Almost everything firmly known about the man the Nation of Islam calls Master Fard Muhammad comes from four years in Detroit. In 1930 a stranger began going door to door in the city’s poorest Black neighborhoods selling silks and other goods. He told customers that the fabrics came from their true homeland, that their ancestors had been Muslims, and that the names they carried had been handed down from slaveholders. People invited him in to hear more, and the meetings moved to rented halls. He used several names, among them W. D. Fard, Wali Farad and Wallace Farad, and said he had come from Mecca.
His followers formed the Allah Temple of Islam. He gave converts new names, laid down rules against pork, alcohol and drugs, and set up a school, the University of Islam, a women’s training class and a disciplined men’s corps, the Fruit of Islam. His teachings, later written into the Nation’s lessons, cast Black people as the original humans and white people as a race of devils whose rule would soon end. Among his most devoted students was Elijah Poole, a migrant from the South whom he renamed Elijah Muhammad.
What happened
In November 1932 a member of the movement killed a man in what he described to police as a religious sacrifice. The killer was found insane, and the Detroit papers turned on what they called a voodoo cult. Fard was arrested and questioned, insisted he had taught no such thing, and was released on condition that he leave Detroit for good; police saw him onto a train to Chicago that December. He came back within weeks, preaching quietly, and was arrested again in May 1933, when the Detroit police took his photograph and fingerprints. A further arrest followed in Chicago that September. In the spring of 1934 police raided the University of Islam, and Elijah Muhammad himself was charged.
Some time that year Fard left for good. The Nation’s own account, passed down from Elijah Muhammad, is that Fard told his student he would have to carry on the work alone, handed him a reading list and departed, as the scholar Michael Muhammad Knight retells it, with Elijah in tears. Later accounts mention a letter from Mexico received in 1934. Members questioned by the FBI decades later agreed that he had last been seen in Chicago in 1934 and had not been heard from since.
The investigation
The FBI had been watching the Nation of Islam for years when, in 1957, an internal memo noted that no real effort had been made to identify the man Elijah Muhammad called God. Its file records that the fingerprints taken in Detroit in 1933 matched those of Wallie D. Ford, arrested in Los Angeles in 1918 and sent to San Quentin in 1926 on a narcotics charge, and paroled in 1929. Agents traced Ford’s former partner, Hazel Barton, and the son they had in 1920, who was killed while serving in the Coast Guard in 1942. In 1963 the bureau helped place newspaper stories presenting the founder as a white impostor. The Nation of Islam has always rejected the identification.
The explanations
Where Fard came from is still argued. He variously gave his origins as Mecca, Afghanistan and Spain; Ford’s records point to New Zealand or Portland, Oregon; a First World War draft registration lists a birthplace in Afghanistan, and several historians now think he was of South Asian descent. His fate is murkier still. He may have left the country under another name, died not long after, or lived quietly for decades. Elijah Muhammad taught that he was alive. When Elijah died in 1975, his son and successor, Warith Deen Mohammed, suggested that an Oakland imam, Muhammad Abdullah, had been Fard all along, a claim Abdullah himself denied.
Where it stands
The FBI could not find him, and the bureau’s own memos admit it never verified his birth date or birthplace. No record of his death has been found. The fingerprint match makes it likely that the Detroit prophet and the Los Angeles café owner were the same man, but the questions that matter most to believers and historians alike, where he was born and how his life ended, remain unanswered. Every February 26 the Nation of Islam marks his birthday as Saviours’ Day.