The Messenger Passes

Throughout his controversial career, Elijah Muhammad was the nation's most potent preacher of black separatism. Yet when he died last week at 77, he was mourned as a statesman. Proclaimed Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley: "Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam has been a consistent contributor to the social well-being of our city for more than 40 years." A New York Times editorial noted his movement's success "in rehabilitating and inspiring thousands of once defeated and despairing men and women."

Muhammad's recent respectability came not from the creed of his "Black Muslims," as they are known to outsiders, but from his "do for self philosophy, which generated black enterprise. As much captain of industry as Messenger of Allah, Muhammad was the supreme ruler not only over 76 temples and some 50,000 to 100,000 disciples, but also over some 15,000 acres of farmland and a complex of small businesses that range from pin-neat restaurants to stores to a 500,000-circulation newspaper. Some estimate the worth of the Nation of Islam's business empire at $75 million. The businesses all have a long-range object: to prepare for the day when Allah gives the nation its own land, perhaps a sizable chunk of the present U.S., which Muhammad predicted was doomed to collapse before 1984.

Vital Black. The movement began in 1930 when W.D. Fard, an itinerant silk peddler, founded a novel version of Islam that attracted thousands of poor Detroit blacks. After Fard disappeared mysteriously in 1934, leadership passed to Muhammad, who had been born Elijah Poole, the son of a Georgia sharecropper-preacher. When dispute erupted over the succession, Muhammad moved his base to Chicago and gradually built the Nation of Islam into a vital black separatist faith.

The theology of the Nation of Islam is significantly different from that of orthodox Islam, which has never been sure whether to recognize Muhammad's U.S. variant. Its black-supremacy views conflict with Islam's racial tolerance. Islam's fundamental tenet is that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed was his Messenger; the Black Muslims believe that Fard was Allah incarnate and that Elijah Muhammad was his Messenger. The Black Muslims deride the orthodox Muslims as "spooky believing" for holding that Allah is a spirit. To them, Allah is the Supreme Black Man among a race of divine black men. The rituals and practices of the Nation of Islam, however, are Muslim indeed: prayer five times daily facing Mecca, abstinence from pork and alcohol, no gambling and a puritanical sex code.

Muhammad denied that he promoted hatred toward whites. If not hatred, it was contempt: whites were "the human beast--the serpent, the dragon, the devil and Satan." The white race, he taught, had been bred 6,000 years ago by a black scientist. In an insanely logical moment, the Nation of Islam once invited American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell to a meeting and heard him laud Elijah Muhammad as the "Adolf Hitler of the black man."

In The Black Muslims in America, Sociologist C. Eric Lincoln says that "the entire movement is a kind of reserve fighting corps--ready to wage open war against the entire white community in case of white provocation." But Muhammad had mellowed in recent years. In his last public appearance a year ago, he even declared that the "slave master is no longer hindering us; we're hindering ourselves."

Rambling Inaugural. Though many killings have been blamed on the movement, Muhammad advocated nonviolence except for self-defense. A number of the murder victims have been members of rival Muslim groups; one was Muhammad's onetime spokesman Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965 after he left the movement.

Many observers predicted a power struggle after Muhammad's death. But last week all seemed to be harmony as Son Wallace, 41, was proclaimed his father's preordained successor. Wallace had twice quit the faith, only to repent; while he tends to matters spiritual, others will mind the money. And after Wallace's boring, rambling inaugural speech, it seemed that no one man would fill the Messenger's shoes.

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