II. BACKGROUND OF NOI
A previous monograph explained how the Nation of Islam originated as one of many militant and cultist groups which had arisen in the northern industrial cities of the United States following World War I.
Briefly, the NOI, known at various times as Allah's Temple of Islam and the Muslim Cult of Islam, developed in Detroit, Michigan, out of the teachings of one W. D. Fard. Fard was a door-to-door peddler in the Negro neighborhoods of that city. To stimulate his sales, he told his customers that his products came from their home country from which he also had come. His rather mystic personality apparently entranced his customers, and before long he was instructing small gatherings with tales of their "true origin." In this way, the tenets of the cult were developed. Little factual data was ever learned concerning Fard; and after May, 1933, when ordered by local authorities to leave Detroit, he dropped out of sight and no trace of him has ever been found.
Following Fard's disappearance, one of his followers, a Georgia-born Negro named Elijah Poole, assumed leadership of the cult. Poole explained that Fard had been Allah himself, had renamed him "Elijah Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah," and had ordered him to continue teaching "the lost-found black people in the wilderness of North America."
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