The Turn to Sunni Islam in America

When Elijah Muhammad, the long-time leader of the Nation of Islam, died in 1975, his son and successor Warith Deen Mohammed led the great majority of that large, mostly African-American movement out of its heterodox teachings and into mainstream Sunni Islam. The Nation of Islam, which had grown up in the cities of the United States from the 1930s, had preached a doctrine of black separatism and ideas, including claims about the divine, that placed it far outside orthodox Islam, even as it gave dignity, discipline and a Muslim identity to many African Americans, among them, for a time, Malcolm X, whose own earlier turn to Sunni Islam after his pilgrimage had pointed the way. From 1975 Warith Deen Mohammed set about a thorough reform: he taught the oneness of God and the finality of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), adopted the five pillars and the Sunni practice of prayer, reoriented the congregations to pray toward Makkah and realigned their rows, renamed the movement's temples as mosques and its followers as Muslims within the global community, and dissolved the old separate structure. It was one of the largest passages of African Americans into mainstream Islam in history, though a minority later revived the older Nation of Islam separately under another leader. This scene depicts that turn around 1976 in a converted storefront mosque in an American city, the new mihrab set in the wall, the prayer rows realigned toward the qibla, the community joining the worldwide practice of the faith.