TRANSCULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS BRICOLAGE: HOW THE NATION OF ISLAM
(RE)CONSTRUCTED A RELIGION
By
Jajuan J. Maefield

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
African American and African Studies—Master of Arts
2017

ABSTRACT
TRANSCULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS BRICOLAGE: HOW THE NATION OF ISLAM
(RE)CONSTRUCTED A RELIGION
By
Jajuan J. Maefield
This study examines the influence(s) that Sufism in general, and West African Sufism in
particular, had on African American practitioners of Islam in North America as evidenced by the
growth and development of the Nation of Islam (NOI). In what follows, I argue that African
Americans created a distinctive cultural attribute of Black Islam that had yet to exist on the
American continent. This distinctive way of examining Black Islam is neither Arabocentric nor
Afrocentric, but rather it reveals a distinctive African Diasporic element of Black Islam whereby
the NOI created a hybrid Islamic identity that (1) was rooted in the racial context of the United
States during the early to mid-twentieth century, (2) aligned with West African Sufi Islamic
practices, (3) retained and reinvented basic tenets of “traditional Islam,” and (4) created
mythologies in order circumvent white secular and sacred power structures, signaling both a
cultural and religious transformation within the NOI. This social a religious transformation was
created through transcultural bricolage, a hybridity of the cultural, religious, and abstract
interpretations and inventions that allowed members of the NOI to practice a brand of Islam that
was rooted in the particularities of the black experience. This study reveals how the Nation of
Islam was forged through the processes of bricolage, a method of construction that involves
using whatever is at hand, and transculturation, the process of using merging and converging
cultures, to construct a religion that centered African Americans adherents.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One .................................................................................................................................... 1
Research Questions .................................................................................................................................. 4
Significance of this Research .................................................................................................................... 7

Chapter Two.................................................................................................................................... 9
The Nation of Islam .................................................................................................................................. 9
Sufism ..................................................................................................................................................... 12
Theories of African Islam ....................................................................................................................... 16
Tranculturation and Bricolage ............................................................................................................... 20

Chapter Three................................................................................................................................ 24
One Nation, Under Fard ........................................................................................................................ 26
Fard's Pre-NOI Identity.......................................................................................................................... 31
Elijah's Nation ........................................................................................................................................ 39

Chapter Four ................................................................................................................................. 43
The Nature of God in the Nation of Islam .............................................................................................. 43
Reclaiming Prophethood ........................................................................................................................ 46
Legitimizing the Qur’an through Biblical Exegeses ............................................................................... 49

Chapter Five .................................................................................................................................. 53
Conclusion and Implications for Further Research ............................................................................... 53

WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................... 57

iii

Chapter One
This study examines the influence(s) that Sufism in general, and West African Sufism in
particular, had on African American practitioners of Islam in North America as evidenced by the
growth and development of the Nation of Islam (NOI). In what follows, I argue that African
Americans created a distinctive cultural attribute of Black Islam that had yet to exist on the
American continent. This distinctive way of examining Black Islam is neither Arabocentric nor
Afrocentric, but rather it reveals a distinctive African Diasporic element of Black Islam whereby
the NOI created a hybrid Islamic identity that (1) was rooted in the racial context of the United
States during the early to mid-twentieth century, (2) aligned with West African Sufi Islamic
practices, (3) retained and reinvented basic tenets of “traditional Islam,” and (4) created
mythologies in order circumvent white secular and sacred power structures, signaling both a
cultural and religious transformation within the NOI. This social a religious transformation was
created through transcultural bricolage, a hybridity of the cultural, religious, and abstract
interpretations and inventions that allowed members of the NOI to practice a brand of Islam that
was rooted in the particularities of the black experience. This study reveals how the Nation of
Islam was forged through the processes of bricolage, a method of construction that involves
using whatever is at hand, and transculturation, the process of using merging and converging
cultures, to construct a religion that centered African Americans adherents.
The NOI’s distinct religiosity, while being borne in the Americas, was rooted in both the
West African Sufi Islamic practices as well as the particular experiences of African Americans in
the United States. The NOI experienced tremendous growth because of their religious
sophistication that was mired in Islam, inscribed with traces of Christianity, and inundated with
the imaginative ingenuity of founder Wallace D. Fard and his best student, the Honorable Elijah
1

Muhammad.1 One consequence of this religious amalgam was the perception that Elijah
Muhammad’s teachings were foreign to Islam, thus prohibiting their brand of Islam to be
recognized by the worldwide Ummah (Muslim community) (Lincoln, 1994, p. 213). However,
what provided a glimmer of validity was that prior to the late 1950s, orthodox Muslims had
never consistently challenged the NOI’s version of Islam, leaving many to suspect that the Black
Nationalist version of Islam was authentic. Still, as the NOI began to respond to its civil rights
opponents, many orthodox Muslims from outside and inside of the movement began to challenge
their nontraditional beliefs (Clegg, 2014, p. 131).
Islam is a religion that originates from the Abrahamic tradition of Judaism and
Christianity. Traditionally, it focuses on the core themes as described by the Quran and the
Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammed.2 The goal of Islam is to redeem the soul through giving
charity, doing righteous works, continuous devotion, and constant prayer. The success of every
Muslim rests on five principles (also known as the five pillars of Islam): (1) The Shahada (the
declaration of faith stating that there is only one true God who is worthy of worship, asserts that
he acts alone without any helpers, partners, or intermediaries, and it recognizes Muhammad of
Arabia, 570-632 AD as the final prophet and messenger of Allah/God), (2) (S)he or must
establish Salat (five daily prayers), (3) (S)he must pay zakat (alms given annually, which is 2.5%
of one’s accumulated wealth), (4) Perform hajj (the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca), and
(5) Fast during the month of Ramadan (Chittick, 2008, p. 5). These criteria are the beginning
point of orthodoxy and orthopraxy in “traditional” Islam. Here, they will serve as guideposts to
1

In The Black Muslims in America, C. Eric Lincoln estimates that during their greatest growth period,
from about the mid-1950s to 1964, and their membership “may have reached between 50,000 to 100,000”
(Lincoln, 1994, p. 218). Lincoln points out that exact numbers of their membership are almost impossible
to determine, as only members within the NOI’s inner circle knows with certainty. What is known for
certain is that the NOI experienced their greatest numericalgrowth under the leadership of Malcolm X.
2
Sunnah is best described as the “way” of the Prophet. Typically, it describes things that Prophet
Muhammad of Arabia (570-632 AD) did, said, or tacitly approved.

2

the discussion that follows about the nature of Islam in both a West African Sufi context and
within the NOI context in the United States. These will provide a foundation that will allow us
to see how the NOI’s practices adhered to, and deviated from, what are considered traditional
beliefs and practices of Islam.
Although the aforementioned may serve as a guide in examining Islam, it is important to
avoid essentialism in Islamic studies. There is not, and cannot be any one normative definition
of the Islamic tradition or its boundaries and limits. In most cases, scholars can identify
competing definitions of Islam by examining the historical interpretations of Muslims
themselves (Curtis, 2002, p. 4). The most visible tradition in the Euro-American study of Islam,
which is sometimes mistakenly seen to represent all of “Islam,” has been the discourse in which
the Qur’an and the Sunna are treasured as paramount sources of divine authority (Curtis, 2002, p.
5). As a result, the study of African American Islam “has been too consumed with dismissing
certain Muslims as cultists, heretics, and sectarians. All of these pejorative and unhelpful labels
presume, by their comparison to ‘orthodox’ Muslims, a normative Islam that in no time and in no
place has ever existed” (Curtis, 2002, p. 6).
In addition, centering the five pillars of the Islamic tradition “does not establish any
common norms, values, or beliefs, other than the centrality of the Qur’an and the Sunna – which
is not to say that other commonalities have not existed in Islamic history. But it does suggest
that any tradition which is truly universal, as the Qur’an nearly to all self-identifying Muslims, is
bound… to have no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete
among themselves to temporarily give their particularisms a function of universal representation”
(Curtis, 2002, p. 5). The point here is that any tradition, as in this case the Islamic tradition, is

3

shaped by human beings who operate in historical time (Curtis, 2002, p. 6). In this case, the
actor who reigned over this particularistic brand of Islam was Elijah Muhammad.
To some, it may have seemed as if Elijah Muhammad was simply forging a belief system
that was whimsical, unorganized, and philosophically unsound, one that was more about social
and political autonomy than about exercising religious freedom. However, what clearly began to
emerge was the recognition that Elijah Muhammad was (re)constructing a socio-political
movement that was rooted in religion and the black experience, while also preparing to build an
autonomous African American society. The identity of the Nation of Islam was forged through
the processes of transcultural bricolage, which catered to African Americans economically,
socially, psychologically, philosophically, and politically, while bringing a do-it-yourself
mentally to Black communities throughout the United States. By examining the NOI’s Islamic
construction, which exemplifies a diasporic religion, we will be able to see how they successfully
blended old ideologies with new realities.
Research Questions
There are several questions that will guide this research. The first will examine how the
NOI constructed its particular brand of Islam. Before beginning this research, one of the
questions that often plagued me was how the NOI was able to get African Americans to convert
to this peculiar religion (by peculiar, I mean one that is foreign to Christian beliefs and
practices), shun their old belief systems, and adopt Islam as a way of life.3 Those who converted
were not accepting a form of Islam that was known to the majority of Islamic adherents, and at

3

It is important to note here that Muslims have long been a fixture in American societies. In
fact, Islam was first introduced to America by African slaves (Gomez, 1998, p. 59). These
African slaves, many of whom were West African, arrived in significant numbers and made
persistent efforts to maintain their Islamic identities, so much so that they may have converted
other slaves to the faith (Gomez, 1998, p. 59).
4

times, its teachings appeared to be antithetical to traditionally held beliefs in Islam and a possible
inhibitor of African American progress.
Another component of this research examines how West African religiosity (re)emerged
in the segregated spaces of North America? While the NOI was founded in the United States, it
(re)introduced African spiritual consciousness and philosophical precepts that have remained a
part of the Black religious experience for centuries. It was the ability West African religious
practitioners to accept and hold seemingly contrasting religious viewpoints without necessarily
reconciling one belief over the other that allowed them to survive across time and space. For
example, in Cuba, Santeria comes from the Yoruba tradition of West Africa and is a complex
blend of divination, spirit possession, and sacrifice mixed with some Roman Catholic elements
(Juergensmeyer and Anheier, 2012, p. 28). Vodú (Voodoo), another African religion, arrived in
Haiti through trans-Atlantic slave trade, and allowed slaves to maintain their African identity.
According to Gonzalez, traditions from the Fon, Yoruba, and Congo “intermingled and became
the foundation of a new, African-derived religion… which also draws on Catholicism and
indigenous religion” (Gonzalez, 2014, p. 108). Similarly, practitioners of Islam in North
America also blended spiritual and secular beliefs into one coherent religion in the United States.
This research will also examine the nature of Sufism (Islamic spiritualism/mysticism),
particularly West African Sufism, and how it influenced the Nation of Islam. Sufism is often
described as a mystical order of Islam that focuses on the spiritual nature of its practitioners
rather than focusing on its followers’ observable practices. It is important to note that Sufism is
not a “sect” of Islam, as most of its practitioners identify as either Sunni or Shi’ite, but rather it is
the approach to the spiritual nature of Islam that is stressed. While Sufism does not encourage its
practitioners to abandon fundamental Islamic beliefs and practices, many insist that the spiritual

5

aspects of Islam are more important than its outward manifestations of its five pillars of faith as
stressed by Sunni and Shi’ite followers. This idea is important, as we shall see later, as it is this
religious lenience (or flexibility) that allows its adherents to have very different practices.
The Nation of Islam is an African diaspora religion, as it derives in whole or in part from
various African-based religious traditions (Juergensmeyer and Anheier, 2012, p. 28). As such, it
is imperative to use an interdisciplinary framework for this study. In A Critical Introduction to
Religion in the Americas: Bridging the Liberation Theology and Religious Studies Divide,
Michelle A. Gonzalez notes that scholars “who focus on African diaspora religions in the
Americas are forced to employ an interdisciplinary approach to study this complex religious
landscape in order to truly account for its diversity” (Gonzalez, 2014, p. 121). Therefore, in
undertaking this study, I use an interdisciplinary methodology to examine the NOI.
Using an interdisciplinary methodology to support this thesis, I examine the religious history,
philosophy, and sociology of the NOI by examining primary documents and speeches of Elijah
Muhammad, primary and secondary sources that delve into the nature of West African religiosity
and Sufism, and primary and secondary sources that deal with the construction of the NOI’s
religious identity. I will also show that by using whatever was available to him, Elijah
Muhammad engaged in a cultural and religious bricolage, one that he helped to create by using
disparate pieces of religious ideologies in order to form a coherent whole. In addition,
Muhammad was also involved in a transculturation that wedded African, African American, and
American culture into one conglomerate.
While background information will be provided about the Nation of Islam’s founder,
Wallace D. Fard (who founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit and lead his followers from 1930
until his disappearance in 1934), this study will primarily focus on the NOI under leadership of

6

Elijah Muhammad, whose role as the prophet and head of the Nation of Islam spanned from
1934 until his death in 1975. Focusing on Elijah Muhammad instead of the Nation’s founder
was a critical choice, but one that did not come without careful consideration. As Elijah
Muhammad ascended to the leadership position of the Nation of Islam, much of the teachings
thereafter became blurred, so much so that many scholars cannot discern which of the Nation’s
teachings were products of Fard and which were products of Elijah Muhammad. In fact, it seems
that to some extent, Fard introduced ideas and that Muhammad would later expand upon as time
and circumstances necessitated. With that in mind, it seems that one can attribute many of Elijah
Muhammad’s teachings to his own understandings and interpretations of what Islam calls for,
and what the nation of Black Americans needed.
Significance of this Research
The history of the Nation of Islam has been explored countlessly since C. Eric Lincoln’s
Black Muslims in America was published in 1961. This research is significant because it adds
another dimension to the conversation about the Nation of Islam that has not been thoroughly
studied. The significance of this research is threefold: it examines the history of a movement as
an African diasporic religion, it examines how the NOI’s theological modifications of traditional
Islamic thought contained a combination of African, Christian, and cultural elements, and it
examines how religious beliefs served as a vehicle of social, political, and economic mobility. In
addition, this study is unique because it adds to the literature concerning the NOI and their
relationship to the Sufi Ahmadiyya Movement.
While nearly every author who have written about the Nation of Islam mention the
Ahmadiyya movement and their importance to the Nation of Islam (as they were among the first
to spread widely circulate the Qur’an to African Americans in the US), very few gave specific

7

examples of how Sufi doctrine became part of the NOI’s theology. In other words, they all give
substantial historical accounts of the history of the Nation of Islam and of the Ahmadiyya
Movement, but they do not provide a theological analysis of specific doctrine that shows how
some aspects of the NOI’s doctrine were derivatives of Ahmadi doctrine. In other texts, Sufism
is mentioned passively or largely ignored, as those authors sought to show that the NOI was an
outgrowth of other Black Nationalist groups such as the UNIA and the Moorish America Science
Temple, as it was “the waning of these two groups… [that] left a void in Black religious political
life at precisely the time such a channel was needed most” (Lee, 1996, p. 21). The NOI, then,
filled the gap left behind by the fall of those earlier groups. While it may be argued that
members of the Nation of Islam were also a part of these earlier groups, the NOI’s identity was
distinct from those groups.
This study also contributes to the body of knowledge that exists within African American
and African studies. One component of this field involves an interdisciplinary approach to
material. Although the NOI can be envisioned solely as a religious movement, it is also
necessary to examine the context in which they gained prominence, how race relations shaped
their ideologies, their hierarchical structure, the involvement of women, their posture on politics,
and how they engaged in politics of respectability. All of these random and yet interrelated
facets, can be comprehensibly examined by using the interdisciplinary framework of
transcultural bricolage.

8

Chapter Two
The Nation of Islam
Much scholarship on the Nation of Islam has been produced since it gained widespread
attention around the late 1950s. However, that scholarship has focused primarily on their
practices and theories of liberation. More specifically, many scholars sought to examine the
Nation of Islam as a radical wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Scholars such as C. Eric
Lincoln, David Clegg, Michael Gomez, and others have often linked some of their beliefs and
practices of these “Black Muslims” to various predecessors including Father Divine, Father
Hurley, Marcus Garvey, and Noble Drew Ali of the Moorish Science Temple of America.
However, while these figures were undoubtedly precursors to the development of the Nation of
Islam, and many members of former organizations would later join and influence the NOI, the
tradition of using Islamic beliefs and practices to navigate different spaces has long been alive in
the West African Sufi tradition. Many scholars point to Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish
American Science Temple as the starting point of the Nation of Islam, most likely because of
their use of the Seven Circle Quran and their references to an all-powerful deity, Allah.
However, Aminah McCloud contends that there is no evidence that the Moorish Science Temple
of America had access to even the most basic tenets of Islam or Islamic texts, with the possible
exception of the Qur’an (McCloud, 1995, p. 13). Given this truth, it seems evident that the
NOI’s version of Islam had roots in something other than the Moorish American Science
Temple, one that had African traditions linked to that tradition.
The Nation of Islam rooted their belief system and their practices in the five pillars of
faith that also grounded traditional Muslims: (1) The belief and worship of one God and
acceptance of Muhammad as his prophet and messenger, (2) The five daily prayers, (3) fasting
during the month of Ramadan, (4) Paying alms tax, and (5) performing a hajj to Mecca.
9

However, while the Nation of Islam followed the traditions of old in theory, what became
evident was that the way they adhered to these traditions differed greatly from more orthodox
understandings of Islam. For example, the belief and worship of one God was maintained,
although the God the NOI proclaimed to be the one true God was Wallace D. Fard ; the prophet
Muhammad of Arabia (570-632 AD) was replaced with the NOI’s prophet Elijah Muhammad;
Ramadan was celebrated in December in the NOI as opposed to celebrating with the worldwide
Muslim community during the ninth month of the Islamic calendar; the NOI transcended
traditional Islamic dietary laws by redefining what was haram (forbidden) and halal
(permissible), and by limiting food intake to just one meal per day; the NOI denied the concept
of the hereafter (heaven and hell); ascribed a racial identity to God; and described the devil
(Shaytan) as one who was not a supernatural being, but was identified as white people on earth.
These beliefs and practices mark a point of departure for the NOI from orthodoxy. The NOI thus
advanced a variety of Islam that decentered Arab interpretations of Islam and centered the
African American experience.
In Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American
Islamic Thought, Edward E. Curtis labeled African American varieties of Islam as neither
nationalist nor racialist, but particularistic (Curtis, 2002, p. 14). This means that each
practitioner of Islam interprets it in a way that integrates his or her unique set of values and
beliefs. However, Curtis also notes that tensions exist between the idea of Islam as a religion
that is universally accepted on one hand, and on the other hand is the idea that religion is
applicable to a particular group of people within a given context. The former is often a
Eurocentric approach to a religious ideology in which one seeks total uniformity, without regard
for the lived experiences of particular individuals or groups. The latter, which is found within an

10

African tradition, examines and expresses religious ideologies in part, or in totality, based off of
their lived experiences (Curtis, 2002, p. 1). Elijah Muhammad attempted to rid African
American Islam of any paradox or ambiguity by advancing an entirely particularistic
interpretation of Islam (Curtis, 2002, p. 16).
African Americans Muslims were not only facing the issue of religious validity, but the
more pressing issue of human survival. The notion of the “other” helps to inform us as to why
African American Muslims were viewed in a negative light. The practice of Islam by an
otherized black minority gave whites a new target, Islam. Not only were blacks un-American by
their skin color, but also by their adoption of an un-American religion, since Islam stood outside
of the accepted religions of Christianity and Catholicism. The problem of black Muslims, then,
has always been twofold; first, they were black in a country that did not accept blacks as equal
human beings, and the second, these “others” were practicing Islam. Where whites perceived
both identities to be distinctly problematic, Elijah Muhammad saw them as being mutually
reinforcing and empowering. As such, he did not make a distinction between being black and
being Muslim; these identities were identical (Curtis, 2002, p. 63).
Another related theme in the history of African American Islamic thought is the struggle
for black liberation (Curtis, 2002, p. 15). Because their theory of liberation involved separating
from white society, Elijah Muhammad proclaims that the Nation of Islam was often credited
with creating a separatist movement (Muhammad, 1993, p. 22). This led to claims that they were
hindering the development of black progress by proposing a separatists’ ideology, but in
actuality, the Nation of Islam offered the chance to embrace a Black Nationalist identity and
agenda that sought social and economic independence (Clegg, 2014, p. 41). C. Eric Lincoln
noted that “all Black Nationalist movements have in common three characteristics: a

11

disparagement of whites and their culture, a repudiation of ‘Negro’ identity, and a concomitant
search for and commitment to the black (African) heritage... The more influential black
nationalist movements also seize on varying interests as focal points for group identification or
as vehicles of counter-aggression against a white majority” (Lincoln, 1961, p. 47). While
Lincoln’s assessment of all Black Nationalist groups takes a universalist approach, thus
essentializing all Black movements, these characteristics are embodied in the Nation of Islam
and expands our understanding of liberation theology.
Black liberation theology has a long list of practitioners, including Muslims, Christians,
and philosophers alike. Much of the scholarship, however, focuses on liberation theology from a
Christian perspective and occurring within an American context. However, the NOI practiced
Islam as a distinctive brand of liberation theology, one that follows a West African tradition of
using Islam as a tool of resistance and liberation. In A Study of the Influence of Islam in
Northern Nigeria, John E. Means notes that Islam has had the easier time transcending time and
space in Africa because many of the practices of the tribes are in harmony with many tenets of,
or rather not in conflict with, Muslim theology (Means, 1965, p. 72). Similarly, the many of the
tenets of Islam, as presented by the Nation of Islam, were in line with many African American
beliefs and practices.
Sufism
Sufism is an order that exists within Islam and not, contrary to popular belief, a sect of
Islam. To highlight the difference between an order and a sect, a sect is a subgroup of a
particular religious practice (in this case Islam) whose religious, political, and/or philosophical
belief systems identifies with a certain ideology within a larger religious group. Hence, in Islam,
Sunni is a sect that follows the Quran and the Sunnah of their Prophet Muhammad. Sunnis

12

regard themselves as those who emphasize the traditions of Muhammad and of the first four
caliphs of the Muslim community after the death of their Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. Shi’a
is a sect that focuses on the Quran and the Sunnah, but are also considered the “party of Ali,” or
those who believe that the first caliph after Prophet Muhammad’s death should have been the
prophet’s son-in-law, Ali, and that all successive leaders of the Muslim state should be
descendants of Prophet Muhammad. An order, in this case the Sufi order, does not identify
themselves as a distinctive sect of Islam, but rather most identify as a specific group, usually
within the Sunni or Shi’a traditions.
Sufis believe and follow many of the “traditional” tenets of Islam, but practice them in
different ways, just as in the case of the NOI. In general, Sufis go beyond external requirements
of Islam to seek a personal experience of God through forms of meditation and spiritual growth.
According to Mbacké and Hunwick, Sufism “is a devotional practice which promotes the
purification of the soul – a spiritual objective that lies at the very heart of Islam” (Mbacké and
Hunwick, 2005, p. ix). Sufism is also characterized by the great importance it places on the
spiritual education of disciples, partially due to the fact that any Sufi path is considered by its
members to be the best way to attain perfection (ihsan) in Islam. This knowledge can only be
transmitted through Sufi sheikhs, which, in general, “have looked upon themselves as those
Muslims who take seriously God’s call to perceive His presence both in the world and in the
Self” (Chittick, 2000, p. 19).
Sufis are best described as mystics as opposed to ascetics. Asceticism refers to the piety
that stresses obedience to a transcendent deity, while mysticism stresses communion with and
immanent deity (Melchert, 2015, p. 14). For Sufis, “direct experience takes precedents over
historical revelation, and from this derives… the law of mysticism (Trimingham, 1971, p. 137).

13

Some Sufis trace their starting point to Ali, the fourth Caliph of the Muslim state after the death
of the Prophet Muhammad, as he was believed to have received esoteric knowledge about the
nature of Islam (Trimingham, 1971, p. 136). Others point to a suggestion of an extra-scriptural
mystical teachings of the Qur’an as indicated by Prophet Muhammad’s friend, Abu Hurayra
(Dickson, 2015, p. 14), who legendarily stated, “I have memorized two kinds of knowledge from
Allah's Apostle. I have propagated one of them to you and if I propagated the second, then my
throat would be cut” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol. 1, Book 3, No. 121). This hints at a type of esoteric
knowledge that exists within Islam but it only known by few. Others who believed that there is
an esoteric nature argue that the Prophet himself laid the foundations of Sufism (Mbacke and
Hunwick, 2005, p. 1). In short, while traditional Islam places emphasis on the orthopraxy, Sufis
place emphasis on the inner spiritual nature of Islam. In doing so, they have greater flexibility in
external practices.
By the eight century, the term Sufi was applied to a group of people who differentiated
themselves from other Muslims by stressing specific teachings of the Qur’an (Chittick, 2008, p.
22). This early Sufism was a natural expression of religion as a communal matter; it was the
adherents right to pursue a relationship with God, as opposed to joining an institutionalized
religion based on authority (Trimingham, 1998, p. 2). By the ninth century, a variety of
approaches to Islam had developed and Sufis became known as anything from “knowers,
ascetics, renouncers, and poor men” (Chittick, 2008, p. 22). However, although they had new
names, their focus and interests of the Sufis were not new.
By the eleventh century, Sufi teachings had become standardized (Dickson, 2015, p. 14),
partially due to the help of renowned scholar Al-Ghazali, who argued for the intellectual
superiority of mystical knowledge (Keeler, 2006, p. 6). He argued that there were three kinds of

14

knowledge in society that could be divided into a hierarchy. At the bottom of his hierarchy were
the common people, or those who believe in the truths of the religion without questioning it.
Above them were elites who learned reasons for their beliefs, and at the top of the hierarchy were
the elite of the elite, or the ones who directly experience religious truth, the Sufis (Keeler, 2006,
p. 6). It was this third group, the elites of the elites who would carry the Sufism across the
African continent. Manding speakers traveled across the Sahara, establishing networks with
Muslims in the Maghreb (Curtis, 2014, p. 5). This contact is believed to have brought West
Africans in contact with Sufis. In Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an
Emancipatory Community, Sean Hanretta notes that “Sufism was one of the earliest forms of
Islamic devotion in the region and an important source of religious power for holy men. One of
the oldest pieces of writing is in West Africa, and perhaps the oldest direct source on Islam in
Africa, is an eleventh century inscription with instructions for Qur’anic recitations used in Sufi
mystical practices” (Hanretta, 2009, p. 33).
Another aspect of the growing prominence of Sufism during the 11th century was the
development of the Sufi lodge, or khanaqah. From the eleventh century onward, khanaqahs
provided meeting and resting places for Sufis, and allowed them to spread Sufism throughout the
border of Northern Africa (Trimingham, 1998, p. 9). This rapid dispersion of Sufi ideas lead to
changes in society, as Sufis began taking on more influential roles with those in power as well as
with the common people (Keeler, 2006, p. 4). However, it was not until the twelfth century Sufi
institutions did not begin to play a major role in Islamic history (Chittick, 2008, p. 24).
Before the twelfth century, Sufism was looked upon as outside of the fold of Islam.
However, as more “respectable” people embraced Islam, such as Saladin and his lieutenants,
those conversions made Sufi belief and associations respectable (Trimingham, 1998, p. 9). Sufis

15

then began their own development of Islam with its own leaders, hierarchy, and forms of
worship, and by the thirteenth century, Sufi centers became the focal point for mystical schools
and teaching centers (Trimingham, 1998, p. 10). From the thirteenth to the first half of
fourteenth centuries, Sufi (Tijaniyyah) teachings were disseminated over the vast portions of the
continent by both Maghreb and Egyptian brotherhoods, and in many cases, they served as
conduits for conversion to Islam (Knysh, 1999, p. 253). Other Sufi groups, such as the Idrisis,
began spreading from Libya into Chad into Kano in northern Nigeria during this period (Knysh,
1999, p. 255). As a result of the diasporic nature of Sufism, not only were ideas dispersed, but
also the dispersal of black bodies throughout the West African continent that facilitated the
spread of Islam. It was those Sufi masters who had special Islamic knowledge were key to
spreading Islam throughout the Western region (Curtis, 2014, p. 5).
By the fourteenth century, Sufi orders were integral to the structure of Muslim societies,
so much so that they became important symbols of political legitimacy (Dickson, 2015, p. 24).
In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Sufi orders provided a visible gathering place for
demonstrating the practice of Islam and were instrumental in spreading Islam throughout the
continent (Robinson, 2004, p. 19).
Theories of African Islam
Islam became a fixture on the African continent, developing both as a religious institution
and as identity marker, especially in West Africa. However, the question of when Islam actually
reached the continent seems to be a point of contention amongst scholars. While some maintain
that Islam reached the continent of Africa in about the 7th century, coming first through Egypt
by way of Arabic conquerors, others, such as Peter B. Clarke, argue that Islam made its first
contacts with Africa around the eighth century, stating that it made its way across the trans-

16

Saharan trade routes from North to West Africa (Clarke, 1982, p. 1). Not long after Arab
conquerors had overrun North Africa did the rulers then begin to organize slave raids into
southern regions of Morocco, leading them as far south as Ghana (Clarke, 1982, pp. 9-10). The
next stage in the contact was between West Africans and Muslim merchants, who began trading
with West Africans in order to obtain supplies of gold. According to Clarke, “the realization that
West Africa was the ‘land of gold’ made it the focus of greater attention in North Africa,
attracting increasing numbers of Muslim traders to the commercial centers of the Sahara and
West Africa itself” (Clarke, 1982, p. 12).
According to John Mbiti, this contact between Islam and West Africa, the Senegambia
region to be exact, would not happen until about the eleventh century (Mbiti, 1990, p. 238-239).
It is important to note that by the time Islam reached the Western part of the continent, they were
practicing a version that was much different from the “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxy” as viewed
by its practitioners in the Arabian Peninsula. What made it distinctive was that they followed a
brand of Islam that not only followed “traditional” beliefs and practices, but one that also
incorporated indigenous African beliefs and practices as well. Many West Africans soon
embraced a unique brand of Islam, Sufism.
West African Sufi Muslims occupy a unique space in their tradition of practicing Islam.
As noted earlier, Sufi Islam is much different from “traditional” forms of Islam such as Sunni or
Shi’ite Islam. What also makes African Islam particularistic is their ability to incorporate their
own epistemologies and cosmologies into Islam, making Sufism, in a sense, distinctly African.
West African Islamic practices were based largely on their lived realities and experiences.
Therefore, it is wrong to say that West Africans deviated from orthodoxy, but rather it is more
appropriate to say that there exists a plurality of orthodoxies that are contingent upon one’s own

17

spiritual realities. The idea of a multiplicity of orthodoxies can be summarized in the Sufi
dictum: “Water takes on the color of its container” (qtd. in Dickson, 2015, p. 14).
According to John E. Means in A Study of the Influence of Islam in Northern Nigeria, the
“high degree of flexibility and adaptability as well as the simplicity of the creed is the great
stimulus which gives greater success to Islam than Christianity” (Means, 1965, p. 73). While
Means was examining Islam in the context of Northern Nigeria, his statement also speaks to how
Islam has been practiced in the United States, particularly by the Nation of Islam. The
expectation of communion with God was a great point of discontinuity in orthodox circles,
which explains why Sufis were attacked by orthodox Muslims, which would be replicated by the
NOI and orthodox groups in the U.S. (Melchert, 2015, p. 17). Both groups were perceived as
deviants because they sought to redefine what it meant to be Muslim
In Islam Outside the Arab World, Westerlund and Svanberg note that in Senegal, as
elsewhere, Sufism is “largely mixed with local beliefs and practices. Belief in jinns (spirits
mentioned in the Quran) is combined with belief in the existence of local spirits. Regional cults
of saints, usually male marabouts, and faith in miracles characterize the orders, whose attitude
towards regional variations and local beliefs has been extremely flexible and tolerant in Senegal”
(Westerlund and Svanberg, 1999, p. 81). Lamin O. Sanneh, notes that the question of saints in
Islam, particularly in Sufi Islam, is of cardinal importance…” (Sanneh, 1997, p. 36), as it links
the living world to the spiritual world. The tradition of prayers at the graveside of Muslim saints
may not be connected with a saint guild in the technical sense of the term, but it is a part of the
phenomenon of saint veneration that is widely diffused in Muslim West Africa (Sanneh, 1997, p.
37).

18

In blending religious beliefs, Muslims in Northern Nigeria also introduce superstitious
beliefs into Islam. For example, people living in rural areas in Northern Nigeria believe that
meeting a blind man first thing in the morning denotes a bad omen, that the cry of a crow
especially at dusk indicates death around the area, and that it is a taboo that a mother should not
call her first child with his or her real name (Doi, 1984, p. 93). Further, many believe that when
returning from the graveyard after having buried the dead person, one should not turn back or
else (s)he too may die. Supposing a woman has been unfortunate enough to have lost about two
husbands who died natural death, she will be feared; and she may not even get another husband
(Doi, 1984, p. 94).
Among the Yoruba Muslims, singing and dancing feature predominantly both in their
social and religious life (Doi, 1984, p. 153). Dreams play a significant role in clerical Muslim
communities, similar to the role they played in the general Islamic Sufi tradition (Sanneh, 1997,
p. 41). As a result, Sufis cultivate the practice of dream interpretation so much so that some of
the Sufi leaders have said “that it is the pivot upon with the Sufi path rests” (Sanneh, 1997, p.
41). Among the Bambara, “the phrase bisimilay (Ar. Bismillah, “in the name of Allah”) is used
in sacramental invocations and magical incantations because it is believed to be a phrase of
power, the word sadaqah (charity) is used for offerings to the Gods, and amulets are accepted
from Muslim clerics, who also transmit other aspects of the material culture of Islam “without
any observable shift of allegiance away from the pagan religious culture” (Sanneh, 1997, p. 42).
These examples show that Africans diverge from traditional Islamic beliefs by observing
practices that would be considered by many in the Muslim community to be un-Islamic.
According to traditional beliefs, Islam does not subscribe to any superstitious beliefs and manmade taboos. In fact, the entire efforts of the Prophet Muhammad were directed towards

19

removing all forms of superstitions from the society of Arabs, and arouse in them the belief in
one and only one God (Doi, 1984, p. 94). However, West African Sufi Muslims believe that
through these various “superstitious” beliefs, they are able to commune with God. By focusing
more on communion with God, Sufis provide a space to introduce foreign practices that assist
them in connecting with the creator.
Transculturation and Bricolage
“Bricolage is a mode of interpreting and adapting existing materials to
new circumstances or needs. While the result may be a new or reformulated myth,
tool, a house, a language, or a discourse, it is… an adaptive mode of being in the
world” (Knepper, 2006, p. 71).
The term bricolage is used to define the assemblage of seemingly disparate pieces in
order to create something anew. This term derived from the French verb bricoleur, which
according to the Merriman-Webster dictionary means “the construction achieved by using
whatever comes to hand.” This term was first used by a French anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss in his book The Savage Mind (1962) to describe mythical thought. In this book, LeviStrauss notes that “the bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from
human endeavors…” (Levi-Strauss, 1962, p. 19). Those “oddments” from human endeavors can
constitute a wide variety of things, as the bricoleur uses any available material from the past in
order to create something anew, and to solve new problems as they arise. Levi-Strauss
popularized usage of the term in the 1960s, and it has since been used to describe any creation
that uses various disparate sources to create something anew.
Bricolage can be used to define the process of creating music, art, and religion. For
example, Stomp: The Musical, uses household and industrial items such as trash cans, brooms,

20

steel, paper, and anything else available in order to make music. In art, bricolage can be seen in
the ready-made era of the early twentieth century in which artists took various objects, fastened
them together, and created an artwork from those disparate pieces. A good example in modern
art is Marcel Duchamp’s The Bicycle Wheel, in which Duchamp uses an old bicycle wheel and a
stool to create a modern piece of art. In religion, Veronque Altglas notes that “in contemporary
society, individuals increasingly craft their religious life and identity by picking and mixing a
wide range of religious traditions. This… designates activities of fabricating, repairing, and
installing – something like ‘DIY’” (Altglas, 2014, p. 2). In a religious context, people who
choose to practice individualization and detraditionalization by breaking with tradition and
historicity, choose to “consume, and combine religious resources of all kind in unique
assortments, thereby elaborating personal, hence, unique, religious identities and systems”
(Altglas, 2014, p. 5). As such, bricolage becomes a great way to examine the identity of the
Nation of Islam.
Bricolage is a more appropriate term than others that describe the mixing of religious
beliefs such as creolization or syncretism. The term creolization, for example, is often used to
describe how various cultures combine to form a new culture. While the creolization process is
one that is continually occurring in the African diaspora, it seems to focus more on culture and
cultural production than it does on the spiritual nature of the natures under investigation.
Similarly, syncretism suggests a process that involves mixing dissimilar traditions. However,
syncretism focuses more on how dissimilar religious practices are reconciled, mixed, and
recreated in new spaces. By focusing solely on religious practices, syncretism falls short.
Bricolage, however, allows us to capture the uniqueness of the African American experience by
allowing us to examine cultural varieties, political suasions, and religious philosophies posited

21

by African peoples in the diaspora. By examining bricolage along with transculturation, we can
capture the entire experience of African American Muslims.
In Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz
described how various cultures come together to form a new, and yet still changing culture. He
argued that while acculturation describes the process of transition from one culture to another,
transculturation expresses “the highly varied phenomena that have come about as a result of the
extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place there [in Cuba]” (Ortiz, 1995,
p. 98). Without understanding transculturation, Ortiz argues, it is impossible “to understand the
evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious,
artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, or other aspects of its life.” His studies, although in
Cuba, represent the same type of cultural changes and exchanges that happened in the United
States. African, African American, and white culture blended to give life to the newly founded
Nation of Islam. Without Situating Ortiz’s theory of transculturation alongside the NOI, one
cannot fully understand the movement that was the Nation of Islam, as their identity involved
combining various cultural identities that remained in flux. In addition, transculturation involves
the process of transitioning from one culture to another, which does not consist of acquiring a
wholly new culture (acculturation), nor of wholly losing one’s native culture (deculturation), but
rather reconciling a multiplicity of cultural attributes that remain fluid (Ortiz, 1995, p. 98).
To summarize, we have examined various manifestations of Islam as well as introduced
two terms, bricolage and transculturation. Collectively, these elements combine to reflect the
Nation of Islam’s ideologies. At the base of their beliefs is the fundamentalist approach to
believing Islam, i.e. belief in Allah, prayer, fasting, taxes, and the hajj. These, were confounded
by the belief that communion with God was possible (Sufism). In addition, the NOI’s practice of

22

Islam introduced a high degree of flexibility and adaptability (West African Sufism). Moreover,
NOI believers were able to use Islam as a tool to deconstruct white racial hegemony (liberation
theology) by calling for the separation, both economically and socially, from white society.
Moreover, the NOI was able to incorporate other aspects into their ideology that reflected their
lived reality such as the politics of respectability, using religion to form extended kinship
networks, and the imagination of Elijah Muhammad (bricolage). Finally, the NOI was able to
blend Afro-American, Euro-American, and religious cultures to form a new culture
(transculturation).

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Chapter Three
The Nation of Islam has a rich history of mixing the religious and the secular. No
movement since the NOI has been able to attract such a massive following of African Americans
who all came together under the banner of freedom, religious harmony, social justice, political
autonomy, and economic stability. While there have been other groups, both secular and sacred,
who were dedicated to the uplift the African American people worldwide, many lacked the
cohesion and explosive power of the Nation of Islam. This section will briefly sketch the history
of the rise of Nation of Islam, provide a rough account of the Nation’s founder, Wallace Fard
Muhammad, and contextualize the rise of an institution that gave a voice to millions of African
American people in the United States, and worldwide.
The 1920s saw booming markets and a time of revitalization. The “Roaring Twenties”
was the period immediately following WWI that was characterized by an economic boom that
saw an increase in jobs, higher wages, and an increase in revenue in both the public and private
sectors of the economy. Jobs were plentiful especially in the North, so much so that the North
was seen by many black southerners as being the land of abundance that held the promise of a
better standard of living, employment, and equality (Lee, 1996, p. 19). As a result, northern
cities saw a dramatic increase in population, as approximately 2,250,000 Blacks left the rural
south and emigrated to large northern cities (Lee, 1996, p. 19). In Detroit, estimates showed that
the black population of 5,741 in 1910 had swelled to 40,838 by 1920, and nearly tripled to
120,066 by 1930 (Curtis, 2002, p. 67). As evidenced by the growing population, Detroit, as well
as many other norther cities, had become a refuge for many southerners looking for better
economic opportunities.

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Black emigrants from the south, however, would soon face the reality that the utopian
North did not provide many opportunities for them. One such emigrant, Elijah Poole from
Sandersville, Georgia (later Elijah Muhammad), would soon learn these harsh realities first hand
after migrating to the Detroit in 1923. He worked several jobs from 1923-1925 including the
American Nut Company, the American Copper and Brass Company, and Chevrolet Axle. Poole,
like many others, could not find steady work. In addition to the shortage of jobs, blacks suffered
horrible living conditions. Edward Curtis describes working and living conditions of Blacks in
Detroit during the 1920s:
“The harsh working conditions for blacks, who still faced discrimination
in the workplace, often prompted them to use constant shuffling between jobs as
one technique to preserve their own humanity… Because Detroit was segregated
and little housing was available to the city’s new residents, blacks lived in
horribly overcrowded conditions and were charged excessively high rents in the
city’s burgeoning ghetto. Moreover, migrants experience discrimination in health
care, education, and nearly every other aspect of life. Detroit’s Salvation Army
even refused to give many Christmas baskets…” (Curtis, 2002, p. 68).
With the onset of the Great Depression, a result of the stock market crash of 1929, the
problems faced by African Americans were exacerbated. According to Curtis, the Depression
“saw the failure of several black banks and an inability among black institutions to cope with the
enormity of the crisis,” including the black church (Curtis, 2002, p. 68). However, what
coincided with the crash of the stock market and the desperate conditions of African Americans
was the rise of a prophet, a prophet that would deliver blacks from economic hardships.

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One Nation, Under Fard
The life of the founder of the Nation is Islam, Wallace D. Fard (also known as Wallace
Fard Muhammad), is chockfull of mystery and speculation. Many historians, religious scholars,
and journalists have sought to disentangle the various strands of evidence that lies in his wake.
What is certain, however, is that Fard arrived in Detroit, Michigan in 1930. From 1930 until his
disappearance in 1934, he sparked one of the most successful black socio-religious organizations
ever seen in Norther America. After his disappearance in 1934, his protégé and successor, Elijah
Muhammad, continued to spread his message of black deliverance from the evils of white
America for generations.
The history of the Nation of Islam has been explored countlessly since C. Eric Lincoln’s
Black Muslims in America was published in 1961. While nearly every author who has written
about the Nation of Islam has described Fard’s life, few have dedicated themselves to uncovering
the truth of his lineage. Many are content with offering a myriad of possibilities without
marrying themselves to any one conclusion. Some seem to construct their theories of Fard based
upon scant evident that suggests that he was a member of other Black Nationalist organizations
such as the UNIA, or religious organizations such as the Moorish American Science Temple
without substantiating those claims. Today, many scholars have given up on the quest for his
true identity. However, since his identity is one key element to understanding his life, it is
necessary, here, to offer a snapshot of the available information.
Nearly every book that details the Nation of Islam or Elijah Muhammad mentions the
founder, Fard. However, most scholars note that as a result of Fard’s use of many aliases, and
poor record keeping at the time, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct his life in any meaningful
way. For instance, in The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora, scholar Edward Curtis

26

does not attempt to reconstruct the life of Fard. Rather, he mentions him as being the founder of
the Nation of Islam before moving to his successor, Elijah Muhammad.
Other scholars take definitive approaches to the scant material offering what they believe
to be the correct view of Fard. Michael Gomez, for example, believes that Fard was born Wali
Dodd Fard on February 25th 1891 in New Zealand (Gomez, 2005, p. 277-8). He states that his
father was Zared Fard, an East Indian, and either Zared Fard or both of his parents came to New
Zealand from what is now Pakistan. According to this account, Fard’s mother, Beatrice, was a
white Englishwoman living in New Zealand. Gomez states that Fard was born in either New
Zealand or Portland Oregon to parents who were either Hawaiian or Polynesian and British.
Further, Gomez asserts that Fard also took on the alias of George Farr, who was a member of the
member of the Theosophical Society in San Francisco by 1921 and also a member of Garvey’s
UNIA. Similarly, Manning Marable’s account of Fard in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
confuses the various narratives by asserting many claims that have yet to be proven true, such as
the belief that Fard’s views represented the “anti-white views of the staunch Garveyite” without
establishing a link between Fard and the Garvey movement (Marable, 2011, p.84).
Therefore, this reconstruction of Fard’s life will rely on primary sources from Elijah
Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, secondary source materials from leading scholars, and the
FBI files. While Muhammad’s accounts cannot be considered definitive, we can use some of
what he says and combine it with what is factually known about Fard to reconstruct his life. In
addition, the FBI files contain about 822 pages of text about Fard and his possible identities.
This was an attempt by the FBI not only to locate the mysterious Fard, but also to discredit him
and the NOI.

27

The official line in the Nation of Islam states that on July 4, 1930, a newcomer appeared
on the streets of Detroit. As America celebrated its independence, this man, who would later
became a God, appeared in the Paradise Valley Community of Detroit, Michigan. Wallace .D.
Fard sold silks and other houseware goods door to door, claiming that the silks were from his
home country of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He claimed to be born on February 26, 1877 (Marsh,
1984, pp. 51-52). Selling household goods and silks allowed Fard a platform to teach a new and
obscure religion Islam. What was new, however, was not the religion itself, as Islam had been
introduced to African American communities in Detroit as early as 1921, but it was the way that
Islam was introduced that gave it credibility. As such, Fard’s religious teachings quickly began
to garner belief and support from the residents of Paradise Valley residents. Fard sold goods and
preached in the homes of black families, especially those who were recent migrants from the
South. Fard began teaching his new religion by first using the bible, believing that his Message
would be better received if he used the bible because his audience was more familiar with that
tradition. Later, he incorporated the Qur’an into his teachings. According to Clifton E. Marsh,
Fard believed that Christianity was the white man’s religion that did not offer solutions to the
social problems or development of the “Asiatic Nation,” and that whites were inherently evil.
Therefore, it was not in their [European] nature to accept Islam, nor was it in the interest African
Americans to retain a religion that was designed by whites to maintain their high place in society
while leaving blacks on the periphery (Marsh, 1984, p. 52).
Part of his allure was his claim that he was a foreigner as opposed to being African
American; it lent certain credibility to his story because African American people who were
downtrodden and accepting of beliefs of White America would not, or possibly could not,
believe in a man who would take them away from their beliefs in God. This exhibits racial

28

undertones that were prevalent at the time. According to Clegg, “Fard’s European features,
despite the fact that he presented himself as a mulatto, perhaps made him and his message more
palatable to his African American followers” (Clegg, 2014, p. 22).
The earliest account of the Nation of Islam comes from sociologist Erdmann D. Beynon
in 1938, who published a first-hand account of the early Nation of Islam entitled “The Voodoo
Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit” in the American Journal of Sociology (1938). According
to Beynon, in the early stage of his ministry, Fard “used the Bible as his textbook, since it was
the only religious book with which the majority of his hearers were familiar. With growing
prestige over a constantly increasing group, [Fard] became bolder in his denunciation of the
Caucasians and began to attack the teachings of the Bible in such a way as to shock his hearers
and bring them to an emotional crisis” (Beynon, 1938, p. 901). Fard’s message soon spread
throughout the black community, and attendance at meeting houses grew tremendously. These
meeting houses were usually the living rooms and basements of residents of Paradise Valley, as
most of the residents, and Fard himself, could not yet afford to rent a hall for the speaker.
Beynon transcribed some of Fard’s early beliefs that were preached in the meeting houses
and later echoed by Elijah Muhammad:
“The black men in North America are not Negroes, but members of the
lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen by traders from the Holy City of Mecca 379 years
ago. The prophet came to America to find and to bring back to life his long lost
brethren, from whom the Caucasians had taken away their language, their nation
and their religion. Here in America they were living other than themselves. They
must learn that they are the original people, noblest of the nations of the earth.
The Caucasians are the colored people, since they have lost their original color.

29

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. They must live according to the law of Allah, avoiding all
meat of "poison animals", hogs, ducks, geese, possums and catfish. They must
give up completely the use of stimulants, especially liquor. They must clean
themselves up – both their bodies and their houses. If in this way they obeyed
Allah, he would take them back to the Paradise from which they had been stolen –
the Holy City of Mecca” (Beynon, 1938, p. 901).
Eventually, numbers at these meeting houses grew so tremendously that the houses
overflowed. As a result, they began renting a hall at 3408 Hastings Street to conduct his
meetings and teachings. Between 1930 and 1933, Fard recruited 8,000 followers among Detroit
blacks. By 1933 he was holding two back-to-back weekly meetings in a four-hundred-person
capacity hall that was jam-packed (Magida, 1996), pp. 46-7). Fard prepared supplementary
texts that was prepare by Fard himself and expect to be memorized by each of his followers.
Growing membership allowed Fard to open a school in 1931, the University of Islam, along with
his most trusted student, Elijah Muhammad. The curriculum focused on Islamic instruction,
math, science, and history math science, and history. The opening of this new school sparked
controversy, especially as parents began pulling their children from Detroit Public Schools and
enrolling them in the University of Islam.
Public school systems had been much a part of the American landscape. They served as
an important site of assimilating people into the American values and systems of beliefs. The
indoctrination process was to include all Americans; it was a Euro-centric system that sought to
push White values on the American public. Fard saw the problematic aspects of having black

30

children enrolled in public schools, and the police saw a problem with the exodus of a large
number of African American students as their parents withdrew them from public institutions
and enrolled them in the University of Islam. In addition to the school, he also established the
Muslim Girls' Training school, which taught domestic duties like cooking, cleaning, and childrearing, and the Fruit of Islam, which was a paramilitary wing of the NOI that sought to defend
the members of the NOI and all others.
In 1932, Fard was arrested and imprisoned for the sacrificial death of John J. Smith.
Facing aiding and abetting in the Smith case, Fard agreed to leave Detroit on the condition that
they drop the charge (Evanzz, 1999, p. 90). In May 1933, Fard resurfaced in Chicago, where
again he was arrested for preaching on the corner under the pretext of disturbing the peace.
Following that incident, Elijah Muhammad, offered Fard refuge in his home in Chicago.
According to Clegg, sometimes the two would talk well into the night, cruising “across the
poverty-afflicted landscape of black Detroit in Fard’s Chevy coupe, parking on the outskirts of
town to talk at length about the universe and the black man’s place in it” (Clegg, 2014, p. 22).
Elijah Muhammad would describe him as a trusted friend whom he gave his last dime while his
family sat at home hungry (Clegg, 2014, p. 26). This friendship soon came to an abrupt end in
1934 when Fard disappeared for the last time. The official line of the Nation of Islam is that he
left for Mecca.
Fard's Pre-NOI Identity
When Fard disappeared, Elijah Muhammad taught his followers that Fard was God in
person, and his disappearance fortified the belief that Fard was God momentarily assuming a
human form to alleviate the oppression suffered by African Americans. During his tenure as
leader of the NOI, Fard made no claims to his own divinity (the only account that identifies him

31

as a God, or the Mahdi is that of Elijah Muhammad). In fact, if we accept Elijah Muhammad’s
account, he was not God in the flesh, but perhaps a prophet. Beynon’s account shows that in the
earliest times of the movement, Fard was considered a prophet initially, and then was deified by
Elijah after his disappearance:
“The organization also is tending to become more amorphous. From
among the larger group of Moslems there has sprung recently an even more
militant branch than the Nation of Islam itself. This new movement, known as the
Temple People, identifies the prophet, Mr. W. D. Fard, with the god Allah. To
Mr. Fard alone do they offer prayer and sacrifice. Since Mr. Fard has been
deified, the Temple People raise to the rank of prophet the former Minister of
Islam, Rlijah [Elijah] Mohammed, now a resident of Chicago. He is always
referred to reverently as the "Prophet Elijah in Chicago” (Beynon, 1938, p. 907).
As noted, by elevating the status of Fard from redeemer/prophet to God, Elijah Muhammed also
elevated his own status from minister to prophet. It stands to reason that if Fard was God, and
Elijah received revelation directly from God, then he must certainly be a prophet. By claiming
that he was a prophet of Allah, Elijah Muhammad was able to become a new leader to African
Americans in the United States.
The official line passed down from Elijah Muhammad was that Fard was half black and
half white (evidence that Elijah Muhammad said this). This story is recounted in the
Autobiography of Malcolm X as well as several other texts. According to their story, Fard was of
mixed ancestry, and he was created this way in order to allow him to be able to accepted by
black people so that he could lead them, but also move among white circles so that he could
remain undetectable to white people, so that he could understand and judge the enemy of black

32

people. As the story goes, Fard’s jet-black father went into the mountains where Caucasians
lived and married one of those women so that his son could “live more like this white civilization
of whites so as to be able to get among them and they will not be able to distinguish them”
(Magida, 1996, p. 45). In addition, according to the Nation of Islam’s teachings, Fard held many
names in order to protect him from both whites and blacks who may have sought his death.
Fard claimed that he was “from the East.” However, some believed that the Mecca that
he came from was not the exotic city of “East” of Arabia, but the “jazz-filled, zoot-suited,
numbers-running Harlem, which was not only east of Detroit, but was widely considered to be
the Mecca of black America” (Magida, 1996, p. 45). However, there are no records that indicate
that Fard had ever traveled to New York neither in the FBI files nor any other primary or
secondary sources. This argument can be credited to some who doubted his story of being from
Mecca and thought that he was speaking of a location within the United States.
A few sources claim that Fard was educated at a British University for a diplomatic
career, and later at the University of California, but that he abandoned his doctoral studies in
order to bring “freedom, justice, and equality” to blacks who were living “in the wilderness of
North America.” However, Karl Evanzz debunked this myth. He researched the University of
California students and graduates from 1913 to 1930 and found no record of anyone named Fard,
Ford, or any other variation thereof. Although no proof exists that Fard had never been to the
University of California, strong evidence suggests that he lived in California, including a World
War I registration issued to Wallie Dodd Fard (“Ford” appears after Fard in parenthesis). When
he filled out this card, he indicated that he was born in Shinka, Afghanistan in 1893. But given
the fact that Fard was often misleading about his age and birthplace, more information is needed
to substantiate that claim.

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Fard’s standard story was that he had been born in 1891 in New Zealand to a Polynesian
mother and an Englishman who arrived in New Zealand on a schooner. Occasionally, he
claimed he was born in Portland Oregon, and that his parents were Zared and Beatrice Ford, both
of which had been born in Hawaii. According to Evanzz, Wallace D. Fard was in fact Wali
Dodd Fard, an immigrant from New Zealand of mixed Afghani and British heritage (Evanzz,
1999, p. 73). This is a possibility, given the accounts that he used the Arabic Quran, which he
translated and gave to his followers (Beynon, 1938, p. 900).
In Islam in Black America, Curtis notes that immigrant Arabs, especially around the turn
of the century, often made their mark as peddlers. They constructed themselves as exotic
Orientals, selling everything from clothes to sweets, by promoting the goods “as products of the
‘Holy Land’ – even though most of these Syrian immigrants had never been to Ottoman
Palestine before” (Curtis, 2002, p. 70). Carrying packs of merchandise on their backs, or by
horse and buggy, they traveled to the surrounding farms and small towns offering their
embroideries, laces, Holy Land souvenirs, and other trinkets for sale (Walker, 2006, p. 266). In
addition, some believe the story because there were approximately 9,000 Arabic-speakers were
among the residents of Detroit in 1930, and of them, 6,000 were Syrians. The remainder included
Iraqi Chaldeans, Yemenis, and Palestinians (Abraham and Shryock, 2000, pp. 18-19). Most of
the immigrants, who called Detroit home early in the century, were illiterate or semi-literate, and
ended up as peddlers. Dennis Walker notes that “many of the religious and ethnic institutions
that Arabic immigrants built in Detroit and elsewhere were concerned to provide socialization so
as to keep the ethnic group in existence, to foster mutual help, and to offer some Arab culture
that would relieved the sense of exile and of having been uprooted (Walker, 2005, p. 256).
Echoing Walker, Gilles Kepel stated that “peddlers and street vendors in American cities were

34

usually Syrian or Lebanese; our man thus told his listeners that he came from the East, and that
his name was Fard (or Farrad, or Ford) and his first name Wallace, or in Arabic, “Wali” (Kepel,
1997, 15). However, as we unpack some of the FBI files, the evidence suggests that he was
neither Syrian nor Middle Eastern.
In order to construct a history of Fard using the FBI files, it is necessary to begin at his
latest arrest in Detroit, just before his disappearance, and work backwards from there. Fard was
arrested on May 25, 1933 under the named Wallace Farad in Detroit, Michigan and ordered to
leave town. At the time of his arrest, his ancestry was listed as “Arabian” and his occupation a
minister (FBI files, p. 136). This arrest record indicated that he was the same man as Wallei
Ford, who was arrested in the Los Angeles Police Department and released four years earlier.
From this we can glean that Fard was Wallei Ford from Los Angeles who had come to
Detroit after spending some time in California. According to the records of the Los Angeles
Police Department, Fard (using the alias of Ford in California), had been arrested three times
prior to his arrest in Detroit (FBI file# 100-43165-16). He was arrested on November 17, 1918
for assault with a deadly weapon and subsequently released. On January 20, 1926, he was
arrested again for violating the Woodwine Act (California prohibition law) for the possession
and sale of alcohol. For this charge, he was given a $1 fine or one day in jail for count 1, and a
$400 fine or 180 days in jail for count two. This record indicates that he was arrested again on
February 15, 1926 for violating of the State Poison Act. He was sentence to six months to six
years at San Quentin Penitentiary on June 12, 1926 and was released on May 27, 1929, after
serving nearly three years.
In his entrance interview for San Quentin Penitentiary, he told the authorities that he was
born in Portland Oregon in 1891 and lived there until 1913 when he moved to Los Angeles. He

35

also told them that he had lived in LA until he was arrested. Further, he told authorities that he
had been married to a Hazel Barton in Los Angeles when he was 26 years old, and that they had
one child together. In this same intake file, he also listed his father’s occupation as “operator of
Ford Bottling Works” in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Files kept on Fard while in prison indicates that he was telling partial truths during his
intake. One FBI file indicates that while he was incarcerated from 1926-1929, he “received a
letter from Hazel E. Osburne (Osborne), described as his former wife attesting to his character”
(FBI files, p. 4). Hazel Osborne had been Hazel Barton, as she took on the name of her second
husband. She had, in fact, married three times during her life, and by the time she spoke to
authorities after Fard’s final disappearance, she was on her third marriage. She reported that her
full name was “Hazel Barton Ford Osborne Evelsizer” (FBI File# LA 105-4805). She explained
that although she had not been legally married to Fard, she had adopted his name since they were
living together. Further, she stated that her second husband, Osborne, had “died after only six
months of marriage” and that Evelsizer was the name of her third husband. What is interesting is
the reason she gave as to why she and Ford (Fard) never married.
Hazel stated that she moved in with Fard in 1919. He told her that he had been married,
possibly in Oregon, she assumed, and that he and his previous wife had been through a bitter
divorce (FBI File# LA 105-4805). One of the reasons why they could never get officially
married, according to Hazel, was because he was already legally married in Oregon. She also
stated that Ford had a baby as a result of his first marriage. She still continued the affair,
however, and a year later, she would give birth to Ford’s son, who was named after his father,
Wallace Dodd Ford.

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A birth certificate for Wallace Ford was issued to Wallace Ford and Hazel Barton on
September 2, 1920. The birth certificate states that the child was born at MacDonald Sanitarium
in Los Angeles at 4:30 PM. Ford (Fard) is identified as a 26-year-old white male, living in Los
Angeles, but originally from New Zealand. He listed the year of birth in 1901, and his
occupation is listed as a restaurant keeper (however, this age does not add up, mathematically, as
he could not be 26 years old in 1920 if he was born in 1901). The mother of new infant is listed
as Hazel Barton, a white woman of 25 years old from New York. Her occupation is listed as a
housewife (FBI File p. 3, File# LA 100-44-993). She lived with Fard until 1921 or 1922, when
she left him and took the child with her (FBI File# LA 105-4805).
Hazel also gave more compelling evidence to suggest that Ford and Fard were the same
person, and that he probably had other aliases too. She stated that when she moved in with him
in 1919, he told her that he had been operating a café in LA for about four or five years since he
left Oregon. Besides that, he never told her anything about “his background, place of birth,
parents, or siblings,” but on one occasion, she found a letter addressed to Fred Dodd of Salem,
Oregon. By reading the letter, she stated that she had no doubt that Ford and Dodd were the
same person, but he only used the name Ford with her.
Hazel also reported that a woman who worked as a waitress in Ford’s café told her that
she used to help Ford write letters to his parents in New Zealand because Ford “had very little
education and had trouble with his correspondence” (FBI File# LA 105-4805). According to
Hazel, this unknown girl had lived with him before he met Hazel. From this account of this girl,
and the birth certificate of his son, Hazel believed that he was indeed from New Zealand.
What further gives this story credence is that she stated that Ford had lived in California
for four or five years before they met, and that he told her that he had been married before. She

37

was correct, because on December 30, 1957, the FBI located a marriage license between Fred
Dodd and a Pearl Allen at Multnomah County Oregon. The date on the marriage license was
May 9, 1914 (FBI files, p. 157). According to the FBI, Ford had been Fred Dodd and changed
his name to Wallace Ford when leaving Oregon due to marital difficulties (FBI files, p. 230).
The FBI could not locate any divorce action for Fred Dodd and Pearl Allen Dodd, so they were
still legally married.
In an effort to find out where Fard was from, the FBI also looked into claims that he was
the son of Zared and Beatrice Ford of Ford Bottling Works located in Honolulu. On a letter
dated October 10, 1957, the Honolulu division of the FBI reported that it could not find any
records of either a Wallie Ford, Zared Ford, or a Beatrice Ford. In addition, “three individuals
who have been associated for a long time with the bottling industry advised that they had never
heard of the Ford Bottling Company” (FBI files, p. 246). At the same time, Portland special
agents also did not find any birth certificate for anyone named Ford around the years 1890, 1891,
and 1892. The record keeper indicated that “around the time of the alleged birth in question,
records were very poorly kept” (FBI files, p. 266). Also, they could not locate any records for
anyone named Zared or Beatrice Ford for any of the years since they began keeping records.
The FBI files allow us to reconstruct the life of Fard. According to these files, Sometime
around 1914, Fard married Pearl Allen at Multnomah County Oregon. After a bitter divorce, he
left her and the child and moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a restaurant owner. In
1918, while operating his restaurant, he was arrested for beating a customer, R.W. Gilabrand,
who refused to pay a two dollar deposit for a steak dinner he ordered. Ford responded by pulling
a gun, chasing him out of the store, and beating him. The next year he met Hazel, who would
become his common-law wife. They had a child together in 1920, and separated a year or two

38

later. After that, Fard kept operating his bar until he was arrested in 1926 and served a three year
prison sentence. After he was released, he traveled to Chicago and then to Detroit, where he
would lead one of the largest organizations to exist, the Nation of Islam.
After his disappearance from Detroit and Chicago, Hazel stated that he worked himself
across the U.S. as a “traveling suit salesman for a mail order tailor until he eventually arrived in
Los Angeles in the spring of 1934 “in a new car and wearing flowing white robes” (FBI file#
100-43165). He tried to work out a conciliation with her, but she did not agree. According to
her, he would send her “considerable amounts of money from time to time” before his arrival,
and once he arrived, he stayed in Los Angeles for about two weeks visiting his son. Then, he
sold his car and boarded a ship bound for New Zealand where he said he would visit relatives.
That was the last time she saw him. His son, would only see a few more years as well, as he was
killed in Linhaven Roads, Virginia on August 3, 1942 while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard
(FBI files, p. 136).
The most accurate account of Fard, to date, seems to come from a summary of the FBI
files. In an effort to obtain information in order to subvert the authority of the Nation of Islam,
the FBI engaged in preserving some important information about Fard. Without their
information, all of his life would have been limited to just the few years that he was in Detroit
and Chicago teaching Muslims.

Elijah’s Nation
Following his disappearance in 1934, Elijah Muhammad, his closest follower and
student, assumed the mantel of leader of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad had been moved
in the direction of Fard by his father, who suggested that Elijah hear the preaching of Abdul
Muhammad, a former follower of Noble Drew Ali of the Moorish American Science Temple,
39

and a recent convert to the Nation of Islam (Lee, 1996, p. 23). Abdul Muhammad would
eventually lead Elijah Muhammad to Fard, and Elijah would come to recognize Fard as the one
prophesied in the bible who was a savior. When Fard disappeared, Elijah Muhammad taught his
followers that Fard was God in person, and his disappearance fortified the belief that Fard was
God momentarily assuming a human form to alleviate the oppression suffered by African
Americans (Marsh, 1984, p. 54).
In addition to those beliefs, what attracted African Americans to the Nation of Islam were
its theories of creation. They believed that a there was once a scientist by the name of Yakub,
who grafted a race of people, white people. Elijah Muhammad taught that originally, there were
many black Gods who existed. One of the Black Gods, Yakub, wanted to cause mischief in the
land. What he then did was to create white people through the process of grafting; a process that
sought to root out the black and brown germs from people and continually doing so until only the
brown germ, which was now white in color remained. With this process, white people were
created.
This was an important feature of their ideology; it provided a backdrop for a practice that
in essence took pseudo-scientific racism and turned it on its head. It had long been the object of
scientists, sociologists, and psychologists to prove that black people were genetically inferior,
but instead the NOI used this same methodology, albeit from a religious standpoint, to argue that
whites, in fact, were the ones who were biologically inferior because God made them that way.
And, as theology goes, if God made them that way, then it was in their nature to be evil and
“devilish.” Therefore, if God created this race of people to be devilish, then blacks should
abandon all practices associated with the “devil” race while also avoiding their company. From
the NOI’s perspective, it was nothing sort of genius to encourage separation on the basis of race

40

because it allowed them to reclaim their agency by arguing that they too, wanted separation from
the white race just as much as they wanted separation from blacks.
The period immediately following the disappearance of Fard (1935 to 1946) represented
difficult times in the development of the Nation of Islam. Membership dwindled, and nearly
came to a halt when Elijah Muhammad was arrested and found guilty for refusing to comply
with the Selective Service Act in 1942. He and several other Muslims were charged with
evading the draft, influencing others to do so, and maintaining relations with the Japanese
government (Marsh, 1984, p. 60). Muhammad served four years in prison before being released.
By the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement (roughly 1954 with the Brown v. Board
of Education decision), the Nation of Islam was gaining more members under the leadership of
Elijah Muhammad and his protégé and national spokesman, Malcolm X, and by 1960, they
boasted a membership of at least 50,000 members. During this period, the Nation of Islam not
only taught that one should be proud to be black, but that one should embrace his blackness somuch-so that he sees all white people as antagonists. In counter distinction to other civil rights
activists at the time, Elijah Muhammad chose to avoid integration with racist whites.
Muhammad also contributed to the racial history of the Nation by introducing something that
was foreign; Muhammad’s followers were not only equal to whites, but they were better in all
respects. Muslims believed that African-Americans must free themselves physically (a separate
state) and psychologically (Asiatics) from all oppressive forces (Marsh, 1984, p. 57).
From its very inception, the Nation of Islam rooted its religious teachings in the
prevailing problem of the time, racism. By doing so, they not only created an environment
which allowed blacks to turn away from their traditional beliefs and practices, but also provided
members with a pride in themselves that had long been absent. It seems that their religious

41

epistemologies, which were rooted in the particular experiences of African Americans, came at
the right moment. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam under the Honorable Elijah
Muhammad provided a healthy alternative to the passive resistance tactics that were practiced by
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights leaders.

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Chapter Four
Elijah Muhammad practiced a very different brand of Islam. In order to construct his
notions of what Islam was, he followed both West African and Sufi religious traditions.
Muhammad does not appear to follow any school of thought, other than that of Fard. However,
there are striking similarities between the NOI’s practices, beliefs, and hermeneutics, and other
brands of Islam. This section will outline some of the ideas practices by the NOI that strictly
falls within the West African and Sufi traditions. It will demonstrate how the NOI, through the
process of transcultural bricolage, combined the sacred, secular, political, and economic state of
affairs and melded them into one coherent whole by examining three themes of the NOI: (1) the
nature of God in the NOI, (2) how they sought to reclaim the notion of prophethood, and (3) how
they legitimized the Qur’an using biblical exegesis.
The Nature of God in the Nation of Islam
Elijah Muhammad believed and taught Nation of Islam adherents that God is manifest in
his creation. This is an important component to unpack when examining the NOI’s belief system
as it shows that African spiritual consciousness remained a fixture in the United States long after
the importation of slaves stopped. In Our Savior Has Arrived (1974), Elijah Muhammad
discusses the nature of God as existing within his creation:
All praise is due to Allah. Allah is all of us. But we have a Supreme One
that we can throw this name ‘Holy’ upon. He is Allah, The One over all of us;
The Most Supreme One, the Wisest One, the Mightiest One; The One that Sees
and Hears that which we can’t see and hear. That is He. He Is rooted in all of us.
Every righteous person is a God. We are all God. When we say ‘Allah’ we mean
every righteous person. Allah teaches me that He is a man – not something that is

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other than man. The Holy Qur’an refers to Him in such pronouns as ‘He’ and as
‘We’ and as ‘Us’” (Muhammad, 1974, p. 26).
This statement shows that he believed that God could appear in the flesh and commune with
man. This is important as it establishes that God is a man, a black man. This alone serves to
change the psyche of African Americans by asking them to rethink the way that they view the
creator. As most blacks were Christian, they were used to identifying Jesus (who some perceive
as God) as a white man with blue eyes. However, this challenged that assumption and granted
Elijah Muhammad authority and guardianship over the people whom he deemed lost.
A second and more important feature of Muhammad’s statement is that it shows that a
direct relationship with God is possible. In Islamic and Christian theology, it is a commonly held
belief that God is in heaven (Christianity), or God is above the heavens (Islam). However, this
classic theology believes in a God who is unattainable, unreachable, and separated from his
creation. As such, classic theology leaves no room for interaction between creator and creation,
with the exception of petitionary prayers. For Muhammad, however, this God was not the
invisible, inaccessible, or “spooky” God of traditional Muslims (Muhammad constantly referred
to the unreachable, unknowable God as a “spooky” being), but one that he could commune with.
Muhammad validates this claim when he stated, “The coming of Allah in the Person of Master
Fard Muhammad, to Whom praises are due forever, was for the deliverance of the lost-and-found
people (Black) from a four-hundred year-old enemy who has never shown them anything but
evil, murder and death (Muhammad, 1973, p. 134). God was not only a part of people’s lives in
a spiritual sense, but he was among them, in both a spiritual and physical sense.
This ideology bears a striking resemblance to West African Sufi traditions. West African
Sufis perceive natural objects as if they were inhabited by spiritual beings, i.e. they are living

44

beings. Therefore, all things, whether living or not, emanates God’s essence. Therefore, in a
West African context, when one appears to be worshipping inanimate objects, they are really
worshipping God who becomes manifest in those things. These objects may be also considered
as divinities and spirits, since they are under the authority of a Supreme Being. According to
John Mbiti, this is a common belief amongst African societies, and he provides insight as to how
the Supreme Being is perceived and how he relates to African communities:
“According to African people, man lives in a religious universe, so that
natural phenomenon and objects are intimately associated with God. They not
only originate from Him but also bear witness to Him. Man’s understanding of
God is strongly coloured by the universe of which man is himself a part. Man sees
in the universe not only the imprint but the reflection of God; and whether that
image is marred or clearly focused and defined, it is nevertheless an image of
God, the only image known in traditional African societies” (Mbiti, 1990, p. 48).
Further, in Introduction to African Religion, Mbiti states that Africans subscribe to “…the
system of belief and practices based on the idea that objects and natural phenomenon is inhabited
by spirits or souls. It is true that African peoples in their traditional setting acknowledge the
existence of spirits, and that some of the spirits are thought to inhabit objects like trees, ponds,
and rocks” (Mbiti, 1991, pp. 18-19).
Quranic hermeneutics also played a role in how Sufis, whether West African or not,
believed in the creator. For example, other Sufis held a belief similar to that of West Africans in
regard to God’s immanence. Their belief was based on an interpretation of the Quran that
differed from most Sunni scholars. Chittick states that it “was noted that the Sufi approach to
explaining the Koran’s message stresses the nearness, presence, and immanence of God rather

45

than His distance and transcendence. There are many Koranic verses to support this position,
such as, ‘And We are nearer to him than the jugular vein’ (50:16) or ‘And He is with you
wherever you are’” (57:4) (Chittick, 2001, p. 34). Sufi orders were able to balance the
transcendent aspects of God with his immanence, by embracing a philosophy of noncontradiction. God is both transcendent and immanent; he is transcendent in that his nature is
beyond humans, but immanent in that man can commune with him. In Sufi Orders in Islam, J.
Spencer Trimingham notes that for “those who became known as Sufis, direct communion with
God was possible” (Trimingham, 1971, p. 133). This is important when one look at West
African cosmologies and how that tradition was carried over by the Nation of Islam.
Reclaiming Prophethood
It is necessary to note the importance of the disappearance of Fard and the ascension of
Elijah Muhammad. During his tenure as leader of the NOI, Fard made no claims to his own
divinity (the only account that identifies him as a God, or the Mahdi is that of Elijah
Muhammad), and those claims only appear after his disappearance. In fact, if we accept Elijah
Muhammad’s earlier accounts, Fard was not God in the flesh, but perhaps a prophet.
Beynon, also argued that in the earliest times of the movement, Fard was considered a
prophet, only to become deified by Elijah after his disappearance:
“The organization also is tending to become more amorphous. From
among the larger group of Moslems there has sprung recently an even more
militant branch than the Nation of Islam itself. This new movement, known as the
Temple People, identifies the prophet, Mr. W. D. Fard, with the god Allah. To
Mr. Fard alone do they offer prayer and sacrifice. Since Mr. Fard has been
deified, the Temple People raise to the rank of prophet the former Minister of

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Islam, Rlijah Mohammed, now a resident of Chicago. He is always referred to
reverently as the "Prophet Elijah in Chicago... Thus continues the chain of these
movements” (Beynon, 1938, p. 907).
As noted, by elevating the status of Fard from redeemer/prophet to God, Elijah Muhammed also
elevated his own status from minister to prophet. It stands to reason that if Fard was God, and
Elijah received revelation and instruction directly from God, then he must certainly be a prophet.
By claiming that he was a prophet of Allah, Elijah Muhammad was able to introduce a new
leader to African Americans in the United States. Unrestricted by Christian ideals of morality,
and unhindered by traditional interpretations of Islam that stated that there would be no new
prophets, Elijah was able to wrest control of a new religious ideology and reinterpret traditional
beliefs to fit into the lived reality of African Americans.
Many in the Muslim community responded that Elijah could not be a prophet of God
because, according to the Qur’an, prophethood was sealed with Prophet Muhammad of Arabia
(570-632 AD). In response, Elijah stated, “Some of the Arab scholars say that the Holy One…
refers to Muhammad – and they are right. But it does not refer to Muhammad of the past but to
the One Muhammad prophesied of in the Sunnah who came from His family in His name under
the title ‘Mahdi (meaning the Guide, the Restorer of the Kingdom of Righteousness” (Our
Savior, 1974, p. 70). The Nation of Islam challenged the authority of the “final” prophet of
orthodox Islam by asserting that Master Fard, who appeared on the streets of Detroit in 1930,
was God incarnated, and that Elijah Muhammad was a prophet since he received direct
instruction from God.
This tradition of designating one’s own prophet from his own people can be traced back
to both West African practitioners of Islam as well as to the Sufi sect, the Ahmadis. In Islam vs.

47

Ahmadiyya in Nigeria, Ismail Balogun notes that “the Ahmadis, like other Muslims, actually
believe that Muhammad is the last of all the Prophets, but they argue that it is the law-bearing
prophethood that has ended. It is the end of the law from God to man, but not from man to man
and occasionally follower prophets who do not bring any book will still arise” (Balogun, 1974, p.
13). Humphrey J. Fisher, writing in Ahmadiyyah: A Study in Contemporary Islam on the West
African Coast Divergence also noted that amongst Sufis, prophethood continues. A favored
verse taken to indicate Quranic foresight of later prophets is that which concludes “… and they
are sure of the Hereafter” (Qur’an 2:4), in which they translate the “hereafter” to mean what is
yet to come, i.e. further prophets (Fisher, 1963, p. 37).
This is an important aspect of West African Sufis concerning prophethood. As noted by
Balogun and Fisher, Sufis in Nigeria redefined what it meant to be adherents to the faith.
Similarly, the Ahmadiyyas used this reasoning to substantiate their claim that Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad was a prophet who was sent to guide his people into salvation by following him and
believing in his claims. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (c. 1839-1908) founded the Ahmadiyya
Movement, a Sufi order of Islam in 1889 in Punjab, India. Ahmad claimed to be the appearance
of the Messiah or, according to some sources, the manifestation of the Prophet Muhammad and
the incarnation of Jesus. However, most Muslims, whether Sunni or Shia, believe that
Muhammad of Arabia (570-632 A.D). The importance for Sufis, as well as with the Nation of
Islam is that if Muslims settle their minds on the fact that Prophet Muhammad (570-632 AD) is
the last and final prophet, then “orthodox” Muslims can close off the prophecy to other nations
while consolidating power on what it means to be Muslim (Fisher, 1963, p. 22). If a prophet did,
in fact, follow Muhammad of Arabia, then the adherents of the new prophet could claim
legitimacy and authority within the religion.

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Reimagining what it means to be a prophet of one’s people can be seen as a strictly
religious act, but imbedded in this is also the practice of bricolage. The bricoleur uses what is
available to him, i.e. the Quran, grammar, and mysticism, to redefine not only religious, but also
social hierarchical systems. This religious act is also an act of will that asserts one’s agency in a
religious realm, while also providing a sense of legitimacy to each prophetical follower. As
evidenced above, the Nation of Islam needed to establish credibility in order to affect the masses.
With a Black Prophet, one that was identifiable by Detroiters, they were able to build a strong
religious foundation.
Legitimizing the Qur’an through Biblical Exegeses
In Our Savior Has Arrived, Muhammad states: “White Christianity has robbed and
destroyed our peace and love for one another. It was white Christians who brought our fathers
into slavery; it is white Christianity that is keeping you a subject people. They don’t want you,
nor do they like to see you go from them to your own. They fear your unity with your own”
(Muhammad, 1974, 189). Here, Muhammad holds the bible responsible for the destruction of
African Americans by stating that it was the religion of the enslaved, and that it Christianity was
a form of social control keeping the majority of Black Christians docile and unable to “go from
them to your own.” The message was clear; leave Christianity which is under developing blacks
and come to Islam that will provide freedom and salvation. However, although Elijah
Muhammad viewed the Bible as a fallible tool of subjugation, he not only used the Bible in his
speeches, but he often referenced the bible at least twice as much as he did the Qur’an. In
Message to the Blackman, one of the Nation’s canonical texts, he cites or refers to the Bible
twice as often as he does the Quran (Berg, 2009, p. 59).

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Not surprisingly, much of the Muslims original doctrine reflects the religious knowledge
and experiences of the group. Although they purport to shun Christianity, many of their
teachings were strongly linked to the Bible. Biblical myths were repeated with minor changes
and used as references for various prophecies. While traditional Islam links the Old and New
testaments with the Qur’an, the heavy emphasis that the NOI placed on the Christian documents
is in part a consequence of the background of Fard, Elijah Muhammad, and their early followers
(Lee, 1996, p. 27). Fard had long before realized that in order to have a good and successful
Islamic campaign, it would require linkage with the Bible; he felt that it was necessary to
connect the new teachings with something that many were already familiar with. Nonetheless,
his teachings had a profound effect on Elijah Muhammad, who would also become gifted in
destroying the Bible while at the same time using it to evince his teachings. Due to his
familiarity with scripture, Elijah Muhammad was able to manipulate it for his own ends.
One of the techniques implore by Muhammad was to take the Bible literally and attack
Jesus’ character. According to Curtis, in one instance, he did both simultaneously. Taking the
Gospels literally, Muhammad cited Jesus’ own words as proof for his polemical stance: “Do not
think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For
I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…” (Matt. 10:3435). Muhammad used this to prove that Christianity was a divisive religion that had no intention
of uniting black people. In addition, it also proved that Christianity was a violent religion, one
that had no place in the lives of black people.
Similarly, the Ahmadiyyas took the same route when dealing with the Bible. According
to Fisher, the Ahmadis held the Bible “to be contradictory, burdened by unreason and
superstition, cruel and depraved,” and yet they saw fit to “accept passages with which they may

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attempt to besmirch Jesus’s character” (Fisher, 1963, p. 76). In addition, they often used Biblical
prophecy and various Biblical references to demonstrate the truth of Ahmadiyyah” (Fisher, 1963,
p. 74). What is important to note also, is that in the Ahmadi tradition “the positive use of the
Bible is balanced by outright rejection” (Fisher, 1963, p. 76), just as it had been done in the
Nation of Islam.
Up to this point, we have seen that many of the practices of the Nation of Islam fall
within the Ahmadiyya (Sufi) tradition. Although some may manifest in slightly different ways,
the tradition of West African Sufism that is followed by the Nation of Islam is evident. Before
turning to the next section, there is one that is worth noting about the Nation of Islam. In Elijah
Muhammad and Islam (2009), Herbert Berg notes that: “Mr. Muhammad is thought to have
drawn scriptural support for his racist theology from a mistranslated Ahmadiyyah Koran.
Correctly written, a passage in the Koran states that God does not accept people with “blurred
eyes,” but the Ahmadiyyah version which Mr. Muhammad purportedly consulted says that God
does not accept people with “blue eyes.” (qtd. in Berg, 2009, p. 61). It is possible that he often
consulted the mistranslated Ahmadiyyah Quran, but there is more evidence suggesting that he
knew that some was misinterpreted and still chose that translation anyway.
The Ahmadiyyah Movement had a presence in Detroit, and even moreso in Chicago.
Edward Curtis argued that “the Ahmadiyya are particularly important to the development of
African-American Islamic thought, since… their theological orientation may have been one of
the sources from which Elijah Muhammad fashioned his black Islamic thought (Curtis, 2002, p.
71). In addition, Curtis states that the Ahmadiyya were quick to focus on urban African
Americans because they were ripe for conversion. He states:

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In 1920, the Adjani faction sent Mufti Muhammad Sadiqi as a missionary to teach
in New York, he quickly moved from there to Chicago, then to Highland Park in
the greater metropolitan Detroit area, and finally back to the Windy City, where
he established a headquarters… While the Ahmadiyya both preached and
practiced racial cooperation and equality, Sadiq did not hesitate to use racialist
arguments to promote Islam among blacks. Through his speeches and the
Moslem Sunrise, Sadiq also associated white Christianity with slavery, which he
argued destroyed the African’s original language, Arabic, and his religion,
Islam… Later, Sadiq’s successor, Sufi Bengalee, also promoted Islam as the
inspiration behind the historical black achievements, including, for example, the
accomplishments of former slaves Bilal ibn Rabah and Zayd ibn Muhammad
under the banner of Islam (Curtis, 2002, p. 71).
This tactic of targeting a specific demographic of blacks was key to spreading the Elijah
Muhammad’s Islam.

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Chapter Five
Conclusion and Implications for Further Research
In the last section, I attempted to show how the NOI fell within various traditions of
practicing Islam. While one may classify this as merely a form of syncretism, what differentiates
Elijah Muhammad’s movement was the inclusion of various elements that sat both inside and
outside of the religious purview. Muhammad was able to engage in a process that I termed
transcultural bricolage, the act combining cultural elements and random assemblages of
information to (re)construct a religious consciousness within the African American community.
By examining Elijah Muhammad’s NOI through the lens of transcultural bricolage, we
can begin to see how those various elements came together to form a unique whole. It is evident
that he followed existing traditions, reshaping and refashioning those traditions as he deemed
necessary for his cause. Other elements were simply add-ons that came with the imaginative
power of Fard and Muhammad. However, in the quest to reformulate a religion that catered to
blacks, he included what was other elements such as a theory of liberation and even engaged in
the respectability politics. As we will see these various elements, constructed through a type of
transcultural bricolage, were what made this movement a success.
It is widely known that Elijah Muhammad engaged in a liberation theology. It was his
belief that salvation would only come to black people if there recognized that Islam was the
natural religion of blacks and that Christianity was not only the religion of whites, but it offered
no real help for the African American community. Elijah challenged white hegemonic power
structures by calling for the separation of blacks from that society. He believed that true salvation
could only come by separating physically by asking the government for a separate state for
blacks, socially by demanding that his followers not associate with these devils, academically by

53

establishing schools where black children could attend, and economically by proposing an
economic plan that rivaled Marcus Garvey’s program.
Other practices that represent a type of bricolage became manifest with his views on
respectability politics. The grouping of these various pieces, however, also extended to various
aspects of their ideology as well as demonstrated a transcultural assemblage. Although they
shunned white people as devils, it is also evident is that Muhammad did adopt some notions of
European respectability, especially when defining how their adherents should dress. Muhammad
often commented on African American peoples being “Asiatics” who had a duty to return to
their original religion, language, and standards of dressing modestly. In essence, Muhammad
called for African Americans to return to their “African-ness.” However, while he did desire for
them to return to their religion, he did not necessarily want them to return to Africa. Instead, he
ordered his followers, both men and women, to dress respectably. Elijah Muhammad wanted
Muslim men and women to dress in conservative attire, which meant that men were to dress in
suits, while women wear long garments, covering themselves for the sake of God. This, in itself,
is not problematic. What is problematic, however, was that Elijah Muhammad’s ideas of
modesty mirrored European notions of respectability. However, if Muhammad truly wanted to
shed all aspects of Euro-American values, then why was it necessary to conform to their
standards in regard to attire? It seems that he would instead order his followers to return to the
African dress worn when blacks were Asiatics.
In addition, Elijah Muhammad ordered his followers to stop eating soul fool. These
“slave foods,” as he described them, were staples in many black households. He warned that
these foods, including pork, collard greens, corn, and yams, were in fact the devils attempt at
exploiting black people and weakening their health. He followed Islamic dietary laws but also

54

saw the need to transcend the limitations as set by traditional Islam. In How to Eat to Live, for
example, Muhammed stressed that his followers would be healthier if they only ate one meal per
day, that fasting would better serve Allah if they did so for days at a time, and that fasting
continuously instead of eating at sundown with the world wide Muslim community would be
more advantageous.
On one level, we can rationalize the dietary orders regarding soul food as being intended
to move African Americans away from what he commonly referred to as the “slave mentality.”
However, we can also interrogate this another way: these foods were often what white people
often referred to as “black people’s food.” Consuming these foods proved to many whites that
blacks were a lower species because soul food was not respectable food (even though many
whites also enjoyed eating these foods). Respectability politics is the reason why Elijah
Muhammad instructed his followers to abstain from this food, and not merely for health reasons
as he proclaimed.
This project was undertaken with the thought in mind to allow the reader to view the
Nation of Islam in another lens. This has not been an exhaustive study on the various Islamic
traditions that the Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam used at their disposal, nor is it
complete in representing how West African Sufism in particular and Sufism in general, are
almost mirror images of the way that Muhammad would come to practice Islam. This is,
however, a good starting point for one who wishes to delve further into the construction of the
NOI. Muhammad was successfully able to blend Christianity, African religious praxis, African
American and liberation theology into one realm. It has always been a common practice for
African Americans to use their religion as a way to escape the bounds of slavery, the era of Jim
Crow, and de jure and de facto segregation.

55

One sect of Sufis, the Ahmadiyyah, seemed to have more of an influence on the Nation of
Islam than I had previously expected. What is certain is that Fard gave Elijah Muhammad an
Ahmadi translation of the Quran. What is not certain, however, is how much contact Elijah
Muhammad may have had with Ahmadi missionaries, and also, how much of their mistranslated
doctrine did he knowingly subscribe to. Herbert Berg, one of the premier scholars of the Nation
of Islam, is one of few authors who recognized that Elijah Muhammad was using a
misinterpreted Ahmadi Quran, stating that Muhammad was probably aware of its
misinterpretations, but chose to use it anyway as those misinterpretations validated his points.
Further research should explore how much of the Ahmadiyya (mis)interpretation of the Qur’an
actually made its way into the practices of the Nation of Islam.
In order to do so, one would have to obtain an old Ahmadi copy of the Quran from the
early twentieth century. It is known that missionaries arrived in the United States in 1917 with
copies of their translated Ahmadi Quran, and that they specifically targeted African American
Muslims for conversion. We also know that Fard was certainly aware of the misinterpretations
when he gave the book to Elijah Muhammad because, as the reports go, Fard spoke and read the
Qur’an in Arabic. Scholars do not currently know where Fard actually came from because of
varying FBI accounts. In addition, existing police reports identify Fard with at least a half dozen
different identities: British, Hawaiian, or Polynesian parents, a criminal who served jail time in
San Quentin Palestinian, a Syrian, a black Jamaican whose father was a Syrian Muslim, a
Turkish born Nazi, or a Turko-Persian (Curtis, 2002, p. 69). Therefore, if one is to fully
understand how the Nation of Islam constructed their religious reality is to conduct further
research on the Ahmadi translation of the Qur’an.

56

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