Bilal Ibn Rabah in the Black Religious Tradition

Louis Farrakhan 

Louis Farrakhan, a former mentee of Malcolm X, would reject the Sunni reforms made to the Nation of Islam.  According to Dr. Sherman Jackson, “he continued to authenticate his movement on the basis of classical black religion.” Indeed, Farrakhan frequently invoked Bilal in order to authenticate the resurrection of the Nation of Islam.

 First, Farrakhan wholesale rejected being under the tutelage of foreign Islamic scholars:

They were satisfied only if you said your prayers and read the Qu’ran in Arabic, they didn’t know what to make of you black people other than that. But Islam is not just to make you an Arabic reader of the Qur’an; it is to make you bring you back to what you were.”

 Farrakhan expresses the belief that while blacks were learning the rituals of the faith and the Arabic language, they were not regaining a “knowledge of self” to advance their social, political, and economic conditions.

Farrakhan declares that Saudi Arabia, (where many African-Americans earned scholarships to study Islam) had in fact lost the  spirit of Islam becoming decadent,  corrupt, and reduced to ‘mere rituals and hypocrisy’ with “big-belly sheiks running around with oil wealth while the people are in squalor and poverty.”

He then raises the question:”Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) made Bilal the muezzin, the caller to prayer. What do you think he did it for?” Farrakhan interprets Bilal selection as muezzin as a symbol that it would be a black man in the last day who would have to reignite the faith of the entire Islamic world.

He shares a story in which  he was in the Arab world and Muslims there told him they were born Muslim but took the faith for granted until they were inspired by the zeal Black Americans had Islam.

Invoking Bilal and this story, Farrakhan posits a theory of Islamic revival by which the entire Islamic world will be reawakened by the black community’s practice of Islam. He then states his goal to work to turn the black community into the finest Islamic community in the entire world.

Next: Why Bilal Ibn Rabah Resonates with Black Muslim Leaders