Most of our barbers are proud members of the Nation of Islam. We conduct our business in accordance with Christian teachings, incorporating elements of Islam that align with those teachings. We won’t “preach” to you, though. If you are curious or have questions, just ask us.
The Nation of Islam: What It Is and Where Its Teachings Come From
For nearly a century, the Nation of Islam has been one of the most recognizable — and most argued-over — movements to come out of Black America. Whether you grew up hearing bean pies sold on the corner, watched The Autobiography of Malcolm X get assigned in a high school class, or remember the Million Man March filling the National Mall, you’ve encountered it. What follows is a plain explanation of what the organization actually teaches and how it uses two books that most of its audience already knew: the Bible and the Quran.
Origins
The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930 by a traveling salesman known as Wallace D. Fard, who preached to Black migrants who had come north during the Great Migration and found the same poverty and segregation waiting for them. Fard taught that Black people in America were not Negroes, not chattel, and not converts to anything — they were the descendants of an ancient Muslim people, stolen and stripped of their original religion, language, and names.
When Fard disappeared in 1934, leadership passed to Elijah Poole of Sandersville, Georgia, who became Elijah Muhammad and led the movement for the next four decades. Under him the Nation built mosques, schools, farms, restaurants, and newspapers, and did significant recruiting inside prisons — where it reached men, most famously Malcolm Little, whom nearly every other institution in American life had written off.
After Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, his son Warith Deen Mohammed took over and moved the bulk of the membership toward mainstream Sunni Islam, dissolving the old structure. Louis Farrakhan broke away and rebuilt the original organization, formally reclaiming the Nation of Islam name in 1981. Now in his nineties and largely withdrawn from day-to-day leadership, Farrakhan remains its head, with headquarters at Mosque Maryam in Chicago.
How the Nation reads the Bible
Elijah Muhammad was preaching to people raised in the Black church. He knew the Bible was the book in their houses, so he used it — but read it as coded prophecy about Black people in America rather than as literal ancient history.
Exodus is the master text. In this reading, Black Americans are the Israelites, America is Egypt, white American power is Pharaoh, and Elijah Muhammad himself stands in the position of Moses. Ezekiel’s wheel becomes the “Mother Plane.” Revelation’s Armageddon becomes the coming end of white political dominance. The “lost sheep of the house of Israel” become the “lost-found” Black nation in the West.
The Nation also teaches that the Bible was tampered with — that slaveholders edited and selected it to produce obedient captives, keeping the passages about servants obeying masters and burying the ones about deliverance. So the book is treated as containing real truth in symbolic form, but requiring an interpreter to unlock it.
How the Nation uses the Quran
Elijah Muhammad held the Quran to be the more reliable of the two books — unedited, preserved in its original language. Members were taught Arabic phrases and prayers, told to take the shahada-style declaration that there is no God but Allah, and encouraged to fast, pray, abandon pork and alcohol, and adopt modest dress. Members dropped surnames inherited from slaveholders in favor of “X” or an Arabic name. Under Farrakhan the Nation has moved closer to standard Muslim practice, observing Ramadan in the lunar month and holding Friday congregational prayer.
But it’s important to be clear about the theological distance here, because this is where most Muslims part ways with the Nation. Orthodox Islam is built on tawhid — the absolute oneness of God, who does not take human form — and on the belief that Muhammad ibn Abdullah, who died in 632, was the final prophet. The Nation has taught that Fard was God appearing in person and that Elijah Muhammad was his messenger. Sunni and Shia scholars alike consider both claims incompatible with Islam. The Nation’s account of the origin of white people through a scientist named Yakub has no basis in the Quran or the Bible and is rejected by both traditions.
The contested record
None of this can be discussed honestly without the criticism attached to it. The Nation is credited by supporters with genuine work — drug recovery, prisoner reentry, business ownership, discipline, and a message of self-respect delivered to people the wider society had abandoned. It is also designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and tracked by the Anti-Defamation League, largely over decades of antisemitic rhetoric from Farrakhan and other ministers, along with statements condemned as anti-white and anti-LGBTQ. Malcolm X’s break with the organization in 1964, and his assassination the following year by men connected to it, remains the sharpest wound in its history.