The Nation of Islam

This post will discuss the Nation of Islam (NOI), an Islamic NRM that started in the 1930s under the leadership of W.D. Fard Muhammad. Specifically, I will be analyzing the NOI under the leadership of W.D. Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad.

NOI followers believed that Black people were the chosen people of Allah and the first humans on Earth. They followed the religion of Islam until white colonizers stripped them of their faith during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Elijah Muhammad preached that he was a prophet of Islam guided by Allah who came down in human form as W.D. Fard Muhammad. To truly be successful, NOI taught that Black people would have to separate culturally, socially, economically, and politically from White society.

Many of the teachings of the NOI seem strange and blasphemous to the average Muslim like the manifestation of Allah in a physical form or a prophet after Prophet Muhammad (S). However, followers of the NOI believed that they were Muslims. After all, both followers of the NOI and followers of traditional Islam read the same Qur’an. However, one of the main reasons NOI is considered a cult and not within the fold of Islam is its beliefs about prophethood and Allah. One of the basic tenets of Islam is to believe in Prophet Muhammad (S) as the final messenger and to believe Allah is the only God, who is unique and incomparable to anything else. This contradicts the idea that Elijah Muhammad could be a prophet or that W.D. Fard Muhammad could be an incarnation of Allah. On top of this contradiction, there are other contentions with NOI beliefs such as their beliefs regarding heaven and hell and their racial beliefs. The question then arises as to where the reinterpretation of the Qur’an the NOI has comes from.

Black nationalism which was gaining much power during the time of Elijah Muhammad explains many of the racial beliefs of the NOI, but the origins of other beliefs may not be so clear. Perhaps ideas like the manifestation of God into a human form could be traced back to Christianity, but the rationalistic approach the NOI had in reaffirming their beliefs resembles that of the Mu’tazilites, who pioneered a rationalistic re-reading of the Qur’an that produced divergent ideology. Although a physical manifestation of God would go directly against Mu’tazilite beliefs of God having absolutely no attribute comparable to humans, both the Mu’tazilites and followers of the NOI valued rationality in their readings of the Qur’an.

The NOI of Elijah Muhammad seems to lie clearly in the cult category mostly because of its deviation from the tenet of Islam to believe in a unique God and a final prophet Muhammad (S). The next post will cover how ISIS deviated from Islam to become a cult.