Article Four:
Farrakhan, His Role As An American Muslim Leader
It is difficult in a brief presentation to undo the distortion perpetrated by the mass media upon common Americans perceptions of the Nation of Islam and Minister Louis Farrakhan. This goal is made equally difficult due to the complex religious beliefs and creed presented by the N.O.I.. Historically, the public image given by the mass media was one orchestrated by the F.B.I. to neutralize this group of African-American dissidents. This conclusion is based upon the study of a great number of F.B.I. files previously unreleased.
The Nation of Islam is often seen as a bizarre cult situated on, if not beyond, the margins of Islam The Islamic identity of the N.O.I. is an appropriate area to address. As the universal is shaped by the cultural, we find an impressive spectra of Islamic identities, united in their diversity, when we go to Malaysia, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Trinidad, Sweden, or Iran The same pattern can be applied to the U.S., where the African-American social context gave rise to a specific black theological interpretation of Islam when it took hold in urban America during the Great Depression. When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad died or departed, according to one�s perspective, his son Warithuddin Muhammad rapidly transformed the Nation into a conventional Sunni Muslim movement. Among those who opposed the sweeping reforms were Minister Louis Farrakhan who argued that Elijah Muhammad never intended for Blacks to follow completely what is called orthodox Islam. While Farrakhan has moved his Nation closer to Muslim orthopraxy, he defends the deviating features of the creed, building his case on familiar Islamic arguments.
Farrakhan argues that God in His omniscience applies a certain method when He reaches out for His people. When God called Muhammad Ibn Abdullah to be His Messenger, the Arabs were living under the conditions of jahiliyya, the period of ignorance, ruling out the possibility of presenting the full content of God�s will at once. The Prophet worked for more than 20 years reforming the lives of his people. Adding the period of the rightly guided Khalifs it took more than half a century to bring the Arabs into the Islamic civilization. The African Americans were also found lost in a period of ignorance, the depth of which was even worse than that experienced by the Arabs. The Arabs had at least lived in their own country and spoke their native language, while Blacks were deprived of their freedom and original culture during slavery. Given these conditions, Farrakhan told a group of prominent ulama during a meeting in Mecca in 1989, it would have been impossible to present the perfection of the Qur�an without time for some serious preparation. Elijah Muhammad is said to have been divinely guided to adopt a gradual approach, based on the knowledge of the African American reality which explains his success where the mainstream Muslim dawah failed.
The direct divine guidance claimed by Minister Farrakhan gives confidence enough to not only defend his understanding of Islam, but to claim that the scholars of the old world of Islam have to be guided back to the straight path of Islam from which they have deviated.
As do many Muslim Modernists and Islamist ideologists, Farrakhan argues that the traditional Islamic position of favoring the implementation of Islam in state and society through a blind and unconditional imitation (taqlid) of the past obviously has led to internal stagnation and decline. If religion does not evolve in step with the evolution of society, it ceases being guiding and becomes hampering and oppressive instead. The degradation of Islam from its former position as the world�s leading civilization to a backward Third World religion proves the case. Look at the conditions of the traditional Islamic heartland, Farrakhan says. It is divided into warring states in which poverty, exploitation, racism and sexism prevail.
God knew that internal decline and corruption were to appear within the Eastern community of believers. This made Him reveal to the Prophet Muhammad that a necessary future renewal was ordained to come from a far-away land. In the Latter Days, Prophet Muhammad said in a Hadith, the Sun of Islam will rise in the West. Another tradition specifies the identity of those chosen to realize the divine plan. The Prophet Muhammad said, "I heard the footsteps of Bilal going into Paradise ahead of my own." This shows, according to Farrakhan, that it is the Blacks who are going to lead the Muslim world back to the faith that they had forsaken. Given the racism that eventually would block a clear perception at that time, God also advised those future white Muslims in yet another Hadith, "You should accept wisdom and leadership even if it comes from one whose skin is black as soot and whose hair is like dried raisins."
One might see this as an interesting sample of Farrakhan�s arguments, but still won�t buy it because there are too many non-Islamic elements in the N.O.I. creed to have us subscribe to its Islamic nature. What about the statements like God came in the Person of Master Farrad Muhammad, or that Elijah Muhammad first was presented as the Last Messenger of God and now is identified as the living Christ, or the theory of the inherent divinity of the black man and the corresponding evilness of the white man, or the existence of a number of Gods, something which stands in sharp conflict with the strict monotheism of Islam?
There is an explanation for all of this and I will attempt to clarify it. The confusion is partly cause by the unusual terminology of the Nation. If we translate some central concepts into more conventional Muslim ones, we will find that the creed stands in more harmony with Islam, especially with its Ismailiyya and Sufi varieties.
The Nation teaches that God is no mystery God but a black man who came in the Person of Master Farrad Muhammad. He is said to have been born to a black father, Alphonse Shabazz, whom he called God, and a white mother. This God, Master Farrad Muhammad, is described as the Wisest God of all Gods. He is not identical with the Supreme God Who was in the Beginning and who created the world together with a closed circle of Gods or Scientists. These Gods are long since gone as the N.O.I. teaches that there is no God now living who was in the Beginning. In addition to all this, the Nation teaches that the Original Black man is by nature divine and that the white man is a race of devils created by an evil scientist, or God, named Mr. Yakub, in a temporarily successful effort to install an evil viceregent on earth. The Original Man lost world hegemony tot he race of evil and was put to sleep, a euphemism for the unawareness of their true divine identity. The devils enslaved a number of the Original People and used them as slaves here in North America. Deprived of their true identity, they looked upon themselves as ignorant Negroes at the bottom of society until God came to Detroit in 1930. God raised one among them in divine wisdom to become His messenger, Elijah Muhammad. Working in this profession, the Messenger was in 1975 exalted as the Messiah, the living Christ whose imminent return is expected. Upon departing, Elijah Muhammad entrusted the leadership of the divine nation to Minister Louis Farrakhan. Today, Farrakhan is standing at the tomb of Lazarus, that is the black man, and calling him back to life. Master Farrad Muhammad thus raised Elijah Muhammad who raised Louis Farrakhan who is now raising the black community into divinity. The time of resurrection is approaching when the regime of evil will fall and the era of the divine black man will commence and thus usher in a period of divine justice, freedom and equality, that is Islam.
Now if we were to translate these central tenets into more conventional Islamic concepts, we will find a creed with remarkable similarities to Shi�i and Sufi Islam, merged with ideas derived from a black nationalist Christian tradition to become a specific kind of black gnosis which could be termed blackosophy.
The Originator is in all these creeds self-created, infinite and eternal. The Nation adds that he took the color from the black space out of which he emerged. The creative act proceeds as a series of emanations. The first emanation is Divine Wisdom (or Black Intellect in N.O.I. terminology). Like in Shi�i creeds, a circle of Imams (called Gods or divine scientists in the N.O.I. teachings) is then created as manifestations of the Divine Wisdom or Light, an act preceding the creation of the material universe. The notion of the Imams as creations of Divine Light could be taken to the extreme as in the Druze doctrines of Al-Hakim as God in Person -- a notion akin to the N.O.I. doctrines of Master Farrad Muhammad. Ismailiyya and the Nation also share a basic notion of cyclical time, with alternating cycles of unveilment and ignorance. In the blissful cycle previous to the present one, Ismaili doctrine says, there was a race of humans superior to ours. They lived an angelic life until the cycle of Occultation began, in which the true Gnosis is concealed and only taught to a closed circle of earthly angelic descendants. The Fall of Adam represents the fall of the Angels (or the Original People in N.O.I. terminology). In the Isma�ili Gnosis, the Angels abhor the introduction of the new era in which fallen mankind will rule earth, which, in the N.O.I. Gnosis is presented as the Original People�s objection to the creation of the white man as the viceregents of earth, both quoting Qur�an 2:30 to support this argument: "Wilt Thou place therein someone who make mischief therein and shed blood?" to which God responds, "I know what you know not." The plan God has in mind is mankind�s raison d��tre, to learn the necessary lessons needed in order to be able to walk the path of Gnosis towards the perfection of mankind. While the Ismaili Gnosis speaks about angels, the N.O.I. speaks about Gods. "God in his fallen state is man," Farrakhan says, and "Man in his exalted state is God." Bridging the natures and cycles is thus the divine being on the inside of Self, leading the Self to the source of Self: "Ye are all Gods, children of the Most High God".
In the N.O.I. creed, God is spirit after all, but spirit manifest in man and only man, whereby it is on a certain level of truth correct to say that "God is man and man is God". The human mind is a receiver of energy or the power of God. If man submits to God the power of God will begin to manifest in man. Much in the same but reversed manner, the devil also travels in flesh, manifested in white bodies. As in Shi�i and other Gnostic teachings, this is not understood as reincarnations but as representations of the divine or the diabolic, as the actualization of dormant potentials.
The role of Master Farrad Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad is thus similar to Jesus� role in Gnostic Christianity or the Prophet Muhammad�s role in Sufism: they are masters of gnosis who by their exemplary lives show man the path to God which every man is invited to walk. The fact that the Nation call such a man "god" is again only a question of unusual terminology. Farrakhan asserts that such a man possessing divine guidance has power that is of Allah and is Allah. He is not the God but a God. That man is thus God only to a certain extent: God is manifest through him, comes in his body, making him what perhaps could be called a partial representation as God is not confined to the material person in question. The key concept in the Nation of Islam is similar to the key concept of Sufism and Ismaili Gnosis: knowledge of Self. Knowledge of Self is Knowledge of God. The code that helps produce the right mentality necessary for the divine to evolve is ISLAM, which if you break it down stands for I-Self-Lord-Am-Master, I.S.L.A.M.
Converted into practice in the social context of the African American community, the N.O.I. creed acts in one respect as a psychological lever, aimed at breaking down the mental chains of inferiority by which the blacks are said to be stuck at the bottom ladder of American society. In this respect, the Black-man-is-God thesis is an extreme version of positive thinking, a therapy which evidently is functional as a great number of individuals prove capable of transforming their lives against all odds, holding on to a new self-esteem: I-Self-Lord-Am-Master.
The Blackoscopic Gnosis to a large extent explains the remarkable optimism expressed by the Nation at the brink of disaster. As is commonly stressed by the media, Minister Farrakhan frequently appears as a dooms-day prophet who with inflammatory rhetorical skill anticipates the dreadful end of the world as we know it. He points to grave statistics: the African American population is the only one in the Western world whose life expectancy rate is declining; 50% of all children raised in poverty are Black; 53% of all children with A.I.D.S. are black; black unemployment in many cities hovers around 40%, an increasing number of black children are born by teenage mothers and raised without fathers, the murder rate in many urban areas shows that a young black male would have been safer as a soldier in Vietnam than going down to the local drug-store, about 25% of all black men in their 20�s are either in prison or out on parole -- I could continue to regurgitate statistics but you know the reality. Farrakhan interprets this as that the fabric of American society is beginning to tear apart, as signs of the great apocalypse, as evidence that the cycle of evil is approaching its predestined end.
Yet, and this is a central paradox of the Nation of Islam, in the face of this destruction all action taken is constructive. "You can accomplish what you will", Farrakhan teaches. "Man and woman is God, the force and power to make things happen in the world". The N.O.I. social philosophy has led to an oscillation between the poles of optimism and pessimism, of constructive action and promised destruction. Any obstruction experienced at the former pole has pushed them to the latter. Exacting reality prevents the Nation from remaining at the escapist poles of Doom, and engagement around what needs to be done returns focus to the pole of constructive action. Should observers concentrate less on the rhetoric of doom and study what actually is being done, a sober de-dramatization might replace the exited cries of condemnation. I would argue that if left alone the Nation of Islam will prove to be of no danger to American society, and many of its detractors will probably end up acknowledging the results as valuable.
Observed from the perspective of civilizing theory, the Nation of Islam is a movement of auto-civilizing that ultimately will adjust a segment of the African American community to the norms of the dominant culture of American society. Central to this argument is the fact that not only is the N.O.I. more Islamic but also far more American than is generally acknowledged. The call for a return to the Original Way of Life proves upon examination to be rather identical with the American Way of Life. The ideals preached are generally compatible with those of conservative, white, Christian, middle-class Americans: the Nation hails traditional family values, loyalty to the nation and obedience to God. They applaud the decent, hardworking, God-fearing heterosexual who should be neatly dressed, polite, modest, law-abiding and respectful of authorities. They are non-smoking, non-drinking, clean-living moralists who encourage self-help and mistrust social welfare, and value a God centered education with emphasis on discipline and learning.
The increasing impact the N.O.I. presently experiences, not least among young black urban males, is, I believe, derived not so much from the N.O.I. mythology as from its effective social activism combined with the rhythmical teachings of the rappers in the black Islamic hip hop movement. The remarkable Islamic boom has now largely made Farrakhan impossible to avoid. While it formerly was expected from black leaders who wished respectability to denounce Minister Farrakhan almost as a rite of passage, this strategy is now increasingly becoming out-dated.
During the early 1990�s we have observed an interesting development in which the Nation has sought and found common ground with traditionally more respected black civil rights organizations. Even though the agreements have been surrounded with obstacles and objections, the trend is evident. The Million Man March Minister Farrakhan called for October 16, 1995 could prove to be a definite turning point in the history of the N.O.I.. Not unlikely, it could gear the organization towards the center of black aspiration and give the Nation and Minister Farrakhan an unprecedented respectability and influence in the black mainstream.
All those who feel terrified over this possible development and unequivocally condemn Minister Farrakhan should pause to reflect on what they are actually attacking. Farrakhan is not so much a problem as he is the symptom of increasing social problems in American Society. Should Farrkhan disappear he would probably be replaced by another voice produced by the same social conditions that produced him. The Nation is basically a consequence of the Black experience, it is a social product stamped with a "Made in the U.S.". If anything, perhaps the N.O.I. helps the American public focus on more relevant issues and problems than whether one should drink their coffee -- with or without caffeine.
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