Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [54]
For all his proselytizing, however, Sadiq was not a natural leader. By the late 1920s, the movement languished; but it did not die away completely. Under the guidance of a new leader, Sufi Bengalee, the Ahmadi movement surged again. In 1929-30 Bengalee delivered over seventy public lectures throughout the United States, reaching thousands. Many of these events were designed to attract black and interracial groups. For example, in November 1931 the Ahmadi-sponsored program “How Can We Overcome Color and Race Prejudice?” attracted more than two thousand attendees at one Chicago venue. By 1940, through its extensive missionary work, the Ahmadis claimed between five and ten thousand American converts, half of them African Americans. The Ahmadis’ primary missionary centers were based in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City (Missouri). The movement was largely responsible for introducing the Qurʹan and Islamic literature to a large African-American audience. Because many of the proselytizers Sadiq selected were African Americans, some Garveyites were attracted to the movement, although the multiracial character of the Ahmadiyya made it difficult for most black Garveyites to convert. By the Great Depression their numbers were still significantly smaller than those of the Moorish Science Temple.
It was within this rapidly changing social context that an olive-skinned peddler calling himself Wallace D. Fard made his appearance in Detroit’s black ghetto. He regaled his poor audiences with exotic tales of the Orient, which he mixed with the militant, antiwhite views of the staunch Garveyite. Little is known of his origins. Years later, when he commanded a large number of followers, a story circulated that he had been born in Mecca, the son of wealthy parents of the tribe of the Koreish, which connected in ancestry to Muhammad. Others believed that Fard had been a Moorish Science Temple local leader on the West Coast.
Fard (pronounced FA-rod) preached in the emotional style of a Pentecostal minister, exhorting audiences to avoid alcohol and tobacco, and praising the virtues of marital fidelity and family life. Blacks should work hard, save their meager resources, and if possible own their homes and businesses. Within months, after he had attracted a sympathetic following, his message took an apocalyptic turn when he “revealed” that he was actually a prophet, sent by God to preach a message of salvation. African Americans were not Negroes at all, he announced, “but members of the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen by traders from the Holy City of Mecca 379 years ago. . . . The original people must regain their religion, which is Islam, their language, which is Arabic, and their culture, which is astronomy and higher mathematics, especially calculus.”
Fard employed elementary physics to challenge his audience’s unquestioned belief in the Bible. As one follower later explained:
The very first time I went to a meeting I heard him say: “The Bible tells you that the Sun rises and sets. That is not so. The Sun stands still. All your lives you have been thinking that the Earth never moved. Stand and look toward the Sun and know that it is the Earth that you are standing on which is moving.” Up to that day I always went to the Baptist church. After I heard that sermon from the prophet, I was turned around completely.
Fard did not claim to be divine: he presented himself as a prophet, like Muhammad, and added Muhammad to his name. By 1931, news of his controversial addresses attracted hundreds of blacks,