The Divinity of Master Fard Muhammad

Wallace D. Fard Muhammad appeared in Detroit's Black community in 1930, selling silks door to door and teaching a course of lessons that reinterpreted history, race and religion around the claim that Black people were the original human family and that Islam, not Christianity, was their natural religion, stripped of what he taught was the slaveholder's distortion. Among his earliest and most attentive students was Elijah Poole, a Georgia born migrant to Detroit, whom Fard renamed Elijah Muhammad and trained personally over roughly three years. Fard organized the Temple of Islam, later the Nation of Islam, around a body of teaching delivered partly in person and partly through written lessons that Elijah Muhammad continued to circulate for decades after Fard's disappearance.

Fard vanished from public view in 1934 under circumstances that were never fully resolved, and Elijah Muhammad spent the following years consolidating leadership of a small and factionalized movement against rival claimants. It was in this period, and increasingly in his later writings and sermons, that Elijah Muhammad systematized the claim at the center of Nation of Islam theology, that Fard had not been a teacher pointing toward God but God himself, Allah, present in human form, and that Elijah Muhammad's own role was that of Messenger, the one Fard had chosen and instructed to carry the teaching forward. Under Elijah Muhammad's leadership from 1934 until his death in 1975, the Nation of Islam grew from a marginal Detroit sect into a national organization with temples across the United States, its theology of Fard's divinity taught as settled doctrine throughout.

Sunni and Shia Islam alike hold, as a matter that admits no real dispute inside either tradition, that God is one, without partner, body or human likeness, and that Muhammad ibn Abdullah, who died in 632, was the final prophet, after whom no valid prophet or messenger can come. The Nation of Islam's founding theology contradicts both points directly. Locating Allah in the physical person of Wallace Fard Muhammad breaks with the doctrine of divine transcendence that mainstream Muslim scholarship treats as inseparable from tawhid, the oneness of God, and casting Elijah Muhammad as a Messenger sent after Muhammad ibn Abdullah breaks with the finality of prophethood that nearly every Muslim community, however much it disagrees on other questions, holds without qualification. Mainstream Muslim organizations, in the United States and elsewhere, have for this reason consistently described the Nation of Islam's core theology as standing outside Islam as they understand it, whatever kinship the movement's practice, calendar and vocabulary otherwise show.

The Nation of Islam's own leadership has not been uniform in its response to that judgment. After Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975, his son Warith Deen Mohammed led the majority of the movement toward Sunni orthodoxy, explicitly setting aside the doctrine of Fard's divinity and Elijah Muhammad's messengership as his father had taught it. Louis Farrakhan rebuilt a separate organization retaining the Nation of Islam name and, with it, the original theology largely intact, so that the doctrine of Fard's divinity now describes one living reading of the movement's history rather than an uncontested consensus even among those who trace their lineage to it.