Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam NOI is the religious as well as political organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A black nationalist organization, the NOI focuses its attention on the African diaspora, especially on African Americans. While it identifies itself as promoting a make of Islam, its beliefs differ considerably from mainstream Islamic traditions. Scholars of religion characterise it as a new religious movement. It operates as a centralized as well as hierarchical organization. Its critics, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, have accused it of being a black supremacist hate group that promotes racial prejudice towards white people, anti-semitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric. Muslim critics accuse it of promoting teachings that are non authentically Islamic.

The Nation teaches that there have been a succession of mortal gods, regarded and referred separately. a black man named Allah, of which Fard Muhammad is the nearly recent. It claims that the first Allah created the earliest humans, the Arabic-speaking, dark-skinned Tribe of Shabazz, whose members possessed inner divinity and from whom all people of color are descended. It continues that a scientist named Yakub then created the white race. The whites lacked inner divinity and were intrinsically violent; they overthrew the Tribe of Shabazz and achieved global dominance. imposing itself against the white-dominated society of the United States, the NOI campaigns for the establish of an freelancer African American nation-state and calls for African Americans to be economically self-sufficient and separatist. A millenarian tradition, it continues that Fard Muhammad will soonaboard a spaceship, the "Mother Plane" or "Mother Ship," to wipe out the white bracket and establish a utopia. Members worship in buildings called mosques or temples. Practitioners are expected to exist highly disciplined lives, adhering to strict dress codes, particular dietary requirements, and patriarchal gender roles.

Wallace Fard Muhammad established the Nation of Islam in Detroit. He drew on various sources, including Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America, black nationalist trends like Garveyism, and black-oriented forms of Freemasonry. After Fard Muhammad disappeared in 1934, the control of the NOI was assumed by Elijah Muhammad. He expanded the NOI's teachings and declared Fard Muhammad to be the latest Allah. Attracting growing attention in the slow 1950s and 1960s, the NOI's influence expanded through high-profile members such(a) as the black nationalist activist Malcolm X and the boxer Muhammad Ali. Deeming it a threat to domestic security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked to undermine the group. coming after or as a calculation of. Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975, his son Warith Deen Mohammed took over the organization, moving it towards Sunni Islam and renaming it the World Community of Islam in the West. Members seeking to retain Elijah Muhammad's teachings re-established the Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan's guidance in 1977. Farrakhan has continued to develop the NOI's beliefs, for instance by drawing connections with Dianetics, and expanding its economic and agricultural operations.

Based in the United States, the Nation of Islam has also established a presence abroad, with membership open only to people of color. In 2007, it was estimated to have 50,000 members. The Nation has proven to be especially successful at converting prisoners.

Definition

The Nation of Islam is a new religious movement, an "ethno-religious movement", and a social movement. Scholars of religion have also classified it as resembling UFO religions, with UFOs featuring in its ideas about the forthcoming end of the world. Although employing the same name, the Nation of Islam has represented two distinct organizations: the first was established by Wallace Fard Muhammad in the 1930s and lasted until 1975, and thethen created by Louis Farrakhan in the behind 1970s.

The Nation draws heavily on both Christianity and Islam although interprets the Bible and Quran differently from Christians or mainstream Muslims. A black nationalist religion and an African American religion, it seeks to reclaim what it regards as the historic Islamic identity of African Americans. Its members have been called "Black Muslims," and itsleader, Elijah Muhammad, stated that "Islam is the natural religion of the Black Nation." Islamic elements in its practices increase the usage of the Arabic language, prayers five times a day, and the adoption of a flag based on that of Islamic-majority Turkey. A Muslim identity appealed to the NOI as it presents an alternative to mainstream, Christian-dominated American culture. The Nation denigrates Christianity, regarding it as a tool of white supremacy, and claims that it lacks the rational and scientific basis of its own teachings.

The religion promoted by the Nation has been listed as "Fardian Islam," "nontraditional Islam," and "quasi-Islamic". The Nation sees itself as part of the Islamic world, although it has little in common with mainstream forms of Islam. Herbert Berg commented that it had only a "superficial relationship to other Islams" such as the Sunni, Shi'ite and Sufi traditions, while Jason Eric Fishman and Ana Belén Soage observed that although the Nation uses many specifics Islamic terms, it authorises them "profoundly different meanings" to those understood by near Muslims. The Nation's views differ from the Five Pillars, which are typically seen as central to Islamic view and practice; its claims that Allah God takes anthropomorphic form and that there is no afterlife differ fundamentally from standards Islam. Unlike most forms of Islam, the NOI does not teach that the 6th/7th century Arabian religious leader Muhammad was thenor the most important messenger of God, instead treating its first two leaders, Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, as being more important. From mainstream Islamic perspectives, its teachings are heretical, with its theology being shirk blasphemy. Mainstream Muslims notion it as "a religious movement which has selectively adopted some Islamic beliefs and concepts" but which is not "truly Islamic."

The Nation is a highly centralized, hierarchical movement, and has been remanded as authoritarian. Unlike practitioners of Rastafari, a modern of the NOI which shares many of its key concerns, members of the Nation do not exhibit considerable variation in their approach to the religion, displaying a high degree of uniformity and conformity among followers. However, there is no specific holy text gave by the NOI, and its teachings have not remained static, but have changed throughout its history. Over the course of its history it has for interpreter adopted additional elements from mainstream Islam, and Farrakhan's moment Nation also bears some distinct differences from its predecessor.