As just observed, Asian philosophy and religious thought are intertwined and so the questions engaged in philosophy of religion seem relevant: what is space and time? Frequently, women and men join religion online forum communities where by they are able to chitchat about their questions and considerations with regards to religion. He seeks to understand how anxieties about tyranny, intolerance, misogyny, and homophobia, seen in the politics of the Middle East, are projected onto Islam itself. David C. Lindberg states that the widespread popular belief that the Middle Ages was a time of ignorance and superstition due to the Christian church is a “caricature”. This South Side Chicago bank expanded under NOI management to hold over $10 million in assets and employ more than 500 people by 1975. This “bank for the black man,” as Elijah Muhammad called it, reflected now decades-old capital accumulation practices by the NOI and indicated that the Nation was one of the wealthiest black organizations in the United States.

In 1959 the American public learned about the NOI for the first time when New York’s WNTA-TV produced a documentary titled The Hate that Hate Produced, depicting the NOI as a black supremacist organization whose goal was the separation of blacks from the United States into a separate homeland in five Southern states. By 1969 the NOI produced the paper with an all-black printing crew in one of its buildings on a printing press capable of turning out 50,000 copies per hour. Those numbers grew to a record 950,000 in one week in 1974, making the paper one of the largest black-owned publications in the nation. While it’s one of Japan’s largest automakers, a lot of people are not aware that Nissan is actually the largest automaker in North America.A.S. “Black Merchants of Hate,” Saturday Evening Post, January 26, 1963; Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Black Man in America (Atlanta: M.E.M.P.S, 1965); Mark Berman, “Muslim Leader in Atlanta Pushing Fish Sale to Blacks: Soar Long and High,” The Atlanta Constitution, August 31, 1974; Claude Clegg, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Edward Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Milo Dakin, “Muslims Ask Alabama to Sell 100,000 Acres,” The Atlanta Constitution, January 1972; Ted Stewart, “Who Will Inherit the 80 Million Black Muslim Empire,” Sepia, May 1975; E.U.

Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); “Nation of Islam Deserted,” African Mirror, August-September 1979. William Barry Furlong, “Herbert Muhammad Works Out of Briefcase, But Handles Champ,” The Atlanta Constitution, May 11, 1975. Dennis Walker, Islam and the Search for African-American Nationhood. NOI members sold the fish door-to-door in black neighborhoods to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, promoting it as three times cheaper than land-produced meat, easier to digest, and unlike catfish, whiting was not a “bottom feeder.” In 1974 Minister Abdul Rahman Muhammad of Atlanta estimated that 200,000 pounds of fish were sold in the month of September alone. By 1974 NOI enterprises had taken on an international dimension with its agreement with a Peruvian fishing distributor to provide one million pounds of whiting fish from that South American nation. While Muhammad Speaks was officially the newspaper of the NOI from 1960 to 1975, it was also one of the organization’s most profitable enterprises. During the spring of 1952, ex-convict Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X, joined the NOI.

They also saved money by restricting their diet to one meal per day, when possible, in accordance with NOI guidelines, which in turn reduced food expenditure. They attributed their economic security to their adherence to Muhammad’s Three-Year Economic Plan, which helped them save money by eliminating the desire to purchase liquor, tobacco, expensive clothes, and cars. Wallace D. Muhammad, Muhammad’s son, began to dissolve the NOI’s business enterprises due to mismanagement. The NOI’s economic program declined after Elijah Muhammad’s death. The attacks on Elijah Muhammad and his organizations continued until his death in 1975 when his son Wallace D. Muhammad assumed the leadership of the NOI. As such the NOI had created the first black-owned national food production and distribution network, a longstanding dream of black nationalist organizations. Wallace also de-emphasized the NOI’s black nationalist agenda and moved the organization towards Sunni Islam. In 1995 Farrakhan and the new Nation of Islam convened the Million Man March on Washington D.C., an effort to publicly challenge the disintegration of both the black family and African Ameican communities. Originally starting from a base of 8,000 impoverished Detroit residents in 1934, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had transformed the Nation of Islam into an economic powerhouse with an enormous impact on the national black community which included both Muslims and non-Muslims.