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This chapter explores the intellectual defenses of Elijah Muhammad by African American Muslim intellectuals who defended their leader as a genuine Islamic prophet. To defend their leader's authenticity, these intellectuals offered interpretations of Muhammad's message on a frequent basis in Muhammad Speaks. They also employed a variety of genres such as public speeches, foreign endorsements in newspapers, and cartoons.

This chapter reinterprets the rise of black radicalism as a moment of competing “voices” across competing mass medias amid rapid changes in the black freedom struggle and media landscape of the 1960s. It also reinterprets Malcolm X as a newspaper publisher, a rather underanalyzed side of Malcolm. Black publishers had long considered their papers the “voice” of the race, and Malcolm’s founding of Muhammad Speaks in 1960 to amplify the voice of Elijah Muhammad signified this. Yet, the paper’s founding also marked the beginning of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) robust media campaign to use various medias—radio, books, and albums of Muhammad’s speeches—to promote Muhammad’s vision for racial advancement over others. His vision promised to redeem black manhood by renewing their lives, a vision displayed through salesmen for Muhammad Speaks. Thus, readers could read both the paper and their bodies. Malcolm, however, made his display through television. But when he began to gain a voice through television that rivaled that of Muhammad’s in print, the NOI’s media campaign turned from promising to renew the lives of black men to promising to take it away. Malcolm became a newspaperman cut short of his full publishing potential.

This chapter presents a more detailed look at Elijah Muhammad's exegetical framework and teachings in light of some major themes in his writings. Elijah Muhammad and his followers may have honored the Qur'an and insisted on being called Muslims, but many of the beliefs and practices that he elucidated struck other Muslims as heretical and even unislamic, so much so that they strongly objected to the use of “Islam” to describe Elijah Muhammad's movement. Elijah Muhammad produced no systematic tafsīr, or commentary on the Qur'an, and none of his writings even takes the form of traditional commentaries. He was completely unfamiliar with the vast tafsīr literature produced over the fourteen centuries of Islam. Elijah Muhammad's conception of Allah differed from a more “orthodox” Muslim interpretation in two ways. First, he identifies Fard Muhammad with Allah. Second, he seems to ignore the doctrine that Allah is one. That is to say, Elijah Muhammad was not a strict monotheist.

This chapter sketches the life of Elijah Muhammad, including his life before the Nation of Islam, his tutelage under Fard Muhammad, his struggles to keep the movement alive during years of persecution and imprisonment, and his astounding success from the late 1950s through the turbulent years of Malcolm X. The last decade of Elijah Muhammad's life appears superficially as a period of malaise but was actually a time of economic successes and growth for his movement. Divisions within the Nation of Islam and renewed struggles for power began as the effects of serious illnesses and advancing age made it increasingly obvious that their Messenger would soon need a successor.

This chapter focuses on the mutually suspicious, even hostile, relationship between Elijah Muhammad and many other Muslims, and on the various ways scholars have understood the relationship between Islam and Elijah Muhammad. Most scholars recognize that he took the underdeveloped teachings of Fard Muhammad and produced a viable religious movement. However, some scholars maintain that “Islam” is merely a veneer for a militant civil rights movement, or that his was a millenarian sect, whose strong racial and political agenda was garbed in Islamic language. Even those scholars who maintain that Elijah Muhammad must be considered a Muslim ask what is the best way to understand his role in Islam: as a racial exegete? a jihadist? He has even been recast as a “proto-Muslim” or “crypto-Muslim,” who guided African Americans through a temporary “unorthodox” stage so that they could eventually be brought to Sunni Islam.

Elijah Muhammad is credited with introducing the Qur'an to most African American Muslims. The earlier Moorish Science Temple's most Islamic feature was the use of the word “Koran” for the scripture “written” by its founder, Drew Ali. In that regard, the Nation of Islam was clearly much more “Islamic.” This chapter focuses on the status of the Qur'an for Elijah Muhammad and the use he made of it. A comparison between Drew Ali's Koran and Elijah Muhammad's use of the Bible and predictions of a future scripture highlight Elijah Muhammad's unique understanding of the role of the Qur'an within his formulation of Islam. His understanding of the Qur'an was not monolithic, however. As he became more familiar with the Qur'an and then experienced the negative reaction of other Muslims, his relationship to the Qur'an evolved.

This chapter evaluates the Muslim legacy of Elijah Muhammad by examining his two main successors, Warith Deen Mohammed (originally named Wallace D. Muhammad) and Louis Farrakhan. The tension between orthodoxy and heterodoxy embedded within the Nation of Islam by Elijah Muhammad himself led to the rupture between these two successors. However, regardless of whether Elijah Muhammad is viewed as a “true” Muslim or not, it was his genuine personal attachment and dedication to the religion of Islam that spurred him to engage in the mythmaking that not only led tens of thousands of African Americans directly to Islam and several million more indirectly but also made Islam part of the religious landscape of America.

In 1930, Farad Muhammad, a mysterious peddler, told African Americans in Detroit that their true religion was Islam and that their original language was Arabic, stolen from them when they were brought as slaves into the New World. With few followers, he established the Lost–Found Nation of Islam in North America. When Farad disappeared in 1934, Elijah Poole, who later became known as Elijah Muhammad, emerged as the leader of this Islamic movement. This book analyzes the beliefs, practices, doctrines, and religious narratives of the Nation of Islam (NOI). It provides a profile of the rich religious landscape of African American Muslim members of NOI and illuminates the movement's impact on the relationship between religion and politics in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter explores Islam among African Americans and within America in general prior to Elijah Muhammad. Although Elijah Muhammad's perseverance, his message of anger and hope, and his unique rhetorical skill convinced thousands of African Americans to accept his version of Islam, many African Americans already offered fertile ground for his ministry. Vestigial memories that many African slaves had been Muslims may have survived. White American islamicism, while quite negative about Islam, contained several characterizations of Islam that would have made it quite appealing to African Americans, such as its perceived hostility to Christianity and Europe, and its identification with Africa. And, just prior to the birth of the Nation of Islam, the missionaries of the Ahmadiyya movement and of Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America began to preach their particular formulations of Islam among African Americans. These factors set the stage for Elijah Muhammad's mentor and founder of the Nation of Islam, Fard Muhammad, and the development of the movement Elijah Muhammad would lead for over four decades.

This chapter describes the first meeting between Lee Boyd Malvo and John Muhammad, his perceived “hero” father figure. It was during the early days of October 2000 that Malvo first encountered John Muhammad. They became acquainted when Muhammad sold a visa to Malvo's mother to gain entry into the U.S. Since then, Malvo visited Muhammad every day, and found a family in him and his children. Malvo's relationship with Muhammad was later established when Muhammad “saved” Malvo when he suffered from Rheumatic Fever. After this rescue, Malvo and Muhammad went everywhere together, and Malvo soon lived with Muhammad. Muhammad introduced Malvo to the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, and he became Malvo's longed-for parent. On September 4, 2001, Muhammad lost custody of his children. This devastated him and led him to brainwash Malvo and use him in his “war against the system.”

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to understand Elijah Muhammad as a Muslim, opting for sociological and psychological approaches rather than theological ones. More specifically, by contextualizing Elijah Muhammad within the larger Islamic tradition, this book seeks to understand him as Muslim through a detailed examination of his religious context, his life, his use of the Qur'an, his relationships with other Muslims, his legacy, and his own religious convictions. It argues that to understand him, his movement, and his significance, scholars of religion must abandon the prejudice that he was not a real Muslim or that he was merely superficially Muslim. Even his political, economic, and social agendas were inextricable from his religious one. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

When Elijah Muhammad died of heart failure on February 25, 1975, his son, Wallace D. Muhammad, succeeded him as the new leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI). This conclusion summarizes the dramatic changes in the movement after Elijah's death. These changes are referred to as the “Second Resurrection”. In less than three years, for example, Wallace D. Muhammad aligned NOI with basic Sunni Islamic traditions and instructed his followers to observe the five pillars of Islam. Sister Fatima, a follower of Wallace Muhammad, explained these changes as the result of a divine plan that is meant to bring African Americans to Sunni Islam.

This chapter examines the FBI’s repression of the Nation of Islam. The FBI placed several of its own operatives into leading positions in this religious community, forging along the way a unique relationship with New York City’s police department. The essay explains how Bureau's efforts to destroy the Nation of Islam produced what is arguably its most violent repression of religious groups at the time. The author Karl Evanzz focuses on Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, both of whom targeted by the FBI for years. By explaining the bureau’s efforts to disrupt the best known organization of African American Muslims, the chapter interprets for readers a pivotal episode in the nation's history of religion and the security state.

American culture is suffused with technological millennialism. While the number of core believers in eugenics, cryonics, uploading of consciousness, and space colonies as postmillennial projects may be few, their futurist concepts have broad appeal for literature and film. Millennial ufology, in particular, represents a highly visible reformulation of Christian eschatology. Rather than angels or the messiah emerging from the clouds to battle the Antichrist and redeem the chosen, the messiah is now a benevolent interstellar space traveler, returning to Earth to rescue his space brothers from evil aliens and the ravages inflicted on the planet by technology and pollution. This chapter explores the relation of technology, extra-terrestrialism, and millennium as developed in the writings of the Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal (1925– ), a Catholic priest who became the Sandinista Minister of Culture in the 1980s. Cardenal uses the UFO motif to link first with last things, alpha with omega, Indian with European. The ultimate technology symbolized in UFOs is needed to reverse history and return the earth to a golden age where the land is once again in the keeping of Native Americans. The chapter uncovers surprising links between Cardenal’s poetic visions, the history of UFO sightings, and the reports of UFO experiencers and of the Nation of Islam leaders, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan.

Known for its radical resistance to white supremacy, US foreign policy, black Christianity and the liberal dream of racial integration, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) was a prime target of US governmental surveillance and repression. Its very presence was perceived as a threat to the ideological foundations of 1960s US liberalism, which rested on anti-communism and the suppression of political dissent both at home and abroad, on the rhetoric of equal rights under the law and sometimes racial integration, and on federal welfare programs. At the same time, the Nation of Islam’s leadership appropriated and furthered what were at the time several other modes of liberalism: it policed its members’ middle-class, straight sexuality; it embraced the dream of black capitalism and encouraged entrepreneurship; it used the US courts to argue for freedom of religion and framed its activities as such; and it forbade its members from engaging in violent revolution or even nonviolent political resistance against many of the very liberal institutions that it identified as a religious evil.

In the United States, the African American struggle for identity, freedom, and equality was expressed in a variety of religious and political movements in the twentieth century. This chapter examines one of the most important of these: the Nation of Islam, which emerged in the late 1920s and continues to exist today. American society has often perceived the Nation [NOTE: Members of NOI and informed outsiders often refer to this group as ‘the Nation’; there is absolutely no reason ‘of Islam’ has to be added here.] as a violent threat to its stability and security, and the Nation, in its outspoken criticism of white America, has often implied that it would not hesitate to use violence to achieve its goals. Despite this context, however, the actual incidents of violence in which the Nation has been involved have been limited in both number and intensity.

This chapter examines how musicians provided different rejoinders to African Americans' struggles in Chicago during the late 1960s. One response came from the Affro-Arts Theater and its founder, Phil Cohran. His teachings—and their connections to Sun Ra and Elijah Muhammad—are explored; so, too, is Cohran's influence on Maurice White (Earth, Wind and Fire founder) and Chaka Khan. The saga of the Affro-Arts Theater’s Afrocentric house band, The Pharaohs, and their colleagues The Pieces Of Peace are also described. After the assassination of Martin Luther King and the civil unrest that followed, Syl Johnson responded to the violence through his album, Is It Because I’m Black. Johnson’s story is woven into an analysis of this album and its aftermath.

This chapter examines the Garvey movement's direct intellectual legacy with respect to the discourse of black nationalism and the integrationist tendencies of the modern civil rights movement. It considers the ties of activists at the local, state, regional, and national levels to the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as well as the presence of the core tenets of Garveyism—black pride and self-determination—in black thought and popular culture. The formative influence of Garveyism has been acknowledged by some of the most influential African Americans of the twentieth century, particularly Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and iconic black nationalist Malcolm X. Marcus Garvey reemerged as an icon courtesy of black popular culture, even as most historians have not acknowledged the pervasiveness of grassroots Garveyism in virtually every African American cultural, political, and intellectual movement since the 1930s.