Elijah Muhammad's Doctrine of His Own Prophetic Office

Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole in Georgia in 1897, led the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975, and central to the movement's theology as he shaped it is the claim that he himself held the office of Messenger, having received his teaching directly from the man the Nation of Islam holds to be God in person, Master Fard Muhammad, during a period of instruction in Detroit in the early 1930s before Fard's disappearance from public record. C. Eric Lincoln's early study of the movement, based on fieldwork within Nation of Islam communities, describes how Elijah Muhammad's followers were taught to regard his teaching with an authority the movement placed above that of any conventional Muslim scholar or imam, since his instruction was understood to come from direct revelation through Fard rather than through the ordinary chain of Islamic scholarly transmission that gives authority to teachers in mainstream Sunni and Shia practice. Under this doctrine, Elijah Muhammad's writings and recorded sermons function within the Nation of Islam not merely as one interpreter's reading of Islam but as the specific, current instruction of God's own messenger to Black Americans, a status the movement's internal literature continued to affirm throughout his four decades of leadership.