Warith Deen Mohammed

Warith Deen Mohammed was born in Hamtramck, Michigan on 30 October 1933 as Wallace D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, and his wife Clara Muhammad.¹² Mohammed succeeded his father as the movement's leader on his death in 1975, with the title Supreme Minister.¹³ In 1976 he dissolved the original Nation of Islam and moved his community toward mainstream Islam; the English article states that his goal was to align American Muslims with Sunni Islam.¹⁴ Mohammed died in Chicago on 9 September 2008 and was buried at Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens South in Illinois.¹

Mohammed grew up inside his father's movement, was trained in its schools and mosques, and held religious posts in the movement in his youth.¹ He renamed his community several times in succession: the World Community of Islam in the West, then the American Muslim Mission, and finally the American Society of Muslims.¹³ Mohammed rejected the deification of the movement's founder W. D. Fard, accepted whites as members and fellow worshippers, and introduced the Five Pillars of Islam into his community's theology.¹³ Louis Farrakhan broke away from Mohammed's community in the late 1970s and revived the name Nation of Islam and its original teachings.¹ Mohammed led his community for more than three decades until his death, and the American Society of Muslims carried his legacy after him.¹

Mohammed's best-known achievement is the transformation of hundreds of thousands of Nation of Islam followers toward a practice close to the Islam of the wider world, one of the largest religious transformations in American history.¹ He and his community issued newspapers and religious publications, built relations with Islamic institutions in the Muslim world, and opened relations with immigrant Muslim communities in America.¹⁴ He left a written legacy of sermons, lectures and lessons on the Qur'an and on his community's history.¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The English article reports that Mohammed's goal was to align American Muslims with Sunni Islam, and describes his transformation of the movement as making it an orthodox, mainstream Islamic movement.¹ The Arabic article describes his transformation as replacing the Nation of Islam's teachings with ideas close to the Sunni Islam widespread in the East, and files him among American Sunni Muslims; on the basis of these two independent sources his school is recorded in the museum's data as sunni, documented.⁴ The Arabic article also carries a sectarian editorial verdict on whether his transformation reached "correct Islam"; that verdict belongs to the article's editors and is not adopted by the museum.⁴ The sources record that Mohammed questioned importing the geographically formed classical schools and spoke in a 2008 interview of a distinct American sense of madhhab developing, so no specific legal school is attributed to him in the museum's data.¹ Farrakhan's supporters regard the revived Nation of Islam as the true continuation of Elijah Muhammad's legacy, while Warith Deen Mohammed's followers regard his transformation as its true continuation; the museum presents both positions attributed, without a verdict.¹

• Warith Deen Mohammed — English Wikipedia¹
• Warith Deen Mohammed — Arabic Wikipedia⁴
• Warith Deen Mohammed — Urdu Wikipedia³
• Warith Deen Mohammed — Wikidata Q2030011²