Religion: Conversion of the Muslims

In its heyday in the 1960s, the separatist sect known as the “Black Muslims” appeared to many as a sinister force for racial hostility. Their leader, Elijah Muhammad, preached a weird doctrine that the race of “white devils” had been created from blacks, and that Allah had assumed bodily form in the person of W.D. Fard, a mysterious black itinerant who preached in Detroit until he vanished in 1934. The great annual event was “Savior’s Day,” the cult’s Christmas, which celebrated the advent of Fard.

Savior’s Day was observed once again last week, but this time as “Survival Day.” The name change, signifying Fard’s downgraded status, is only the latest indication that the movement has abandoned virtually all its peculiar views. The man who has directed these sweeping changes in the two years since Elijah Muhammad’s death is his son, Wallace D. Muhammad, 43, whom Fard had predestined as leader before he was even born.

Last Book. “Our purpose is the revival and restoration of pure Islam,” the pudgy, bearded Wallace declared to the throng at Chicago’s gold-domed central mosque on Survival Day weekend. No longer is Fard to be considered divine, according to Wallace, for “God does not eat, he does not drink.” Nor is Elijah Muhammad to be considered the “Messenger of God.” Wallace’s view: “The Prophet Mohammed is the seal of the prophets, and the Koran is the last book.” The soft-spoken Wallace Muhammad, who had originally wanted to be an electronics technician, privately questioned Fard’s divinity as early as 1955. Twice his father expelled him from the sect for this heresy, but the banishments proved temporary, for as Wallace recalls, “Daddy used to say, ‘Our Savior Master Fard told us that boy is different.’ “

Besides returning to orthodox belief in Allah, Wallace Muhammad has abolished his father’s separatism, which also ran counter to orthodox Islam. Elijah Muhammad had demanded a piece of the U.S. for a separate black nation, and taught that Allah would destroy the white devils and their civilization by the end of this century. Wallace Muhammad, who has opened membership in the sect to all races, told Survival Day worshipers, “We know there is no superiority in any color.” He has also abolished the group’s muscular police force, the “Fruit of Islam.”

He has even changed the group’s name. Once the Nation of Islam, it now calls itself the World Community of Islam in the West, or the Bilalians, in honor of Bilal, Mohammed’s first black follower. Ministers, now termed imams, are expected to instruct members in the Koran and the Bible. At “temples,” renamed “mosques,” the seats have been ripped out so that members can prostrate themselves during prayer. Wallace also stresses such traditional “pillars” of observance as the month-long fast of Ramadan, the five daily prayers while facing Mecca, and the Hajj (pilgrimage).

This new orthodoxy has driven away only “five or six” ministers, Wallace claims, and has helped boost membership from 40,000 to 70,000 since his father died. It has paid off in other ways. Arab nations are providing substantial aid, including $16 million for a South Side Chicago mosque. The money comes at a strategic time. Last week the once-secretive organization for the first time released a balance sheet for Chicago headquarters; it shows a consolidated debt of $6.5 million, part of it from the group’s private empire of small businesses. For years, complains Wallace, “money was handled like it was being dug out of the ground somehow.” He is selling off the various businesses. Personally joining in the new austerity, Wallace shuns his father’s luxurious estate near the University of Chicago. He prefers to live in a modest brick bungalow not far from his mosque.