The basement wall holds a crazy quilt of artwork, ranging from an old-time Americana print of three kittens in a treasure chest to a distinctly Middle Eastern poster of King Tutankhamen.
But it is the big painting of a black couple in formal attire that pulls together the diverse backgrounds of those who live and work inside this tidy bungalow in an integrated neighborhood of south suburban Calumet City.
“This painting of my father and mother was done from a photo at my sister’s wedding reception,” said Imam W. Deen Mohammed. “My father was a wise man. This shows his family side.”
Not all sides of his father’s life similarly please Mohammed. They propelled him to the top of a multimillion-dollar religious empire and the horns of a dilemma: by rejecting his father’s leadership style, Mohammed stepped away from that empire and let it fall.
In so doing, he has put himself in concert with millions of Muslims worldwide, but at odds with a controversial former partner who has tried to resurrect the fallen power.
The couple in the painting are Elijah and Clara Muhammad. They had eight children together, one of whom was Wallace, now known as W. Deen.
When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, the Nation of Islam he had built into a powerful faith-and-finance empire during four decades of autocratic reign was at a crossroad. Would it continue teaching its successful militant brand of religion, whose nationalistic message was retribution for black Americans in a racist society? Or would it move toward a riskier religious concept, seeking to align African-Americans with a billion Muslims who practice Islam worldwide?
Which way would it go, and who would lead the way?
Nearly 20 years past that crossroad, it has become clear that Muhammad’s American religious movement has traveled a good distance down both paths. And it has followed two dramatically different personalities.
Minister Louis Farrakhan, a former Episcopalian recruited into the Nation of Islam by the late Malcolm X, has continued the militant separatist stride.
W. Deen Mohammed has sought to walk the more tolerant, inclusive route.
And for all the sensational publicity that Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has generated-most recently when a suspended top aide was shot in the leg by a disgruntled former minister-Mohammed has quietly moved to prominence in a much larger, though not as clearly defined, group of African-American Muslims.
“I discourage a formal name, but we identify ourselves as Muslim Americans,” Mohammed said.
There are no precise figures for the U.S. Muslim population, nor a breakdown of the racial, ethnic and political groups within it. But researchers estimate there are 6 million Muslims in this country, of whom 2 million are blacks.
Within that group, 10,000 to 20,000 are members of the Nation of Islam headed by Farrakhan, while some 200,000 followed Mohammed from the Nation of Islam when he dissolved it in 1975, according to the American Muslim Council.
Small fish in a big pond
At least one researcher puts the Nation of Islam membership even lower. “Farrakhan draws big audiences, but his hard-core followers only number about 2,000,” said Amir Amin, managing director of the Chicago-based Institute of Islamic Information and Education.
Since resurrecting the Nation of Islam’s name and philosophy in 1978, Farrakhan has become the big fish in a small, but splashy, pond.
Mohammed is comfortable as a smaller fish in mainstream Islam.
Farrakhan has parlayed his anger’s popular resonance into speaking engagements across the country that draw big crowds, controversy and publicity.
To considerably less fanfare, Mohammed also has kept a busy national speaking itinerary.
In recent weeks, he has traveled from coast to coast and from Toronto to Houston, addressing audiences ranging from worshipers in a mosque in Philadelphia to college students in Albany, N.Y., to an interracial Christian peace gathering in Los Angeles. He spoke at an international Islam conference in Mecca in 1990, and led the first-ever prayer by an Islamic clergyman in the U.S. Senate in 1992.
Pride in segregation
While Farrakhan directs his ministry from a posh mansion on Chicago’s South Side, the working center of Mohammed’s ministry is a Calumet City basement office just a few steps from the three kittens poster.
The two leaders’ separate approaches are also evident in their ministries’ respective newspapers: Emulating the style of Elijah Muhammad’s long-time publication, Muhammad Speaks, Farrakhan’s Final Call is more confrontational than Mohammed’s Muslim Journal.
When blacks were “openly mistreated by citizens of this country and the courts were denying them justice,” there was a justification for the Nation of Islam approach, if not a moral sanction for it, Mohammed said.
Asked if he thinks America is no longer segregated, he said, “That complaint is my boast.
“America is segregated and I hope it stays segregated. We are going to love each other, get along with each other, and support what is good for all Americans. …
“We need to be proud of our social group. If it happens to be all black, then that’s not bad, that’s good. We should not do it so selfishly that it hurts us when another group progresses. We should applaud the good progress of other groups, but want our group to keep up.
“That’s not racism. It might be racial, but there’s nothing wrong with being racial. It’s wrong when you hate that other people have something, and you want to deny them what they have.”
It could be argued that Elijah Muhammad left the keys to his kingdom with his son, who was then known as Wallace Deen Muhammad, by naming him as successor. But if so, Elijah Muhammad did not leave a clear roadmap for the future.
In fact, he left no will enumerating his portion of the $20 million-plus ministry or his chosen benefactors. As a result, the fortune dissipated in probate legal fees and taxes during years of litigation among his eight legitimate and 13 illegitimate children.
Feuding and infighting
The feud over Muhammad’s financial estate was matched by infighting over his legacy of faith: As his son took the sect toward Islamic orthodoxy and called it the American Muslim Mission, Farrakhan disagreed and formed a breakaway, reorganized Nation of Islam in 1978.
In the years since, the two men who first met in the 1950s when Mohammed was a restaurant cook-manager and Farrakhan a calypso singer have tried several times to reconcile their differences.
An aide to Farrakhan said he would not consent to an interview about his relationship with Mohammed and other Muslims.
For his part, Mohammed talked at length about his deliberate split from the Nation of Islam, and why he thinks it cannot survive as it now operates under Farrakhan.
Stressing that he was a believer who followed and worked for his father for 40 years, Mohammed said his father’s style of “mystifying” himself into “more than a normal man” has been adopted by Farrakhan.
That has attracted followers to both men, Mohammed said, but has alienated him from both and has separated them from Islam:
“They have to be racial, promote their own interest, and pretend that nothing else works but what they believe in. They have to do that to draw from that small number of desperate souls in the black community.”
In the short run, it brings popularity and “some money, some appearance of wealth,” Mohammed said. “But in the long run, they have nothing. These things disappear in time, and you have to start all over again.”
Mohammed defended Farrakhan’s right to attack racism and materialistic behavior, but criticized what he called Farrakhan’s “radical, extreme and dangerous attacks” such as those on the Jewish community or individuals.
“I don’t think he’s really sincere when he’s attacking Jews as a religious people,” Mohammed said. “I think he’s just doing what he knows will get him in the media focus again, in the news again, and that’s how he thrives.”
Conceding that Farrakhan is a popular speaker, Mohammed contended: “He’s not popular because he’s quietly helping blacks. He’s popular because he’s loudly causing trouble.”
Existing apart
In years past, he and Farrakhan have spoken on programs together, talked of conciliation, even embraced. But it has been years since the last time, Mohammed said, and he can’t envision the next time:
“We can exist apart and not make trouble for each other. … I find it impossible right now to identify with Farrakhan or to even seek a dialogue with him, our dispositions are so different.
“He is so untrue to Islam. I think he is untrue to his own conscience and I think it bothers him seriously.”
Said John Esposito, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, “While Louis Farrakhan reflects closely the early philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, W. Deen Mohammed has taken the bulk of what used to be the Nation of Islam into the international Muslim community.
“The Farrakhan group is clearly peripheral to mainstream Islam,” Esposito said. “Most Muslims would say this is an illegitimate form of Islam.”
Indeed, some have.
“We say that Louis Farrakhan is not a Muslim,” Abdur Rahman Alamoudi recently told an interreligious commission of the American Jewish Committee. As founder of the American Muslim Council, Alamoudie addressed the group as an advocate of building better Jewish-Muslim relations.
But the reality of American Muslim understanding of Farrakhan and Mohammed is not that simple.
Mohammed Kaiseruddin, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, said he was impressed with Mohammed’s “good knowledge of Islam and the Koran” when he led prayers a few years ago at a huge diverse gathering of Muslims in Chicago for Eid-al-Fitr, a major Islamic festival.
But, Kaiseruddin said, Farrakhan “is a very effective speaker. I’ve heard him in person. While some Muslims are very critical of him, others say he will eventually come around to true Islam, so he should not be alienated from us.”
Advancing Islam’s cause
“W. Deen Mohammed is a true Muslim, advancing the cause of Islam regardless of race,” said India-born Mustafa Malik, director of research for the American Muslim Council. “Farrakhan advances a racially segregated cause. There is no room for such racism in Islam.”
Another problem many Muslims have with the Nation of Islam is its devotion to Elijah Muhammad and his teacher, Wallace Fard, as prophets, Malik said. “Muslims consider Prophet Mohammed to be the final prophet until the Messiah arrives. I don’t want to say Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are not true Muslims, but if they insist that Elijah Muhammad was a prophet, they are outside the purview of Islam.”
But one Chicago-area Muslim leader of Arabic background, insisting on anonymity, defended Farrakhan and was critical of Mohammed.
He called Mohammed a “poor manager” of his father’s estate and charged him with “trying to advance his own school of thought” rather than true Islam, and added:
“Being black in this society causes deep pain. Louis Farrakhan and his people address that pain. W. Deen Mohammed and his people do not.”
Mohammed, 60, now married for the third time, has eight children and six stepchildren. His son Wallace, as treasurer, and daughter, Laila, as secretary and scheduler, are among a small staff at work in the basement office designated as “Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohammed, Muslim American Spokesman for Human Salvation.”
Its publications, Mohammed’s travels, and a local TV show from 7 to 8 p.m. Tuesdays on WJYS-Ch. 62, are all financed by individual donations.
On a recent morning, Mohammed surveyed the scene in his Calumet City ministry office, where son Wallace processed checks as daughter Laila answered phones. They worked in a basement room filled with plastic crates and wooden desks piled high with brochures, books and cassettes-one of whose titles was “Koran Made Easy.”
Mohammed said he would like to travel less and spend more time studying the Koran, writing a book on the life of Prophet Mohammed, and “writing a strong letter to African-Americans blending Islam into our social life and religious life.
“The 1960s and ’70s took our attention away from spiritual matters. When we had a stronger religious social life, we had stronger and better families.”
