Life in abundance: Diet,Black health and spirituality in the Nation of Islam,1930–1975

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the relationship between the Nation of Islam and dietary rules, as well as to show how its doctrinal component is linked to a quest for an African American redemption. Although this Black nationalist organization claims to remain within the fold of the Islamic religion, historical research conducted in the 1990s and 2000s has stressed that its message is characterized by peculiar beliefs and religious practices. The author’s analysis relies on writings that were produced by the Nation of Islam – mainly, the two volumes of How to Eat to Live, authored by Elijah Muhammad. These dietetic teachings appear to bond the movement to various new religious movements, mainly of Christian inspiration. It appears probable that this set of beliefs was influenced by the German naturopath Arnold Ehret (1866–1922), thus leading to a significant difference with Sunni Islam.

Introduction

The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in July 1930 by a preacher known as WD Fard Muhammad. From its very origin, this African American religious movement has forged strong ties to the Black nationalist tradition. Fard disappeared in 1934, after only three and a half years of presence among his disciples, having experienced various troubles with Detroit and Chicago police forces (Gomez, 2005: 291–292). He was succeeded at the head of the organization by a Georgia-born autoworker named Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole, 1897–1975). The institution they created maintained a peculiar understanding of the word ‘Islam’: Fard was elevated to the status of an embodied divinity after 1934, while Muhammad was regarded as a new ‘Messenger’, thus fulfilling a prophetic mission. These basic articles of faith contradicted common expressions of the Islamic religion and seemed to fall into the categories of shirk (‘association’), by joining a human being to the Godhead, and of bidah (‘innovation’), by contesting the status of Muhammad Ibn Abdullah (c. 570–632) as the final prophet sent to mankind (Cragg, 2011; Demichelis, 2021; Evanzz, 2011: 103).

In many regards, the leading figures of the Nation of Islam appeared to be conscious of this difference towards Sunnism in the post-Second World War period: their textual production sometimes alluded to an ‘Orthodox Islam’, ‘Al-Islam’ or ‘Islam of the East’, from which the Nation of Islam clearly distinguished itself (Curtis, 2006: 44–59; Muhammad, 2008: 49). The very existence of this gap has played a crucial role in the early academic works that intended to analyse the organization – namely, The Black Muslims in America, authored in 1961 by the American sociologist C Eric Lincoln, and Black Nationalism: The Search for an Identity, written by the Nigerian political scientist EU Essien-Udom in 1962. While neither of these books was focused on historical matters, their conclusions had a long-lasting influence on historiography. Lincoln and Essien-Udom did not conceal a certain amount of scepticism regarding the religious dimension of the Nation of Islam: according to them, this movement was mainly of a political nature, being inspired by the African American nationalist tradition. As such, the Nation was envisioned as being superficially dressed up with a religious discourse. These spiritual references were sometimes felt by the authors as being dissonant, seeming to impede or contradict the alleged political agenda of the Nation of Islam (Essien-Udom, 1995: 8; Lincoln, 1973: 86–87). This appreciation sometimes led to quite problematic comments, especially under the pen of Lincoln: the supposedly limited beliefs of the Nation of Islam were deemed as being intrinsically foreign to the Islamic religion, whose Sunni branch was implicitly elevated to the rank of orthodoxy. In addition to creating a blind spot by avoiding considering the Nation of Islam as a religious belief system, this approach exceeded the boundaries of a scientific investigation by expressing what deserved to be qualified as the ‘correct opinion’ within Islam, as suggested by the use of the word ‘orthodoxy’ to designate the Sunni understanding of the religion (Lincoln, 1973: 182–183).

The spiritual dimension of the Nation of Islam has recently been reconsidered by a new trend in historiography. Edward E Curtis IV (2006) approaches the movement’s beliefs from the angle of cultural history by accepting to study its doctrine as a cohesive belief system, whose clear differences from Sunni Islam still need to be taken into consideration. For his part, Stephen C Finley (2022) has studied how the organization expressed concerns for the physical well-being of Black people. Finley contends that the salvation of the African American body held a central place in Elijah Muhammad’s religious message, thus paving the way for quasi-psychoanalytic considerations regarding traumas of African American history and resilience by means of developing a particular quest for health.

The diet that the organization promoted has recently been detailed by Mary Potorti (2017). This analysis mainly focuses on the socio-economic impact that the doctrine had on believers’ daily activities, constituting an attempt to form a counter-society relying on a political ideology with ties to Black nationalism. While Potorti perceives clear differences with Sunni rules, her analysis does not intend to explore the possibility that some non-Islamic sources might have determined the existence of this gap.

This article aims to deepen the analysis of this rarely considered doctrinal component, which was often mentioned in the religious literature of the Nation of Islam and constituted a major interest for its members. The intention is to show how the Nation of Islam developed its own religious concerns and a form of practical autonomy towards Sunnism through this question. The article begins by examining the importance of diet to the Nation of Islam during its early years and its centrality to the teachings of the Nation. Due to the recent character of this religious organization and because of its differences vis-à-vis Sunni Islam on various basic doctrinal issues, it is possible to hypothesize that its focus on food may have been linked to other contemporary beliefs that burgeoned in 20th-century America. Finally, the core texts of the Nation of Islam are examined – the two volumes of How to Eat to Live, authored by Elijah Muhammad in 1967 and 1972 – in order to summarize the dietary rules of the movement nearly 30 years after its founding.

Mr Fard’s diet

According to tradition, the Nation of Islam was started in Detroit on 4 July 1930. Its founder first came to meet the Black population of the city by acting as a peddler selling silks and raincoats. His physical appearance led his customers to believe he was an Arab immigrant, thus belonging to the wide category of ‘Syrian peddlers’. At that time, this term identified not only sellers who were born in Syria, but also all home sellers who came from predominantly Islamic countries of the Mediterranean region. Introducing himself as WD Fard Muhammad, the peddler appeared to be both sympathetic and charismatic. His seeming refinement started to impress his Detroit customers: he gradually began to explain that he possessed a deep knowledge of the land where the ancestors of the African American people lived prior to their enslavement (Beynon, 1938: 896).

His personal interest in Black people was particularly welcome in light of the difficult situation this community was experiencing: most of the African American people living in Detroit had left the South after the First World War, thus participating in a major population movement that later came to be known as the Great Migration. While only 6000 Black people were living in Detroit in 1910, this number had risen to 120,000 by 1929 (Ndiaye, 2009: 56). Many of them had moved to the North with plans to work in some of the great automobile factories that dotted the city of Detroit. These Black labourers later suffered the consequences of the stock market crash in 1929: the production of most of the factories slowed down, resulting in a high unemployment rate among these African American families. Furthermore, their recent relocation was meant to leave racial injustice and violence behind, but instead of finding a haven of equality in the industrial metropolises of the North, many of the African American migrants faced segregated housing and confinement to low-skilled, low-paying jobs because of their racial heritage (Beynon, 1938: 899).

As a result of this situation, Mr Fard appeared as a ray of sunshine in a dull world. His customers were fascinated by his stories regarding Africa. Some of his buyers decided to prolong their conversations by inviting Mr Fard to stay for dinner. According to early testimonies, the seller often politely accepted. He sat at the family table, taking respectfully from all the dishes that were served. Nonetheless, he waited for the end of the meal to look at his hosts and solemnly warn them: ‘Now don’t eat this food. It is poison for you. The people in your own country do not eat it. Since they eat the right kind of food they have the best health all the time’ (Beynon, 1938: 895).

This enigmatic remark constituted the first step in his conversion efforts: Fard wanted to encourage Black people to break with American daily habits. His listeners were not hooked on his dietary comments per se; Fard’s solicitude rather implied that something had gone wrong during the history of their community. The search for their lost identity was linked with concerns for their health, which appeared to be connected to religious preoccupations. His target audience mainly came from a Southern Protestant background, in which dietary prohibitions were largely unknown on the grounds of the Christian New Covenant. Now, these African American families heard that some taboos could be legitimately broken to prolong their life and improve their physical condition. Fard the peddler progressively came to present himself as a highly qualified preacher, possessing a deep knowledge of the Bible and the secrets of White domination over the USA. He soon earned the loyalty of a circle of believers. The foreigner took his flock to a new level when he publicly disavowed the Bible by throwing it on the floor, depicting it as a corrupt text that was designed to control the African American people. Fard taught his believers that they were members of the ‘Nation of Islam’, thereby asserting that they truly did not belong in the USA and that Protestant Christianity was not their natural religion (Beynon, 1938: 896).

In the first years of his ministry, Fard engaged in open critical reflection regarding religious dogmas and customs. His message took the unique form of a seemingly anti-religious rhetoric: Fard specifically reprobated what he called ‘tricknollegy’, allegedly consisting of ‘telling lies, stealing any how to master the original man’ (Fard Muhammad, 2009: 8). Fard described Christianity as an illogical system of thought, where only 10% of the population was supposedly conscious of the fraudulent, unrealistic implications of its teachings. The alleged aim of this elite was ‘[t]o conceal the True God, which is the Son of man, and make slaves out of the 85% by keeping them worshipping something he knows they cannot see (invisible) and he lives and makes himself rich from their labor’ (Fard Muhammad, 2009: 16).

Conversely, Fard claimed to reveal the secret that had been long hidden behind the belief in God: the founder of the Nation of Islam denied the very existence of a ‘mystery God’. In his system, this term designated the belief in a transcendent, supernatural divinity – what he described as an illusory reflection of the infinite potential power of Black people:

There is not a mystery God. The Son of man has searched for that mystery God for trillions of years and was unable to find a mystery God. So they have agreed that the only God is the Son of man. (Fard Muhammad, 2009: 16)

His personal theology disclosed that the first human beings to appear on Earth – namely, Black people – were the sole legitimate materialization of divinity. Contemporary African Americans thus appeared as their legitimate heirs (Gomez, 2005: 315). This message was referred to as ‘Islam’ by Fard, who also claimed that tangible benefits could result from sufficient ‘knowledge’ of the rules governing the material world. From its very foundation, his movement was meant to profess a form of scientific religiosity. The early doctrinal texts of the Nation of Islam already compared this set of beliefs to exact sciences, such as mathematics and astronomy (Bowen, 2017: 268).

Whereas the submission of African American people to Christianity was considered a temporary situation that would come to an end in a near future, Fard depicted White people as being intrinsically devils. This situation was seen as an ongoing condition with atavistic implications: according to Fard, Caucasian people had been designed by a Black scientist named Yakub through a grafting process more than 6000 years ago, thus making them a devilish race that was motivated by irretrievably malicious instincts towards Black people and the laws of Nature, using Christianity as one of their multiple means of governing the African American people (Clegg, 2014: 41–76; Fard Muhammad, 2009: 22).

By developing this interpretation of the word ‘Islam’, Fard clearly distinguished his beliefs from the traditional expressions of the Islamic religion. The rejection of a transcendent deity was not consistent with the monotheistic principle (Tawhid), which is defended by mainstream branches of Sunni, Shia and Ibadi Islam. His early claims to prophethood also seemed to ignore the common Islamic belief regarding the end of prophecy with Muhammad Ibn Abdullah. Finally, the preponderant racial preoccupations of his doctrine put aside the proselyte, universal implications of classical expressions of the Islamic religion (Beynon, 1938: 896).

Fard’s dietary interest appeared to be in line with this doctrinal latitude. Some of his recommendations seemed to hold an underlying meaning, often alluding to the African American past instead of referring to the ancient Islamic past. Products that carried the remembrance of life in the South or slavery were explicitly depreciated: ‘Peas, collard greens, turnip greens, sweet potatoes and white potatoes are very cheaply raised foods’ (Muhammad, 2006: 5). Fard also showed contempt for ‘poison animals’ such as catfish and opossum (Beynon, 1938: 901). While these dietary rules were already being mentioned as early as 1934, it turns out that they were notably absent in the two texts of the Lost-Found Muslim Lessons, which compiled Fard’s teachings and thus still hold a central place in the organization’s beliefs. Nevertheless, the focus on diet was implicitly linked to the belief in the devilish nature of White people: believers were expected to break with contemporary American daily life, supposedly rooted in deception and in breach of the natural laws (Fard Muhammad, 2009: 19–20; Sharrief, 1934).

Karl Evanzz (2001) hypothesizes that this dietary focus may have been an important argument for the communication of the movement: people who accepted the Nation of Islam’s message were expected to change their physical appearance by losing weight. Evanzz (2001: 81) points out that this may have been interpreted as a genuine divine revelation, which positively affected individual bodily functions and thus bore the sign of an efficient, rational spirituality. While most of the practices of the first Nation of Islam believers remain poorly documented, its focus on dietary issues was being studied by social scientists as early as 1938 (Beynon, 1938). These religious rules were included in a wider cleansing effort. It is possible to draw parallels with other early recommendations that were expressed in the founding years of the organization: among other things, believers were encouraged to maintain perfect personal hygiene, wear elegant clothes and dedicate time to housekeeping. This lifestyle has sometimes been described as driven by conservative tendencies; as noted by Potorti (2017: 69), the early Nation of Islam already linked its quest for good health with a desire for African American people to achieve success and material prosperity.

Beyond the tangible impact this goal may have had on the believers’ lives, it is particularly relevant to consider Fard’s dietary concern as a symptom of a radical, uncompromising world view. In fact, the Nation of Islam was not the first African American group to take its inspiration from the religion of Islam: during the second half of the 1920s, another movement – the Moorish Science Temple of America – experienced significant popularity among Black communities living in the northern industrial cities. Known by the name of Noble Drew Ali, its leader claimed to be a new prophet teaching the religion of Islam, while publishing a text he referred to as being the ‘Circle Seven Koran’ (Gomez, 2005: 215).

Ali died in Chicago in 1929, only a few months before the Nation of Islam was founded by Fard in Detroit. Like the Nation of Islam after him, he showed a certain interest in the health of the African American body, supplying various lotions and tonics through the Moorish Manufacturing Corporation he owned. Nevertheless, dietary rules did not play a major role in his teachings. It is also noteworthy that the beliefs of the Moorish Science Temple never referred to the idea of deliberate poisoning through industrial food or fat and sugar. This contrast establishes not only that Fard’s dietary regime was given greater ideological importance, but also that his doctrine implied a more negative vision of the White American majority, who were allegedly trying to harm the African American people by deliberately corrupting what they ate (Clark, 2013).

Several details tend to suggest that the mysterious peddler may have honestly trusted in the virtues of the diet he proposed to his followers: long after his departure, some of them related that Fard suffered from a serious form of diabetes. Sometimes, he had to keep sugar sachets in the pockets of his blazer, just in case he felt faint. It is possible that reducing his caloric intake was perceived as a way of regulating these personal health issues (Arian, 2017: 323–324).

Even though Fard pretended to come from Arabia when he met his believers, he had in fact a troubled past, which involved links with food and cooking activities. According to recent historical research, it is highly probable that he once owned a food truck in Oregon before working as a restaurant manager in Los Angeles, working in the food service industry on the West Coast between 1904 and 1926 and having trouble with the law on at least four occasions. This part of his life is known to us through historical sources that were gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1950s and 1960s (Arian, 2017: 350; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1963). Among the hundreds of pages produced by the Bureau, one report features the testimony of Fard’s former live-in partner in Los Angeles: the Nation of Islam’s founder came to visit her, likely in the summer of 1933. While she seemed to ignore the very existence of the movement Fard had founded in Detroit three years earlier, she clearly told the Bureau agents that he had mentioned during this short stay the adoption of a new lifestyle for himself, in which eating one meal a day was a prominent feature (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1957a).

Following his departure from Detroit in 1934, Fard came to be commonly called ‘Allah in person’ amongst his disciples. A staunch proponent of Fard’s divine nature, Elijah Muhammad formalized this belief when he emerged as the head of the Nation of Islam in the late 1930s and early 1940s (Beynon, 1938: 906–907). It is important to consider this article of faith in light of its doctrinal consequences for believers up to this day: assigning Fard a divine nature meant that this stranger who walked into Detroit would be remembered as the manifestation of the Godhead in the flesh, with a perfect understanding of the universe through his alleged supreme knowledge. Fard is, then, presented as the holder of hidden and functional truths regarding different fields such as religious practices, community organization, family life and high culture. The dietary rules he advocated were included in a holistic approach that was meant to help and heal the African American people (Gardell, 1996: 172–173). Fard himself was expected to reappear with power and glory to destroy the USA and chastise the Caucasians for their mistreatment of Black people. Such a belief contributed to envisioning Fard as a messianic figure, whose coming to Detroit anticipated the battle of Armageddon (Allah, 2015: 46).

Fard’s diet was reasserted and consolidated under the aegis of Elijah Muhammad, leading the Nation of Islam until his death in 1975, and thus contributed to maintaining a significant difference from traditional expressions of Islam. The organization reached its apogee in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Once a small group that gathered together a few dozen families, the Nation of Islam had become a national movement and acquired visibility in the American media. The important contribution of Malcolm X as its spokesperson is not to be underestimated: according to one early evaluation, the Nation of Islam increased its membership a hundredfold under his influence, totalling 40,000 believers in 1964 (Gomez, 2005: 494).

This new popularity catapulted Elijah Muhammad to the front of the national stage. Even though he became best known for his Black nationalist political stance, he maintained a thin line between public issues and his religious message. Muhammad’s persistent interest in diet easily illustrates this situation: he regularly mentioned the fact that he was still in contact with the departed Fard, especially through telepathic waves. Consequently, he could be presented as Fard’s legitimate emissary in the transmission of the doctrinal matters that were once formulated in Detroit (Allah, 2015: 152). Fard’s disappearance remains a mystery to this day, which has puzzled historians and the Federal Bureau of Investigation alike: no satisfying or definitive thesis has emerged to say what happened to him after he founded the Nation of Islam. Therefore, Muhammad could reinterpret his master’s teachings with a free hand (Arian, 2017: 323–326; Morrow, 2019: 333–343).

After the Second World War, the Nation of Islam witnessed a new trend: encouraging its members to practise entrepreneurship. The individual savings created by the consumption of a single daily meal were described as funds that could be invested in various community businesses owned by the Nation of Islam or its members (Muhammad, 1980: 159–160). Muhammad explicitly promoted these economic effects, thus echoing some of ED Beynon’s early sociological observations while claiming to improve his believers’ lifespan: ‘In prolonging your life by abstaining from the pig, alcoholic drinks and tobacco, you will also be adding money to your savings by hundreds and thousands of dollars’ (Beynon, 1938: 905; Muhammad, 2006: 20).

It is also worth noting that the late 1950s and early 1960s correspond to the climax of the organization in terms of commercial and property ownership: the organization and its members possessed many grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants, fish-import businesses and farms across the USA. All of the products sold were intended to be in harmony with the alimentary rules promoted by Muhammad. This last comment leads us to see how the Nation of Islam proposed a diet that directly affected the professional activities of its believers; similarly, the organization advocated a brand of Black nationalism that relied on economic solidarity and community independence from the White majority (Curtis, 2006: 98–109; Potorti, 2017: 77–79).

How to cultivate divine potential: dietary rules in the peak years of the Nation of Islam

The doctrinal importance of dietary rules was to be gradually reinforced during this pivotal period. In 1958, the head temple of Chicago released a leaflet explaining which foods the members must favour. In 1961, the newspaper Muhammad Speaks started to publish texts that developed these explanations. As early as 1965, dietetic columns became more common practice, and were signed by none other than Elijah Muhammad himself. His recommendations would be later assembled into two volumes under the title How to Eat to Live, originally published in 1967 and 1972 (Potorti, 2017: 71).

This work was based on both Fard’s early recommendations and Muhammad’s observations throughout the previous decades. His advanced diet featured characteristics that could be organized into three main categories: qualitative advice, quantitative advice, and suggestions about fasting and frugality. It seems important to examine these categories to understand why their transmission was still perceived as relevant more than 30 years after Fard’s departure, and how these concerns resonated with other beliefs that were promoted by this organization.

Qualitative advice

The Nation of Islam envisioned some products as having positive or detrimental effects on the human body. These decisions were not always justified explicitly; Muhammad showed a general interest for fresh vegetal food: ‘TRY to eat all of your foods, fresh from the source from which it springs’ (Muhammad, 2008: 182). He recommended consuming all fruits and vegetables, with a few exceptions, such as collard greens, turnip salad, kale and peas, which were deemed inappropriate for human digestion (Muhammad, 2006: 4).

Following this precept, Muhammad proposed taking the navy bean as the staple food of this diet, thus consecrating it as a cultural cornerstone of the organization. Muhammad (2006: 5) justified his interest in the navy bean by its alleged concentration of ‘proteins, fats and starches’, going so far as to use biblical references: ‘This dry bean, or pulse, is of ancient origin. It was this bean, according to certain historians, that Daniel preferred for himself and his followers in the prison of Nebuchadnezzar’. Conversely, the consumption of other sources of starch, such as rice or pasta, was largely discouraged; Muhammad (2006: 6) made an exception for bread if it was home-made.

Another form of Muhammad’s qualitative advice can be seen in his distrust of the contemporary food industry. This sector was often depicted as being controlled by White Americans, thus allegedly reflecting their unnatural and immoral features. The food-processing industry was criticized by Muhammad not only because of its chemical storage methods, but also in view of the current agricultural practices. The leader of the Nation of Islam displayed preoccupations that resemble 21st-century questions, which is surprising, given that genetically modified organisms were still to be discovered:

The natural food value of the vegetables that we go to the market and buy should not be destroyed with a lot of additions. They contain the vitamins and proteins nature put in them for us, if the experimenters and poisoners of food do not interfere. (Muhammad, 2008: 87).

Echoing testimonies regarding Fard’s alleged diabetes, the two volumes of How to Eat to Live mention a disdain for sugar, describing it as an ingredient that is likely to shorten one’s lifespan. The addition of sugar in various food preparations could be deemed as one of the dangers of modern American life (Muhammad, 2006: 66). Giving up sugar was regarded as a way for diabetes to be ‘controlled and cured’ (Muhammad, 2006: 30).

More generally, Muhammad perceived industrial cooking as an insidious prolongation of slavery through food production. According to him, White Americans willingly added poison to food products in order to harm Black people, and he occasionally drew an implicit parallel with the dangers of Christianity: ‘They seek, and have tried throughout their civilization, to change the very natural religion of the black man’ (Muhammad, 2006: 35). Once jailed during the Second World War for draft evasion, Muhammad (2006: 2) had experienced events that seemed to confirm his perceptions: ‘In prison, they almost starve my followers trying to force them to eat the filthy, poisonous swine flesh. This I know, because when I was in prison, they did the same to me’. According to his account, this practice even concerned bread, to which the White prison cooks attempted to add some pork to humiliate Muhammad and other Muslim inmates who refused to be drafted in the US Armed Forces (Muhammad, 2006: 54–55).

Apart from his non-negotiable rejection of pork, the leader expressed a relative tolerance for other meats such as beef, lamb, chicken and pigeon (Muhammad, 2006: 25). Nonetheless, the consumption of animal fat was forbidden. This last injunction was justified by means of verses from the Bible and the Quran (Muhammad, 2008: 72). While consuming flesh was not forbidden per se, this dietary practice was largely discouraged, especially compared to the value given to fresh vegetal food. Fish was a notable exception because of its supposed beneficial nature: ‘we can eat fish. Fish is raised under a different atmosphere. Fish is from a different world of life. . . . Fish is good for us’ (Muhammad, 2008: 53). Nevertheless, Muhammad (2006: 60–61) rejected ‘scavengers of the sea such as oysters, crabs, clams, snails, shrimp, eels, or catfish’.

His issue with industrial food was often intrinsically linked to the pork issue, the consumption of which was perceived as a bad Caucasian habit: ‘they practice eating the very worst meat (the poisonous and filthy swine, wild birds, wild fowl of any kind, and even reptiles) and teach man to eat it’ (Muhammad, 2006: 48). This depiction falls within the caveman and devilish natures that Muhammad (2008: 96) attributed to White people, thus describing the taste for improper food as a hereditary sign of savagery: ‘When they were in the hillsides and caves of Europe, they ate the foods other wild beasts ate’. The theme of White dietary habits was particularly close to the topic of poisoning, making the modern food industry an extension of this general inclination towards poisoning: ‘He has poisoned the Bible and the food that we eat’ (Muhammad, 2008: 69–70).

Muhammad justified the rejection of swine by invoking the Bible and the Quran, thus making their consumption an indisputable taboo. However, he provided reasons for this ban that were intended to rely on a scientific basis by echoing ancient facts that were supposedly revealed by Fard: ‘The hog is a grafted animal, so says Allah to me – grafted from rat, cat and dog’ (Muhammad, 2006: 70). According to Muhammad (2006: 98), pork had been genetically manipulated for thousands of years to serve the specific needs of Caucasian people: ‘The hog was made, Allah taught me, for medical purposes, to cure the white man’s many diseases, since he had been grafted out of the black man’.

How to Eat to Live also mentioned dangerous health conditions that could result from the trichinae worms reportedly contained in pork meat: ‘From there, the trichinae work themselves into the spinal cord and travel the spinal cord toward the brain, at which time there is no possible cure’ (Muhammad, 2006: 15). This worm was described as giving birth to ‘pork-worms’ inside the human body, eventually generating ‘larger worms called “tapeworms”’, which could reduce ‘human life, from our early childhood to a short span of 50 to 75 years (which should just be the beginning of life)’ (Muhammad, 2008: 64). Potorti (2017: 71–72) has rightly pointed out that the depiction of the trichinae worm was intended to disgust the reader: the revulsion for pork meat set members of the Nation of Islam apart from a surrounding society that saw no problem in consuming an allegedly dangerous product.

These reasons were meant to designate pork’s status as a prohibited flesh. The wide use of swine in American food was hence envisioned as the sign of a deep lack of civilization, barely concealed behind a thin layer of modern technology (Muhammad, 2006: 101–102). Notwithstanding, Muhammad considered that Orthodox Jewish Americans practised one divine and true religion. He wrote: ‘The dietary law, given to Israel by Moses is true today. Israel was given the proper food to eat Jehovah approved for them, and that which was forbidden to eat we should not eat today’ (Muhammad, 2006: 95). This remark was complemented by other parts of How to Eat to Live, which seemed to accept kosher meat as a substitute in the absence of halal meat (Muhammad, 2006: 52–53).

Quantitative advice

While it is difficult to be certain if all the previous qualitative recommendations were already a part of Fard’s own teachings, it is established that Muhammad maintained various practices that were adopted in the early 1930s, including the consumption of one meal a day (Muhammad, 2006: 9). His advice was supposed to eliminate the various poisons contained in the human body over a lifetime, especially under the influence of industrial food (Muhammad, 2008: 68). He presented this as a way to prolong the life of the believers: ‘IF WE EAT twice a week, this would make us to live twice as long as we would live by eating once every day or every other day’ (Muhammad, 2008: 63).

The sole daily meal was meant to be taken at the end of the day, corresponding to a family dinner in the early evening: ‘Eat the proper food as given in this book and eat at the proper time: one meal a day from 4 to 6 PM’ (Muhammad, 2006: 33). Children under the age of 16 were exempt from this obligation, having the right to eat twice a day because of their developmental needs. Muhammad (2008: 76) made a similar concession in the case of sick persons.

Frequent fasts and frugality

In addition to eating one meal a day, Muhammad’s disciples were advised to fast on a regular basis: ‘Fasting is a greater cure of our ills – both mental and physical – than all the drugs of the earth combined into one bottle or a billion bottles’ (Muhammad, 2006: 19). Muhammad frequently defended this practice by mentioning an interest in resting the digestive system. Nature and bodily functions were thus described as operating according to frugal rules. This seemingly counter-intuitive method was presented as a miracle cure, which could easily confuse one’s family doctor. Conventional modern medicine was supposedly unaware of the benefits of fasting, leading the reader to conclude that such a panacea could not have been revealed by someone other than an all-knowing being in the person of WD Fard (Muhammad, 2006: 9). The believer was expected to experiment with progressively longer periods, finally leading to several days without any food consumption (Muhammad, 2006: 41).

While Muhammad intended to make use of science to improve the believer’s life in a tangible and material manner, his propositions were often depicted as having been prefigured in the Bible: ‘The Bible says that He will give us more life abundancy, but He demands strict obedience to His Will’ (Muhammad, 2006: 1). Also making use of the Quran, Muhammad (2006: 58) interpreted the last four verses of the 89th Surah as an allusion to this physical state, in which perfect health would be reached: ‘O soul that is at rest, Enter into My gardens, Into my paradise among Servants well pleased and well pleasing’. It is significant that the literal meaning of these verses refers to the entering of Paradise for deserving Muslims in the afterlife. Contrary to the evident meaning of the Quranic text, Muhammad denied the possibility of a bodily resurrection or the existence of an immaterial soul. This singular creed was tirelessly reasserted from the founding years of the Nation of Islam, thus leading to a metaphorical interpretation of verses mentioning life in Heaven and Hell (Ali, 1934). Rather, Muhammad envisioned Paradise as an extended individual lifespan in the likeness of the biblical patriarchs, who are described as living for hundreds of years. Muhammad taught that living in perfect health and according to the laws of nature constituted the only fulfilment of the ‘Life in abundance’ that was promised in the Bible for the deserving believers who conformed to the will of God.

Putting Fard’s diet in context

All these concerns appear to differ significantly from the dietary rules in the traditional expressions of the Islamic religion. Representing the two largest branches of Islam, Sunni Islam and Imami Shia Islam draw their rules regarding food and fasting from Quranic verses, hadiths and rulings that were elaborated by scholars through centuries of jurisprudence (Kamali, 2021). This did not exactly apply to the Nation of Islam, which sometimes willingly distinguished its instructions from mainstream Islamic practices.

The case of Ramadan fasting is particularly informative. Muhammad (2008: 50) stood apart from common Islamic interpretations by discouraging fasting from dawn to sunset and implicitly preferring to organize 24-hour periods of fasting: ‘In the case of the Orthodox Muslims worshipping Ramadan by not eating until after sunset, and darkness approaches (they can eat all night long if they want to, until next morning at dawn) – they call this a FAST!’. The leader of the Nation of Islam admitted that the Quran was revealed to Prophet Muhammad during the month of Ramadan in the 7th century, thus seemingly joining traditional understandings; nonetheless, he refused to fast during this month of the Islamic calendar (Muhammad, 2008: 51). He replaced this practice with a fast that took place every year during the month of December, thus privileging the Gregorian solar calendar. Elijah Muhammad extended his ascetic approach by prompting his disciples to stop spending money on food or gifts for the holiday season. While he presented Jesus as being a prophet in the manner of traditional Islam, he also asserted that Christ died long ago and popular customs confused his memory with pagan traditions:

WHY DID I prescribe for you the month of December? It is because it was in this month that you used to worship a dead prophet by the name of Jesus. And, it was the month that you wasted your money and wealth to worship the 25th day of this month, December, as the Christians do. (Muhammad, 2008: 48)

The decision to fast every December was even more remarkable since it was perpetuated through the 1960s, at a time when other Muslim communities were already present and active in the USA, including immigrant groups and other African American movements. Their coexistence illustrates that the doctrinal peculiarity of the Nation of Islam did not result from a lack of knowledge regarding common Islamic practices. On the contrary, Muhammad affirmed through this decision his will to maintain the specific belief system that had been developed from July 1930. Hence, his teaching mainly resonated more with the contemporary African American context than with any foreign expression of the Islamic religion (Essien-Udom, 1995: 310–319).

Although dietary concerns play a role in the Sunni tradition by encouraging believers to follow Muhammad Ibn Abdullah’s recommendations regarding the consumption of small amounts of meat or the importance of fruits such as date palm and pomegranate, such advice relies essentially on hadith texts that were still mostly ignored by the Nation of Islam in the middle of the 20th century. The very notion of emulating the Prophet’s behaviour seems to have played little or no role in Elijah Muhammad’s world view: while the prophetic behaviour has been interpreted as a way to maintain health by some contemporary Sunni Muslims, the preoccupations that the Nation of Islam expressed were clearly separate from Sunni classical sources. Deifying Fard and envisioning Elijah Muhammad as a new prophet placed the Nation of Islam in a position of practical independence vis-à-vis its Sunni counterpart (Ali et al., 2018; Yargatti and Muley, 2022).

The doctrine that Fard and Muhammad developed appears to be closer to other belief systems that existed in the contemporary western world, especially in some of the new religious movements that emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Relating alimentary concerns with science and spirituality was not something new in American culture: this combination can be traced back to some Christian movements that appeared a century before the Nation of Islam. Preoccupations with food and health were promoted in the first half of the 20th century by popular figures such as Dr John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943). At first influenced by Seventh Day Adventism, this practitioner opened his own sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. His growing doctrinal and practical independence finally caused a rupture with the church in 1907. Kellogg moved on to a form of medical vitalism, which was seen as compatible with the science of his day. Until his death, he advocated a vegetarian diet, which he envisioned as a way to recover health and vitality (Strings, 2019: 169).

The close link between health and spirituality sometimes had tragic consequences. This was especially illustrated at the turn of the 20th century with the case of the ‘Starvation doctor’ Linda Hazzard (1867–1938). Based in the Seattle area, this promoter of fasting attracted theosophists and freethinkers by pretending to heal cancer and various diseases. Her dietary guidelines appeared to be extremely harsh: claiming to help the body eliminate harmful substances, Hazzard coerced her victims into taking very restricted food portions, essentially consisting of fruit and vegetables. She declared that she was inspired by the works of Dr Edward Hooker Dewey (1837–1904), who was known for adding fasting therapy to his evangelical doctrine. Because of the undernutrition induced by her methods, one of Hazzard’s patients died in 1902. According to estimates, her practices may have led to a dozen deaths. Those events attracted the attention of the authorities in Wilderness Heights: Hazzard was suspected of profiting from the physical and psychic weakness of her starved patients. She was finally arrested in August 1911 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for manslaughter (Beck, 2006).

Despite these previous trends in contemporary American culture, it is worth noting that Fard’s hypothetical influences were never explicitly detailed by himself or by his successor, Elijah Muhammad. This lack of claimed predecessors opens the way to suppositions of our own. Recent research by Patrick D Bowen (2017) asserts that Fard may have been inspired by his probable eclectic reading in the years that predated the founding of the Nation of Islam. According to Bowen, Fard’s diet presents important similarities with The Mosaic Law in the Light of Modern Science, authored in 1926 by Thomas H Nelson. This book was rooted in a peculiar Christian fundamentalist context: Nelson promoted a strict diet, notably prohibiting pork and valuing fruit and vegetables (Bowen, 2017: 261).

Fard may have been influenced by American figures like this or foreign writers whose texts were also published in the USA in the 1920s. The German naturopath Arnold Ehret (1866–1922) claimed to have lived his younger years in a fragile state of health. Among other things, he was forced to leave the army because of heart disease. Despite the difficulties generated by his condition, he claimed to have discovered that his bodily functions were deeply affected by the nature of the food he was eating and by the frequency of his meals. He also affirmed that he had cured all his chronic diseases by stopping eating for extended periods of time. Ehret justified this practice by explaining that sickness resulted from an accumulation of mucus in the organs, thereby leading to a dangerous condition that could only be solved through exhausting the body’s reserves. Based on this alleged discovery, he later founded a sanatorium in Switzerland, proposing to help the sick through these fasting methods.

Interestingly, Ehret’s propositions met with a certain degree of success in the USA. Visiting Panama in 1914, he was forced to stay in the USA because of the start of the First World War; Ehret moved to California, where he remained until his death in 1922. Between 1912 and 1922, various translations and adaptations of his theses were published in American naturopathic magazines, such as The Naturopath and Herald of Health. Shortly after his passing, an American edition of one of his books was released: Mucusless-Diet Healing System was published by the Ehret Literature Publishing Company, based in Los Angeles, and dedicated to the dissemination of his dietary recommendations (Czeranko, 2019; Melton et al., 1990: 159). This book was a condensed expression of Ehret’s main concerns. As its title suggests, particular attention was accorded to the impact of mucus on the human body: ‘Every sick person has a more or less mucus-clogged system, such mucus being derived from undigested and uneliminated, unnatural food substances, accumulated from childhood-on’ (Ehret, 1924: 23). To contain this supposed danger, Ehret proposed regular periods of fasting. This included prolonged periods without any food consumption and eating a single daily meal. The latter point was expressed through striking wording, recommending ‘The 24-Hours Fast, or One Meal a Day Plan’. In addition, Ehret advised his readers to take this meal at the end of the day: ‘the best time to eat is in the afternoon, say 3 or 4 o’clock P.M.’ (Ehret, 1924: 158).

Just like WD Fard and Elijah Muhammad after him, Ehret was preoccupied by the then-emerging food industry. His arguments were mainly based on the work of the Swedish biochemist Ragnar Berg (1873–1956). According to Berg, the use of sulphur, benzoid of soda and salicylic acid in canned food posed a risk to consumers’ health. Ehret (1924: 104–110) also retained most of Berg’s dietary recommendations: both clearly valorized fruit and vegetables at the expense of meat and cereal products. Nevertheless, Ehret distinguished himself by describing his eating regime as being beyond the limits of contemporary science and materialism. He would often refer to the Bible, arguing that material there was in perfect harmony with his research findings:

There could be no disease if men would live right, in accordance with the divine story of the Genesis arguments. . . . In plain instead of mysterious words, you and all mankind will suffer and die from disease as long as you fail to return again to the laws of the Creator, to the laws of Nature, as man lived in paradise. (Ehret, 1924: 85)

Ehret (1924: 97) developed his proposition of a vegetarian diet by interpreting it as a return to the lifestyle that prevailed in biblical times: ‘a mucusless diet, consisting of fruits and herbs, meaning green-leaf vegetables, considered “unfashionable” since the time of Moses, that great Dietician and Faster’. He linked these efforts with the Christian belief in original sin and the Fall that followed, presenting his diet as a way to return humanity to its original Edenic condition: ‘We are only a shade of the original man, caused thru our degeneration, but you may yet experience what cannot be described, that this kind of eugenics is the fundamental truth of evolution into “Heaven on Earth”!’ (Ehret, 1924: 182).

The comparison of Ehret’s doctrine with Fard’s teachings throws up occasional differences, illustrating variations in their world views. For instance, Ehret expressed a belief in a life after death for people who respected the rules of nature he attempted to promote, while the possibility of an afterlife was negated by Fard and Elijah Muhammad (Ehret, 1924: 194; Evanzz, 2001: 107). Beyond this type of variation, it is remarkable that Ehret’s American publishing house was based in Los Angeles at a time when Fard probably inhabited the same city. At the turn of the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation linked the vanished founder with a restaurant manager called Wallie Ford: the Bureau concluded that Fard and Ford were one and the same person. Ford’s presence in Los Angeles was at least attested between 1918 and his incarceration for drug dealing in 1926. Thus, the future Fard would have been present in the city when the first edition of Mucusless-Diet Healing System was published. Even though this identification with Ford is contested by the Nation of Islam to this day, it was apparently considered seriously by J Edgar Hoover’s investigating officers in their attempt to damage the public image of the Nation of Islam. This synchronicity tends to suggest that the Nation of Islam drew on contemporary American religious culture involving naturopaths who advocated dietary and spiritual solutions to contemporary health issues (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1957b, 1963).

For four decades, the Nation of Islam also ensured the continued transmission of concerns that bore striking similarities to Ehret’s approach. By way of illustration, Muhammad claimed as late as the 1960s that asthma was aggravated by an accumulation of fluid in the body. His description focused on mucus:

As you know, I contracted bronchial asthma, and I have learned that there are no drugs that the public has access to which actually serves as a cure. But I am doing fine now, and eating once a day and once every other day does not give the mucous [sic] time to accumulate and choke the bronchial tubes and tract. (Muhammad, 2006: 27–28)

This is particularly close to Ehret’s (1924: 38–39) description of the common cold as ‘a beneficial effort to eliminate waste from the cavities of the head, the throat, and the bronchial tubes. The cold goes deeper and will eliminate and clean the mucus from the most spongy and vital organ, the lung’.

Considerations around weight and fatness found a special meaning for this community in the first half of the 20th century and for American culture at large. As Amy Erdman Farrell puts it: ‘Fatness in the United States “means” excess of desire, of bodily urges not controlled, of immoral, lazy, and sinful habits’ (Farrell, 2011: 10). According to the sociologist Sabrina Strings, overweightness was interpreted as a form of primitiveness. In this situation, the refusal to be overweight expressed an attempt to break down the prejudices that frequently stigmatized the Black body. Conversely, the Anglo-American body was more commonly presented as being civilized and thin. From the early 19th century, fatness was perceived as a physical feature linked with specific African ethnic groups, such as the Hottentots/Khoikhoi (Strings, 2019: 89–98). Given these factors, humanity seemed to be divided into two divergent categories, distinguishing ‘whiteness and blackness, good and bad’ through supposed physical morphotypes that reflected the dominant relations in American society (Strings, 2019: 64).

As with other topics engaging the African American community, Fard and Muhammad developed a Black nationalist ideological vision in two argumentative stages: first, they apparently confirmed negative clichés regarding African Americans before immediately claiming to reverse these offensive descriptions through concrete action. This method of communication was reflected in illustrations published in the Muhammad Speaks newspaper throughout the 1960s and 1970s: some of them seemed to caricature Black people living in the South, depicting them as being overweight and going against God’s will by eating pork, drinking alcohol and consuming products that were deemed inappropriate by the Nation of Islam (Curtis, 2006: 120).

The negative view of these food habits stands in sharp contrast to the celebration of popular customs that cultural figures of Black nationalism began to express in the mid 1960s. Muhammad’s opinions placed him in a paradoxical position: in practice, the leader of the Nation of Islam tended to assert a Black nationalist ideal that would break with the African American past, preferring to encourage Black people to identify with a timeless, natural religion. His deviation from more common forms of African American nationalism would on occasion lead to discreet reluctance on the part of some believers, especially when they were in charge of businesses that intended to sell meals or pastries to Black customers. Potorti (2017: 80–81) suggests a limit to Muhammad’s influence in writing that ‘the efforts of Muslim cooks to recreate the flavors of the South constituted subtle resistance against the Messenger’s aim to eradicate Southern culture entirely from black life’.

The negative descriptions of culinary traditions inherited from the South were implicitly intended to be off-putting for the African American reader; it was also implied that members of the Nation of Islam escaped this condemnation by obeying Fard and his messenger, Elijah Muhammad, and thus saving their bodies from alleged contemporary degradations. By simultaneously validating and contesting stereotypes regarding African Americans, the Nation of Islam cultivated a nuanced vision of Black self-esteem: collective action was linked with personal responsibility, sometimes making use of individual body shaming as a prerequisite to a Black nationalist commitment. Converts to Islam were believed to be in touch with a proud, 1000-year-old cosmic heritage, predating the American wickedness that demeaned their innocent African ancestors and could be defeated through an appropriate new way of life (Curtis, 2006: 102). As Finley (2022: 72–73) has observed in the case of the beliefs of the Nation of Islam, ‘ideal black bodies were dangerous to the dominant culture because they were symbolically out of place. They resisted being rendered inferior’.

Conclusion

This study has shown that dietary recommendations play an important role in the Nation of Islam. While this concern was not developed in the main early texts that were produced by the founders, it became one of the major components of the movement’s religious message after the Second World War. These dietetic efforts expressed a desire to move away from the African American contemporary condition, which was regarded as fallen and needing to return to God’s commandments. By doing so, the Nation of Islam consolidated the authority of its leaders: both were presented as the depositaries of a transcendent knowledge, thus making their dietary recommendations a substitute for traditional Islamic teachings.

As has been demonstrated above, these rules happened to be similar to other spiritual streams that emerged in contemporary American society, and searched for health through frugal diet plans that would break with dominant models. WD Fard’s suggestions were presented by Elijah Muhammad as contesting social norms in both the political and scientific fields. From its very origin, the organization has expressed concerns about health in the African American community, perceiving the Black body as being endangered by contemporary civilization and American society. The durability of this set of beliefs in the Nation of Islam denotes the lasting preoccupation of a tormented appreciation of Black bodily integrity in the African American cultural context.

It was thus particularly significant that Fard’s dietary recommendations were suppressed when the Nation of Islam moved closer to a more conventional form of Islam under the aegis of Warith Deen Muhammad (1933–2008). After Elijah Muhammad’s passing in 1975, his son and successor officially encouraged believers to adopt the beliefs and practices of Sunni Islam. The elimination of landmarks that had structured the life of the community over the past 40 years provoked various expressions of reluctance, thus partially justifying the dissenting opposition that gathered around Minister Louis Farrakhan (born 1933). Reviving the beliefs and practices that originated with Fard and Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan denounced the reform process as a form of collaboration with the American government and as an abandonment of divine revelations that took the form of a collective apostasy. The restoration of the former dietary practices was welcomed by the members of this dissident movement, and they have often been stressed by Farrakhan himself as a way to maintain health, save money and eventually reach a canonical age in the likeness of biblical patriarchs (Farrakhan, 1993: 135–141; Gardell, 1996: 328–330). The recurrent character of these claims attests to the fact that the Nation of Islam has long attributed a deep religious and political dimension to nutrition, thus stepping far outside the conventional bounds of dietetics and blurring the lines between various components of African American life.