Remembering Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, Iconoclast and Servant of His People

To God we belong and to Him we return. Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the passing of Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, one of the great spiritual leaders of the twentieth century. His name is one that we should all know as American Muslims, especially if we are engaged in any sort of community work. Imam Muhammad presided over a period in African American Muslim history called the "Second Resurrection," the mass exodus out of the Nation of Islam into the global community of Sunni Muslims. His example is relevant to all Muslims today looking to build communities that address their members' deepest spiritual needs.

Imam W.D. Muhammad is perhaps most famous as the successor to his father, Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam who mentored the likes of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Elijah Muhammad was certainly the most prominent figure of the "First Resurrection," that period from the 1920s into the 1970s when African Americans became the face of Islam in America. Despite obvious credal differences with our essential belief in God's Oneness, the Nation of Islam "conferred upon Blackamericans a sense of ownership in Islam," to quote Dr. Sherman Jackson. Indeed, it is largely thanks to Elijah Muhammad that so many of our African American brothers and sisters today see themselves as fully Black, fully Muslim, and fully American with the effortless authenticity that is still difficult for so many White, South Asian, or Arab Muslims in America.

Imam Muhammad's mission only furthered this sense of Black ownership in Islam. This is important to note since many memorials to him focus upon his reforms of the NOI. While there can be no doubt that these were sweeping on nearly every level--theological, organizational, political, even financial--it is the continuity he established with his father's priorities that made him as great leader from whom we can still learn today. The most important of these is perhaps the genius he shared with Elijah Muhammad for addressing the deepest theological concerns of his congregation. For, while the official creed of his reformed American Society of Muslims may have changed, he continued to pursue his father's project of social and theological liberation for all African Americans.

Nowhere was this more visible than Imam Muhammad's program, the Committee for the Removal of All Images that attempt to portray the Divine, or CRAID. This was an iconoclastic movement that attempted to persuade Black Christians to remove images of Jesus--especially ones that portrayed him as a White European--from their churches. The June 17, 1977 issue of the Bilalian News, the newspaper of the reformed NOI, ran the headline, "DESTROY ALL RACIAL IMAGES OF GOD," and called upon an interfaith coalition to “demonstrate and boycott if necessary, until we get all those Caucasian images of [the] divine out of our neighborhood.”*

It may seem strange to many readers today that a Muslim leader would concern himself with the internal workings of churches. I certainly remember my own sense of confusion during my first reading of the Autobiography of Malcolm X over Malcolm's debate with the Christian prison chaplain over the true color of Jesus' skin. The debate itself was fascinating but its import eluded me. Yet this issue of portraying a White God to Black congregations cuts to the heart of debates over the role of religion in perpetuating systemic racism. Indeed, by Imam Muhammad's time, such debates were nearly a century old. As early as the 1890's, the African Methodist Episcopal preacher, Henry McNeal Turner, wrote about the detrimental psychological effects upon African Americans of having to pray to a God who resembled the same people who had enslaved and oppressed them: "Every race of people since time began... have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much so as other people?" By 1967, the historian Vincent Harding wrote in The Christian Century, "No white Christ shall shame us again. We are proud to be black." The question of the color of Christ, God's peace be upon him, therefore remained a painful topic of debate among many Black Christians and, eventually, Muslims during the decades leading up to the formation of CRAID. 

This debate became so pervasive among Black Americans that, by 1965, Elijah Muhammad could say, without further context, that "those who worship his [Jesus'] image (the so-called Negroes) are guilty of loving the white race and all that race stands for."** For Elijah Muhammad, theology was upstream of psychology as well as social and political dynamics. If an entire people could be beguiled into worshiping the likeness of their oppressors, those same oppressors could determine their place in the world. His response, therefore, struck at the root of the matter by providing a theological solution. He side-stepped the question of Jesus' color altogether by naming a Black man, Fard Muhammad, as God while declaring whites to be devils. Whatever our disagreements with these claims may be, it is clear that Elijah Muhammad was not alone in his desire to address an issue that had become a deep wound for his people. It was this same sense of theological concern that animated the mission of Imam W.D. Muhammad.

CRAID continued this tradition of theological concern for African Americans while adapting its language. Imam Muhammad not only was more diplomatic in speaking on the question of Jesus' color, he also levied his critique in a new theological language that compared his followers' task with the Prophet Muhammad's ﷺ cleansing of the Ka'aba. “Whether you realize it or not, you who support my call to have racial images removed from the worship of God, are doing something more important than anything anybody has done since Prophet Muhammad.” Moreover, his call to directly remove harmful images in Black neighborhoods followed the Prophetic ethos of first seeking to right wrongs with one's hands, and if one cannot, then to speak out against it. In this sense, Imam Muhammad's intervention in the question of Christ's portrayal was perhaps more daring than his father's--and his love for his people more fervent. 

The lessons from this single chapter of Imam W.D. Muhammad's life are far-reaching. His actions speak of a man whose finger was on the pulse of his community. He was intimately familiar with the ills that afflicted his people and possessed the insight to provide solutions that dealt with root causes rather than symptoms. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can take from him is his understanding of who "his people" were. It was not simply the Muslims. He understood portrayal of the divine as an issue that harmed not only Muslims, and not only African Americans, but humanity as a whole. And it was his belief that Islam can provide a cure for all of humanity that made him a truly Prophetic leader.

*Most of the information on CRAID is sourced from: Brummitt, Jamie L. "Black Muslims, White Jesus: Removing Racial Images of God with CRAID and W.D. Muhammad." In New Perspectives on the Nation of Islam. Edited by Dawn-Marie Gibson and Herbert Greenberg. New York, Routledge, 2017.

**Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman (Phoenix: Secretarius MEMPS Publications, 1973), 83.