R.I.P. W. Deen Mohammed
Hat Tip: New York Times
Imam W. Deen Mohammed, a son of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, who renounced the black nationalism of his father’s movement to lead a more traditional and racially tolerant form of Islam for black Muslims, died on Tuesday in Chicago. He was 74.
The death was confirmed on the blog of Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Michigan, where Imam Mohammed had recently led a convention. The Associated Press reported that no cause had been determined.
Imam Mohammed emerged from the cauldron of religious politics and internal rivalry that characterized the Black Muslims, as the Nation of Islam members were called, in the 1960s and 1970s.
Following Malcolm X, who was drifting away from black separatism toward traditional Islam when he was assassinated in 1965, Imam Mohammed increasingly favored a nonracial approach to religion, without categorizing white people as devils, as Elijah Muhammad did. His father excommunicated him several times for this dissidence.
The son was nonetheless unanimously elected supreme minister of the Nation of Islam after his father’s death in 1975. He pushed his followers toward a more orthodox faith, emphasizing study of the Koran and the five duties of a Moslem: faith, charity, prayer five times a day, fasting during Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca. A major change was rejecting the divinity of the founder of the Nation of Islam, Wallace D. Fard; a lesser one was relaxing the religion’s strict dress code.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:02 am
What a man of conviction! Each of us should reconsider following strictly after ‘our parent’s religion’, and instead pursue truth rather than follow after tradition!
Yasser Arafat once commented on how inextricably the 3 major faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are tied together. He reportedly said this to Rev. Bob Schuler, when his wife became a Christian!