

The entire movement was placed under a Minister of Islam. The men of the organization were drilled by captains and referred to as the Fruit of Islam.
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He established the Moslem Girls' Training and General Civilization Class, where women were taught how to keep their houses, clean and cook. He established the University of Islam, where school-age children were taught, rather than in the public schools. Following the rapid increase in membership, he instituted a formal organizational structure.

įard named his community the "Nation of Islam". These incidents drew police attention, according to Beynon, and contributed to persecutions and schisms. One member of the group, later declared mentally insane, allegedly participated in "human sacrifice" in 1932 in an effort to follow lessons regarding the sacrifice of devils. īeynon described disputes and tension that arose between the new community and the police over the group's refusal to send their children to public schools.
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Fard prepared texts that served as authoritative manuals of the faith and were memorized verbatim by his followers. The Quran was soon introduced as the most authoritative of all texts for the study of the faith. Finally, the community contributed money and rented a hall to serve as a Temple where meetings were conducted. Attendance at the house meetings grew until the listeners were divided into groups and taught in shifts. With growing prestige over a constantly increasing group, became bolder in his denunciation of white people and began to attack the teachings of the Bible in such a way as to shock his hearers and bring them to an emotional crisis." īeynon's interviewees told him that reports of Fard's message spread throughout the black community. In the early stage of his ministry, Fard "used the Bible as his textbook, since it was the only religious book with which the majority of his hearers were familiar. At his suggestion, he came back to teach the residents, along with guests. He began by selling silks door to door, telling his listeners that the silks came from their ancestral homeland. He came to the homes of black families who had recently migrated to Detroit from the rural South. From those interviews, Beynon wrote that Fard lived and taught in Detroit from 1930 to 1934. In 1938, sociologist Erdmann Doane Beynon published in the American Journal of Sociology a firsthand account of several interviews he conducted with followers of Fard in Michigan. Beynon's account of Fard and his followers Both during and after his life, some charged that Fard was a con man who used mystery and charisma to swindle poor blacks by selling them new Muslim names and stirring up racial animosity. He influenced his successor Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and many other Black Nationalist thinkers. He advocated community members to establish and own their own businesses, eat healthy, raise families, and refrain from drugs and alcohol.

įard taught a form of black exceptionalism and self-pride to poor Southern blacks during the Great Northward Migration at a time when old ideas of scientific racism were prevalent. In 2020, it attracted an estimated 14,000 participants. The annual Saviour's Day event is held in honor of Master Fard's birth. Today, the Nation of Islam has an estimated membership of 20,000–50,000.
