Doubtful. If we’re talking the American NOI, then I don’t think things would be so simple as African Americans finding Sunni Islam. NOI turned into something more about black nationalism than about Islam from my perspective. I’m not sure if NOI, Elijah Muhammad, or Louis Farrakhan ever reconciled the Islamic/Arab world’s place in the slave trade, but I’m not too familiar with the early manifestations of the movement to speak on that.
I’m not sure if NOI, Elijah Muhammad, or Louis Farrakhan ever reconciled the Islamic/Arab world’s place in the slave trade
Doubtful. If we’re talking the American NOI, then I don’t think things would be so simple as African Americans finding Sunni Islam. NOI turned into something more about black nationalism than about Islam from my perspective. I’m not sure if NOI, Elijah Muhammad, or Louis Farrakhan ever reconciled the Islamic/Arab world’s place in the slave trade, but I’m not too familiar with the early manifestations of the movement to speak on that.
Persuant to the overlap with UFO cults...
For quite a few years, we’ve been keeping an eye on the odd relationship that’s developed between Farrakhan’s group and David Miscavige’s Church of Scientology. As best we can tell, that relationship began around the year 2006, when Scientologist and Baptist minister the Rev. Alfreddie Johnson Jr. began bringing Farrakhan to Hollywood Celebrity Centre events. According to NOI’s official publication The Final Call, Farrakhan began introducing Scientology concepts to his Nation of Islam followers on May 8, 2010. Farrakhan had come to the realization that L. Ron Hubbard (perhaps the whitest man who ever lived) had valuable “wisdom” for the black nationalist organization that Farrakhan has led since 1977.
Farrakhan asked his followers to study Hubbard’s original text, the 1950 book Dianetics, which is known as “Book One” to Scientologists. We’ve seen photographs of large convention rooms filled with hundreds of NOI members doing “Book One auditing,” which is the original form of counseling that Hubbard developed and does not use an E-meter. More than a thousand NOI members have been certified as Dianetics auditors, according to The Final Call. We’ve also seen an increasing number of Nation of Islam members doing actual Scientology, and progressing rather far up Scientology’s expensive “Bridge to Total Freedom.” But at this point, we still don’t see much convincing evidence of an actual merger between the two groups.
From this anti-Scientology website, which seems credible, but obviously has an agenda.