Fard appeared selling oriental rugs to black families recently arrived from the South. But these doctrinal statements are not the whole of the matter: Fard was concerned with black uplift and hard work, with casting off the remnants of slavery and the mentality that went with it, with control over diet and physical exercise. He preached the importance of mathematics as discipline for the mind, and taught his disciples that they should memorize key figures about the population and size of the earth: the square miles of arable land, the diameter of the planet, the ratio of water to land.
Fard disappeared in He was succeeded, after a power struggle, by Elijah Poole, who became the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, leader of a newly militant Nation of Islam. There was a complex mythology, according to which blacks had built a magnificent civilization thousands of years ago in the holy city of Mecca.
And there had arisen in Mecca a jealous and evil scientist named Yacub who, banished from the city, went to the isle of Patmos and, through a brutal eugenics program, created the white man, a devil who would overspread the world with barbarity. There is no heaven higher than your head, preached Elijah Muhammad, no hell lower than your feet. His congregation attracted, among thousands of others, a Korean war veteran named Clarence Smith, who took the name Clarence 13X.
How could an absent founder be worshipped as God if there is no heaven above our heads, no hell beneath our feet? He left the Nation, or was thrown out, in , very close to the time when Malcolm X broke with Elijah Muhammad. Clarence 13X was a charismatic man, and the lost boys of the uptown streets were quickly drawn to him. He began to preach a doctrine of righteousness and self-realization.
This had nothing to do with magic or miracles, but it meant that the black man was, in the largest possible sense, the author of his own existence. Before long, he had become a presence in Harlem, which he renamed Mecca. Like Noble Drew Ali, he put new names on the land wherever he went. Allah and his friend Shahid later Abu Shahid developed the Supreme Mathematics—the Cipher, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars and Child, 0 to 9—and the Supreme Alphabet, a similar code for all of the letters, which could be used to spell out further words and encode new meanings into language.
They organized Parliaments in which Five Percenters could build together, that is, practice the exegesis and elaboration of these codes through conversation. Allah himself was arrested in June on assault charges after a tense and confused night in Harlem.
After several months in custody, he was sent upstate to the asylum for the criminally insane at Matteawan. He thought he was God, the evaluators pointed out. During this time the New York press regularly ran alarmist articles calling the Five Percenters a hate group and a terrorist organization. But how cruel to judge preemptively the politics of a movement based in spiritual life!
The man thought by the FBI and police to command an army of black supremacists turned out mostly to want support for educational programming. Now known as the Allah School in Mecca, it still exists, and it is still leased from the city on favorable terms. Allah encouraged young Five Percenters to go to college, and several were ready to matriculate by the late sixties.
On the night Martin Luther King, Jr. This presence on the ground, and the peacekeeping efforts of Five Percenters that night, is credited with having saved New York from the terrible riots that razed Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.
Gottehrer and many others wept the night Allah was mysteriously killed, only fourteen months after King. John Lindsay went to the Allah School to pay his respects, and more than four hundred people were at the funeral. In the months before his death, Allah had made a crucial final addition to his legacy: he told the Five Percenters that no single leader should succeed him, that every God had to show and prove for himself.
But the only way to follow in my footsteps is to lead yourself. He had grown up in an army family, on bases in the United States and Germany. These kids played sports, excelled in school, and had big plans; K. But they moved on to college and jobs, and K.
It ended swiftly and badly, with a conviction for a serious crime and a twenty-five- to thirty-year sentence before he was even eighteen. While in the county jail, he turned to religion. At first he converted to Sunni Islam. He was particularly touched by the Hadith that tells of a man who kills one hundred of his fellow men and sets out to repent, but dies before he can bring his atonement to completion.
The angels of mercy and the angels of torment both claim his soul, but the merciful ones argue that he has walked far enough along the path of righteousness to be forgiven, and he is saved. Still in jail, K. He would ask K. Then another man, who called himself Victorious, appeared and began to initiate the curious K. His study of the Knowledge of Self, as it is sometimes called, led him to see threads leading everywhere: to the Koran, to the Bible, to casual things people said.
He told his mother he had become interested in the Five Percenters, and when she wanted to know more, he put Victorious on the phone to explain it to her. In the prison where K. This is in keeping with their public reputation, which, insofar as it exists at all, tends to associate them with racism and extreme violence. And yet the Nation of Islam, in which many of those doctrines originated, can practice freely, and constitutional protections apply to many groups unaffiliated with a religion.
Allah B explained to me that only in the states of New York and Massachusetts can Five Percenters practice openly in prisons. But to disqualify Gods and Earths from constitutional protections because of this would be a hypocrisy remedied only by the subsequent disqualification of the entire human race from believing in the divine by virtue of its long record of violence and evil.
On the matter of what it is, exactly, that Five Percenters believe about race or almost anything else, no complete answer can be given. But there is an ethical charge to this very fact.
Culture Freedom provided backing vocals and production, and Father Shaheed served as a DJ and producer. The album was not as commercially successful as its debut, and was not as acclaimed. Sales were once again limited, but the album was a critical success. Released in a new Hip Hop era, the album received little attention, failing to reach the Billboard album chart. Despite the lack of significant attention, the album, like its past releases, received significant acclaim. White , Black.
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