named Timothy Drew, established the cult in Newark, New Jersey, in 1913, as the Canaanite Temple. Proclaiming himself Noble Drew Ali, he told followers that he was the second prophet of Islam, Mahdi, or redeemer. In orthodox Islam, Muhammad is widely described as the Seal of the Prophets, the last of a line of Qur'anic prophets beginning with Adam. Any such claim to the status of prophet is inherently blasphemous, but Ali’s deviation from Islam’s five pillars didn’t stop there. The sacred text of his cult was the Holy Koran, also known as the Circle Seven Koran, a sixty-four-page synthesis that drew on four sources: the Qur'an, the Bible, the Aquarian Gospels of Jesus Christ (an occult version of the New Testament), and Unto Thee I Grant (a publication of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a Masonic order influenced by the Egyptian mystery schools).
Noble Drew Ali’s major appeal to black Americans paralleled Blyden’s arguments. He claimed that Islam was the spiritual home for all Asiatics, a term that embraced Arabs, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, black Americans, as well as several other ethnicities and nationalities. African Americans were not Negroes at all, Ali insisted, but “an olive-skinned Asiatic people who were the descendants of Moroccans.” Members consequently acquired “Islamic” names, as well as new identities as “Asiatic” blacks, or Moroccans. The Moorish Science Temple preached that blacks’ authentic religion was Islam; their national identity was not American, but Moorish; and their genealogy extended back to Christ. Ali’s strange quasi-Masonic creed attracted hundreds of followers in Newark, chiefly drawn from illiterate sharecroppers and landless workers who had trekked from the rural South during the initial wave of the Great Migration. By the late 1920s, the Moorish Science Temple claimed thirty thousand members, with temples in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Petersburg (Virginia), Cleveland, Youngstown (Ohio), Lansing, Chicago, and Milwaukee, among others.
Ali’s awareness of orthodox Islam’s core tenets was sketchy at best. He demanded that followers adhere to many of Islam’s dietary laws; the eating of pork was forbidden. There was some overlap between the Temple people and Garveyism, but the two movements differed in fundamental ways. The Moorish Science Temple was essentially a cult, while the Universal Negro Improvement Association was a popular movement with many different local leaders. However, as the UNIA fragmented, some of its former members joined the Temple, or began to influence it. In March 1929, Ali was arrested on suspicion of murdering an opposition leader, Sheikh Claude Greene. Released on bail, he died mysteriously several months later. His movement almost immediately split into feuding factions. The two major groups were led, respectively, by Ali’s former chauffeur, John Givens-El, who announced he was the reincarnation of Ali, and by Kirkman Bey, “Grand Sheikh” and president of the Moorish Science Temple Corporation. By the 1940s, Kirkman’s followers came under intense scrutiny by the FBI, and a significant number of their temples were investigated for sedition. The Moorish Science Temple largely disintegrated after World War II, with fewer than ten thousand members remaining nationwide, but it had prepared the path for more orthodox expressions of Islam within black America.
From a theological standpoint, the most successful sect in America was the Ahmadiyya movement, which had been founded by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (c. 1835-1908) in the Punjab. At first, it adhered to the core tenets of Islam, but in 1891 Ahmad declared himself Islam’s Mahdi, as well as an avatar of Krishna to the Hindus and Messiah to the Christians. Several years later, he further asserted that Christ did not die on the cross, but survived and made his way to India, where he did finally die and physically ascended into heaven. Such claims outraged Muslims, who declared the sect blasphemous and heretical. Following Ahmad’s own death in 1908, the Ahmadiyya cau
se fractured into the Qadianis, the more conservative faction connected with landowners and the merchant classes, who supported strict adherence to Ghulam Ahmad’s version of Islam, and a more liberal group, the Lahoris, who supported rapprochement with orthodox Islam.
Between 1921 and 1925, Ahmadiyya made its first great inroads in America when the first Qadiani Ahmadi missionary, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, persuaded more than one thousand Americans to convert, both white and black. Many African-American Ahmadi Muslims joined the faith in Chicago and Detroit, cities where the UNIA was also strong. In July 1921, Sadiq initiated the first Muslim publication in the United States, the Moslem Sunrise, through which he reached out to Garveyites, encouraging them to link Islam with their advocacy of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. In a January 1923 issue, he declared: My Dear American Negro . . . the Christian profiteers brought you out of your native lands of Africa and in Christianizing you made you forsake the religion and language of your forefathers—which were Islam and Arabic. You have experienced Christianity for so many years and it has proved to be no good. It is a failure. Christianity cannot bring real brotherhood to the nations. Now leave it alone. And join Islam, the real faith of Universal Brotherhood, which at once does away with all distinctions of race, color and creed.
For all his proselytizing, however, Sadiq was not a natural leader. By the late 1920s, the movement languished; but it did not die away completely. Under the guidance of a new leader, Sufi Bengalee, the Ahmadi movement surged again. In 1929-30 Bengalee delivered over seventy public lectures throughout the United States, reaching thousands. Many of these events were designed to attract black and interracial groups. For example, in November 1931 the Ahmadi-sponsored program “How Can We Overcome Color and Race Prejudice?” attracted more than two thousand attendees at one Chicago venue. By 1940, through its extensive missionary work, the Ahmadis claimed between five and ten thousand American converts, half of them African Americans. The Ahmadis’ primary missionary centers were based in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City (Missouri). The movement was largely responsible for introducing the Qur'an and Islamic literature to a large African-American audience. Because many of the proselytizers Sadiq selected were African Americans, some Garveyites were attracted to the movement, although the multiracial character of the Ahmadiyya made it difficult for most black Garveyites to convert. By the Great Depression their numbers were still significantly smaller than those of the Moorish Science Temple.
It was within this rapidly changing social context that an olive-skinned peddler calling himself Wallace D. Fard made his appearance in Detroit’s black ghetto. He regaled his poor audiences with exotic tales of the Orient, which he mixed with the militant, antiwhite views of the staunch Garveyite. Little is known of his origins. Years later, when he commanded a large number of followers, a story circulated that he had been born in Mecca, the son of wealthy parents of the tribe of the Koreish, which connected in ancestry to Muhammad. Others believed that Fard had been a Moorish Science Temple local leader on the West Coast.
Fard (pronounced FA-rod) preached in the emotional style of a Pentecostal minister, exhorting audiences to avoid alcohol and tobacco, and praising the virtues of marital fidelity and family life. Blacks should work hard, save their meager resources, and if possible own their homes and businesses. Within months, after he had attracted a sympathetic following, his message took an apocalyptic turn when he “revealed” that he was actually a prophet, sent by God to preach a message of salvation. African Americans were not Negroes at all, he announced, “but members of the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen by traders from the Holy City of Mecca 379 years ago. . . . The original people must regain their religion, which is Islam, their language, which is Arabic, and their culture, which is astronomy and higher mathematics, especially calculus.”
Fard employed elementary physics to challenge his audience’s unquestioned belief in the Bible. As one follower later explained: The very first time I went to a meeting I heard him say: “The Bible tells you that the Sun rises and sets. That is not so. The Sun stands still. All your lives you have been thinking that the Earth never moved. Stand and look toward the Sun and know that it is the Earth that you are standing on which is moving.” Up to that day I always went to the Baptist church. After I heard that sermon from the prophet, I was turned around completely.
Fard did not claim to be divine: he presented himself as a prophet, like Muhammad, and added Muhammad to his name. By 1931, news of his controversial addresses attracted hundreds of blacks, many desperately seeking a message of hope as the country sank into depression. Fard wrote two basic texts: “The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam,” a pamphlet which was generally presented orally and which adherents were to memorize, and the manual “Teaching for the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way.” Formal membership in the “Lost-Found Nation” required converts “to return to the holy original Nation.” Members were required to surrender their surnames, which Fard ridiculed as being identified with slavery. In turn, he promised to bestow upon each new member “an Original name,” printed on a national identification card that showed its bearer to be a righteous Muslim. Members were given sets of questions and answers to be memorized perfectly: Q: “Why does [Fard] Muhammad and any Moslem murder the devil? What is the duty of each Moslem in regard to four devils? What reward does a Moslem receive by presenting the four devils at one time?”
A: “Because he is one percent wicked and will not keep and obey the laws of Islam. His ways and actions are like a snake of the grafted type. So Mohammed learned that he could not reform the devils, so they had to be murdered. All Moslem will murder the devil because they know he is a snake and also if he be allowed to live, he would sting someone else. Each Moslem is required to bring four devils, and by bringing and presenting four at one time, his reward is a button to wear on the lapel of his coat, also a free transportation to the Holy City of Mecca.”
The most controversial dimension of Fard’s preaching concerned Euro-Americans. Since black Americans were both Asiatics and Earth’s Original People, what were whites? The reason that both Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali had failed, Fard taught, was that neither had fully grasped the true nature of whites: as Malcolm Little was to learn, they were “devils.” To explain this, Fard presented his parable, Yacub’s History, centered on the genetic plot of an evil “Big Head” scientist named Yacub, who lived thousands of years ago. A member of the exalted tribe of Shabazz, Yacub nevertheless used his scientific skills to produce genetic mutations that culminated in the creation of the white race. Although the naturally crafty and violent whites were banished to the caves of Caucasus, they ultimately achieved control over the entire earth. The Original People, Fard taught, subsequently “went to sleep” mentally and spiritually. The task of the Nation of Islam was to bring into consciousness the “lost-found” Asiatic black man from his centuries-long slumber.
The demonizing of the white race, the glorification of blacks, and the bombastic blend of orthodox Islam, Moorish science, and numerology were a seductive message to unemployed and disillusioned African Americans casting about for a new rallying cause after the disintegration of Garveyism and the inadequacies of the Moorish Science Temple. One evening in August 1931, Fard gave a lecture to an audience of hundreds at the former UNIA hall on West Lake Street in Detroit. One young man in particular, a thirty-three-year-old migrant from Georgia named Elijah Poole, found the address mesmerizing. Recalling it later, he approached Fard and said softly, “I know who you are, you’re God himself.”
“That’s right,” Fard quietly replied, “but don’t tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known.”
Born in Sandersville, Georgia, in 1897, Poole had been a skilled laborer for years, working in his home state as a foreman at a brick-making company. Thin, wirily built, and of below average height, at the age of twenty-two he moved to Detroit along with his wife, Clara, where he quickly became an active member of the UNIA. A
fter Garvey’s imprisonment and exile in 1927, Poole had been searching for a new movement dedicated to black racial pride. In Fard, he felt the presence of a messianic leader who could realize the shattered dreams of Garveyites.
The large number of converts to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam required Fard to institute rudimentary administrative units, a level of lieutenants and captains, and a small number of assistant ministers. He set about promoting his most dedicated followers. In 1932, the sect established a small parochial school in Detroit, followed by another in Chicago two years later. For the male members, he established the Fruit of Islam (FOI), a paramilitary police corps which quickly became the organization’s security force. Women and girls were coordinated through Muslim Girls Training (MGT) classes, which instructed them in their roles as Muslim wives.
In the desperate months of 1932, as black unemployment rates in Detroit reached 50 percent, the sect surrounding Fard expanded exponentially, and with its rising fortunes grew those of Elijah Poole. Although Poole was a poor public speaker, without charisma or even basic language skills, Fard saw something in him, bestowing on him an original name, Elijah Karriem, and a new title, “top laborer.” He was soon representing Fard in a number of capacities, but what neither man anticipated was the surveillance and harassment by Detroit police. On the night of November 20, 1932, Robert Harris, a Nation of Islam member, was arrested for a gruesome ritualistic murder; he had hung up his victim to die on a wooden cross. Under questioning, Harris ranted that his actions were necessary to permit his “voluntary” victim to become a “savior.” The story made headlines, and the Nation of Islam was quickly dubbed the “Voodoo Cult.” Police broke into the group’s headquarters, arresting Fard and one of his lieutenants. Harris was subsequently committed to a mental institution, but the Nation of Islam remained under intense police scrutiny; Fard was arrested on two further occasions. Finally, on May 26, 1933, he fled Detroit for Chicago, where his recent missionary efforts had been particularly well received.