Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [55]
Q: “Why does [Fard] Muhammad and any Moslem murder the devil? What is the duty of each Moslem in regard to four devils? What reward does a Moslem receive by presenting the four devils at one time?”
A: “Because he is one percent wicked and will not keep and obey the laws of Islam. His ways and actions are like a snake of the grafted type. So Mohammed learned that he could not reform the devils, so they had to be murdered. All Moslem will murder the devil because they know he is a snake and also if he be allowed to live, he would sting someone else. Each Moslem is required to bring four devils, and by bringing and presenting four at one time, his reward is a button to wear on the lapel of his coat, also a free transportation to the Holy City of Mecca.”
The most controversial dimension of Fard’s preaching concerned Euro-Americans. Since black Americans were both Asiatics and Earth’s Original People, what were whites? The reason that both Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali had failed, Fard taught, was that neither had fully grasped the true nature of whites: as Malcolm Little was to learn, they were “devils.” To explain this, Fard presented his parable, Yacub’s History, centered on the genetic plot of an evil “Big Head” scientist named Yacub, who lived thousands of years ago. A member of the exalted tribe of Shabazz, Yacub nevertheless used his scientific skills to produce genetic mutations that culminated in the creation of the white race. Although the naturally crafty and violent whites were banished to the caves of Caucasus, they ultimately achieved control over the entire earth. The Original People, Fard taught, subsequently “went to sleep” mentally and spiritually. The task of the Nation of Islam was to bring into consciousness the “lost-found” Asiatic black man from his centuries-long slumber.
The demonizing of the white race, the glorification of blacks, and the bombastic blend of orthodox Islam, Moorish science, and numerology were a seductive message to unemployed and disillusioned African Americans casting about for a new rallying cause after the disintegration of Garveyism and the inadequacies of the Moorish Science Temple. One evening in August 1931, Fard gave a lecture to an audience of hundreds at the former UNIA hall on West Lake Street in Detroit. One young man in particular, a thirty-three-year-old migrant from Georgia named Elijah Poole, found the address mesmerizing. Recalling it later, he approached Fard and said softly, “I know who you are, you’re God himself.”
“That’s right,” Fard quietly replied, “but don’t tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known.”
Born in Sandersville, Georgia, in 1897, Poole had been a skilled laborer for years, working in his home state as a foreman at a brick-making company. Thin, wirily built, and of below average height, at the age of twenty-two he moved to Detroit along with his wife, Clara, where he quickly became an active member of the UNIA. After Garvey’s imprisonment and exile in 1927, Poole had been searching for a new movement dedicated to black racial pride. In Fard, he felt the presence of a messianic leader who could realize the shattered dreams of Garveyites.
The large number of converts to the Lost-Found Nation of Islam required Fard to institute rudimentary administrative units, a level