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Wallace Fard MuhammadWallace Fard Muhammad (1891? - after 1934) was a preacher and founder of the first Nation of Islam mosque in the United States. Alternative names on record are numerous: Wali Farad, Farrad Mohammed, and F. Mohammed Ali. Within the NOI he is generally known as Master Fard Muhammad. His distinctive mixed parentage allowed him to at various times to claim to belong to several different races, often either African or Arabian. This may have influenced his later doctrine of the "Asian black man" and to his emphasis on Islam as the authentic black person's religion, though he did not originate these ideas. After his prison experience, Ford became involved with the Moorish Science Temple of America, founded by Timothy Drew. From Drew's ideas he developed his own idiosyncratic theories, mixing aspects of theosophy and Islam, preaching his new gospel among African-Americans. In Detroit, Michigan, he established the Temple of Islam, the University of Islam, a group of male guards called the Fruit of Islam and other Black Muslim organizations. After a scandal involving an apparent ritual murder, Fard bestowed leadership of the Nation of Islam to his disciple Elijah Muhammad. In 1934 he disappeared without a trace. Ideology Fard claimed that a race war was imminent. For Black people in America, the duty was to discover their origins and purpose. Out of all the nations of the earth, diasporic Africans are the only nation without any knowledge of their history, no control of their present lives, and without any guidance for their future. Black people had been systematically denied knowledge of their true history by their white oppressors. Christianity was a religion of the slaveowners which had been forced on enslaved or subordinated black peoples. Islam was the original faith of blacks prior to slavery. The original peoples of the world were black. White people were a "race of devils" created by an evil scientist named Yakub on the island of Patmos. He also claimed that black people were divine, created by Allah from the dark substance of space, and that a spacecraft was waiting to destroy all white people when the appointed time came. The idea that Islam is the original true religion is derived from mainstream Islamic theology, which claims that Judaism and Christianity are corrupted forms of God's original message that Muhammad merely reaffirmed. The presence of Islam in eastern countries such as Indonesia as well as the Middle-East may have led Fard to conclude that it was the historical faith of Asian peoples as a whole, but this aspect of his thinking was directly influenced by Drew, who had claimed that all non-Europeans are in fact part of a unified Asian race, which he called "Moorish". Christian missionary activity under Imperialism may also have contributed to Fard's association of white supremacy with the attempted imposition of 'corrupted' religious ideas. The figure of Yakub is derived from the Biblical Jacob (Yakub being a variant spelling of the name), while his activities on Patmos recall St. John's revelations there. He thus combines central figures in the founding of Judaism and Christianity. Fard's racialising of Islamic beliefs is part of the widespread preoccupation with racial theory and eugenics at the time. The common white supremacist idea that blacks were "less evolved" than whites is turned round so that blacks become the original uncorrupted peoples of the world and whites are defined as a degenerate offshoot of them, just as Muslims claim that Judaism and Christianity are corrupted offshoots of Islam itself. According to Fard, Yakub's progeny were destined to dominate the world for six thousand years, before the original black peoples once more regained power. This process had begun in 1914 and Fard had been sent to proclaim it. Fard's followers were given Arabic names to replace those that had originated in slavery. Fard offered blacks a credo of moral and cultural superiority to their white oppressors. His birthdate is celebrated today by the Nation of Islam as Saviour's Day. One of Fard's first disciples was Elijah Poole, who later changed his name to Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975). Elijah began preaching that Wallace Fard Muhammad was the Mahdi, and even "The Living God". Controversy over identity Picking up on reporting from the Los Angeles tabloid, Herald Examiner the FBI reported that Fard Muhammad was identical to Wallace Dodd Ford, born on February 25, 1891 of mixed European and Polynesian parentage. It is uncertain whether he was born in New Zealand or in Portland, Oregon, of parents who came from Hawaii. Ford was certainly in the USA by around 1930. According to the FBI, he was later arrested and imprisoned for drugs offences. Photographs of both men exist. The NOI has rejected this identification of Wallace Dodd Ford with Wallace Fard Muhammad, interpreting it as part of a smear campaign. In the August 16, 1963 edition of their newspaper, Muhammad Speaks the Nation of Islam carried the banner headline, NATION OF ISLAM OFFERS HEARST $100,000 TO PROVE CHARGE. Using the article as a public challenge, Elijah Muhammad wrote: - I will pay the Los Angeles "Herald-Examiner" Newspaper $100,000.00 (one hundred, thousand dollars) to prove the headline charge ("BLACK MUSLIM FOUNDER EXPOSED AS A WHITE") made against us; that we are following one Wallace Dodd with many aliases including the name Fard; that he is the man that I am representing to my people as being Master Fard Muhammad.
- Let Mr. Dodd prove that he was among us; prove that he gave us our names. Let Mr. Dodd prove who was his secretary and where were the identification cards printed, of which he have with us today and did he write the Arabic on them himself? ..Again, let Mr. Dodd prove that he and I were together and that the Lessons that I am teaching to my followers are from him and where were they given to me and did he ever examine me on what he gave me, and where?
They also claim that he was born in 1877 (which would put him in his fifties when photographed), and that he came from Mecca. Elijah Muhammad - Fard Muhammad's student and successor - had this to say about his Teacher, in his book, "Message to the Black Man": "Allah (God) came to us from the Holy City Mecca, Arabia, in 1930. He used the name Wallace D. Fard, often signing it W.D. Fard. In the third year (1933), He signed His name W.F. Muhammad, which stands for Wallace Fard Muhammad. He came alone. He began teaching us the knowledge of ourselves, of God and the devil, of the measurement of the earth, of other planets, and of the civilizations of some of the planets other than earth." current NOI leader Louis Farrakhan accepts that Fard was imprisoned, insisting that this was because his preaching threatened the racist status quo, not because of any criminal acts. External links Muhammad, Wallace Fard Muhammad, Wallace Fard Muhammad, Wallace Fard
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