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One thing Fard never claimed to be was God. But he did give Elijah Muhammad permission to say whatever he wished following his death. Muhammad had once suggested to Fard that he thought his teacher was the Almighty, and after Fard's passing from the scene, Muhammad declared as much: Fard was Allah incarnate and Elijah Muhammad was his prophet. When Louis Farrakhan reorganized the Nation of Islam in the late 1970s (the sixties were a messy time for the Nation), he altered this tradition, claiming now that Elijah Muhammad himself was God and that Farrakhan was the last prophet. Contrary to what one might think, this shift didn't present a theological problem for Farrakhan's NOI: as readers of his newspaper the Final Call know, Farrakhan and Elijah Muhammad communicate regularly, and it is assumed that the Messenger has given Farrakhan's revisions his approval. (Muhammad now inhabits and transmits messages from the Mother Wheel, a spacecraft.)

Two years ago, Farrakhan, having sustained a serious medical operation, decided to move the NOI toward orthodox Islam, and perusers of the Nation's website can see that traditional Muslim beliefs get more space in Farrakhan's pages than they used to. But if the Nation is really going to move toward the beliefs of historic Islam, then Elijah Muhammad will not get to be God anymore and Farrakhan will have to fully surrender his status as the final prophet to a different Muhammad of more ancient fame.

While readers in search of a systematic account of NOI theology should consult Mattias Gardell's In the Name of Elijah Muhammad (1996), Evanzz regularly alludes to the Messenger's ever-evolving religious beliefs. When the maritally faithful Malcolm X asked Muhammad about his philandering, the prophet announced that, like some biblical figures, he was almost obligated to fool around so that Allah's will for him could be more fully revealed in the lives of his progeny. Soon thereafter, however, Muhammad denied his "affairs" altogether and thus helped to drive Malcolm out of the NOI: an enigmatic prophet Malcolm could handle; a bald-face liar he couldn't. So much for the Messenger's theology of marriage.

As for Elijah Muhammad's views on matters racial, there's good news: toward the end of his life he said that it was "time for us to stop calling white folks the devil because there's some black devils too." Unfortunately, the Messenger's equal-opportunity demonology didn't take immediate hold among Farrakhan and his crew, though since his serious medical operation Farrakhan has softened his tone. Three years ago one might have expected him to justify Daniel Pearl's murder in terms of "that's what the white oppressor gets." But in February, Farrakhan pointedly denounced Pearl's killers and said, in effect, that nothing could justify their wickedness. (The usual anti-American rhetoric accompanied Farrakhan's statement, but even that was more moderate than one would have expected a few years back.)

Evanzz, who ends his book with a surprising tirade against "pulpit pimps" such as Farrakhan and others who pretend to be Elijah Muhammad's true successors (Muhammad never designated an organizational heir), provides his readers with ample documentation for his claims, which undoubtedly have him in hot water with the NOI. Evanzz's bibliography, moreover, is impressive: he reproduces some 70 pages of primary sources—including recently declassified FBI documents—as appendices. The most fun of these is titled "Reported Aliases of the Messenger," and it is here that we learn that some of Muhammad's pseudonyms were Eli Muck Muck, Muck Eli Muck, Mohammad Muckmud, and Elijah Mut Mut. Among his duller nicknames (he had 126 in all) were Robert Pool and Charles Evans.

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March (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46