WEB POSTED 03-10-2000
70 year
Commemorative of The Nation of Islam in North America
What others have said
Over the last 70 years,
accolades and tributes to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Minister Louis
Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam have come from all quarters.
Here's a cross-section of how others have seen it.
Readers Digest magazine
(reported in early 1960s)
"This mild-looking man is the most powerful Black man in
America. He offers a new way of life. Muhammad prompts even his severest
critics to agree when he says he attacks ‘traditional reasons the
Negro race is weak."
James Baldwin, author,
"The Fire Next Time"
"Elijah Muhammad has been able to do what generations
of welfare workers and committees and resolutions and reports and
housing projects and playgrounds have failed to do. ... He has done all
of these things, which our Christian church has spectacularly failed to
do."
Jet magazine
"Muhammad, a master psychologist, offers identification,
definition and belonging to all those who seek it, and in return gets a
loyalty, obedience and discipline which staggers the imagination."
New York Times magazine
"Alone of all the Negro leaders, Elijah Muhammad has a
vivid awareness of the vital need of a new birth in any drastic human
transformation, and he alone mastered the technique of staging a new
identity. ... It is worth remembering that what Elijah Muhammad is doing
to the Negro is, in a sense, what America has done to the immigrant from
Europe."
Arthur J. Schlesinger, former presidential
assistant and historian, writing in Esquire magazine
"Muhammad’s movement is unique in that it has thrived
outside of the Christian tradition and the Protestant community. White
Americans have brought this on themselves, and the responsibility can’t
be evaded by attacking the Muslims.
Newsweek magazine
"They (the Muslims) manage to do something that is beyond
the grasp of most public schools in urban ghettos. Muslims schools have
little trouble with drugs, truancy, or unruly behavior."
Newsweek magazine 30 years
later
"Still, Farrakhan can attract an audience like no other
political performer. Many Blacks also credit Farrakhan with being a
doer. According to them, he saves lost souls, launches Black businesses
and chases drug dealers out of neighborhoods—all without government
handouts. ..."
The Washington Star News
"The Black Muslim Mosque has been called by high police
officials a stabilizing influence in the community."
Life
magazine
The "N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League cannot match the
impact of the ... Muslims. Their leaders do not have the hour-by-hour
contact with people who, like the Muslims, suffer the problems each and
every day of their lives."
Abdul Basit Naeem, former editor and publisher
of Moslem World & The U.S.A.
"Despite Mr. Elijah Muhammad’s blunt techniques and a
few controversial teachings about certain aspects of Islam, I have
nothing but the utmost respect for the Moslem leader. I do indeed
appreciate his efforts to bring the Black people of America back into
the fold of Islam, which, in his opinion, as in mine, is the only
solution to their basic problems. ... Americans of African descent, I
believe, should be grateful that the Message of Allah has, at last, been
brought to them, through the person (of) ... Mr. Elijah Muhammad."
