Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought

Chapter 7: Toward an Islam for One People and Many

Chapter 7 Toward an Islam for One People and Many LOUIS FARRAKHAN AND THE RECAPITULATION OF PARADOX It would be wrong to conclude from the previous chapter that particularism has vanished in African-American Islamic thought. In fact, its ongoing presence can be seen quite clearly in the career of Minister Louis Farrakhan , leader of a reconstituted Nation of Islam (NOI). Born Louis Eugene Walcott in Bronx, New York, on May 11, 1933, the future NOI leader first learned about the teachings of Elijah Muhammad through Malcolm X, who was helping to start a temple in Boston at the time. Converting to the NOI in the middle 1950s, Louis X, as he came to be called, quickly achieved a great deal of success as a movement leader. Originally serving as Malcolm’s assistant minister in Boston, the former calypso singer composed a number of movement songs, including “A White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell,” in addition to authoring two important movement plays called Orgena, a Negro Spelled Backwards and The Trial. In 1964, after Malcolm left the movement, Elijah Muhammad appointed Louis X as the Minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7. He was even mentioned as a successor to Elijah Muhammad, as Malcolm X had been.1 When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, the man who had since become Louis Farrakhan initially expressed his support of Wallace Muhammad . But tensions between the two men grew, especially after Muhammad had Farrakhan replaced as minister of Temple No. 7 and brought him to Chicago, where he could be watched more closely. After being sent on a 129 good will tour of the Caribbean, Farrakhan had had enough. Rallying several NOI confidants around him, he planned a resurrection of the old NOI in 1977. Attacking Wallace Muhammad’s Sunni Islamic reforms as a misguided departure from Elijah Muhammad’s teachings, Minister Farrakhan charged that the new policies ignored the issue of racism. Any form of integration was, he said, a “lullaby.” Racism was a global problem, he argued in another interview. “I have visited Christian, Muslim, Socialist , and Communist countries,” Farrakhan said. “Wherever I found a plurality of races, I consistently found the Black man on the bottom.”2 Elijah Muhammad’s black dispensationalist Islam, he stated in effect, was the only realistic answer to this problem. In fact, from the late 1970s until today, Farrakhan has retained many aspects of the elder Muhammad’s thought, especially by emphasizing the importance of Elijah Muhammad’s prophetic status. In the early 1990s, Minster Farrakhan sought to legitimate his own leadership of the NOI by describing his unique links to the Messenger. He cited, for example, his kinship to Muhammad through the marriage of two daughters to members of Elijah Muhammad’s family. He also compared his relationship to Elijah Muhammad to that between Jesus the Messiah and Paul, the great evangelist. Finally, he reported having experienced spiritual visions—including one in which he visited a UFO during a trip to Mexico in 1985—that confirmed the validity of Muhammad’s teachings.3 Like Elijah Muhammad before the early 1960s, Farrakhan justified these views through interpretations of Islamic texts. He also incorporated several elements of Sunni Islam into his movement, telling his followers, for example, to observe the Ramadan fast not at Yuletide, as Elijah Muhammad said, but according to the lunar calendar followed by other Muslims. In addition, the Minister began to hold the main prayer meeting on Friday rather than Sunday and encouraged followers to make the hajj. Finally, Farrakhan used historical parallels to the life example of the Prophet Muhammad to illuminate the meaning of his own mission. When Farrakhan purchased the Stoney Island mosque in 1988 for some two million dollars, he compared this act to the Prophet Muhammad’s triumphant return to Mecca after a ten-year absence. When, in another example, he tried to explain his belief that Elijah Muhammad is not actually dead but in hiding, he likened Elijah Muhammad’s disappearance to that of the Prophet’s escape from Mecca before establishing his political community in Medina.4 More recently, however, Minister Farrakhan has received a great deal of attention from the national press not for the continuing presence of such particularism, but for his participation in interracial and interfaith 130 Islam in Black America dialogue and activism. In a way, Farrakhan’s ecumenism might be dated...