There is a massive 700 plus posts first section of this thread in Archives if anyone wants to look at it, but almost the entire thing is 2008 or earlier so I am not sure it is worth the effort.
With all the yelling and screaming going on about Islamic believers being brought into the USA I thought it would be wise to refresh my memory of the Muslim faith, which I have little used since the chapter on major religions in my history studies some 30 years ago.
In the course of my reading up on the subject today I discovered a little recognized fact. The group calling itself Nation of Islam is actually a small splinter group that started from the original Nation of Islam after 1979, when the original group changed its focus.
When W.D. (Wallace) Muhammad was installed as Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam in 1975, he immediately began to reformulate his father's beliefs and practices to bring NOI closer to mainstream Sunni Islam. He renamed his organization a number of times, settling on the American Society of Muslims, and many of his followers assimilated into traditional Islam. Wallace Muhammad publicly shunned his father's theology and black separatist views, changed the spelling of his last name from the Nation’s preferred “Muhammad” to the older form “Mohammed,” accepted whites as fellow worshipers and attempted to forge closer ties with mainstream Muslim communities in the United States. Wallace later changed his own name to Warith Deen Mohammed.
In all Imam Mohammed lead about 200,000 of the 220,000 members of the Nation of Islam into a much more traditional form of Sunni Islam, almost doubling the Sunni population of the USA within three years of his becoming the leader of the movement. As late as 2005 this mass influx of former Nation of Islam members made up a third of all Sunni Muslims in the total USA population. Even today after large numbers of Asian and Middle Eastern Muslims have emigrated to the USA the former Nation of Islam members and their converts make up 24 percent of the total Muslim population of the country.
Despite the name Nation of Islam being used by that group they are not very much like mainstream Sunni's, they believe in Black Supremacy and still call for a separation of the 'races' as reparations for slavery and other past transgressions. In 2010 they alienated most mainstream Muslims by getting involved with Dianetics, the religion based on the books of L. Ron Hubbard.
Basically if all you know about Islam is what you have heard from leaders like Louis Farrakhan
or those who criticize him you don't know much about actual Islam.
