The Nation of Islam (NOI), often referred to as the Black Muslims, originated among southern migrants in the rapidly expanding inner-city areas of the industrial North. Founded during the Great Depression by a mysterious prophet later identified as God in Person, it was led by the Last Messenger of God, Elijah Muhammad until 1975. He was succeeded by his son Imam Warithuddin Muhammad, who initiated a rapid transformation process aimed at merging the movement with mainstream Sunni Islam. This period is known as “the Fall of the Nation” among the followers of Minister Louis Farrakhan, who heads by far the most successful of the various “resurrected” Nations that operates in black America. A former night club entertainer, Farrakhan is the epitome of black preacher artistry, who with inflammatory rhetorical skill has succeeded in making the Nation the center of radical black racialist aspirations. Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam today enjoys a popularity unsurpassed in its history, and black militant Islam has become an integral part of a contemporary black youth culture with its message rhythmically pumped out through popular hip hop stars. Though constantly controversial, Farrakhan has made a remarkable breakthrough in national politics after leading the greatest demonstration in U.S. history in the Million Man March of 1995.

Being one of the first comprehensive black theologies in the United States, the Nation interprets Islam through the perspective given by the African American experience in a way so distinct that many mainstream Muslims refuse to accept it as Islamic. This claim derives from a notion of Islam as one, eternal, unchangeable entity shared by many Islamists and Islamologists alike, but its validity may be seriously questioned. Deconstructed and studied in its multiple forms in various social contexts, we find that the meaning of “Islam” varies considerably in time and place and can at best be understood as an umbrella concept, bringing together a wide variety of different histories. The creed of the Nation may depart considerably from legalistic Sunni Islam (1)

Nation of Islam teaches that a self-created God in the Beginning of Time creates the universe through a series of emanations. The first divine ray, the Divine Intelligence (black intelligence in NO] terminology) takes the form of Primordial Man. Next in creation is, according to NOI doctrine, a circle of twelve greater and twelve lesser “scientists” or “gods,” The spiritual Guide which represents God in Person is an idea akin to the NOI notion of Master Farad Muhammad. The NOI share ideas about cyclical time with Hinduism, although it is far more elaborated in the astronomical speculation among the former. The NOI doctrine informs us that in the beatific cycle prior to the present cycle of confusion, there was a race of humans superior to ours. They lived in a time ushered in by the Universal Adam, who appeared in the first cycle’s sixth millennium on the island of Sri Lanka. The true knowledge was openly preached and man lived an “angelic” life until the cycle of epiphany closed and the cycle of occultation began, in which the true Gnosis is concealed and only taught to a closed circle of earthly angelic descendants. One of them, Adam, who is not identical to the universal Adam, but a partial or episodic Adam, who manifests to initiate each cycle, is invested as the enunciator of the new law. Adam is accordingly not the first man but one of the last survivors from the previous cycle. In the exegesis of Quran 2:30, it is the Original Peopleof the previous cycle who abhor the introduction of the new era and question  Mr.. Yacub who gravely responds, “I know what ye know not.” The hardship experienced by fallen man in the present cycle is a necessary phase, the completion of which leads to a perfected state, the aim of Creation. Central to NOI speculation is the divine potential a priori embedded in man as focus for man’s ambitions. NOI holds the aim of mankind to be a resurrectional process in which by a knowledge of Self, man undergoes an “angel omorphosis,” a doctrine, though differing in terminology  The NOI’s division of mankind into two opposing categories, “gods” and “devils,” is similar to the Zoroastrianclassification of those who have an angelic potential, those who, on this plane in this time cycle, reflect angelic archetypes from higher planes at times past and times to come, and those who are representations or manifestations of Iblîs or the diabolic. (2)

The Nation teaches that the black man is not an inferior creature whose future is necessarily as a welfare recipient in the black urban ghettos, but the Original Man, in himself a locus of all the divine creative powers. Blacks are “gods of the universe.” In the Beginning of Time, a first emanation of divine intelligence took the form of Primordial Man, who took the color from the black space out of which he emerged. The divine energy and creative powers can only manifest in man, and a succession of Man-Gods took charge in creating the world as we know it. In the original divine civilization, the black ManGod mastered all disciplines from mathematics to architecture, symbolized by the pyramids that were placed as a sign of this magnificent past, in itself containing parts of the keys to unlock the secrets of the universe. What is in the Bible described as the Fall of Adam represents an event of cosmic significance at which mankind fell into its present beastlike state. “God in His fallen state is man, and man in his exalted state is God.” (3)

The black gods “died” mentally, a metaphor used to describe the black man’s unawareness of his true identity. World supremacy was given over to a white race of evil, grafted through a process of gene manipulation out of the black man. In essence, the white man is the abstracted and concentrated potential for evil that was present in the first black man, as all creation is composed of the negative and the positive. Ruled by his inner negative side, manifest as the blond, blue-eyed devil, the black man was to suffer in his effort to learn how to master the Quranic imperative “enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.” (4)

The true secrets of the universe were concealed to a closed circle of divine Gnostic sages or the “four and twenty elders” of Christianity, and was not to be revealed until the cycle of confusion ends and the cycle of unveilment commences. Reconnecting with the roots implies embarking on a black path of gnosis, and as knowledge of Self equals knowledge of God, the spiritual journey ultimately guides the black man and woman back into the exalted state of divinity defined as the reason d'être of mankind. This is symbolized in the concept of “I.s.l.a.m.,” which if one breaks it down stands for I-Self-Lord-Am-Master. (5)

The reign of the devil explains the phenomena of colonialism, slavery, racism, economic hardship and oppression that blacks have experienced in recent history. The white devil was commanded by God to subdue the world and establish his supremacy in fulfillment of Revelations 6:8: “And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” A pale horse rode into Africa, America, Asia and Australia, Farrakhan exclaimed, and “wherever you Caucasians went you brought Death to the people.” (6)

Wherever you went you brought Hell to the people. But, as Revelations also informs us, there will be an end to the righteous’ suffering. The white devil was to rule for 6,000 years, and that era is now rushing to its end. The countdown to Armageddon started in 1555 when a white devil named John Hawkins arrived at the shores of Africa onboard the slave ship Jesus to capture the black tribe of Shabazz, and bring them as slaves to the “wilderness of North America.” With this, God’s words to Imam Shabazz (known biblically as Abraham) in Genes 15:13-14 came true: “Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and they shall serve them; and they shall afflict them for four hundred yea and also that nation, whom they will serve, will I judge.” The fulfillment stressed by the Nation as irrefutable evidence that identifies blacks as the principal actors of the Scriptures, reducing to impostors any other nation with claims to be the Chosen People. In effect, slavery brought the original man as Trojan horse into the fortress of evil, giving the African American a key role I the approaching apocalypse.

Close to the expiration of the 400 years, a self-fulfilled God and mem her of the Gnostic circle named Master Farad Muhammad came to Detroit or the 4th of July 1930. He was raised as a poorly educated son of a Georgia share cropper to become His Messenger, and then departed to the abode from which God supervises the destiny of mankind. Elijah Muhammad spread the gospel and embarked on the black path of divinity until he was elevated into a black Messiah and taken to God. (7)

Elijah the Messiah entrusted Minister Farrakhan to guide the lost-found Nation of Islam through the turbulent times to come and will immanently return to judge the wicked as the sun sets over the devil’s world.
Far from being an escapist movement, passively awaiting God’s intervention, the Nation is a religion of practice that teaches blacks to use their inherent divine powers to create their own destiny. Most significant for our purpose is to outline the way Islam was used as a marker for the black nation.

Sharply criticizing the black Church, which at that time had gone from its earlier activist position to become-largely politically quietist and other-worldly. (8)

Ehiah Muhammad taught that Islam was the aboriginal religion of the black man. Christianity was said to be a slave religion, a pie-in-the-sky philosophy, taught the blacks to turn the other cheek to oppression and set all hopes for a dead white man nailed on a cross to give them compensation beyond the grave. Islam restored black self-respect, and in its demand for social justice turned into a creed of black empowerment. (9)

Inspired by black Islamic theology reached by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, black Christians in the late began developing a black theology of liberation, reasserting the activist standpoint of the early church. Today, black nationalist Christianity and Islam cooperate freely, with black as a theological concept bridging the man-made borders of different creeds.

The black-man-is-god concept can be seen on a psychological level as An extreme version of a very American positive thinking, destined to break the mental chains of inferiority by which the black man is said to be chained at the bottom ladder of society. The Nation urges the black man to stop whining over injustice past and present. Nothing good can be expected from the devil. The government of the United States is one of the most powerful on earth and would e solved all its domestic problems long time ago had it been genuinely interested. The United States is equated with Babylon and any demand for assimilation with the foul spirits in the city of evil at its brink of destruction is an insane suicidal policy.

Aloof from the civil rights struggle for desegregation, the Nation taught separation from evil. Blacks were not Americans, but a separate nation with legitimate claims of self-determination in a territory of its own. In compensation for centuries of unpaid slave labor, the Nation demanded land, in America or Africa, and reparations in equipment and cash to get the new nation started. It adopted its own flag, which is red with a white star and crescent, and composed its own national anthem. Elijah Muhammad, and later Farrakhan, regard themselves as the head of a theocratic shadow cabinet, governing a rightfully independent nation state from its headquarters, “the Black House,” in Chicago. Organizationally, the Nation is modeled as a sovereign state administration, with departments for finance, education, health, defense, law, foreign relations, and so on. Its efforts to “rebuild” an economic black national infrastructure have been remarkably successful. During the time of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation evolved into the most potent economic force in black America. (10)

It owned tens of thousands of acres of farm and grass lands, a modem transportation fleet including trucks and a jet plane took care of distribution, and in the cities there were restaurants, super markets, real estate, bakeries, hotels, print shops, a bank and numerous other ventures. The economic empire crumbled during the Fall, due to privatization of the companies and legal suits, but has slowly been rebuilt during the present government.

Emphasizing re-education as a key to national liberation, Muslim schools are now mushrooming throughout the country, but still fall short of meeting the national demand. The health ministry, presently headed by Minister Dr. Alim, Muhammad, not only runs programs for better diet and exercise, but also operates a chain of AIDS clinics. The defense department is in charge of a black Muslim army which gained national attention when its soldiers started to intervene in downtrodden neighborhoods to clear the streets of drug dealers and prostitutes in the late 1980s. Later incorporated as NOI Security, the Islamic patrols today have contracts in at least five different states and are employed as guards at black housing projects. This could partly be seen as the Nation’s first serious effort to expand its jurisdiction in black America. Its prison ministry has won great prestige for its outreach efforts, and is also responsible for what is held to be the most effective rehabilitation program for criminals and drug addicts. Internationally, the Nation engages in trade and Farrakhan is today greeted as a head of state when he travels across Africa and Asia. Charges of having working relations with dictatorial governments counted as foes to the United States are brushed aside as interventions in the affairs of a sovereign state, and besides, who is the United States to criticize other nations for friendly relations with foreign dictatorships? (11)

Long at the margins of black America, the Nation of Islam grew out of its sectarian position during the 1980s and gradually gained wider acceptance for its separatist message. For a long time, black America was largely caught up in the civil rights struggle and kept the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. alive. A gradually diminishing gap in income, the standard of living, and health and education seemed to confirm the vision of a multiracial American nation as a realistic possibility. Affirmative action placed individual blacks in visible positions of power and blacks made an inroad into public affairs as elected representatives on county, city, state and federal levels. Reaganomics marked a dramatic reversal of this trend, and during the 1980s and early 1990s whites and blacks effectively were pushed apart-economically, socially and politically. The blacks in the United States are the only Western population whose life expectancy rate is declining. With 50 percent of black children raised in poverty, a dramatic school drop-out rate, high unemployment numbers, one third of black males either in prison or out on parole, and a crime rate that makes black inner city war zones deadlier than the Vietnam War, Farrakhan is considered more a realist than an extremist when he, paraphrasing the Kerner Commission, concludes that “there already exist two nations in the United States. One black and one white. Separate and unequal.” Since 1995, the black-on-black crime rates have dropped dramatically. Besides all credit that might be given to the Clinton administration, the Muslim impact deserves recognition. Farrakhan’s unique rapport with young blacks in concert with black Islamic rappers is a part of the picture. Touring the nation with a “stop the killing” campaign, Farrakhan in 1992 succeeded in effecting a truce between the notorious Los Angeles-based gang federations Bloods and Crips.

Expanding the peace process, increasingly more gangs with a total membership of several hundred thousand signed up. The Million Man March encapsulated much of the same spirit, as more than a million black men atoned for their failure to take responsibility for their own families and communities. Renouncing the path of self-destruction, they pledged to rebuild their neighborhoods, renounce drugs and violence, get educated, and take charge of their own futures. This “spirit of the Million Man March” should be considered when trying to explain the dropping crime rates in black America.

Ideologically, the Nation of Islam can be seen as a Third Positionist organization, a black Islamic version of leftist National Socialism. It hails God, Nation and the nuclear family and preaches a morality compatible with conservative American middle-class standards. Its disciplined members are clean living, non-drinking, hard-working and law-abiding national soldiers, kept in shape by a strictly hierarchical and undemocratic chain of command. Farrakhan is elected by God and not the black citizens, and can, according to the NOI Constitution, appoint and discharge his Ministers and other officials at will.

The corporate character of the racial nation is emphasized, and though appealing to the poor masses, their problems are explained primarily by race and not class. Anti-capitalist and anti-Communist, the third way envisioned merges ideas from black nationalism with the third way of Islam and the nationalist Islamic socialism of Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi. At this writing (1997), the Nation of Islam is the most successful of the radical racialist movements in the United States, dwarfing its competitors in black America as well as the radical racialists of white America to whom we next will turn in part 3 Oct.30, 2002.

1) See K. Paul Johnson “The Masters Revealed: The Myth Of The Great White Lodge” p.66,146. and “Initiates Of Theosophical Masters” p.141,149,150,152,155.

2) For a description and analysis of the NOI creed, see Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elilah Muhammad, chapters 6-8.

3) Muhammad, Jabril, “Path to God Revealed to Blacks,” Final Call, October 3, 1988.

4) The Holy Quran 3:110, translated by Yusuf Ali.

5) The blackosophic mysticism of the Black Islamic creed is discussed extensively in Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, chapters 6 and 7.

6) Farrakhan, Louis, speech in Los Angeles, February 2, 1992.

7) The NOI teach that Elijah Muhammad never died in 1975. He learned of a conspiracy against his life and was rescued by black extraterrestials and taken to the abode from which God supervises the destiny of man. Farrakhan claims that another man was buried in Elijah’s place, which explains why his son Imam Warithuddin Muhammad removed his grave site. In the NOI head mosque in Chicago is a secluded area called the Holy of Holies in which an empty sarcophagus symbolizes the miracle of the living Messiah.

8) For excellent studies of the multifaceted and evolving black church, see C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (New York: Orbis Press, 1986).

9) See, for example, Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman (Philadelphia: Hakim’s Publications, 1967); The Flag of Islam, (Chicago, 1974).

10) C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (1973), 97.

11) Mattias Gardefl, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, chapters 3, 6 and 10.