Black Muslim leader W.D. Mohammed dies at age 74

WASHINGTON – W.D. Mohammed, the son of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad who took over after his father’s death and for the next 30 years led tens of thousands of American Muslims away from separatist ideology and into mainstream Islam, was pronounced dead Tuesday at his home in Markham, Ill., a south suburb of Chicago. He was 74.

A spokesman for the Cook County, Ill., medical examiner’s office said determination of the cause of death is pending further tests.

Mohammed, who became the chief minister of the black separatist Nation of Islam in 1975, shunned his father’s fiery style and quickly forced changes that remade the nation’s largest Muslim community.

He disbanded the militaristic security force called Fruit of Islam and decentralized the rigidly structured religion. He removed chairs from mosques so its members would kneel in prayer five times a day. He advocated that observant members read the Quran in Arabic and urged the African-American-centric organization to exhibit racial tolerance.

The changes won the respect of Sunni Muslim leaders worldwide but startled longtime Nation of Islam members who were used to a philosophy of black supremacy and the practice of unquestioning loyalty to Elijah Muhammad.

Those rapid changes caused a split in the old Nation of Islam. W.D. Mohammed changed the organization’s name, reforming it as the American Society of Muslims. In 1977, his rival Louis Farrakhan revived the Nation of Islam, and with it, the often anti-white and anti-Semitic message.

Although less well-known to the public than Farrakhan, the soft-spoken Mohammed led a far larger congregation. No one knows exactly how many Muslims are in the United States, and how many of them are African-American. But the largest group, an estimated 50,000 followers who practice in 185 mosques, belonged to Mohammed’s organization, according to a 2005 article in the Wilson Quarterly.

He continued to appeal to black pride, renaming the Nation of Islam’s former Harlem temple after Malcolm X, and told mosque members that “your heart is dead if you waste five gallons of gas to drive to a white man’s store rather than shop within your own community.”

Born Wallace D. Mohammed in Hamtramck, Mich., on Oct. 30, 1933, he was the seventh of the eight children of Elijah Poole, who took the surname Mohammed. The son later changed his own name to Warith Deen Mohammed. At the age of 7, he showed early skepticism toward Nation of Islam orthodoxy that claimed his father was ordained from above.

“I had common sense, and my common sense told me this was ridiculous, the idea that God is a God that wants one people to dominate others,” he told the Seattle Times in 1997. Master W.D. Fard Muhammad, the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam “was not God, and I knew he was not God, Elijah Mohammed was not a prophet.”