The Origins of the Nation of Islam (The Farrakhan Controversy-Part IV.) Sergeant Sam Smith The Nation of Islam can trace its origins back to the summer of 1930. Wallace Fard Muhammad (affectionately referred to as Master Fard Muhammad or simply as Fard by the Nation of Islam) a mysterious salesman showed up in Detroit’s ghettos, working the streets, going door-to-door, using religious lingo to peddle his goods that he advertised as “African.” He had straight hair and was light skinned. He told people he was an Arabian merchant, from the “holy city of Mecca.” He sold silks, hats, and other artifacts allegedly imported from his homeland. (Elijah Muhammad once stated that Fard was not a silk peddler, but a tailor of custom-made clothes.1) He told his potential customers and followers that the silks he was selling were of royal stock, the kind their ancestors adorned themselves with in Mecca. To get inside the houses of Detroit blacks, he occasionally offered to clean their homes for free.2 Impoverished, culture-hungry, black families welcomed Fard to their homes, and soon he assumed the role of an Imam (Muslim teacher).3 Fard used the Bible as a textbook to teach them about their true religion (not Christianity) but the religion of the Black Men of Asia and Africa. “He used the Bible because it was the only religious book his followers knew. It was not the proper book for the Black Nation; but, carefully interpreted; it could be made to serve until they were introduced to the Holy Qur’an (or Quran).”4 Fard told his host tales of great African and Asian empires. At the dinner table he warned his hosts against eating pork, polished rice, and other foods: “Now don’t eat this food, it is poison for you. The people in your own country do not eat it. Since they eat the right kind of food they have the best health all the time. If you would just live like the people in your home country, you would never be sick any more”5 Soon, the stranger was holding religious meetings in private homes, relating his own experiences in foreign lands, adding dietary admonitions and health tips for those who cared to listen.6 He made many converts among the black Christian families that he visited. In addition to cleaning their homes for free, he occasionally paid people twentyfive cents to come to Nation of Islam Sunday meetings to hear his lectures.7 According to many of his first followers, this was the only way to get blacks to hear Fard’s fiery and anti-white rhetoric.8 “According to Fard, the world was ruled in early times by members of a black race, who were known as the original men. These people established a highly advanced civilization, and their scientists populated the earth with animals, created mountains and seas, blasted the moon into the sky from the Pacific Ocean region, and even
communicated with a race of nine-foot-tall giants on Mars. The original men lived in peace with each other and worshipped Allah from their holy city in Mecca. Fard taught that evil had entered the world because a mad scientist named Yacub had let his pride in his scientific knowledge of genetics tempt him into breaking the laws of Islam. Exiled from Mecca, the vengeful Yacub used his knowledge of genetics to create a devil race of vicious, immoral white people. Once loosed upon the world, the lying scheming white devils caused great trouble for the original people. Eventually, the whites were herded together and sent to live in caves in the cold wasteland of Europe. Allah sent the black prophets Moses and Jesus to teach the white devils about Islam with hopes of civilizing them. But according to Fard, the whites corrupted the prophets’ teaching and created the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Fard maintained that in accordance with an ancient prophecy, the white devils had finally gained control of the world. Once in power, no evil was beyond them. They had enslaved millions of blacks in Africa and transported them to the Americas, where the black captives were stripped of their language, culture, and history and were brained washed into hating themselves. They were taught that whites were superior in all ways and that God and Jesus were white. But the corrupt reign of the white man was about to end, Fard said. He, the Madhi, had appeared and he was going to lead the black race back to the original state of grace it had known before the advent of the white man. The time of redemption was at hand.”9 When Fard arrived in Detroit, one of his earliest and most zealous converts was Elijah Poole, an unemployed migrant laborer who left rural Georgia, with his wife and eight children. Poole was the son of a Baptist minister who witnessed the lynching of a friend in 1912.10 Though interested in Negro improvement, Elijah testified that before he met Fard (whom he pronounced “Far-ad”); he often took refuge in drunkenness. Poole joined the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) in 1928. Within a year of the arrival of Fard Muhammad in Detroit, Elijah Poole and two of his brothers joined Fard’s Nation of Islam. Poole became Fard’s most trusted and ardent follower and rose swiftly through the ranks to become the Nation of Islam’s chief Lieutenant. He was appointed as a Minister of Islam in early 1934.11 Fard later revealed to Poole that he was God incarnated and he renamed Poole “Elijah Muhammad.” The Poole brothers neglected to tell Fard that they were blood-
related. Master Fard replaced the Poole brothers “slave names” with their true African names and “despite of his omniscience, the prophet gave (them) the surnames of Sharrieff, Karriem and Muhammad. When the snafu was discovered, Farrad (Fard) explained that he had ‘divine knowledge’ of their ‘proper’ names.”12 Wallace Fard Muhammad kept an air of mystery about himself. “One early convert recalled his introduction to the man Detroit blacks reverently referred to as ‘The Prophet’: My name is W.D. Fard, and I come from the ‘Holy City of Mecca.’ More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time has not come. I am your brother. You have not yet seen me in my royal robes.’”13 But who really was Fard Muhammad? Karl Evanzz, an African American journalist and noted Nation of Islam authority and author of The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad, wrote that Fard was born Wali Dodd Fard in New Zealand in 1893. His grandparents were from East India, the Islamic area that eventually became Pakistan. Evanzz believed that Fard immigrated to the United States via Canada in 1913. He earned his living at various times as a restaurateur, gambler, bootlegger and traveling salesman. Before arriving in Detroit in 1930, using the alias of David Ford, he attained a high rank in the Moorish Science Temple, a vaguely Islam-like religion.14 There is an FBI record of Wallace Dodd Ford. According to law enforcement records, Fard was born in New Zealand or Portland, Oregon on February 25, 1891, to either Hawaiian or British, or Polynesian (Māori) parents. His education was minimal (he had trouble with his correspondence) and he had a foul temperament that rendered him difficult to get along with.15 Fard was a petty criminal. As early as November 1918, he was arrested for “assault with a deadly weapon.” On January 20, 1926, Fard was arrested for violating the California Prohibition law and a month later he was arrested for selling narcotics in his restaurant. He was tried and convicted and served a three-year sentence in San Quentin Prison from 1926-1929. The FBI has photographs and fingerprints of Wallace Dodd Ford on file.16 The FBI alleged that Ford used 58 aliases during his lifetime.17 He went by such names as David Ford-el, Wali Farad, Farrad Mohammed, W.D. Fard, and F. Mohammed Ali. However, he is generally known within the Nation of Islam as Master Fard Muhammad.
In June 1934, Master Fard mysteriously disappeared. He left no explanation for his followers. At the time, many people speculated that Fard was murdered. Nobody had hard information until 1963, when a sensational article appeared in the Seattle PostIntelligencer and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner claiming that Fard was really Wallace Ford/Dodd, a white, ex-convict who served time in San Quentin Prison for selling drugs. The reporter asserted that after leaving Chicago, Ford returned to Portland, Oregon, and briefly visited his ex-wife and child, before moving back to New Zealand18 Karl Evanzz reported that Wallace D. Fard died in Chicago in 1971 at the age of 78. Today, Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam reject the notion that Wallace Dodd Ford and W.F. Fard is the same person. The Herald Examiner, a Los Angeles newspaper published an article written in 1963 that exposed Fard as an enterprising fraud and con-man who created the Nation of Islam to serve his own megalomaniacal purposes. The Nation of Islam refuted these charges. The August 16, 1963 edition of Muhammad Speaks newspaper, headlined: "Nation of Islam Offers Hearst $100,000 to Prove Charge." Master Fard’s successor, Elijah Muhammad wrote in an article entitled "Beware of Phony Claims," “I, Elijah Muhammad, Messenger of Allah, told the Los Angeles ‘Herald-Examiner’ -- on Monday, July 29, 1963, that my followers and I will pay the Los Angeles ‘Herald-Examiner’ Newspaper $100,000.00 (one hundred, thousand dollars) to prove the headline charge (‘Black Muslim Founder Exposed as a White’) made against us; that we are following one Wallace Dodd with many aliases including the name Fard; that he is the man that I am representing to my people as being Master Fard Muhammad (Allah in Person) who appeared among us in Detroit, Michigan in 1931 and is the same person Wallace Dodd.”19 Elijah Muhammad extended the $100,000 reward to any one who could prove that Wallace Dodd Ford and Wallace Fard was the same person. Wallace Dodd Ford’s, former common-law wife, Hazel Ford, came forward with what she claimed as proof that Fard and Wallace Dodd Ford were indeed one and the same.20 She also claimed to have a child fathered by Dodd/Fard. The Nation of Islam never paid the money and the matter was dropped. Elijah Muhammad said this about his teacher, in his book Message to the Blackman: “Allah (God) came to us from the Holy City Mecca, Arabia, in 1930. He used the name Wallace D. Fard, often signing it W.D. Fard. In the third year (1933), he signed His name W.F. Muhammad, which stands for Wallace Fard Muhammad. He came alone. He began teaching us the knowledge of ourselves, of God and the devil, of the measurement of the earth, of other planets, and of the civlizations of some of the planet other than earth.”21
Where did Fard learn about Islam?
C.E. Lincoln, author of The Black Muslims in America, originally published in 1961, recounted a legend that described Fard as the black Jamaican son of a Syrian Muslim. Another story described Fard as Palestinian.22 If journalist Karl Evanzz was correct in asserting that Fard was indeed Pakistani he could have been born a Muslim. Other accounts suggest that Fard was Turko-Persian,23 if true, he came from the Muslim, stronghold territories of Turkey and Iran. Evanzz may be correct in asserting that Fard was from a Muslim part of India that was later partitioned into Pakistan in 1947. Fard had a virulent hatred for Hinduism. His views on Hinduism was remarkedly similar to Muslims in India and Pakistan. He preached that the “white race and Indian Hindus had always been are are now the enemies of Islam and Muslims.”24 Fard once told Elijah that there was a law among Muslims, a ruling, as he called it. “If the Hindu and the Christian are walking together, kill the Hindu first because the Hindu is more poisonous than the Christian.”25 However, it is known that upon Wallace Dodd Fard’s release from prison, in the spring of 1929, he moved to Chicago, Illinois and joined the United States’ first black Muslim organization known as the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), founded in 1913 by Timothy Drew, then known as Noble Drew-Ali. Drew borrowed the title “Noble” from Masonic rituals. Timothy Drew was born in 1886 in North Calolina to former slaves. He was raised in a Baptist church and moved to Newark, New Jersey in 1907, and attempted to build a militant Christian organization to combat racism and segregation. This group, known as the Drew Baptist Movement, failed miserably. 26 What happened? Drew had to compete with the growing influence of major black churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Black Baptist church and even with a growing list of Christian cult leaders such as Daddy Grace and Father Divine. Drew soon discarded the notion of founding a Christian organization and turned to the new concept of Islam.27 There were many naïve and disgruntled Christian African Americans that could be persuaded into his cult of personality when he offered them a cultural identity and deceived them about their African heritage. He was successful and by the late 1920s, it was estimated that the Moorish Science Temple (originally named the Canaanite Temple) had 15,000 members in 17 temples in fifteen cities.28 Drew-Ali taught that Morocco was the original land of African Americans, whom he called Moors and Asiatics.29 He told his masses fabricated tales about travelling to Morroco and Egypt and even meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt, but there are no records of his travels and none of his stories were ever substantiated.
The Prophet Drew-Ali even wrote his own version of the Muslim’s holy book and called it the The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple. In his Koran, he borrowed from freemasonry and plagiarized concepts from a white spiritualist from Ohio named Levi Dowling, who authored The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. In fact, the first nineteen chapters are taken directly from Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel. Drew-Ali told his followers that he was the reincarnation of Jesus and even authored a “lost gospel” of Jesus Christ. By 1929, Noble Drew-Ali had created a multi-million dollar empire. He became very wealthy manufacturing and selling oils and herbal remedies for countless ailments which he named Old Moorish Healing Oil, Moorish Purifier Bath Compound, and Moorish Herb Tea for Human Ailments.30 Drew-Ali charged female members two dollars per month and male members one dollar per month making him a profit of between $15,000 to $18,000 a month from his various temples and businesses. The tangible income afforded him a lavish lifestyle that jealously provoked several of his MSTA highlevel businessmen. One of his officers, Sheik Claude Greene-Bey accused Drew-Ali of wasting MSTA revenues on himself and a succession of women. At this time, Drew-Ali had married, divorced, and remarried whomever he wanted, and sometimes living with two or more women at the same time, although wisely paying for separate homes for each one. When he grew tired of one, he divorced her and married another. One Drew-Ali’s wives was a lady that Greene-Bey admired and loved.31 Drew-Ali’s indiscretions and casual dismissal of Greene-Bey’s accusations would later carry fatal consequences. In 1929, Drew-Ali renamed Wallace Dodd Ford, David Ford-el (Drew-Ali’s followers added the suffixes “bey” or “el” to their names to signify their Moorish heritage). Shortly thereafter, Chicago police detectives arrested Timothy Drew-Ali, and held him in jail on the suspicion of being an accessory to the homicide of his chief rival in the MSTA. Sheik Claude Greene-Bey was murdered during a coup attempt to oust Drew-Ali from leadership. On March 11, 1929, Greene-Bey dumped the contents of Drew-Ali’s offices on the sidewalk in front of their mosque. Three nights later, several of Drew-Ali’s enforcers attacked Greene-Bey outside of MSTA headquarters, shooting him once and stabbing him several times, leaving his body to be discovered by the janitor the next morning.32 According to the Chicago Police, they arrested Drew-Ali while he was celebrating Greene-Bey’s death with his wife and several Moors.33 The MSTA was in midst of a violent civil war and the Moors were divided in their loyalty between Drew-Ali and Greene-Bey. Drew-Ali had a trial pending and his followers were leaving the MSTA in massive droves. He desperately needed someone capable of managing his organization, so he hastily appointed David Ford-el (Fard) as overseer of the Chicago Temple. On July 20, 1929, Drew-Ali was found dead in his home, less than a month after he put David Ford-el (Fard) in charge of his Chicago mosque. His death was a mystery. Black newspapers attributed his death to tuberculosis, but most Moors rejected this notion.34 One theory holds that Drew-Ali died from injuries inflicted on him by Chicago police officers, while another theory holds MSTA disidents responsible and that supporters of Shiek Greene-Bey physically attacked Drew-Ali after he was released from jail and beat him so badly that he never recovered. Another theory holds that Drew-Ali
might have been the victim of a murder-for-hire plot. According to several members, Drew-Ali was quite the ladies’ man. He was simultaneously involved with three women, two were teenagers (ages 14 and 16) and the third was a twenty-year-old woman. The theory is that one set of parents of the teenagers, both of whom allegedly gave birth to Drew’s illegitimate children, were outraged by the prophet’s statutory rape and had him murdered.35 After Drew-Ali’s death, David Ford-el (Fard) wanted to rule the MSTA so he told his fellow Moors that Drew-Ali, named him as his successor and prophet. Fard further claimed divine leadership when he declared on July 29, 1929, that he was the actual reincarnation of Noble Drew-Ali. The MSTA soon split into several factions as arguments erupted over who was worthy to be Drew-Ali’s successor. Those loyal to Greene-Bey argued that David Ford-el had not been with the MSTA long enough to qualify for leadership. Even Drew-Ali’s former chauffeur, John Givens-el, threw his hat into the ring when he directly challenged Fard’s divine claim to assume the prophet’s mantle by stating that he was also reincarnated as the Prophet Drew-Ali. Givens-el started calling himself “Noble Drew-Ali, Reincarnated” and established the so-called Reincarnated Temples. All was not well in the MSTA and it soon took a turn for the worse. On September 25, 1929, Charles Kirkman-Bey, a close friend of Drew-Ali and who claimed to possess Drew-Ali's last will and testament, was kidnapped from his home on the orders of Ira Johnson-Bey, yet another contender for the MSTA leadership. Kirkman-Bey was held against his will as a prisoner in Johnson's apartment. Over 1,000 police officers surrounded Johnson’s home. Johnson-Bey refused to release Kirkman and when police tried to break in and rescue him, a shoot-out ensued. Two police officers and one cult member were killed. Subsequently sixty-three Moors were arrested. Johnson-Bey was charged with murdering a police officer.36 The MSTA remained a “house divided.” Thousands of members swore their allegiance to David Ford-el (Fard), but the majoirity rejected him and decided to be loyal to Kirkman-Bey. The inner violence, the arrests of several prominent members, and the boiling scandal that followed prompted David Ford-el (Fard) to break away from MSTA and move to Detroit, Michigan where he began recruiting Christians into his racist, antiChristian cult. In 1930, Fard named his group of followers the “Allah Temple of Islam,”
which later became the “Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of the United States.” While in Detroit, Fard established the University of Islam, which combined elementary and high school education, a Muslim Girls Training Class, to produce properly submissive wives and mothers, and his fear of enemies and his distrust of police motivated him to organize the Fruit of Islam, a paramilitary unit led by captains and trained in combat and the use of firearms.37 By this time the media began referring to NOI members as “Black Muslims.” (The next “Farrakhan Controversy” article will continue to focus on the teachings of the Nation of Islam’s founder Wallace Fard Muhammad and his relationship with Elijah Muhammad) 1
“Elijah Muhammad, Master Fard Not a Peddler,” audiotape of a radio broadcast (n.p., n.d., distributed by Secretarius MEPS, Atlanta) 2 Muhammad, Warith Deen, lecture, University of Cincinnati, February 28, 1995 3
Benyon, Erdmann D. “The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit,” American Journal of Sociology 43 (July 1937-May 1938): 894-907 4
Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. 1st ed., Beacon Press, Boston, 1961, p.11 Benyon 6 Newton, Michael. Holy Homicide: An Encyclopedia of Those Who Go With Their God…And Kill! Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, Washington, 1998, pp. 183-96 7 Farrakhan, Louis, “Has America Entered Divine Judgment?” (lecture delivered at the Savior’s Day convention, Conrad Hilton Hotel, Chicago, February 24, 1982) 8 White, Vibert L. Jr. Inside the Nation of Islam: A Historical and Personal Testimony by a Black Muslim, University Press of Florida, 2001, p. 25 9 Rummel, Jack. Malcolm X: Militant Black Leader, Chelsea House Publishers, New York-Philadelphia, 1989 10 Pipes, Daniel. Militant Islam Reaches America, W.W. Norton & Company, New York London, 2002, p. 221 11 Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. 3d ed. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994, p.181 12 Newton, 1998, p. 186 13 Ibid, p.183 14 Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad, Pantheon Books, New York, 1999 15 Clegg, Claude Andrew, III. An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah MuhammadI, St. Martin’s Press, New York, New York, 1997, pp.20-21 16 One can go to the FBI website and type in “Wallace D. Ford,” and look at Ford’s criminal record (Freedom of Information Act) 17 Kavanaugh, Kelli B. “Mystery Man: At the root of the Nation of Islam, a cipher and a controversy,” Metrotimes: Detroit’s Weekly Alternative, 03-05-03 http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=4650 18 “Black Muslims’ Founder a Fake; Posed as Negro,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 28, 1963, p. 4 19 “An Old Lie! Resurfaced,” Muhammad Speaks Website (retrieved 05-27-07) 20 FBI Files (retrieved 05-27-07) 21 Muhammad, Elijah. Message to the Blackman, 1965, p. 22 22 Kavanaugh, Ibid 23 This view was asserted at a conference by Elijah Muhammad's son and history professor Akhar Muhammad, Turner, RB, Islam in the African-American Experience, Indiana University Press, 2003, p.165 5
24
Muhammad, Elijah, The Supreme Wisdom: Solution to the So-Called Negroes’ Problem, vol. 2, p. 53, Chicago: University of Islam 1957; Muhammad, Elijah, Our Savior Has Arrived, Chicago: Muhammad’s Temple of Islam No. 2, 1974 25 Muhammad, Elijah, Our Saviour Has Arrived, pp. 32-33 26 White, 2001, p. 6 27 Ibid, pp. 6-7 28 "Cult Head Took Too Much Power, Witnesses Say," Chicago Tribune, May 14, 1929. 29 Evanzz, 1999, p.62 30 FBI HQ file on Noble Drew Ali; literature obtained from Sheila Seabreeze-Bey, archivist for the MSTA; Evanzz, 1999, p. 65 31 Ibid, p. 66 32 Ibid, p. 67 33 “Cult Leader Being Held in Murder Case,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1929 34 Evanzz, 1999, p. 67 35 White, 2001 p. 10 36 Evanzz, 1999, p. 68 37 Newton, 1998, p. 186
