Word: islamize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Throughout his controversial career, Elijah Muhammad was the nation's most potent preacher of black separatism. Yet when he died last week at 77, he was mourned as a statesman. Proclaimed Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley: "Under his leadership, the Nation of Islam has been a consistent contributor to the social well-being of our city for more than 40 years." A New York Times editorial noted his movement's success "in rehabilitating and inspiring thousands of once defeated and despairing men and women...
...only over 76 temples and some 50,000 to 100,000 disciples, but also over some 15,000 acres of farmland and a complex of small businesses that range from pin-neat restaurants to stores to a 500,000-circulation newspaper. Some estimate the worth of the Nation of Islam's business empire at $75 million. The businesses all have a long-range object: to prepare for the day when Allah gives the nation its own land, perhaps a sizable chunk of the present U.S., which Muhammad predicted was doomed to collapse before...
Vital Black. The movement began in 1930 when W.D. Fard, an itinerant silk peddler, founded a novel version of Islam that attracted thousands of poor Detroit blacks. After Fard disappeared mysteriously in 1934, leadership passed to Muhammad, who had been born Elijah Poole, the son of a Georgia sharecropper-preacher. When dispute erupted over the succession, Muhammad moved his base to Chicago and gradually built the Nation of Islam into a vital black separatist faith...
...theology of the Nation of Islam is significantly different from that of orthodox Islam, which has never been sure whether to recognize Muhammad's U.S. variant. Its black-supremacy views conflict with Islam's racial tolerance. Islam's fundamental tenet is that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed was his Messenger; the Black Muslims believe that Fard was Allah incarnate and that Elijah Muhammad was his Messenger. The Black Muslims deride the orthodox Muslims as "spooky believing" for holding that Allah is a spirit. To them, Allah is the Supreme Black Man among a race...
...that he promoted hatred toward whites. If not hatred, it was contempt: whites were "the human beast-the serpent, the dragon, the devil and Satan." The white race, he taught, had been bred 6,000 years ago by a black scientist. In an insanely logical moment, the Nation of Islam once invited American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell to a meeting and heard him laud Elijah Muhammad as the "Adolf Hitler of the black...