In a just world, Imam Warith Dean Mohammed, not Louis Farrakhan, would have been the face of African American Islam. The son of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Mohammed, W.D. Mohammed was America's most influential black Muslim leader before he died yesterday at the age of 74.
He broke with his father's prejudiced beliefs (he was excommunicated several times for it) and led most of the original NOI membership into Sunni Islam, the path that Malcolm X was following when he was assassinated. Mohammed's organization (called the World Community of al-Islam, but renamed several times) did a great deal to integrate immigrant and African American Muslim communities, and its membership has always dwarfed Farrakhan's reformed NOI. Farrakhan felt he should have been the heir to Elijah Mohammed, but the members of the NOI felt differently.
But America needs its black bogeymen, and Mohammed was never the dynamic public speaker Farrakhan is. Farrakhan's talent as a speaker and ability to appeal to the fears of white Americans placed him center stage, despite the fact that even conservative estimates of Mohammed's organization place it at several times the size of Farrakhan's NOI. From what I understand, one of the reasons the NOI remains small in comparison is that it acts almost as a funnel to Sunni Islam; there are a lot of people who turn to the NOI out of anger and frustration at society, and once they let go of that they find themselves turning to traditional Islam.
At any rate, the story of W.D. Mohammed is, as journalist Salim Muwakkil said yesterday on NPR, one of the "great untold stories" of American history, and it is a reminder of how much the worldview set forth by American journalism is guided by the fears and sensibilities of a small and particular group of people. Despite his influence, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post felt Mohammed's death was a front page story. One wonders if the same will be true when Farrakhan dies.
--A. Serwer
