You hear a lot about it. It has become linked to Hip-Hop culture. This is a first little essay I wrote about the Nation Of Islam a few years ago.

I am writing a 50 pages-long essay and I'd like it to deal with themes I am interrested in, like black nationalism in the US, or maybe the Hip-Hop culture in the US.
I have only vague ideas of specific topics for this essay, but it could be something like "The way the Nation of Islam communicates with Black Youth"...
So, if you are interrested by such topics, if you can help me by any means (the address of a web site that could interrest me, etc...), just email me, I'll be glad to read and write back, and that'll make me soo happy :)

Write me now ----------> <---------- Write me now

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Bibliography:
* Pauwels, Marie-Christine, Civilisation des Etats-Unis, Paris, Hachette, 1997
* Body-Gendrot, Sophie, Maslow-Armand, Laura, et Stewart, Danièle, Les Noirs Américains  Aujourd’hui,  Paris, Armand Colin, 1984
* Abri, Niloufar, Nation of Islam, article paru dans le magasine L’Affiche # 41, Paris, 1996
* Lincoln, C. Eric, The Black Muslims in America, USA, Beacon Press, 1973
* D’Souza, Dinesh, The End of Racism, New York, The Free Press, 1995
* Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time, USA, Penguin Books, 1964
* Foster, William Z., The Negro People in American History, New York, International Publishers,  1954
* the New GROLIER Multimedia Encyclopedia, USA, Grolier Inc., 1993

   The Nation of Islam was officially born in 1930, when Wallace D. Fard created a Muslim temple in Detroit following the model of Timothy Drew’s Moorish Science Temples. Fard had attracted 8000 followers when he mysteriously disappeared in 1934, replaced by one of his chief lieutenants, Elijah Poole, who had taken the name of Elijah Muhammad. It is estimated that the Nation of Islam had about 100 000 members in 1960. At Muhammad’s death in 1975, there was a split in the movement and W. D. Muhammad -the son of Elijah- renamed his group ‘the Lost Found Nation of Islam’, which became ‘the World Community of Islam in the West’ in 1976. This group admitted non-black members, which was an innovation, and had about 100 000 members when W. D. Muhammad chose to dissolute the group to unify its members with the Worldwide Muslim community. Yet the other splinter-group, led by Minister Louis Farrakhan, has been keeping the original name and the radical doctrine of the Nation of Islam until now. The Nation of Islam is nowadays generally considered as the most important black nationalist movement in the USA. It has had well-known ministers, such as Malcolm X, who had been one of its members as soon as 1947, and who has without doubt played a considerable role in the succes of the Nation. Today the Nation of Islam is often referred to as ‘the Black Muslims’, the ‘NOI’ or simply ‘the Nation’. But the Nation of Islam was not born out of nothing. That is why it may be good to study the roots of the movement, that is to say the previous movements that inspired the Nation of Islam’s basic principles; then we will see that a part of the NOI’s principles is aimed to unify the black community; and we will finally see that the other part of the NOI’s principles is aimed to separate this black community from the rest of the USA, and even from the rest of the world.

   A lot of black movements had been existing before the birth of the Nation of Islam, but not all can be considered as being its ‘ancestors’. Among the most famous, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee movement, whereas its aim was to help black people, had hardly anything to do with the NOI, because it preached humility, submission and accommodation. The National Urban League fought only on the economic plan, using Negroes as strikebreakers; and moreover it was mostly financed by wealthy white employers, for these reasons at least it cannot be considered as being the direct ancestor of the NOI. The NAACP has always been multi-racial, and even W. E. B. Du Bois’s Niagara  movement, whereas more radical than the Tuskegee movement, was still too soft to pretend to have built up the roots of the NOI.
   And yet, the Nation of Islam must have found its roots in an older movement. In fact, there are two movements that have directly inspired the Nation. The first one is Marcus Garvey’s movement. The help of black people is the common principle to all black movements, and Garvey handled the matter by creating the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914. But the ‘Back to Africa’ principle was far more important to Garvey, since he wanted all the black people of the USA to come back to Africa, where the evil white slavemasters had taken them from. This idea was one of the earliest forms of black nationalism, which is highly stressed by the Black Muslims today. The purity of the (black) race was also one of Garvey’s most stressed principles, and Garvey even supported the Ku Klux Klan, since both extremes agreed on the fact that all black people should return to Africa. But Garvey’s movement was a failure when the means he had set up for the repatriation of black people were condemned and Garvey was sent back to Jamaica. But Garvey had been a pioneer of the formalization, the institutionalization of black nationalism, by creating a Negro government, a Negro national anthem, a Negro flag, and so on.
   While Garvey had stressed the economic side of black nationalism, Timothy Drew (then called Noble Drew Ali) stressed its (so-called) religious side. As a matter of fact, when he created the first Moorish Science Temple in Newark, New-Jersey in 1913, the return to Islam (the original religion of most slaves) was a pretext for unifying the black community, since this conversion was reserved to Moors. The help of black people, which is found in every black nationalist movement, was here a spiritual help, and this is the second basic principle of the Black Muslims, together with black nationalism.
   The real creator of the Nation of Islam was Wallace D. Fard, who took the succession of Drew in 1930, creating other Moorish Science Temples and the name ‘Nation of Islam’. But Fard also took the politico-economic ideas of Garvey. Being the heir of both Garvey and Drew’s movements, the Nation of Islam’s basic principles were the spiritual return to Islam, whose aim was to unify the black community; and black nationalism, that is to say the will to separate the black community from the rest of the USA.

   The principles whose aim is to unify the black community are divided into two major stages: first, the establishment of new bases to clear the way for a new departure; then adherence to Islam.
   The establishment of new bases consists of the repudiation of the ‘Negro’ identity, since the Black Muslims consider it ‘a label the white man placed on us [black people] to make his discrimination more convenient’(1). Then, black people have to find their real identity, their African heritage. This return to the African culture may find its roots in Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ principle. The new departure is also more simply the will of more freedom, more equality for black people in a white-oriented society. This will was clearly expressed in the ten propositions that were stated in each issue of the Muslim newspaper Muhammad Speaks.
   The second stage is the strict adherence to Islam. And here it is not so much the worshipping of Allah or the prayers that are important, but more the behavior Islam prescribes. As a matter of fact, the good Muslim is expected to be clean inside and outside, to banish tobacco, alcohol, provocative dress and most cosmetics for women. Islam imposes a strict discipline, and this seems to be a good thing for the ghetto population whom it addresses. The example of black prisoners who discover the Nation of Islam in prison is often cited, since these prisoners often suddenly become model prisoners. American Writer James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time:

‘Elijah Muhammad [leader of the NOI from 1934 to 1975] has been able to (...) heal and redeem drunkards and junkies, to convert people who have come to prison and to keep them out, to make men chaste and women virtuous, and to invest both the male and the female with a pride and a serenity that hang about them like an unfailing light.’(2)

   But the meetings of the Nation of Islam would never have attracted so many people if it had just preached a unifying of the black community. Each mass movement needs an enemy on which to let off steam, a devil to fight against, especially when this mass movement arises from oppressed ghettos. And as wrote Dinesh D’Souza in The End of Racism, ‘Basically, it is antiwhite hatred that unifies and directs the activities of the Nation of Islam’(3). And here comes the second leading principle of the Nation: black nationalism. But not a common one: an extremist, racist, black nationalism.

   We are now going to see the different sides of this nationalism one after the other: its racist side, its extremist side, and then its separatist side.
   The racist side of the principles of the Nation of Islam basically consist of a disparagement of the white man and his culture. Concerning the white man’s culture, the Black Muslims refuse his religion, since ‘the Christian religion was and is the master stratagem for keeping the so-called Negro enslaved’(4), and his laws. As a matter of fact, the Black Muslims refuse the American Constitution (stressed by Fard): the follower is expected to ‘respect authority, on the job and wherever else it is legitimately exercised’(5), unfortunately the white man’s authority ‘is not legitimate but is simply imposed by force and maintained by intimidation’(6). Concerning the white man himself, one of the principles of the NOI is that he has been created by error by a satanist sorcerer in rebellion against Allah, named Yakub. The Nation always stresses that the white man has used the so-called Negroes for a too long time, and is still doing so nowadays:

‘The white man knows that the black man is by nature a leader. Granted equality, he will automatically assume leadership. Since the white man knows this, he grants symbolic status to a few Uncle Toms and keeps the rest of us available for exploitation.’
   -Minister Louis Farrakhan, Leader of the NOI since 1975-

   As a conclusion, we have just seen that the basic principles of the Nation of Islam had been inspired by Timothy Drew’s Moorish Science Temples, and by Marcus Garvey’s ‘Back to Africa’ movement. Then we saw that the first part of the basic principles of the Nation of Islam consisted of the unifying of the black community through the adherence to Islam. And we have finally seen that the second part of the basic principles of the Nation of Islam consisted of a racist, extremist, separatist, black nationalism.
   It appears clearly that all this is basically a matter of color of skin (one could caricature the basic principles of the NOI as: ‘Love and help your black brothers, hate and reject all white devils’).
   One can also notice that some differences appeared between the different leaders’interpretations of the Nation’s principles. For example, some said that the black man must obey all laws, except the white man’s laws, while some others said that the black man must even obey the white man’s laws as a temporary solution, until black people create their own nation. In short, some leaders excluded only white people, while other leaders excluded all non-black people.
   Whether the Nation of Islam attracted growing masses, is not sure. As a matter of fact, only 14% of the black population officially say the Nation of Islam represents their ideas. But the most important thing is the number of people who agree with its principles in the mass-meetings of the Nation, such as the ‘One Million Strong’ march that attracted 600 000 black persons in Washington on the 16th of October, 1996, although the three fourths of them had nothing to do with the nation of Islam.
   Moreover, the Nation gets the support of very popular artists in the ghettos (such as rap groups), which contributes to spread the principles we have just described. And even if some people judge the Black Muslims too extremist (perhaps because of the Fruit of Islam, the gang-like army of the Nation), and even  if, after several years, the Nation of Islam was to be totally given up by the popular support, I do not think the basic principles of the Nation of Islam would be forgotten. And I think they will last so long as the racism problems will not have been solved, because both are linked. That is why  I can bet that those principles are not yet ready to be given up. On the contrary.

Notes: (Book references)
1 - Lincoln, C. Eric, The Black Muslims in America, page 70
2 - Baldwin, James, The Fire Next Time, page 49
3 -  D’Souza, Dinesh, The End of Racism, page 427
4 - Lincoln, C. Eric, The Black Muslims in America, page 80
5 - Ibid, page 95
6 - Ibid, page 69
7 - Ibid, page 129
8 - Ibid, page 84