Association (UNIA), the Black Power movement
(1966–75), and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Civil
Rights movement (1955–68). However, the NOI
is best understood as a religious organization with
strong sociopolitical aims and its fits better into
the Islamic term, umma, or Muslim religious com-
munity, with its implications of individual and
social identity, economic relations, and political
order ideally guided by divine law, the
sharia
. It is
clearly, by its own admission, not part of the Sunni
umma, but that does not exclude it from the larger
communal and theological diversity of Islam.
According to the theological discourse of
the founder, Elijah Muhammad, conveyed pri-
marily through speeches/sermons and eventu-
ally recorded as written works, such as Message
to the Blackman in America, the “Blackman” (a
key term in NOI discourse) is the original first
human, made in the divine image and therefore
himself partaking in divinity. His original nature
makes him/her the prototype of all people of
color (black, brown, red, yellow, symbols for all
non-Caucasian people of the world). Being the
original, the “Blackman” is therefore the good,
the beautiful, and the blessed, thus negating the
antiblack, derogatory, and racist connotations
of such American designations as “Negro” and
“colored,” as well as derogatory colloquial slurs.
NOI theology treats seriously the question of the
origin of evil in the world, particularly the evils
suffered by persecuted peoples, such as the Afri-
can people’s history of enslavement at the hands
of Europeans, the horrors of the Middle Passage
(described in NOI terms as prefiguring the Nazi
Holocaust of World War II), and the persecution
and denigration of their descendants in post–Civil
War America to the present. Elijah Muhammad’s
answer to the question of cosmic and human evils
experienced by the Blackman is to posit a gnostic
demiurge, the evil Yakub, who is understood as a
proximate source of the world’s evils, not God, but
a powerful and malign force setting up this pres-
ent world order in which “White is right” and all
people of color are tormented and lost. He is the
white creator, the mad scientist, who has caused
the present-day evils of racism, persecution, pov-
erty, unjust imprisonment, and despair (whether
referring to slavery itself or being caught up in the
belly of the Beast, devoured by American police,
courts, and prisons). The ultimate purpose of this
demiurge and the immediate evils endured by
the Blackman is their spiritual reclamation, or, as
Elijah Muhammad put it, their “resurrection from
the mentally dead.”
The future and ultimate destiny of the com-
munity’s members is to serve as agents of sal-
vation, overturning the devil’s work (meaning
initially Yakub, and in history, all white evildoers
and persecutors of people of color). NOI theol-
ogy of the end times draws upon a biblical refer-
ence (Ezekiel 1:15–18) to the prophetic vision of
the divine chariot with flaming wheels, known
in Jewish mysticism as Merkavah, and recast in
Elijah Muhammad’s exegesis (as expressed in The
Fall of America and
The Theology of Time) as the
“Mother Plane.” This teaching brings modern
American awareness of the atomic age to the
notion of “heaven,” envisioning a celestial J
Udg
-
ment
d
ay
and redemption as literally heavenward
or extraterrestrial. NOI members in this vision
await their apocalypse, which will destroy the
corrupt present order of society but redeem the
righteous, namely, all people of color who have
suffered and fought oppression and injustice.
It will take them via a spaceship—the Mother
Plane—to freedom and bliss. Interestingly, this
NOI motif of the Mother Plane gained wide (if
unacknowledged) currency after Elijah Muham-
mad’s death through the popular culture venue
of P-Funk (a pop American music genre during
the 1970s that defined groups formed under the
aegis of George Clinton). P-Funk (and the Moth-
ership) has since achieved a rebirth and reissue,
increasing the popular currency and longevity of
Elijah’s apocalyptic teachings in the “sampling” of
Islamic Hip Hop and artists such as Public Enemy,
Arrested Development, Brand Nubian, X-Clan,
and others.
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