ABSTRACT
The Nation of Islam's protest against oppression therefore has a strong theological basis. This chapter explores how Elijah Muhammad, and later Louis Farrakhan, answered the basic questions posed by any theology: What is the divine? Can the divine be known, and how are human beings to respond to this knowledge of the divine? The historian of African American religion Lawrence Mamiya argues that the split between Farrakhan and Warith Dean Muhammad roughly followed class lines. According to his argument, Farrakhan drew his followers from the lower classes. Mamiya believed that economic hardship and racial strife during the 1980s might, therefore, lead to growth for Farrakhan's Nation. Contrary to Mamiya's thesis, those years in fact coincided with Farrakhan's gradual move away from the racial particularism of Elijah Muhammad's theology. Farrakhan even appears to have embraced Muslim "orthodoxy.".
