Elijah Muhammad (1897 - 1975) was leading Nation off Islam, a religious organization and North-American black nationalist in the middle of the 20th century.

Youth

Elijah Muhammad was born Elijah Poole the October 7th 1897, in the small town of Sandersville, in Georgia. His/her parents were old Esclave S having worked on a cotton plantation. His/her father was also preacher Baptist. Elijah left the family home at age the 16 years, and travelled through the country, making any kind of small trades.

He marries in 1917 Clara Evans, which will become by the suitet “mother Clara Muhammad”. In 1923, the couple is fixed in the town of Détroit, where Elijah works on a assembly line of Chevrolet.

Adhesion with Nation off Islam

Poole and its two brothers became very early disciples of Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of Nation off Islam in 1930. The ideology of the organization affirms right from the start that Islam is the true religion of the blacks, that the Christianity of the white is the religion of slavery, and that the blacks must refuse the tender with the “white demons”, representing evil on the ground. Islam thus preached is very far from orthodoxe Islam, and is not recognized besides by this one.

Wallace Fard Muhammad disappeared, as mysteriously as it had appeared, at the summer 1934. The movement which it had founded quickly developed several factions, most important being that carried out by Poole, which had become an important Make-up lieutenant, and which had taken the name of Elijah Muhammad.

Direction of Nation off Islam

Being established in Chicago, far from the hostile factions Moslem of Strait, Elijah Muhammad built what quickly becomes the most important center of the movement. Chicago comprises not only one temple of the NOI, but also a first newspaper called The Final Cal to Islam , a " university of the islam" (an elementary school private), like several companies: houses of report/ratio, stores, grocer, restaurants… Gradually, of the temples are open in other repurchased cities, and farms, with an aim of being able to offer to the members a food ritually pure. The movement forced strict rules to follow concerning clothing, this one having to be elegant and preserving, food, prohibition of various food, prohibition to smoke, to take drugs, play money plays, to dance and of drinking.

Elijah Muhammad also updated the theology of the movement. Under its ministry, Wallace Fard Muhammad was proclaimed the terrestrial incarnation of Allah (God), Elijah Muhammad being its prophet divinement designated. Muhammad also taught that the blacks constituted the original human beings, but that an insane black scientist called Yakub had created a white “animal” by his genetic engineering. The white then received a provisional exemption to govern the world. This period, however, finishes. Time came so that the blacks take again their old role dominating. These characteristics very strongly dissociates the NOI of Islam, at the point to make it incompatible with this last. The violent war is probable before the transition can be accomplished. While waiting, Muhammad recommended an independent nation for the Afro-américains.

Imprisonment

In 1942, during the Second world war, Muhammad is one of the chiefs of the NOI stopped on the charge of sedition and conspiracy. It is shown to sympathize with the Japanese, and to encourage its members to resist the Conscription. He indeed proclaims at the time all the not-white are oppressed by the white, and that there is no reason so that the Afro-Américains fight for their white oppressors. Muhammad is not pacifist, but he affirmed that the only war to which the Afro-Americans should take part would be next “the battle of Armageddon” in which the blacks would reaffirm their legitimate superiority. For its words and actions, Muhammad spent four years, of 1942 to 1946, in the federal prison of Milan, Michigan.

Factions were from time to time withdrawn from the movement of Muhammad. With beginning of the year 60, Muhammad was competed with by charismatic the Malcolm X, chief of the temple N° 7 of New York. The tensions between Malcolm X and Muhammad developed. In 1964, Malcolm X founded its own movement, which was attached to orthodoxy sunnite, and repudiated the racism of Nation off Islam . Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21st, 1965.

Posterity

Elijah Muhammad dies on February 25th, 1975. After its death, the control of its movement passed to his/her son, Wallace (now Warith) Deen Muhammad. This one attached the organization to orthodoxe Islam sunnite, giving up the aspects of theology incompatible with the Islam, like the divinity of Wallace Fard Muhammad, or the Racisme anti-white. It has famous the movement in the World Community Al-Islam in the West (WCIW) then in Muslim American Society , before dissolving it to leave the place to autonomous local Muslim communities, in accordance with the usual practice sunnite. It also started to call the blacks “Bilalians” according to Bilal, the first Muezzin of Islam. Warith Muhammad softened the strict vestimentary code, gave up resistance to the military service, accepted American patriotism, and encouraged the black mosques to open to the white Moslems.

Many members were disturbed by this new orientation, and were withdrawn. The most important group of them maintained the old name of Nation off Islam , under the direction of Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan generally maintained the ideas and the practices of Elijah Muhammad, including the strict behavioral rules.

Internal bonds

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