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So I’ve been putting off posting from the theme started in this thread.
Frankly, the whole Hindu caste thing, while fascinating, is a difficult nut to crack-still not sure it’s racist, but it results in racism. I’ll hopefully have something coherent to post on it soon. I’ve also been a little to busy. For your amusement, though, and to give at least some equal time to something that’s obvious (and absurd) I figured I’d get to the Nation of Islam-not to be confused with conventional Islam, neither Shia, Sunni nor Sufi, but the group more commonly known as the Black Muslims.
A little background: the Nation of Islam was founded in 1931 by a man who’s a bit of a mystery, Wallace D. Fard, later, Wallace Fard Muhammad. Fard met a man named Elijah Poole, who became the Honorable, Elijah Muhammad, and led the Nation of Islam until his death in 1975. Fard died in 1934-or later-more on this in a bit. In any case, Elijah Muhammad was the leader of the Nation for most of it’s history.
The basic tenet of the Nation of Islam is that there is no God but Allah. Unlike the Shia, who add to this "and Mohammad is his prophet," the Nation adds, "who came in the person of W.D. Fard". So the first bit of craziness, not racist-just garden variety religious gobbledygook, is that they believe that Fard was God incarnate, a madhi, or messiah.
However, once one delves into their cosmology and theology, things get more than a little weird, and step right off the black-Nazi boat. Most of these things can be found in a wealth of documents and public statements-for documents, there are Message to the Blackman in America, and The Supreme Wisdom. These books teach thing like:
The black man is the original, and only true human being.
The white man was created by a black mad-scientist (?!!) named Yakub, through a form of birth control, and was taught to deceive the original man through tricks and lies, so that they could divide them, conquer them, and rule over them.
That the white man is a "blue-eyed devil."
The black man is genetically superior to the white man.
The Nation also teaches other things-like complete separation of the races, but it also teaches independence, economic responsibility, and good citizenship. Like any reasonably successful religion, it gives order to some people’s lives, and there are many good people who practice this religion, and are good citizens. It also has a history of teaching divisiveness and hate. Some of its most famous members repudiated its teachings, and joined mainstream Islam: Malcom X and Muhammad Ali for starters, and rejected the racist teachings of the Nation of Islam-but only after publicly believing and saying some very hateful things that they later regretted. Some, like Louis Farakhan and his followers, are still preaching crazy stuff like this every day-Farakhan is even regularly on public access cable in Detroit, Chicago and Denver.
They also believe a lot of other crazy stuff, like Fard didn’t really die in 1935 (God, sorry, Allah, can’t die) he was transported to another plane in a spaceship. Of course, their believing that Fard is God is heretical to the rest of Islam, which, BTW, teaches that all races are equal.