Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A centralized and hierarchical group committed to black nationalism, it focuses attention on the black African diaspora, especially on African Americans. While describing itself as Islamic and using Islamic terminology, its religious tenets differ substantially from orthodox Islamic traditions. Scholars of religion characterize it as a new religious movement. As of 2007 it was estimated to have 50,000 members. Based in the United States, the Nation has also established a presence elsewhere, with membership open only to people of color. The Nation teaches that there has been a succession of mortal gods, each a black man named Allah, of whom Fard Muhammad was the latest. It claims that the first Allah created the earliest humans, the dark-skinned Original Asiatic Race, whose members possessed inner divinity and from whom all people of color descend. It maintains that a scientist named Yakub then created the white race, a group that lacked inner divinity and whose intrinsic violence led them to overthrow the Original Asiatic Race and achieve global dominance. Setting itself against the white-dominated society of the United States, the NOI campaigns for the creation of an independent African American nation-state and calls for African Americans to be economically self-sufficient and separatist. A millenarian tradition, it maintains that Fard Muhammad will soon return aboard a spaceship