The Nation of Islam: Wallace Fard, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X

In July 1930 a door-to-door silk peddler began teaching in the poor Black neighborhoods of Detroit. Within four years he had vanished, but the movement he started, the Nation of Islam, would shape American religion and politics for the rest of the century. It produced Malcolm X, one of the most influential Black leaders in American history; it was taken by its second leader's son into mainstream Sunni Islam; and it was revived by Louis Farrakhan, whose speeches have drawn both huge crowds and wide condemnation.

The Nation used the words "Islam," "Allah" and "Qur’an," and borrowed heavily from the Bible, yet its own published creed teaches doctrines that Muslims reject as unbelief and that Christians recognise as a denial of the God revealed in Christ. This article tells the story from the movement's own texts and from historians, explains why mainstream Muslims reject its classic teaching, and gives the Orthodox answer, which takes seriously the racism that drove many people into the movement while saying plainly that its doctrines are false.

In brief

W. D. Fard founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1930 and disappeared in 1934; his origins are still uncertain. His follower Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole) led the movement from Chicago until his death in 1975 and taught that God is a man, that Allah had appeared "in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad," that Elijah was His Messenger, and that the white race was made by an evil Black scientist named Yakub. Malcolm X, its best-known preacher, broke with it in 1964, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, embraced Sunni Islam and was assassinated in 1965. After Elijah's death his son Warith Deen Mohammed led most members into Sunni Islam, while Louis Farrakhan re-founded the Nation in 1978 on Elijah Muhammad's teaching. Mainstream Muslim scholars judge the classic Nation doctrine to be outside Islam. The Orthodox Church judges it false because God is Spirit and not a man by nature, the eternal Son became man once in Jesus Christ and no other, and all human beings are made "from one blood."

Thesis: The Nation of Islam gave real dignity and discipline to people wounded by American racism, but its teaching about God, Christ and the races is false, and its answer to racism is not a new god in Detroit but the God who became man in Jesus Christ for every nation.

Detroit, 1930: the peddler from "the East"

The Nation's founder used several names: Wallace D. Fard, W. D. Fard, Wali Farrad, and later W. F. Muhammad. According to the sociologist Lawrence Mamiya, he founded the movement in a Detroit neighborhood called Paradise Valley in July 1930, appearing as a peddler "from the East" who sold silks and gave advice on health and religion to poor African Americans in the years of the Great Depression.¹ Using both the Bible and the Qur’an, he taught that Christianity was not their true religion, gathered followers in homes, and then rented a storefront he called Temple of Islam No. 1. He also founded a school, the University of Islam, and a disciplined men's guard, the Fruit of Islam.

Mamiya summarises Fard's message as a teaching about a period of domination by white "blue-eyed devils," who had won their power by brutality and trickery, and about the need for Black people to gain "knowledge of self."²

{{strong: Fard taught in Detroit from 1930 and vanished in 1934, and no one has established where he came from or what became of him.}} Members of the Nation hold that he was born on 26 February 1877 and came from Mecca. {{moderate: FBI records identified him as Wallace Dodd Ford, a man who had come to the United States from New Zealand; the Nation rejects this identification.}} Two of Elijah Muhammad's sons offered still other accounts of his origin.³

Elijah Muhammad's theology, in his own words

Elijah Poole, the son of Georgia sharecroppers, moved to Detroit in 1923 and became Fard's assistant around 1930. When Fard disappeared, Elijah took the leadership, moved to Chicago, and founded Temple No. 2 there; he was imprisoned from 1942 to 1946 for advising followers to avoid the wartime draft.⁴ His teaching is gathered in Message to the Blackman in America (1965) and in the creed "What the Muslims Believe," still published on the Nation's website. Four doctrines stand out.

1. God is a man, and He came in Fard

Elijah Muhammad rejected the idea of an invisible God. A chapter of Message to the Blackman ends with the words: "Know that God is a man and not a spook!" Another states: "Allah came to us from the Holy City Mecca, Arabia, in 1930."⁵ The twelfth article of the Nation's creed, as it appears on the Nation's website today, reads:

"WE BELIEVE that Allah (God) appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad, July, 1930; the long-awaited 'Messiah' of the Christians and the 'Mahdi' of the Muslims."⁶

Mamiya notes that it was Elijah Muhammad who deified Fard as Allah and declared himself Allah's Messenger, and that both beliefs are contrary to the creed of Sunni Islam.⁷

2. The Yakub story

The best-known and most troubling teaching is the account of Yakub. In Message to the Blackman, Elijah Muhammad writes that some 6,600 years ago "our nation gave birth to another God whose name was Yakub," a brilliant scientist who was exiled with his followers to "an Isle in the Aegean Sea called Pelan (Bible Patmos)." There, through six hundred years of controlled breeding in which darker infants were killed, "Mr. Yakub had an all-pale white race of people on this Isle."⁸ As Britannica summarises the teaching, Allah allowed this race to hold power for 6,000 years, and "their time was up in 1914."⁹ In statements he gave to the New York Herald Tribune, reprinted in the same book, Elijah explained that the word devil "is applied to wicked people, people who are by nature wicked."¹⁰

3. A "mental" resurrection

The creed's fifth article teaches belief in the "resurrection of the dead--not in physical resurrection--but in mental resurrection," and adds that "the so-called Negroes are most in need of mental resurrection."¹¹

4. Separation

The creed also calls for "the separation of the so-called Negroes and the so-called white Americans," regards integration as "hypocritical," and asks that followers drop the surnames given by slaveholders.¹² Members commonly took the letter X in place of a surname. Elijah also required a strict discipline: no pork, alcohol, tobacco or drugs, and an emphasis on family, work and Black-owned business.¹³ That discipline changed many lives.

Malcolm X: the movement's voice, and its sharpest critic

Malcolm Little, a former street hustler, joined the Nation while in prison between 1946 and 1952. After his release he founded temples, became minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem, and rose to be the Nation's National Representative. By Britannica's account he also "articulated the Nation's racial doctrines on the inherent evil of whites."¹⁴

Tensions grew in the early 1960s. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Malcolm called it a case of "chickens coming home to roost," which embarrassed the movement, and in 1964 he broke with the Nation "over political and personal differences with Elijah Muhammad."¹⁵ {{very-strong: In 1964 Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, embraced Sunni Islam and took the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.}}¹⁶

His letter from Mecca, later printed in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, describes pilgrims "of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans," and says that what he had seen "has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held."¹⁷ He had, in effect, rejected the Yakub story. On 21 February 1965 he was shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. Three members of the Nation were convicted; two of them were exonerated in 2021.¹⁸

1975: the son who led the Nation into Sunni Islam

When Elijah Muhammad died in February 1975, leadership passed to his son Wallace, later known as Warith Deen Mohammed, who had long been drawn toward mainstream Islam. He rejected the beliefs that white people were "blue-eyed devils" and that his father was a prophet, renamed the movement (the World Community of al-Islam in the West in 1976, the American Muslim Mission in 1978), and took the title imam.¹⁹ He also gave up the belief that Fard was Allah. {{strong: The majority of Elijah Muhammad's followers went with Warith Deen Mohammed into the wider Sunni Muslim community.}}²⁰

Louis Farrakhan's revival

Louis Farrakhan, born Louis Eugene Walcott in 1933, grew up active in St Cyprian's Episcopal Church in Boston before joining the Nation in 1955, and succeeded Malcolm X at the Harlem temple. Rejecting Warith Deen Mohammed's reforms, he left in 1978, re-founded the Nation on Elijah Muhammad's teachings, and began publishing The Final Call in 1979.²¹

Farrakhan's Nation organised the Million Man March in Washington in 1995 and has worked against drugs and violence in Black neighborhoods. It has also been surrounded by controversy. In 1984 he praised Adolf Hitler on national television as a "very great man," and his later statements about Jews have been widely condemned as antisemitic; Farrakhan denies being antisemitic.²² In 2000 he and Warith Deen Mohammed recognised each other as fellow Muslims, and he moved his group closer to Sunni practice. Britannica gives an estimate of 10,000 to 50,000 core members in the early twenty-first century.²³

Why mainstream Muslims reject the Nation's teaching

The Qur’an's Surah 112 says of God: "He neither begets nor is born" (112:3), and Islam holds that no human being is God. It also calls Muhammad "the Messenger of Allāh and seal [i.e., last] of the prophets" (33:40), so a twentieth-century "Messenger" who brings new doctrine is ruled out.²⁴ The widely used Sunni fatwa site IslamQA, describing the Nation's history, concludes that in Elijah Muhammad's period "it was a disbelieving group that was outside of the framework of Islam," and that Farrakhan "has adopted the deviant ideas of the group as they were at the time of Elijah Muhammad."²⁵ Warith Deen Mohammed's reform acknowledged the same point from inside the movement.

An Orthodox Christian must add that the step from the Nation to Sunni Islam removed the Yakub story and the deification of Fard, but did not lead to the truth about God. Islam denies the Holy Trinity, the divinity of Christ and His death and resurrection, and so contradicts the apostolic faith (1 John 4:2-3); Muhammad is not a prophet of God and the Qur’an is not His word. The reasons are set out in why Islam is not a continuation of the apostolic faith and in its comparison of Jesus in Christianity and Islam.

An Orthodox assessment

The wound was real

The Nation of Islam grew among people whom many professing Christians had enslaved, segregated and despised, often while quoting the Bible. Malcolm X wrote from Mecca of the "so-called 'Christian' white American heart," and his phrase stings because it was earned.²⁶ The Church cannot answer the Nation honestly without repenting of that history wherever Christians took part in it. (See also the site's article on the Black Church in America.)

Racism, however, is a betrayal of the Gospel, not its fruit. St Paul preached in Athens that God "has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26), and wrote that "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).²⁷ In 1872 a council of Orthodox patriarchs and bishops in Constantinople condemned "the doctrine of phyletism, or the difference of races and national diversity in the bosom of the Church of Christ," a decree aimed at organising the Church by ethnicity, which Orthodox writers have since applied against racial division as well.²⁸ Christianity was never "the white man's religion": Acts 8 records the baptism of an Ethiopian court official, and some of the Church's greatest early teachers and saints, from St Athanasius of Alexandria to St Moses the Black, were Africans.

God is not a man by nature

The Nation's central claim is that God is a man, and that He came in Fard. The Scriptures teach the opposite. "God is not a man, that He should lie" (Numbers 23:19); "God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24).²⁹ The Church does not worship a vague phantom, as Elijah Muhammad's word "spook" implies, but the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, beyond every creature and yet present to His creation.

The Nation might reply that Christians themselves believe God became man. They do, and the difference is decisive. The Church confesses that the eternal Son, "true God of true God; begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father," "was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man," and "was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried. And the third day He arose again."³⁰ The Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) without ceasing to be God: one Person, the eternal Son, in two natures, as the Council of Chalcedon defined in 451, not a man who later became divine (see Jesus Christ: true God and true man). This happened once, in Jesus of Nazareth, for the salvation of every nation, and it will not be repeated by a new arrival. Christ Himself warned: "if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise" (Matthew 24:23-24). When He comes again, it will be "as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west" (24:27), in glory, to judge the living and the dead, not as a peddler who must later be identified by his followers.³¹ The Nation's claim that Fard was "the long-awaited 'Messiah' of the Christians" is therefore false.

The Yakub story is a myth, and a harmful one

No historical record or archaeological find mentions Yakub, an island called Pelan, or a six-hundred-year breeding programme; the story is known only from the Nation's teaching. Worse, it teaches that a whole race is "by nature wicked." The Orthodox Church teaches that every human being, of every color, is made in the image of God, that sin is a sickness of the will common to all of Adam's descendants, and that no race is evil by birth. The unity Malcolm X glimpsed at Mecca is given in its fullness only in Christ, whose Church gathers "a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues" (Revelation 7:9).³²

Resurrection is not a metaphor

The Nation teaches a "mental resurrection." The apostles preached a bodily one. The risen Christ said, "Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have" (Luke 24:39), and Paul wrote that "if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!" (1 Corinthians 15:17).³³ The Church sings at Pascha: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!"³⁴ See also why Christians believe in bodily resurrection.

Objections and replies

"The Nation did more for Black communities than the churches did."

In some places that may be true, and the Church should hear it as a rebuke. The Nation's discipline helped many people, including Malcolm X himself. But good works do not make a doctrine true. A teaching that calls a man God and a race devils cannot be the foundation of lasting healing, and both Malcolm X and Warith Deen Mohammed came to reject those teachings.

"Christianity was forced on slaves; Islam was the religion of their ancestors."

It is true that some enslaved Africans brought to America were Muslims, and that slaveholders often used a distorted Christianity to justify slavery.³⁵ But Christianity is not a European religion. It began in Asia and spread early into Africa, where Alexandria and Carthage were among its great centers. The real question is not what one's ancestors held but who God is.

"Farrakhan's Nation has moved toward Sunni Islam, so the old doctrines no longer matter."

The Nation's website still publishes the creed that Allah "appeared in the Person of Master W. Fard Muhammad." Until that is withdrawn, it remains official teaching. And even a full move to Sunni Islam would leave the decisive question unanswered: whether Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God who died and rose again.

What we can say confidently

• W. D. Fard founded the Nation of Islam in Detroit in 1930 and disappeared in 1934; his origins are not established.
• Elijah Muhammad taught that God is a man, that Allah appeared in Fard, and that the white race was made by Yakub. The Nation's website still publishes the creed article on Fard.
• Malcolm X left the Nation in 1964, embraced Sunni Islam after the hajj, and was assassinated in 1965.
• Warith Deen Mohammed led most of the movement into Sunni Islam after 1975; Louis Farrakhan re-founded the Nation on Elijah Muhammad's teachings in 1978.
• Mainstream Sunni scholars regard the Nation's classic doctrines as outside Islam.
• By the standard of the Scriptures and the Creed, the Nation's teaching about God, Christ, the races and the resurrection is false.

What remains disputed

• Who Fard was, where he came from and what happened to him. The FBI identification is contested by the Nation, and his family and followers have offered other accounts.
• How much of the later doctrine Fard taught himself and how much was developed by Elijah Muhammad after 1934.
• The size of the Nation at its height and today; published figures are estimates.
• Full responsibility for the assassination of Malcolm X. Two of the three men convicted were exonerated in 2021, and questions about who planned the killing remain.

Conclusion

The Nation of Islam was born of a real wound and answered it with a false gospel. Its founders offered self-respect and order to people whom American society, and too many American Christians, had treated as less than human. But they also taught that God is a man who appeared in Detroit, that a race was created evil, and that the resurrection is a state of mind. Each of these is false. The One whose coming the prophets foretold is the eternal Son of God, who took flesh from the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, died on the Cross and rose bodily from the tomb. He makes no one a devil by birth. He calls every human being, Black and white and every other, into one Body, one baptism and one Cup, and the Orthodox Church, which keeps the apostolic faith whole, invites the members of the Nation, and every Muslim, to Him.

Notes

1. Lawrence H. Mamiya, "Fard, W. D. (c. 1877-1934), Religious and Political Leader," Contemporary American Religion (Macmillan/Gale), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/legal-and-political-magazines/fard-w-d-c-1877-1934-religious-and-political-leader.
2. Mamiya, "Fard, W. D." (see note 1).
3. Mamiya, "Fard, W. D." (see note 1).
4. "Elijah Muhammad," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elijah-Muhammad (read through the Internet Archive copy of March 2026).
5. Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Chicago: Muhammad's Temple of Islam No. 2, 1965), ch. 5, "The Origin of God as a Spirit and Not a Man," and ch. 8, "The Coming of God and the Gathering Together of His People." Checked against a full-text copy of the Secretarius MEMPS e-book edition (copyright 1965, 1973) at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/message-to-the-blackman-elijah-muhammad.
6. Nation of Islam, "The Muslim Program: What the Muslims Believe," article 12, https://www.noi.org/muslim-program/ (read through the Internet Archive copy of 4 October 2026).
7. Mamiya, "Fard, W. D." (see note 1).
8. Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman, ch. 55, "The Making of Devil" (see note 5).
9. J. Gordon Melton, "Nation of Islam," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nation-of-Islam (read through the Internet Archive copy of 2024).
10. Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman, ch. 138, "Clarification of Confusion Surrounding Muslims," section "On Whites as Devils" (see note 5).
11. "The Muslim Program," article 5 (see note 6).
12. "The Muslim Program," articles 7 and 9 (see note 6).
13. Melton, "Nation of Islam" (see note 9).
14. "Malcolm X," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Malcolm-X (read through the Internet Archive copy of October 2026).
15. Melton, "Nation of Islam" (see note 9); "Louis Farrakhan," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Farrakhan (Internet Archive copy of March 2026).
16. "Malcolm X," Britannica (see note 14).
17. Malcolm X, letter from Mecca (1964), as printed in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1965), ch. 17, "Mecca"; checked against the full text of the Ballantine Books trade edition (1992) at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/the-autobiography-of-malcolm-x-as-told-to-alex-haley-malcolm-x-alex-haley-1992.
18. "Malcolm X," Britannica (see note 14); Melton, "Nation of Islam" (see note 9).
19. "Warith Deen Mohammed," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Warith-Deen-Mohammed (Internet Archive copy of July 2025).
20. Melton, "Nation of Islam" (see note 9).
21. "Louis Farrakhan," Britannica (see note 15).
22. "Louis Farrakhan," Britannica (see note 15); Melton, "Nation of Islam" (see note 9).
23. "Louis Farrakhan," Britannica (see note 15).
24. Qur’an 112:3 and 33:40, trans. Sahih International, Quran.com, https://quran.com/112 and https://quran.com/33/40.
25. IslamQA, "Beliefs of Farrakhanism or the Nation of Islam," answer no. 152526, https://islamqa.info/en/answers/152526.
26. Malcolm X, letter from Mecca (see note 17).
27. Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28 (NKJV).
28. Decree of the Council of Constantinople (September 1872), art. 1, in the English translation of the Methodist Quarterly Review (January 1873), reproduced in Matthew Namee, "The 'Bulgarian Question' and the 1872 Council of Constantinople, Part 4," Orthodox History (Society for Orthodox Christian History in the Americas), 4 December 2012, https://www.orthodoxhistory.org/?p=6160.
29. Numbers 23:19; John 4:24 (NKJV).
30. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, translation of the Orthodox Church in America, https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/symbol-of-faith.
31. John 1:14; Matthew 24:23-27 (NKJV); the Creed (see note 30).
32. Revelation 7:9 (NKJV).
33. Luke 24:39; 1 Corinthians 15:17 (NKJV).
34. Paschal Troparion, Orthodox Church in America, "Selected Liturgical Hymns," https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/prayers/selected-liturgical-hymns.
35. Melton, "Nation of Islam" (see note 9), which notes that Islam was first brought to the United States by enslaved African Muslims.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Qur’an. Sahih International translation. Quran.com.
• Muhammad, Elijah. Message to the Blackman in America. Chicago: Muhammad's Temple of Islam No. 2, 1965.
• Nation of Islam. "The Muslim Program." noi.org.
• Malcolm X, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965 (letter from Mecca, 1964).

Orthodox sources

• The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the Paschal Troparion, in the translations of the Orthodox Church in America.
• Council of Constantinople (1872), decree on phyletism, English translation in the Methodist Quarterly Review, January 1873; reproduced by Matthew Namee, Orthodox History, 2012.

Other scholarship and reference

• Mamiya, Lawrence H. "Fard, W. D. (c. 1877-1934), Religious and Political Leader." In Contemporary American Religion. Macmillan Reference/Gale.
• Melton, J. Gordon. "Nation of Islam." Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Elijah Muhammad"; "Malcolm X"; "Warith Deen Mohammed"; "Louis Farrakhan."

Sources from the Islamic tradition

• IslamQA (supervised by Shaykh Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid). "Beliefs of Farrakhanism or the Nation of Islam." Answer no. 152526.