Just when you thought your opinion of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its reality-challenged leaders couldn't fall any lower, you find yourself clearing a space in the basement of your mind. Washington Post researcher Karl Evanzz has written the comprehensive biography of Elijah Muhammad, NOI's co-founder and "prophet," and 704 exhaustively detailed pages later we know far more than we ever thought possible (or bearable) about the movement so lacking in intellectual, religious or moral underpinning that only the grinding boot heel of oppression could have produced it.
Given the book's commendable grasp, the only remaining question is how Evanzz could withstand the mudslide of murder, incest and stupidity facing anyone who tries to make sense of this mishmash religion that, for all its incoherent hatred, has brought 4 million black Americans to (something like) Islam. Reading about the weak, lethal and fanatically anti-intellectual leaders of the NOI made me want to wash my mind out with soap. This all goes double, of course, for the government counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) agents who worked so hard from as early as the 1940s to foment both political and actual fratricide among black activists, from the NOI's chaotic prototypes to the saintly (though libidinous) Martin Luther King and on to the nihilistic Elijah Muhammad himself. Few emerge from this sordid tale deserving to hold their heads up.
