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Nation of Islam women are expected to emphasize housework and child rearing and to dress "modestly." (Whereas they must be covered even in August, pants are sometimes permitted.) When religious services are crowded, it is not unknown for women to be asked to give up seats to men and listen via loudspeaker in another room.
The Nation of Islam operates restaurants, bakeries and fish markets. Members tithe, and some have donated for decades to buy farmland, a scheme Farrakhan pledges to finally put into action this summer. He vows to open a $3 million restaurant-and-bakery complex on Chicago's South Side, reopen a Nation of Islam supermarket and build a printing plant for the Final Call big enough to rent space. He recently bought a Chicago "business center" to house management and media operations as he expands into TV. He already has Nation of Islam bookstores that do a brisk business in tapes of his speeches and books on black topics.
In Chicago the Nation operates the Muhammad University of Islam, actually an elementary and secondary school run by Shelby Muhammad, a former Chicago public-school teacher who converted in the early '80s. Along with religious training, the school emphasizes math, science -- and discipline. Children are searched on arrival, not only for weapons but for candy and gum as well. This rigor is so popular, Muhammad says, that she has had to stop accepting applications from non-Muslim parents.
To white America, these operations are virtually invisible. What whites know about Farrakhan is the hate he spews or, in the case of Khallid Abdul Muhammad, endorses. Some critics thought Muhammad was a stalking-horse for Farrakhan himself. TIME's Monroe, who has known Farrakhan for a decade, believes his professed anger at Muhammad was genuine. But Farrakhan wouldn't back down from his argument that Jews must acknowledge a historical role as slave traders, slave owners and ghetto employers and landlords. Far from their being another oppressed group, he says, when it comes to black America, Jews were oppressors. This leaves Jews, who played a major role in the black civil rights movement, feeling betrayed. And as a matter of logic, points out Farrakhan adversary Henry Louis Gates, chairman of Harvard's department of African-American studies, it is dubious. To blame Jews today for acts centuries ago, Gates says, carries "the tacit conviction that culpability is heritable."
Despite the protest, Khallid Abdul Muhammad is to appear on a New Jersey campus again, at Trenton State College next week. Governor Christine Whitman will counter with free screenings for college students of the Holocaust film Schindler's List to show "in a very, very graphic way what happens if the kind of attitudes expressed at Kean College are left unchecked."