AMERICA'S EARLY EXPERIENCE WITH THE MUSLIM FAITH: THE NATION OF ISLAM

Middle East Policy, Fall 2008 by Talhami, Ghada Hashem

... He (the black intellectual) has been brainwashed more thoroughly than any of the rest of us, but he will ultimately have no choice other than to accept Islam.... They have stayed in the white man's schools too long, learning nothing of themselves, and they are fervid in their hopes that the white man is going to change and treat them like men instead of boys.6

More than Marcus Garvey and Drew Ali, Elijah easily appreciated the nexus of religion, economics, politics and racial justice. Thus, he was able to make of the NOI the highest stage of black nationalism in America.7 Elijah Muhammad regarded Islam in a completely different light than did other adherents of this religion. He advocated African-American Islam as a separate sect that God had sent to convert Afro-Americans.8 Given his deliberate emphasis on the distinctive features of this community, it was simply a matter of time before the NOI attracted suspicion from U.S. security agencies. Targeting this community through a long-standing program of surveillance, infiltration, provocation, and divisiveness, the FBI kept the organization constantly under a watchful eye. This harassment of the NOI was fraught with serious implications for the Arab-American and Muslim-American community at large. Added to this were the deliberate distortions purveyed by an unsympathetic press that emphasized the challenge to black-American Christianity posed by this faith. The rise of Malcolm X to NOI leadership later intensified the FBI's pursuit of the movement.

Surveillance of the NOI began early, predating FBI focus on the leadership of the civil-rights movement by decades. The issues arousing suspicion were constantly changing, although similar postures by later groups drew the FBI into the Afro-American community for similar reasons. As early as 1942, the Chicago residence of Elijah Muhammad was raided and several boxes of documents confiscated, yielding valuable information on the NOI. This information dated back to the disappearance of the movement's original founder, W. D. Fard Muhammad, who was known by his followers as the Lord King, or "God in human form." America was at war at the time, and the raid was motivated by the government's zeal in the pursuit of pro-Japanese agitators.

Elijah Muhammad was taken into custody and booked on charges of avoiding the draft. His group was seen as a fifth column, which opened him up to charges of sedition. In today's version of these events, Arabs and Muslims are picked up by security agencies and charged with violating immigration laws; in the 1940s, it was evading the draft. Today, immigrants are accused of secret ties to invisible centers of international terrorism with which the United States is at war, but then, agitators were accused more seriously of harboring ties to the Japanese. Fard Muhammad had already, in 1934, been accused of maintaining ties to a suspicious Japanese national known as Satohata Takahashi.9 The NOI fell under greater suspicion after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which they viewed in eschatological terms as the beginning of their deliverance. Anticipating the arrival of mysterious ships that would take them to Hawaii or the mother plane, an NOI minister in Milwaukee named Sultan Muhammad wrote to The Messenger: