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Elijah Muhammad’s Prophets: From the White Adam to the Black Jesuses
- Author(s):
- Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations (view group) , Herbert Berg
- Editor(s):
- Michael Pregill
- Date:
- 2017
- Group(s):
- Mizan: Journal for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations
- Subject(s):
- Qurʼan, Islam--Study and teaching, Bible, Reader-response criticism
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Islamic literature, Prophets in Islam, bible in islam, Islam in America, Black Islam, Qur'an studies, Islamic studies, Reception of the Bible
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/2bvj-gg71
- Abstract:
- Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam from the mid-1930s until 1975, wrote extensively about Adam, Moses, and Jesus. His qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ bear little resemblance to the older accounts in the Qurʾān and the Bible or to the traditional qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ material. His focus was his racialist mythology into which he placed appropriate racialized versions of Adam, Moses, and Jesus. Although seemingly at odds with biblical and qurʾānic accounts, he constantly cited and alluded to these texts in order to support his novel understanding of them. In so doing, Elijah Muhammad created a modern, nontraditional, and wholly new and independent branch within the genre of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ aimed at mid-twentieth century African Americans.
- Notes:
- This is a stable archival PDF of an open-access, peer-reviewed journal article originally published at www.mizanproject.org/journal/.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 2 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
berg_elijah-muhammad.pdf