Wallace Delaney Muhammad was born on October 30, 1933 to Clara Evans and Elijah Poole in the impoverished Paradise Valley in Detroit, Michigan. A year later, Poole, later known as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, took over the Nation of Islam as โSupreme Leaderโ upon the disappearance of the Nation of Islamโs (NOI) founder W.D. Fard.ย Four decades later, Wallace Muhammad would reject the central tenets of the Nation, now headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and lead one of the largest congregations of African America Muslims in the United States.
The seventh of eight children, Wallace would later be considered โNOI royalty,โ inheritor of his fatherโs influential position and wealth. While his father was alive, Wallace rebelled continually. He was excommunicated five times and at one point, prohibited from communicating with family members.
Wallace attended an NOI school from 1952 to 1954 where he learned Arabic.ย In prison, where he was serving a term for draft evasion, Mohammed began studying the Bible and Qurโan and saw contradictions between traditional Islam and the NOI, which was a syncretic mix of freemasonry, Christianity, and Islam.
A year after his release, Mohammed officially left the NOI after rumors of his fatherโs infidelity surfaced.ย After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, he re-entered the group.
By age twenty-five, he was leading Temple No. 11 in Philadelphia.ย Against NOI convention, he led followers in traditional Islamic prayer and read the Qurโan in services. While he was careful not to openly question his father and the Fardโs divinity, Mohammed carefully reinterpreted their work as allegorical.
Many were surprised when Mohammed was named successor upon his fatherโs death in 1975. Within two months, Mohammed redirected what scholar C. Eric Lincoln labeled a โproto-Islamic cultโ towards orthodox Sunni Islam. By 1977, he led hundreds of followers on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Symbolically, he changed his name from Wallace D. Muhammad to Warith Deen Mohammed.ย In 1976, the Nation of Islam became the World Community of Al-Islam in the West, which in 1980 became the American Muslim Mission.ย The organizationโs journal, Muhammad Speaks, was renamed Bilalian News, after the Prophet Muhammadโs African companion, Bilal ibn Rabah.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, Mohammedโs congregation numbered 300,000. He gained acceptance in mainstream Sunni Muslim American organizations, and made peace with his fatherโs remaining followers, who had splintered away under Louis Farrakhanโs leadership in 1978.
In 1992, Mohammad led the first Muslim invocation in the United States Senate. He was involved in charity and interfaith work, developing friendly relations with the Vatican, and working tirelessly to integrate the NOI into mainstream American society.
On September 9, 2008, Warith Deen Mohammed died of natural causes in Chicago, Illinois at the age of 74.
