Open Collections

Tareen, SherAfgan

Database of Religious History (DRH)

Established in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929, the Nation of Islam is a religious movement that facilitates its predominantly African-American followers to learn how to maintain a healthy lifestyle in urban settings. The movement evolved out of a chance encounter between Clara Evans and Fard Muhammad on Hastings Street, the famous south-north street east of Downtown Detroit where a large number of African-American migrants from the rural south lived due to limited housing opportunities elsewhere in the city. Fard introduced Clara to a set of ritual practices related to hygiene, clothing, and diet rooted in the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a prophetic figure from Qadian, Punjab. Clara drew upon his teachings to overcome dependency on public assistance amidst working as a domestic servant with an unemployed husband and a growing family. Faced by a declining Detroit Public School System, Clara established a homeschool for the neighborhood's children as well as adults, offering an Islamic education geared at overcoming periodic unemployment and the accompanying shame of failing to look after one's family. Over the next two decades, Clara and her fellow sisters helped expand the homeschool on a national scale, with similar schools appearing in other cities in the midwest with a large African-American population such as Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis as well as on the eastern seaboard such as Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Harlem (New York) and Boston. Since the passing of Clara's husband Elijah Muhammad in 1975, the Nation of Islam has split into two factions: one that abides by the doctrinal innovations introduced by Elijah such as his status as a Prophet and Fard as God incarnate and another that follows Elijah's son Warith (Wallace) Deen Muhammad exhortation to embrace Sunni Islam and its understanding of prophecy and divinity rooted in the Quran and the hadith. These doctrinal contestations however are overshadowed by a consensus among members of both factions that black motherhood is both scientifically advanced and morally upright.

Other

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0416083

Non UBC

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/