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Despite its name, the Nation of Islam has never been accepted as valid by the major branches of the religion, in part because it granted its leader the status of prophet. Says Mustafa Malik, director of research of the American Muslim Council: "To be a Muslim, you have to believe that there is only one God and Muhammad is his last Prophet. The Nation of Islam people believe that Elijah Muhammad is the last Prophet. There is nothing in common except that we call ourselves Muslims and they call themselves Muslims." The Nation of Islam is not alone. Several of the 17 or more American black Muslim sects -- including one in Atlanta run by the '60s civil rights radical formerly known as H. Rap Brown -- depart from orthodoxy.
Elijah was succeeded by his son Wallace, who shifted the movement away from antiwhite anger and toward orthodox Islam. Farrakhan was one of several Nation leaders who resisted Wallace's direction and sought to reconstitute Elijah Muhammad's faith. Eventually he became not only Elijah's ideological heir but also the tenant of his castle -- Farrakhan now lives in his ornate, fortress- like home where, as in Elijah's day, Nation of Islam guards are on constant patrol outside.
That was not the career for which he seemed headed in boyhood as Louis Eugene Walcott in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, then beginning its shift from a predominantly Jewish area to a black one. A choirboy at St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church, he ran relays in track and made his way to Winston-Salem Teachers College in North Carolina, which he attended for two years. But his real gift was for music. He played the violin obsessively, retreating to the bathroom with bow in hand for three to five hours at a stretch. He also sang and played guitar and, after leaving college, appeared on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and in nightclubs as Calypso Gene or the Charmer. He has said that after hearing Elijah Muhammad speak in 1955, he had a dream in which he was expected to choose between show business and an unknown future -- and he chose the unknown.
He did not entirely give up entertaining when he joined the Nation of Islam. During his early years, he wrote and recorded A White Man's Heaven Is a Black Man's Hell, a favorite black Muslim anthem. And he still plays the violin between 1 and 3 o'clock most mornings. At his 60th birthday concert in Chicago last May, soon to be available on videotape, he played Mendelssohn.
As a soldier in the Fruit of Islam, the Nation's security force and training vehicle for young men, Farrakhan proved an apt disciple. He became head of the temple in Boston and then, after Malcolm X left, temple head in New York City. By the early 1960s he was prominent in the urban black community. White Americans did not notice him until two decades later.