Elijah Muhammad Is the Messenger of God

Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole in Georgia in 1897, led the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975, and central to the movement's theology as he shaped it is the claim that he himself held the office of Messenger, having received his teaching directly from the man the Nation of Islam holds to be God in person, Master Fard Muhammad, during a period of instruction in Detroit in the early 1930s before Fard's disappearance from public record. C. Eric Lincoln's early study of the movement, based on fieldwork within Nation of Islam communities, describes how Elijah Muhammad's followers were taught to regard his teaching with an authority the movement placed above that of any conventional Muslim scholar or imam, since his instruction was understood to come from direct revelation through Fard rather than through the ordinary chain of Islamic scholarly transmission that gives authority to teachers in mainstream Sunni and Shia practice. Under this doctrine, Elijah Muhammad's writings and recorded sermons function within the Nation of Islam not merely as one interpreter's reading of Islam but as the specific, current instruction of God's own messenger to Black Americans, a status the movement's internal literature continued to affirm throughout his four decades of leadership.

Mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam hold Muhammad ibn Abdullah, who died in 632, as the final prophet, the seal of the prophets after whom no further messenger of God can arise, a doctrine drawn directly from the Quran's own text and treated across nearly all Islamic schools as one of the tradition's least negotiable points. Elijah Muhammad's claim to hold the office of Messenger receiving ongoing revelation therefore placed Nation of Islam teaching outside the boundary mainstream Muslim scholarship draws around orthodox belief, one of several distinctive doctrines, alongside its racial theology and its account of Fard Muhammad's own identity, that led Sunni authorities to treat the movement as a related but doctrinally separate tradition rather than another current within Islam proper. Martha Lee's study of the movement traces how this very question became the fault line inside the Nation of Islam itself after Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975, when his son and successor Warith Deen Mohammed moved the majority of the organization toward Sunni orthodoxy, explicitly repudiating his father's Messenger claim and the broader theology built on it, a reform significant enough that a smaller faction under Louis Farrakhan split away specifically to preserve Elijah Muhammad's original teaching intact.