The Supreme Wisdom Lessons; A Scripture of American Islam; Knight

Michael Muhammad Knight [+–]

University of Central Florida

Michael Muhammad Knight is Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida

From its beginnings in 1930s Detroit, the Nation of Islam has relied on a guarded series of texts, known as the Supreme Wisdom Lessons, to initiate and educate members. These texts appear primarily as exchanges between Nation founder Fard Muhammad and his student, Elijah Muhammad. Memorization, recitation, and interpretation of the Lessons have been of central importance to the Nation throughout its history. Even after Elijah Muhammad’s passing in 1975, the “orthodox” reforms of Elijah’s son Wallace Muhammad (later Warith Deen Mohammed) were grounded in part on Wallace’s authority to derive new meanings from the Lessons. The Lessons are also foundational for the Five Percenters, a community that emerged in 1960s Harlem through former Nation members’ reinterpretation of the Lessons.

This monograph, the first dedicated exclusively to the Lessons, places the Lessons in conversation with their historical milieu, exploring political and metaphysical discourses that informed Fard Muhammad’s world. Attention is also given to the education programs offered to convicts at San Quentin, where Fard Muhammad was incarcerated in the 1920s, for insights into his pedagogy. This monograph additionally performs deep dives into the text of the Lessons, exploring the Lessons’ process of codification, tracking differences between versions, and calling attention to points at which Elijah Muhammad appears to have performed edits within the text. Finally, The Supreme Wisdom Lessons looks at the diverse interpretive traditions surrounding the Lessons, and includes an annotated edition of the Lessons themselves.

Series: Comparative Islamic Studies

Chapter 1

Introduction [+–]

This introductory chapter introduces the Lessons, the key questions to be explored in the book’s discussions, critical issues in the study of the Lessons, important arguments of the book, and the chapter arrangement.

Chapter 2

Fard’s Syllabus: The Lessons in their World [+–]

Taking us into the milieu that informed Master Fard Muhammad and major themes found in the Lessons, Chapter 2 pushes back against a common approach to both academic and popular studies of Fard. Researchers of Fard’s teachings often treat the appearance of similiarities—no matter how flimsy or vague—between the Lessons and possible connections in the larger “Islamic world” as a master key to unlock Fard’s geographic, sectarian, and ethnic background. Well-circulated claims have attempted to identify Fard’s “native” Islam, but I argue that these claims are overly speculative and poorly evidenced, relying chiefly on superficial coincidences and cultural essentialisms. In chapter 2, I demonstrate that it’s more generative to think about the discourses that flowed around Fard (and those who embraced his message) in the times and places where we can reliably locate him. Such discourses include those of Muslim communities in the U.S., most notably the Ahmadiyya and MSTA, but these communities themselves were also deeply connected to a world of metaphysical, esoteric, and occult media, movements, and thinkers. Chapter 2 detonates the idea of tracing Fard’s ideas to a singular “homeland” source or set of sources, given the extent to which many of what would become his key themes were so prolifically circulated in the literatures of his period.

Chapter 3

“I Came to North America by Myself”: Thirty Years in the Wilderness, 1904-1934 [+–]

This chapter takes us deeper into Fard’s life for the thirty years that we can document his presence in North America and explores various political and metaphysical discourses that could have been salient to Fard’s development, such as the anticolonial revolutionary Ghadar movement in the Pacific Northwest. This chapter gives special attention to Fard’s time in Los Angeles and his imprisonment at San Quentin. Looking at San Quentin in the 1920s, we find a strong Theosophical presence both in the prison library and the state’s official approval of Theosophy as a religion, meaning that the prison regularly held specific services for its Theosophist inmates. I also examine the three-tiered educational program that San Quentin offered its prisoners, specifically its middle “letter box” tier, as foundational to Fard’s own pedagogical strategies. I demonstrate that San Quentin’s “letter box” coursework resonates with the style and structure of Fard’s Problem Book, and then follow Fard after his 1929 release from San Quentin to track the emergence of his Nation of Islam in 1930s Detroit and Chicago. Finally, this chapter concludes with consideration of the various possibilities for Fard’s whereabouts after his disappearance.

Chapter 4

Making the Lessons [+–]

The fourth chapter examines the textual histories of the Lessons and Problem Book, focusing on their development from their earliest traces in the 1930s and 40s, points of variation between early copies, and the question of whether we can determine which content came from Fard as opposed to Elijah Muhammad’s post-Fard revisions. The chapter argues that as different Nation factions maintained their own versions of the Lessons after Fard’s disappearance, the version now understood as a base canonical text bears signs of Elijah Muhammad’s editorial intervention. Most significantly, this chapter establishes that before identifying Fard as Allah, Elijah Muhammad identified Fard as Allah’s son, and that corresponding to his linkage of Fard with Christ, Elijah added a description of Fard as “Son of man” to a precanonical version of Muslim Lesson No.2. While Elijah modified the Lessons to affirm his Fard-centered christology, the Lessons do not express Elijah’s more developed theology of Fard as Allah, which he introduced early in the second half of the 1930s. This chapter gives critical consideration to Muslim Lesson No.2’s claimed date of February 20, 1934, while affirming the early crystallization of the Lessons in roughly their recognizable canonical form.

Chapter 5

Renewing the Lessons: Nation(s) of Islam [+–]

This chapter moves beyond Fard and Elijah Muhammad to consider the interpretive traditions that have developed around the Lessons, focusing on the two primary heirs claiming Elijah’s legacy after his passing in 1975: his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, who led the Nation in what he called the “second resurrection,” moving towards aspirations of a global, universal, “orthodox” Islam; and Elijah’s national minister, Louis Farrakhan, who had succeeded Malcolm X in that position and initially adhered to Warith Deen’s reform project, but broke away in 1978 to revive the classical Nation as it had been under Elijah’s leadership. This chapter reveals the Lessons’ complexity as a sacred text as we see its most authoritative readers deploy the Lessons to radically different conclusions. Warith Deen Mohammed’s project of bringing the Nation into “orthodox” Islam ironically depended in no small part on his authority to decode and ultimately recode the Lessons. To move his community away from the Lessons, in other words, he needed to make a convincing argument that this move was in fact embedded in a deeper understanding of the Lessons’ secret meanings. My treatment of Louis Farrakhan’s engagement of the Lessons also complicates the picture, as I focus not only on Farrakhan himself but also leading intellectuals under his leadership, such as Tynetta Muhammad and Wesley Muhammad, who in very different ways demonstrate the Lessons’ versatility as a resource for making Islamic meanings.

Chapter 6

The Lessons as Tradition: The Five Percenters and Ansaru Allah Community [+–]

Chapter 6 broadens this treatment with a look beyond Warith Deen Mohammed’s post-Nation community and Farrakhan’s Nation revival to the Five Percenters, also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths (NGE). As I’ve mentioned, Five Percenters generally reject self-identification as Muslims and consider their tradition to be completely distinct from the Nation of Islam (with some exceptions) but share with the Nation an investment in the Lessons. In this chapter, I look specifically to the significance of the Lessons in the Five Percenters’ origins and ongoing development as an interpretive tradition. I also examine the Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews, among other names (presently known as Nuwaubians), who performed what I have called a “polemical embrace” of the Lessons, appropriating the Lessons to undermine the claims of other communities and leaders (such as Warith Deen Mohammed, Louis Farrakhan, and Allah, the former Clarence 13X) and bolster their own narratives.

Chapter 7

Conclusions: The Stranger and the Apostle [+–]

This concluding chapter pulls together themes from the preceding discussions and critically reflects on the Lessons and their continual significance in American Islam.

Appendix

Appendix: The Lessons and Problem Book [+–]

As an appendix, I then offer the annotated Lessons and Problem Book. This text and annotation reflect a study of copies from the earliest extant versions, including quotations and paraphrasings from the 1930s, through the present, including a copy of the Lessons from Malcolm X’s personal archive. My purpose is not to reconstruct the original ur-text of the Lessons, but rather to establish a consistent canonical “base text” while accounting for variations.

Reviews

The Supreme Wisdom Lessons is the most interesting, original, and significant book on the Nation of Islam that I have read in the last 25 years. In tracing the inspiration, history, and use of the Lessons, Michael Muhammad Knight illuminates everything from the origin of Fard Muhammad and the development of and struggles within the NOI to the formation of the Five Percenters. He shows how this scripture has been far more influential than the Bible or the Qur’an in the development in American Islam. Until now, it has been not given the scholarly attention it merits, and there is nothing I have written about the Nation of Islam that would not have been greatly improved had Knight’s book existed when I was writing them.
Herbert Berg, Professor emeritus, University of North Carolina Wilmington

Responding to prison authorities’ heavy-handed repression of a minority Black religious group – the Five Percenters, aka the Nation of Gods and Earths – Michael Muhammad Knight has produced a fascinating and well-documented study of the scriptures used by the Nation of Islam and related movements. By situating the teachings of the enigmatic W. D. Fard in the milieu of alternative spiritualities such as freemasonry, theosophy, and apocalypticism, Knight provides a highly original and persuasive demonstration of how to understand religious movements deemed suspicious by the state.
Carl W. Ernst, Wiliam R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Comparative Islamic Studies

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The Supreme Wisdom Lessons

A Scripture of American Islam

Michael Muhammad Knight [+–]

University of Central Florida

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