The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a black nationalist religious group founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930.
It has been characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League as a black supremacist hate group.
The NOI teaches that there has been a succession of mortal gods, each a black man named Allah, of whom Fard Muhammad is the most 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.
The whites lacked inner divinity, and were intrinsically violent; they overthrew the Tribe of Shabazz and achieved global dominance.
The official beliefs as stated by the Nation of Islam have been outlined in books, documents, and articles published by the organization as well as speeches by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, and other ministers.
(Assignment of Mr. Elijah Muhammad, The Supreme Wisdom, February 20, 1934; Power at Last Forever, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Madison Square Garden, New York, October 1985) The NOI teaches that Black people constitute a nation and that through the institution of the Atlantic slave trade they were systematically denied knowledge of their history, language, culture, and religion and, in effect, lost control of their lives.
Louis Farrakhan has stated "If you look at the human family—now, I'm talking about black, brown, red, yellow and white—we all seem to be frozen on a subhuman level of existence.
Yakub promised his followers that he would graft a nation from his own people, and he would teach them how to rule his people through a system of tricks and lies whereby they use deceit to divide and conquer, and break the unity of the darker people, put one brother against another, and then act as mediators and rule both sides.In an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, Louis Farrakhan said the following in response to host Tim Russert's question on the Nation of Islam's teachings on race: You know, it's not unreal to believe that white people—who genetically cannot produce yellow, brown or black—had a Black origin.
It suggests, however, that your birth or your origin is from the black people of this earth: superiority and inferiority are determined by our righteousness and not by our color.
Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant.Elijah Muhammad taught his followers that the vision of the biblical prophet Ezekiel, which Jews call the Merkabah, was a UFO that he called the Mother Wheel or Mother Plane: Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the Original scientists.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that Mother Plane is so powerful that with sound reverberating in the atmosphere, just with a sound, she can crumble buildings.Under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan since 1981, the current members of the Nation of Islam hold that Elijah Muhammad did not die, but was restored to health, and is aboard "that huge wheel-like plane that is even now flying over our heads.
"[6] The nation believes that Allah came to North America in the person of Wallace Fard Muhammad[7][8] to teach the Black people about their true history.
This is considered blasphemous by other Islamic denominations because of the NOI's belief of God appearing in human form.
[citation needed] The first book analyzing the Nation of Islam was The Black Muslims in America (1961) by C. Eric Lincoln.
[citation needed] Lincoln describes how religious services use myths and over-generalizations to indoctrinate NOI adherents.
Often the minister reads passages from well-known historical, sociological, or anthropological works, and finds in them inconspicuous references to the Blackman's true history in the world....
Occasionally the minister chides the audience for its scepticism: "I know you don't believe me because I happen to be a Black man.