> A LEAP OF FAITH
>
> THE FATHER PREACHED THAT WHITES ARE DEVILS, AND HE DEMANDED
> A SEPARATE BLACK NATION. THE SON EMBRACED AMERICAN IDEALS AND
> PREACHED THE KORAN'S MESSAGE OF BROTHERHOOD AND TOLERANCE.
> IT WAS A DANGEROUS
>
> By Don Terry
> Published October 20, 2002
> The Chicago Tribune
>
> A few hours after the Messenger of Allah died, scores of his
> ministers hurried to his domed mosque on Stony Island Avenue
> to learn the fate of their nation.
>
> The future was waiting in the basement.
>
> The ministers filed down the stairs, hearts heavy, souls shaken.
> Up until Elijah Muhammad's last breath at 8:10 a.m. on Feb. 25,
> 1975, many believed The Messenger would live forever. They could
> not imagine he would leave them behind in the wilderness of North
> America to face the blue-eyed devil alone.
>
> For more than 40 years, he had lifted them from the gutter,
> plucked them out of the fire, resurrected them from the mentally
> dead. He did it using a theology of love and hate, sincerity and
> science fiction. The white man was the Devil, the black man a
> human God. He preached a separatist gospel of self-reliance. And
> he turned thousands of his brothers and sisters--the so-called
> Negroes, a phrase he used only with disdain--into proud black
> men and women.
>
> They thought he was divine. He didn't argue.
>
> Now that he was dead of heart failure at age 77, what would
> become of his people? Their Nation of Islam?
>
> Gathered in the depths of the mosque on the South Side of
> Chicago, they soon learned the answer. The Messenger's 41-year-old
> son, his successor, held up a Holy Koran. "We have to take this
> down from the shelf," declared Wallace D. Muhammad, staring into
> 200 somber faces. "We say we are Muslims. What my father taught
> that is in this book, we will keep. What is not in this book, we
> have to give up."
>
> So much had to go: There would be no more lessons about white
> devils or hovering spaceships ready to destroy America for its
> racial sins. There would be no more prohibitions against going to
> the movies or demands for a separate black nation in the American
> South.
>
> It was nothing less than a religious reformation that Wallace
> Muhammad began that bitter winter 27 years ago. He and his
> followers took the first steps in a mass march of tens of
> thousands of African-Americans away from the cult-like margins
> of a fierce faith to the mainstream of one of the world's great
> religions. Wallace Muhammad later started using the name Warith
> Deen Mohammed as he and his community waded deeper into Islam.
>
> To Mohammed, his father's Nation had been more concerned with
> property than prayers. It was more social movement than religion,
> more small-business incubator than house of worship. "My father
> was a great social reformer," Mohammed now says. "But when I
> came in, all I cared about was the soul."
>
> Today, there are 6 million to 8 million Muslims in the United
> States, and nearly 30 percent of them are African-American. The
> vast majority sit solidly in the Islamic mainstream, pledging
> allegiance to Allah and America, balancing Islamic piety and
> Western values. America isn't the Great Satan. It is home.
>
> To get his community to this point, Mohammed, the conflicted
> prince of the Nation of Islam's "Royal Family," turned his back
> on his father's kingdom. He tore it down myth by myth, replacing
> it with something new and, he is confident, truer to the faith.
> A year after taking over, he renamed the group the World Community
> of Al-Islam in the West, consigning the 45-year-old Nation of
> Islam to history--or so he thought.
>
> Several disaffected Nation officials, including Minister Louis
> Farrakhan, refused to give up the old ways. They broke away,
> taking some of Elijah Muhammad's followers with them. New but
> significantly smaller Nations of Islam soon began popping up in
> Detroit, Atlanta and most famously in Chicago under Farrakhan.
> Most of The Messenger's followers, however, stayed with the son
> and his Koran-based message.
>
> Mohammed thus "was able to do two remarkable things," says
> Sulayman S. Nyang, a professor of African Studies at Howard
> University. "One [was] the re-Islamization of the movement; the
> second, the re-Americanization of the movement. Here's a man who
> inherited an organization that most scholars of Islam would
> describe as heretical before [Mohammed took over]," Nyang says.
> "That mythology has been replaced by sound theology rooted in
> Islamic orthodoxy. The people had to make a 180-degree turn."
>
> Yvonne Haddad, an Islamic expert at Georgetown University, agrees
> that Mohammed shepherded a remarkable transformation in his
> followers' religious life. While his father shunned patriotism
> and cursed America for its crimes against the "black man," Haddad
> says Mohammed proudly waves the flag. "He still knows there is
> much about America that is racist," she says. "But he's working
> with it to change it. He is extremely important in making Muslims
> look at themselves as Americans and emphasizing their American
> identity."
>
> Yet his own identity is not well known. His is the face of Islam
> we seldom see, the personal story we seldom hear. It is the face
> of a bearded and balding father of 9 and grandfather of 10 who
> has been married four times, loves to cook and putter around his
> modest south suburban home--and professes a surprising admiration
> for the music of Prince, the sexually charged rocker. "He's
> cleaned up his act," he says. "Now I don't have to go sneak to
> see him."
>
> Mohammed currently calls his group the Muslim American Society,
> its third name since the death of the old Nation of Islam. With
> nearly 200,000 active followers, he is the chief imam, or spiritual
> leader, for the largest community of African-American Muslims in
> the United States. Some scholars say the number is closer to 1
> million when all the group's supporters are counted.
>
> Under Mohammed's leadership, the community became increasingly
> active outside its mosques, launching and supporting new businesses,
> becoming more politically involved and reaching out to Christians
> and Jews for interfaith dialogue. "We were really making progress,"
> he says, sighing deeply. "We were on the move."
>
> Then terror came roaring out of the September sky.
>
> Mohammed says the true picture of Islam has been buried in the
> debris of the Sept. 11 attacks. The image of his religion, he says,
> was hijacked by a band of extremists; a group of desperate, depraved
> men whom he insists are no more representative of Islam than
> Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was of white Christian
> Americans.
>
> Still, he says, "We have not been doing our job of presenting
> Islam correctly. The whole world is looking at the Muslims,
> wondering who we are. We shouldn't have waited for this terrible
> thing to happen to show them."
>
> His followers call W.Deen Mohammed "Brother Imam." They also call
> him late--a lot. One even suggested that the initials W.D. stand
> for "Way Delayed." Of course, he often has 50 people demanding
> his attention every day. Plus, he's a 68-year-old man with a
> 12-year-old son. Time has a way of getting away from him.
>
> So none of his followers was surprised recently when there was no
> sign of Brother Imam 30 minutes after he was scheduled to deliver
> the khutbah, or sermon, for the Friday afternoon congregational
> prayer.
>
> The mosque on 71st Street was overflowing. One family drove all
> the way from Michigan to hear him. Mohammed doesn't have a mosque
> of his own and travels around the city and country as a guest
> speaker.
>
> The mosque is a converted nursery school. But inside it looks
> like a shoe store as the faithful come in, slip out of their
> shoes and line them up against the wall before finding a spot
> on the rug. There are chairs set up in the back for the old and
> infirm.
>
> Outside, vendors were setting up their tables. Wherever Brother
> Imam goes, vendors follow a la a Grateful Dead tour. They sell
> sandwiches, tapes of his past khutbahs, copies of the community's
> newspaper, the Muslim Journal, and bean pies.
>
> "Assalamu alaikum [Peace be upon you]" one vendor said to another
> as he set up his table under a tree. "Man, where have you been?
> I haven't seen you in a month of Sundays."
>
> "Wa' alaikumus salam [And upon you is the peace]," the other
> responded, throwing his arms around his friend. "I've just been
> working hard, trying to get into Paradise."
>
> Inside the mosque, someone said excitedly "Here he comes," and
> the men sitting on the floor in the middle and front of the room
> edged closer to the rostrum, so the men in the back could squeeze
> onto the rug. The women and girls were in the next room. A thin,
> elderly man with a white beard entered, and people strained to
> get a glimpse. False alarm. It was Mohammed's 68-year-old
> volunteer driver, Yusuf Abdullah, a former Baptist church deacon.
> Mohammed does not travel with bodyguards or an entourage of aides.
> He either drives himself or Abdullah climbs behind the wheel of
> his Chevy.
>
> Mohammed came next, slipping out of his shoes and bestowing a
> sweet smile on his patient congregation.
>
> "Assalamu alaikum," he said to the faithful.
>
> "Wa' alaikumus salam," they responded.
>
> In his sermon, he said that Allah invented the heavens and the
> stars and the moonlight. He invented weather: the wind, the rain,
> the snow. The believers should study Allah's creation and become
> scientists and scholars and use their knowledge to help their
> communities learn and prosper.
>
> Always give back, always reach out, he added. No one should go
> to school just to become rich for themselves. They must help the
> poor. They must help the world.
>
> They must, he said, try to follow the example of "the Prophet
> Mohammed, peace be upon him."
>
> "That's right," someone shouted.
>
> "Teach."
>
> "Allahu akbar [God is great]," someone said, and several other voices
> joined in.
>
> Brother Imam beamed.
>
> It has been a long and sometimes dangerous journey for Mohammed,
> who turns 69 at the end of October. His followers call the period
> when he took over the Nation "The Change" or "The Transition." It
> could have been The End. Ten years, almost to the day, before his
> ascension, Mohammed's friend and religious confidant, Malcolm X, was
> gunned down in New York City. Malcolm, too, had tried to bring
> orthodoxy and other reforms to the Nation of Islam.
>
> Even before Mohammed took over, there were several outbreaks of
> violence across the Nation of Islam, including a deadly shootout
> with police in Baton Rouge and an assassination and two beheadings
> in Newark, N.J. In some cases, the violence was criminally motivated,
> in others ideological disputes seemed to be the cause.
>
> Mohammed "took a major risk in leading the Nation" to mainstream
> Islam, says Lawrence H. Mamiya, a professor of religion at
> Vassar College. "There were many threats on his life. There
> were many splits in his movement."
>
> Farrakhan is responsible for the most famous fissure. He broke
> away in late 1977 to form his own Nation of Islam--heavy on
> charismatic leadership, light on the Koran. Just like the old
> days. Farrakhan declined to be interviewed for this article, but
> Mohammed recalls that, before he left, Farrakhan came to him
> "with a heavy heart." Farrakhan told him, Mohammed says, that
> he had disgraced his father and chased away the Nation's young
> members. Elijah Muhammad's Nation had worked miracles, Farrakhan
> argued. It had pulled up the lowest of the low--the addict and the
> pusher, the criminal and the just too tired to go on. It had reached
> into the prisons and the worst of the ghetto and transformed despair
> into dignity, pain into pride. There was no reason to change--not
> yet, maybe not ever.
>
> Mohammed, who recognized Farrakhan's talents and popularity, pleaded
> with him to stay. But the men could not come to terms, and
> ultimately Farrakhan was asked to go in peace. Mohammed says he was
> firm in his position: The old Nation had its day, now it was done.
> It was plagued with thieves at the top and the misguided at the
> bottom. It was time to worship God, not myths. It was time to
> grow up.
>
> And so these two sons of Elijah-- Farrakhan, his ideological son,
> and Mohammed, his flesh and blood who succeeded him--went their
> separate ways. Tensions were high in the weeks after the split.
> "Hints of Violence in a Growing Feud," declared the headline
> over Vernon Jarrett's Chicago Tribune column on Jan. 20, 1978.
> But five days later, another Jarrett column was headlined "A War
> of Words, but no Violence."
>
> Over the years, the fiery and flamboyant Farrakhan easily
> overshadowed Mohammed in the media, though his following remained
> much smaller. Farrakhan was the charmer, Mohammed the plodder.
> Farrakhan was outrageous. Mohammed was invisible.
>
> "He's a great man but nobody knows it," says his sometimes
> frustrated son-in-law, Najee Ali, a political and social activist
> who converted to Islam while in prison for robbery 10 years ago
> after listening to a tape of Mohammed.
>
> "We need to be doing more out in the streets. We need to be more
> involved in people's daily struggles."
>
> Mohammed's low profile is partly his own doing. Perhaps "turned
> off by the leadership of his father," says historian Claude Andrew
> Clegg III, Mohammed seemed purposely to fade into the background,
> taking his community with him on a years-long retreat into religion.
>
> Agieb Bilal, a Muslim since 1969, said that in a lecture to the
> faithful shortly after taking over, Mohammed "told us he was
> planting a new seed, and we would be going out of sight for
> awhile until it was time for the new growth to emerge."
>
> In the early days of The Change, Mohammed was relentless in pursuit
> of his mission, focused to the point of obsession. "One day, Uncle
> Wallace started teaching at 5 p.m. We didn't leave until 2 a.m.,"
> recalls his nephew, Wali Muhammad, a Chicago radio talk-show host.
> "He was trying to overcome almost 45 years of [his father's] teaching.
> When he came in talking the Koran, it was like he was talking a
> different religion. He really upset the apple cart. He made a lot
> of people mad."
>
> Some simply lost interest. "I got bored and left," says Zakiyyah
> Muhammad, 56, a neighborhood activist and resident of the Near
> South Side. She had joined the Nation of Islam in 1973, and stayed
> through The Change. By the early '80s, she reluctantly decided it
> was time to leave. The community, she says, was "dead, dead, dead."
>
> "They weren't doing anything. Praying five times a day and reading
> the Koran wasn't enough. I wanted to be involved in making life
> better for black people." She considered joining Farrakhan, but
> finally dismissed the idea. "There were some things about Farrakhan's
> Nation of Islam I liked," she says. "But after learning true Islam,
> I could not embrace them again. I could never go back."
>
> What she and many others wanted most was a mosque that combined
> both politics and prayer, the kind of place Malcolm X envisioned.
> But he is long dead, and Zakiyyah Muhammad is still searching.
>
> Munir Muhammad also could not abide The Change. He joined the
> Nation of Islam in 1973 and left not long after Wallace Muhammad
> took power. He later founded a group called the Coalition for the
> Remembrance of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. "I saw in this man a
> strength I had not seen prior to or since in any human being," he
> says. "There are people who say [Muhammad] is still alive. We are
> not those people. We say he lives in us."
>
> He says that while Elijah Muhammad was alive, there were several
> attempts to destroy the Nation over the years: hypocrites from
> within, traitors from without, the government. All failed. Then
> along came W. Deen.
>
> "We lost just about everything," Munir Muhammad says, referring
> not only to the Messenger's fiery spirit and vision but also the
> millions in property and businesses his son sold off to settle
> tax debts and probate court rulings. Farrakhan's group purchased
> the Stony Island mosque and Elijah Muhammad's Kenwood mansion.
>
> Many friendships also were lost, but some rifts are slowly being
> repaired. After nearly three decades apart, the two old rivals,
> Farrakhan and W. Deen. Mohammed, both near 70, are carefully making
> peace with their past after Farrakhan's brush with death a couple
> of years ago as he battled prostate cancer. The two talk of economic
> cooperation between their communities, and they speak at each other's
> conventions. Farrakhan attended the Muslim American Society's recent
> gathering in Chicago.
>
> "It's good to be home," he told 7,000 Muslims and guests at the UIC
> Pavilion on the last day of the convention in early September. When
> it was time for Mohammed to speak, Farrakhan sat behind him, smiling
> and nodding. "Go ahead, Brother Imam," he said. "Preach."
>
> Afterward, a middle-aged woman with tears in her eyes approached a
> security guard. "I just have to tell them how happy I am to see
> them together," she said. "I've been praying for this for so long.
> The Honorable Elijah Muhammad would be so proud."
>
> Mohammed talks a lot about his father these days, in glowing
> terms. The old man's picture is featured in some Muslim American
> Society literature and Mohammed often is introduced as the son of
> the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. In the first months and years of
> The Change, however, he was much more critical, even harsh. He
> was trying, he says, to free himself and his people of what he
> calls the "old mind." Now they are free, he believes, and he can
> reclaim his father. He even claims that the Messenger knew his son
> would lead the Nation into the mainstream. In fact, he says, that's
> exactly where Elijah Muhammad wanted his movement to go. Some say
> that's wishful thinking, a son's sentimentality.
>
> "I suggest what he is doing is engaging in a bit of myth-making,
> reinventing the story to reach out to Louis Farrakhan's group,"
> says Herbert Berg, an assistant professor of religion at the
> University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who writes on Islam.
>
> If so, it seems to be working. It is Farrakhan who appears to
> be walking the farthest across the dance floor in this cautious
> courtship. Farrakhan is the one who moves closer and closer to
> a philosophically constant Mohammed. In recent years, Farrakhan
> has toned down his angry race rhetoric and talked up the tenets
> of mainstream Islam, which preaches universal brotherhood. His
> followers take classes in orthodox Islam, and he is being tutored
> in Arabic.
>
> But the wall isn't down completely. "I don't see Louis Farrakhan
> ever disbanding the Nation of Islam," says Clegg, the historian
> and author of "An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah
> Muhammad." "In a sort of messy way, Farrakhan has been moving
> toward more orthodox Islam since the early '90s. But you won't
> see [Mohammed and Farrakhan] in the same organization, I don't
> think. It's still a very divided community."
>
> Indeed, in the literature his aides have been distributing at recent
> appearances, Mohammed chides Farrakhan and his followers for not
> keeping up with changing times: "Minister Louis Farrakhan is
> educated and very intelligent, therefore I don't excuse him. And
> I don't excuse many intelligent, educated African-Americans who
> follow him in the wrong teachings of Islam. That is because the
> world has changed, the discrimination laws have been abolished,
> and race relations have improved."
>
> Mohammed says he considers himself a "rational man" who thinks
> through every possible angle of an issue. But he admits with a
> big laugh, his eyes twinkling, "I've made some female choices
> that weren't rational."
>
> He has been married four times, twice to the same woman, his
> first wife. He has nine children, ranging in age from 12 to 42.
> Several of his children work for him, including NGina Muhammad-Ali,
> director of advertising at his community's newspaper, the Muslim
> Journal.
>
> A few years ago, he and NGina attended a Prince concert together.
> He greatly admires the rock star. "I've been following Prince
> since he was outrageously nasty," he says. "I was able to see
> past the nastiness. I saw him as a very intelligent man with a
> cause. He was in a spirit to lead people away from the grip of
> the world and free their minds."
>
> Mohammed also has a lifelong love of movies. He used to have
> to sneak to see movies when his father was alive, because
> movie-going was prohibited in the Nation of Islam. He once put
> on a fake mustache and sunglasses to slip unseen into a show.
> When he took over the Nation, he lifted the ban.
>
> For decades after it was founded in 1930 in Detroit, the Nation
> of Islam thrived and survived on rigid rules, discipline and
> blind loyalty. Conformity was a virtue, independence a sin. In
> the Nation, a Muslim man better have his suit pressed. His hair
> cut. His fingernails clean. His weekly quota of Muhammad Speaks
> newspapers sold. The Fruit of Islam, the Nation's security force,
> was watching.
>
> Wallace Muhammad was always different. Quirky. When he wore a
> suit, folks say, you'd remember, because it didn't happen often.
> He had other things on his mind.
>
> It was easy for Wallace to be different then. He was The
> Messenger's son, a prince of the "Royal Family." When the Royals
> came to a Nation gathering, the sea of believers would step aside
> to clear a path. But being Elijah Muhammad's son did not protect
> him from Elijah's wrath, especially when he questioned his father
> about the Nation's theology. Physically, The Messenger was a small
> man, frail and tormented by asthma. Yet he blew away challenges to
> his authority like a hurricane. The Nation was not a democracy.
>
> Over the years, Elijah Muhammad banished his son at least three
> times for heresy. Wallace never could accept the idea that God
> was a man who walked the Earth in the person of Master W.D. Fard
> Muhammad, the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam. The man
> Wallace was named after.
>
> The believers called such banishment being "put out." For the
> devout, it was a harsh punishment: Friends wouldn't talk to
> you; your own blood would turn their backs if they saw you
> coming down the street.
>
> In the early 1960s, Wallace was put out for being too close
> to The Messenger's former acolyte, Malcolm X. Both were
> disillusioned by revelations that Elijah Muhammad had children
> outside his marriage. Both loved The Messenger, but questioned
> his message. Both wanted him to change.
>
> "I was influenced by my father all my life," Mohammed says, a trace
> of sadness in his voice. "And by Malcolm."
>
> The Nation sought to be self-contained, and it had almost
> everything a believer would ever need--grocery stores, restaurants,
> schools, clothing shops, cleaners, a bank, farms, a fleet of
> trucks, a jet, an army of men, office buildings, apartment houses
> and 80 temples around the country and overseas.
>
> "We were isolated and insulated," says Imam Darnell Karim,
> Mohammed's friend of more than 60 years. "We shut our ears to
> everything. We heard only one voice, the leader's."
>
> Then in the late 1940s, Elijah Muhammad invited in the outside world,
> hiring a Muslim from the Middle East to teach Arabic at the school.
> Wallace, still a teenager, began reading the Koran with fresh eyes
> and started seeing more and more discrepancies between the Koran's
> Islam and his father's. What he learned greatly disturbed him. "All
> my life I had been trying to understand what my father was teaching,"
> he says. "When I decided it was not acceptable, I really started
> searching the Koran, looking for answers."
>
> Still, he tried to keep his doubts to himself. He wanted to be an
> obedient son. He went into the family business, becoming a student
> minister in the Nation of Islam, speaking publicly at the mosque
> for the first time at age 17 or 18. His friend Karim remembers him
> being so nervous that he gripped the rostrum like a life preserver
> as he spoke. Mohammed remembers speaking for only a few minutes. But
> he says his closing words shot through the Nation: "We give more
> attention to the Devil than to Allah."
>
> Mohammed quickly climbed the ranks of the Nation, from foot soldier
> in the Fruit of Islam to student minister to chief minister of the
> high-profile Temple #12 in Philadelphia in 1959. "He didn't teach
> like the other ministers," says his nephew, Wali Muhammad. "He talked
> much more about the spirit and the soul. He talked much more about
> the Koran."
>
> Two years later, on his 28th birthday in 1961, Mohammed was sent to
> federal prison in Minnesota for refusing induction into the United
> States military. Once again, he was being the obedient son: His
> father and many of his followers had been imprisoned during World
> War II for refusing induction. They considered themselves citizens
> of the Nation of Islam, not the United States. They would not defend
> a country that lynched their brothers and humiliated their sisters,
> segregated their families and told their children they were no good,
> a country that had turned its back on them and pretended they were
> invisible.
>
> In his 14 months in the Minnesota prison, he spent most of his days
> and nights studying the Koran. He became even more convinced that
> the Nation of Islam had to change its message. But he had no idea
> how. His father had all the power, befitting the Last Messenger of
> Allah.
>
> When the prison gates opened in 1963, Mohammed returned to the
> Nation, looking for allies. He found one in Malcolm X, who was
> becoming openly critical of Elijah Muhammad. In 1964, this
> association was what got Mohammed "put out" for the first time.
> His rejection of his father's basic teachings that Fard was God
> led to his banishment again in the late '60s and for the last time
> in the early '70s.
>
> On the outside of the Nation, wanting back in, Mohammed and his
> family were living in Chicago in the early 1970s. To make ends
> meet he drove a cab, worked as a welder and did whatever else he
> could find.
>
> When Mohammed was finally readmitted to the Nation in 1974, Elijah
> Muhammad had only six months left to live. Mohammed says his father
> gave him great support in his last days. "He told [his staff] I was
> free to preach. He wasn't holding me to their language any more."
>
> The Messenger died the day before Savior's Day, the annual
> celebration honoring W.D. Fard Muhammad. That year the 20,000
> Muslims who filled the hall roared their approval when Wallace,
> with his family's backing, was proclaimed the supreme minister.
> According to family and Nation legend, Wallace had been preordained
> for this moment. The story goes that when Clara Muhammad was
> pregnant with her seventh child, God, in the person of Fard, told
> her husband Elijah that the child would be a boy, a special boy,
> whom they should name after him. The boy would help his father
> someday and do many great things.
>
> One Muslim says family legend wasn't the only reason Wallace was
> named the new leader. Many of the ministers who supported him did
> so "because they thought he was like King Tut, a fool they could
> control. He fooled them," the man says. "He fooled them all."
>
> Mohammed knew he had to move fast to assert his leadership once
> his father was gone. "I felt there could be trouble," he says,
> from potential rivals who might emerge "and maybe start preaching
> the old way. I also thought the people should have a change right
> away, while they were mourning my father's death. That would be
> the time they would be most serious and respectful."
>
> The changes came fast and furious. He had years of pent-up ideas
> and frustrations. He ordered the chairs ripped out of the mosque
> so worshipers could prostrate themselves in prayer on the floor
> like Muslims all over the world. He stepped from behind the rostrum
> to teach the congregation the proper way to pray. Bilal, the mosque
> secretary, remembers the "officials gritting their teeth when they
> bumped their heads on the floor."
>
> He disbanded the Fruit of Islam security force. When he was in
> exile in 1964, openly criticizing his father, he accused the FOI
> of stalking him and threatening him with harm. And he once described
> the FOI as a "punch-your-teeth-out" squad.
>
> He ended the policy of requiring male members to sell 300 copies
> of the Muhammad Speaks newspaper each week and buy any they did not
> sell. The circulation of the paper dropped. So did the revenue. "I
> could have kept the money coming in, just like my father," he says,
> "but I knew it was un-Islamic. Getting poor people to pay more than
> they can pay is against the religion. As a Muslim, you should be
> helping them."
>
> He decentralized the mosque structure, giving individual mosques
> across the country control of their own affairs.
>
> He said whites could join.
>
> Heads were spinning.
>
> He moved too fast, says Aminah McCloud, an Islamic expert at DePaul
> University. The people did not have a chance to soak in one change
> before another came hurling at them from the rostrum. "The people
> were being psychologically whipped to death."
>
> One of the first whites to join was Dorothy Fardan, a 35-year-old
> former Catholic with a doctorate in sociology. She walked into
> the mosque in Albany, N.Y., in the summer of 1975. Her musician
> husband, Donald Elijah Muhammad, was a longtime member of the
> Nation of Islam, and she had tried to join years before. The
> Messenger, however, had disapproved of interracial marriages,
> and certainly did not approve of devils in the mosque.
>
> "I felt no resentment towards the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,"
> Fardan says. "I admired him. I felt he told the truth about the
> United States. I never personally felt I was a devil."
>
> Fardan, who now teaches at Bowie State University in Maryland,
> eventually drifted away with her husband from Mohammed's community,
> though she is still a Muslim "under the teachings of the Honorable
> Elijah Muhammad." They were unhappy with The Change, although she
> thought Mohammed sincere and not lusting after power.
>
> One of the things Fardan objected to was Mohammed's embrace of
> patriotism in 1976. He walked across a stage carrying an American
> flag, saying it was time for Muslims to recognize and celebrate the
> U. S. as a great country. Today, he has American flag decals on his
> car and his hat.
>
> It wasn't easy selling patriotism to his followers in the beginning,
> he says. He argued that black people had fought and died in every
> American war. They had blazed trails across the West and designed
> cities in the East. They had contributed their blood and brains to
> building the country.
>
> "They bought the logic, if not the spirit," he says of his followers.
>
> He is not selling a love-it-or-leave-it brand of patriotism, he says,
> more of a love-it-and-make-it-better. He knows that race matters, that
> black boys and girls still have a higher hill to climb. And he is not
> happy about talk of a unilateral invasion of Iraq or about the
> treatment of Palestinians by Israel and its chief ally, the United
> States.
>
> "Muslims," he says, "get whipped on too much."
>
> After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, he notes, there was harassment of
> Muslims, including his 12-year-old son, the youngest of his nine
> children. "Even now," he says, "we have to be somewhat fearful."
> But he says the attacks also "woke everybody up" in his community
> to the need to be more involved in the larger society and its political
> life.
>
> "I think we have some of the best Americans around," he says. He
> particularly wants them to get busy in businesses. "Now that the soul
> is right," he says, "we have to finance the religion. Our imams have
> to depend on charity."
>
> But he does not want to repeat the mistakes of the Nation's past.
> He does not want the imams or their mosques controlling and operating
> the businesses, as was the case in the old days when temptation led
> to corrupt management. He wants a high wall between God and commerce.
>
>

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