Wallace Fard Muhammad

Wallace Fard Muhammad (1877 - 1934?) was a preacher and founder of the first Nation of Islam mosque in the United States. Alternative names on record are numerous: Wali Farad, Farrad Mohammed, and F. Mohammed Ali, Wallace Dodd Fard, etc.

Sometime around 1930, Fard supposedly immigrated to the United States. Another report claims he is Wallace Dodd Ford, born in Hawaii on February 25, 1891. In Detroit, Michigan, he established the Temple of Islam, the University of Islam, a group of male guards called the Fruit of Islam and other muslim organizations.

After bestowing leadership of the Nation of Islam to his disciple Elijah Muhammad, in 1934 he disappeared without a trace. According to the FBI, he has an arrest record in the Identification Division. Debate has occured as to whether or not the arrested Wallace Dodd is in fact Wallace Fard Muhammad, both of which have been photographed.

Ideology

Fard claimed that a race war was imminent. For African-Americans, the duty was to discover their origins and purpose. The view of Christianity was a religion of the slaveowners and that Islam was the original faith of blacks prior to slavery in America. This standpoint also announced that out of all the nations of the earth, African-Americans are the only nation without any knowledge of their past history, no control of their present lives, and without any guidance for their future.

Followers were given Arabic names to replace those that had originated in slavery. Fard offered blacks a credo of moral and cultural superiority to their white oppressors.

One of Wallace's first disciples was Elijah Poole, who later changed his name to Elijah Muhammad (1897-1975). Elijah began preaching that Wallace Fard Muhammad was "The Living God".

Popular figures who adopted the ideoloy of the Nation of Islam were Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, and Malcom X. Louis Farrakhan, formally Louis Eugene Walcott, is currently the leader of The Nation of Islam and lives in Chicago, Illinois at the former home of Elijah Muhammad.