Historicity reconsidered: Jesus vs W.D. Fard

[theomise]

W.D. Fard strikes me as a noteworthy data point on the 'Haile Selassie' side of the historicity equation (in contraposition to John Frum, Ned Ludd, Romulus, et al.)

In outline:

The Nation of Islam appears to have been founded circa 1930 in Detroit by a white guy from New Zealand, W.D. Fard (possibly 'mixed-race' with some roots in Pakistan, but in any case without African ancestry).

In 1934 Fard was succeeded by his pupil Elijah Muhammad (an African-American), who immediately deified Fard and began referring to him as "Allah". E.g.:

"Allah came to us from the Holy City Mecca, Arabia, in 1930. He used the name Wallace D. Fard, often signing it W. D. Fard, in the third year (1933). He signed his name W. F. Muhammad which stands for Wallace Fard Muhammad. He came alone. He began teaching us the knowledge of ourselves, of God and the devil, of the measurement of the earth, of other planets, and of the civilizations of some of the planets other than earth."

Elijah Muhammad mentioned almost nothing about Fard's actual worldly life (which allegedly involved an assortment of criminal activity and con-artistry).

Now (regarding Jesus) I would describe myself as an historicity agnostic with strong mythicist leanings. However, I find this case of "just-in-time deification" intriguing for the following reasons:

1) Fard lived in the 20th century - in the age of mass media, photography, sound recording, video production, etc. In other words, orders of magnitude more documentary evidence had been recorded and was available than in the 1st Century AD.

2) Within four years of his founding of the cult, Fard was spoken of in divine terms by his followers - indeed as "Allah" himself! This despite the fact that Fard apparently lived for several more decades (under another name), so it's not even a case of honoring the dead.

3) Fard's actual biography - as a typically flawed human being trying to survive Depression-era Detroit the best way he knew how - was deliberately suppressed and obscured from the very beginning of the movement's internal written 'history'.


Questions...

1) Does anyone know of works that examine the potential parallels here - specifically in relation to Jesus historicism?

2) Has Carrier ever written anything in this connection about Fard? (didn't see anything in the OHJ index)

3) Rank-Raglan estimate?


Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Fard_Muhammad

http://vault.fbi.gov/Wallace%20Fard%20Muhammed
http://mxmission.blogspot.com/2011/04/f ... ammad.html
http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/myste ... id=2175649

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah_Muhammad

[PhilosopherJay]

Hi Theomise,

Fascinating stuff. Thank you for this.

We should note differences between the Jesus tales and Elijah Muhammed (Elijah Robert Poole) relationship to Wallace Fard. Fard was simply a teacher of an eclectic blend of theosophy and Moorish Science. Theosophy was a popular religious cult. I recently saw a 1917 comedy short with Harold Lloyd making fun of it. It was kind of the scientology of the early 20th Century.
Moorish Science was started by Timothy Drew who changed his name to Noble Drew Ali. Timothy Drew apparently "Drew took parts of his book from the Rosicrucian work, Unto Thee I Grant, and most of it from The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, published in 1908 by esoteric Ohio preacher Levi Dowling." (Wikipedia "Moorish Science Temple." ) Drew formed the Moorish Temple in 1913, by the late 1920's, it had some 35,000 members, including Wallace Fard. Timothy Drew died of tuberculosis on July 20, 1929. Wallace Fard lost a power struggle within the Moorish Science Temple and started his breakaway Nation of Islam.
We can say that Noble Drew Ali was a self invention of Timothy Drew. Afer his death Wallace Fard (as well as a number of other followers) claimed that Noble Drew Ali had given him authority to preach. After Wallace Fard's death, Elijah Muhammad claimed authority from him.
What we get is a series of people inventing and re-inventing themselves as fictional prophets out of real people who invented themselves as fictional prophets. However, it does start with Timothy Drew inventing himself as Noble Drew Ali, but also inventing a Noble Drew Ali who authorized him to be Noble Drew Ali.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

[PhilosopherJay]

Hi All,

Apparently a lot of the information about Wallace Fard is wrong and so is the information about his mentor Noble Drew Ali (Timothy Drew). Apparently Fard was a member of Timothy Drew's Church for only a short time before he broke away and started his only church around 1930. Likewise Ali had only started his Church in 1925 (or later) as a breakaway from a Cannonite Church started in 1913 by Abdul Hamid Suleiman. What we have here is a series of audacious conmen making up stories and stealing stories they have heard to create false identities for themselves and their previous church leaders after they die.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

[PhilosopherJay]

Hi All,

The best article on this topic that I have found is Abdul Hamid Suleiman and the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple by Patrick D. Bowen. You can find it athttp://www.academia.edu/1084288/Abdul_H ... nce_Temple.

Basically Bowen says that the two men most associated perhaps with the founding of an organization that developed into the Nation of Islam are Noble Drew Ali (AKA Timothy Drew) and someone he calls Abdul Hamid Suleiman (AKA Dr. Prince de Solomon ). While there are many stories about Drew's and Suleiman's life and travels, almost nothing can be verified before 1926 for Drew (except that he lived in Newark, New Jersey in 1920) and nothing for Suleiman before 1922 (except that he was accused of beating his wife in 1909). Both Suleiman and Drew appear to have developed the idea of creating cults based partly on Shriner (Freemason) culture and eclectic Islamic ideas. Suleiman was pitching this idea in 1922 from his home in Newark. Suleiman was Egyptian or Sudanese (Sudan was part of Egypt in those days). He claimed to be 77 years old in 1922, which may have been false - seven was considered magical in theosophy which was partially based on freemason ideas. He certainly lied when he claimed to have authority from a Middle Eastern Shriner Lodge in Egypt to convert black Shriners to Islam. Nevertheless he amassed a following of hundreds of blacks in Newark, N.J. Most of the blacks in Newark were uneducated migrants from the South who had been taught all their lives to be obedient to religious men. Claiming to be an educated doctor (another con game) and that Islam, unlike Christianity, had no history of racism (false), he was able to offer them hope of overcoming white racism by religious conversion. Self declared Dr. Suleiman was arrested in 1925 for raping the children of one of the women converts.

About a year later, Timothy Drew appears on the scene in Chicago declaring himself a prophet with a similar program to Suleiman of mashing together Theosophic freemasonry with Islamic practices. It is hard to say if Drew was a follower of Suleiman, a co-founder with Suleiman of the religion or had some other relationship with him. Suleiman seems to have ended up as a fortune teller from 1927-1934 (probably after being released from prison on the rape charge).

In any case, there is nothing known factually about Timothy Drew before he incorporated a Moorish Temple in Chicago in November of 1926, except that he was living as a preacher in Newark in 1920. He reorganized the Temple in 1928 and he died of Tuberculosis in 1929. Wallace Fard then took over/broke away to form his own organization, the Nation of Islam in 1930 and Elijah Mohammad took over from him, when he died in 1934. We should remember that this is happening during the Great Depression, when times were unimaginably difficult for black people.

What we have here are a bunch of uneducated, gangster thugs making up crazy stories about themselves and others and mixing wildly divergent ideologies and practices. They are able to recruit cult members among groups of demoralized, uneducated and desperately oppressed people who are willing to do anything to escape their terrible lives.

We can say that Christianity probably started under similar conditions.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

[PhilosopherJay]

Hi All,

The more I read of the fascinating events behind the founding of the Nation of Islam, the more I agree with with the O.P. that it is relevant to the founding of Christianity. At the same time, I am not sure if the events support the concept of an historical Jesus, except in incredibly bizarre ways.

In looking at the events at the time of the founding of the Nation of Islam, one finds the creation of a mythological origin to cover up the actual criminal and pathological origin. Let us start with the idea that Elijah Muhammed declared that Wallace Fard was God. Fard started the Nation of Islam in 1930, after serving a prison sentence for drug dealing from 1926 to 1929. It was actually a breakaway group from Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple that Fard took control over. In 1934, Fard disappeared shortly after being arrested in 1932 along with Elijah Muhammed for a ritual murder that another member of the group had performed, apparently to show his loyalty to Fard. While under arrest, Fard himself told the police that he was not only the Prophet of Allah, but also God. Later, in an insane asylum, Fard admitted that the Nation of Islam was only a con game, a way for Fard, a white man, to con blacks into making him money while taking advantage of their desperate desire for self esteem in an incredibly racist society. He promised police authorities to disband the Nation of Islam, and on this condition was released from an insane asylum and jail.
This was probably seen as a great betrayal by his follower, ex-preacher Elijah Poole, who Fard had renamed Elijah Muhammed. Fard disappeared and was never seen again shortly thereafter. Elijah Muhammed found that he was losing his mentor, but also losing his meal ticket "the Nation of Islam" as well. This was not a good situation for a Black man to be in during the Great Depression in 1934. I am speculating here, but its seems logical to me that Elijah Muhammed had Fard murdered, the same way he would later have Malcolm X and other disgruntled members of the Nation of Islam murdered. Everybody suspected Elijah Muhammed of the murder after Fard's "disappearance". To throw suspicion away from himself Elijah Muhammed declared that Fard had been God/Allah and had appointed him supreme leader of the Nation of Islam when he renamed him as Muhammed, the prophet of God. According to the logic of Elijah Muhammed, he loved God and therefore how could he murder God if he believed Fard was God? Therefore Elijah Muhammed could not have murdered Fard. In other words, Elijah Muhammed's deification of Fard was his defense against the idea that he had murdered Fard.
In fact, this is actually strong evidence proving that Elijah Muhammed did murder Fard. If Fard was still alive, Muhammed would have to be afraid that Fard would come back and denounce the Nation of Islam as a fraud and disband it as he promised the police to do. By declaring Fard as God, the members would have to believe him and the Nation of Islam would be destroyed (that is, Muhammed's meal ticket would disappear). Muhammed would only have declared Fard to be God if he knew for certain that Fard was dead and wasn't going to show up again. If Muhammed knew that Fard was dead, he must have known or suspected who did it. If it was someone else, he would have revealed it to the police to avoid persecution. Only if he himself had killed Fard or had ordered the killing of Fard, would he keep quiet about his knowledge that Fard was dead.
Thus Elijah Muhammed's deification of Fard can be taken as his confession to the murder of Fard.

To relate this to the origin of Christianity, one has to wonder if some Jesus-like figure was killed by his followers and the crime pinned on the Jewish and Roman leadership?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

[steve43]

Who bore more guilt- Judas, Caiaphas, or Pilate?

[Adam]

Doesn't sound like you read Jay's post today, Steve. The parallel would be that Peter or James got Jesus murdered!
By the way, thank's Jay, for getting at the truth of the Fard Fraud. He sounds like a character out of Boardwalk Empire, the HBO series in which Steve Buscemi stars.

[andrewcriddle]

............................
In 1934, Fard disappeared shortly after being arrested in 1932 along with Elijah Muhammed for a ritual murder that another member of the group had performed, apparently to show his loyalty to Fard. While under arrest, Fard himself told the police that he was not only the Prophet of Allah, but also God. Later, in an insane asylum, Fard admitted that the Nation of Islam was only a con game, a way for Fard, a white man, to con blacks into making him money while taking advantage of their desperate desire for self esteem in an incredibly racist society. He promised police authorities to disband the Nation of Islam, and on this condition was released from an insane asylum and jail.
This was probably seen as a great betrayal by his follower, ex-preacher Elijah Poole, who Fard had renamed Elijah Muhammed. Fard disappeared and was never seen again shortly thereafter.
..................................

Hi Jay

Can you give me references for the claim that Fard was held in an asylum c 1933 and whle there admitted that the Nation of Islam was a con ?

Looking on the Internet I can't find a reliable source.

Andrew Criddle

[neilgodfrey]

We are looking for case studies in history that compare with the broad outline of the Jesus narrative. Does not a case study like this one about Fard indicate that such a narrative is not the sort of event that produces a steadily growing and expanding religious movement?

I think what would be interesting would be to ask what sorts of evidence we would expect to find from such a scenario and compare with what we do indeed find.

Ditto for the comparable narrative about Jesus. We can even factor in the usual hypotheticals -- the nature of oral traditions, Q, and the rest -- in addition to the letters and gospels.

[Solo]

............................
In 1934, Fard disappeared shortly after being arrested in 1932 along with Elijah Muhammed for a ritual murder that another member of the group had performed, apparently to show his loyalty to Fard. While under arrest, Fard himself told the police that he was not only the Prophet of Allah, but also God. Later, in an insane asylum, Fard admitted that the Nation of Islam was only a con game, a way for Fard, a white man, to con blacks into making him money while taking advantage of their desperate desire for self esteem in an incredibly racist society. He promised police authorities to disband the Nation of Islam, and on this condition was released from an insane asylum and jail.
This was probably seen as a great betrayal by his follower, ex-preacher Elijah Poole, who Fard had renamed Elijah Muhammed. Fard disappeared and was never seen again shortly thereafter.
..................................

Hi Jay

Can you give me references for the claim that Fard was held in an asylum c 1933 and whle there admitted that the Nation of Islam was a con ?

Looking on the Internet I can't find a reliable source.

Same request, Philosopher Jay. Fard's and the NOI FBI files are on line but there is no mention of an insane asylum and the rumours of a ritual killing were not considered serious enough to warrant arrest. FBI's concern with the org was principally because of its opposition to the Selective Service Act of 1917. Fard apparently did admit to the investigators the "(Lost and Found) Nation of Islam" was a racket, and that he was conning people into believing he was Allah and hailing from Mecca (see page 8 here). Could you provide some reference material to substantiate that the earliest cult was violent and that Ward was a patient in a psychiatric facility ? Thanks.

Best,
Jiri