The Honorable Elijah Muhammad. have given us a nation he clearly altered the course of black culture and politics.The Muslims were "black" before it became fashionable to be labeled as such, and the Black Power Movement and all subsequent African-American protest styles, from the rhymes of the nationalistic rap group Public Enemy to the raison d'être of the Million Man March, are undeniably offshoots of the legacy of Elijah Muhammad.Without Muhammad, the million or so African-Americans who are now Muslims would almost certainly still be Christians.
Their numbers, moreover, are only likely to grow. Though Islam still exercises only modest appeal to white Americans, it has become a powerful and permanent presence among blacks, who by my rough calculation are 200 times more likely to convert to it than are whites. Nor is it hard to imagine such conversions beginning to cascade, in an Islamic pattern that, as the historian Richard Bulliet has established, goes back over a millennium. If that happens, Islam may well pull ahead of Christianity among blacks within a matter of decades.There are signs of such momentum already. The Arabic name Malik, for example, has become one of the most popular given names for newborn black American boys, and in some years the most popular. In black culture, according to one scholar, "all African-American youths have at least some familiarity with Islam, either through a personal encounter, a relative, a friend, a fashionable item of apparel, or, as is more frequently the case today, in the form of rap music poems." Under this last heading, consider that such rap performers as Ice Cube, King Sun, KMD, Movement X, Queen Latifa, Poor Righteous Teachers, Prince Akeem, Sister Souljah, and Tribe Called Quest have all supported Farrakhan. A still more aggressive NoI offshoot named the Five Percenters claims the allegiance of Grand Puba, Big Daddy Kane, Lakim Shabazz, and Eric B. and Rakim. In the view of Farrakhan's biographer Mattias Gardell, the "hip-hop movement's role in popularizing the message of black militant Islam cannot be overestimated."