ABSTRACT
So-called “Black Islam” can be examined as three integrally related Islamic or quasi-Islamic sects in America: the Nation of Islam led by theological inspirer Wali Fard Muhammad and prophet-leader Elijah Muhammad (1930–1975), the successor quasi-Sunni sect launched by Elijah’s son Wallace/Warith Deen Mohammed (1975–), and the new Nation of Islam conducted by Minister Louis Farrakhan Muhammad (1933–) since 1978. Over and above my major work on the “American Black Muslim” phenomenon (2005), I have been recently assessing the extent the three connected movements were able to build “coherent community” by synthesizing concepts of the African race, Islam, and Arabic heritage while surreptitiously threading aspects of white-originated social welfare and social work into their innovative Black nationalist construction of a new Nation. As builders of religio-national community, the Muslim movements have checked social disintegration in urban Black America, objectively (if paradoxically) aiding the human services offered from the United States “system” to forestall persisting poverty, violence, and social breakdown. Indeed, today a new era is opening in which Muslims increasingly penetrate US human services whether as clients or recruited social workers, generating possibilities of synthesis between the two nationalist traditions. Interestingly, Gnostic elements that belong to the foundations of the Nation of Islam still have some place in these processes. Here I discern something of “the Gnostic” factor in developing Black Islamic policies to elevate the status of women.
