The Nation of Islam began in 1930 with the arrival of Wallace Dodd Fard to the black ghetto of Detroit. To the black underclass, Fard presented himself as a merchant allegedly from “the holy city of Mecca.” He sold silks, hats, and other artifacts allegedly imported from his homeland, though Elijah Muhammad once stated that Fard was not a silk peddler but a tailor of custom-made clothes.[3] Poor black families would invite Fard to their homes, where he who assumed the role of a Muslim teacher, reading to them directly from an Arabic edition of the Qur’an.[4] At the dinner table Fard warned his hosts against pork, polished rice, and other foods: “Now don’t eat this food, it is poison for you. The people in your own country do not eat it. Since they eat the right kind of food they have the best health all the time.”[5]
In various ways Fard undermined his hearers’ faith in Christianity and the Bible, which for generations had sustained downtrodden black families. He encouraged his followers to listen to radio broadcasts of Jehovah’s Witness president Joseph Rutherford, whose rallying cry at that time was “Religion is a snare and a racket.” Fard also used Jehovah’s Witness literature to teach his followers that the time of “Gentile” (i.e., Caucasian) domination had come to an end in 1914; that the resurrection of the “so-called Negro” had already occurred as a mental and invisible fact, and that the coming New World was just around the corner. In just a few years, he claimed, the oppressed black man would receive the kingdom and the New World would arrive by 1936 at the very latest.[6]
http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss111/islam1.htm
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8294(197024)9%3A4%3C321%3AWIOBME%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C
