Finding Elijah: A Journey through American Muslim Mythology

By Michael Muhammad Knight

When asked about my religion these days, I sometimes reply that I’m a Sufi following the mashrab of Hazrat Sherwood Anderson, radi’Allahu on him. Writing is a path all itself, complete with its own inimitable sages and more sacred scriptures than any hafiz could handle. Sometimes I get more out of Walt Whitman than Prophet Muhammad and I’m sorry for that but I’ll say Takbir anyway, the world came from Allah so take what He gives you.

I’m roughly 200,000 words into a new novel and have considered sending my protagonist, a slob-drunk punk named Bombay Unger, on a journey to Elijah Muhammad’s grave. It could make a decent conclusion for the character, searching as he is for a historically-rooted sense of American Islam and the journey that Islam has taken in this hemisphere. For better or worse, Western Muslims owe a great deal to Elijah Muhammad. Even if Saint Malcolm outgrew Elijah’s racist doctrines, Elijah made him first. I could see this Bombay Unger character standing where Elijah’s bones rest, by plan or by accident, and coming to a heightened appreciation for the drama that’s taken us this far.

When constructing a setting, I’m a big fan of authenticity. If you write a story about Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue, for example, you should do it with the knowledge that a dude might someday read that story who walks up and down Elmwood every day and knows every last store and bum that you’re talking about—so get the stores right, and get the bums right. To poeticize about outpatients in front of the Elmwood/Forest Mobile station adds myth and lyricism to something in that reader’s daily life—it’s real, he’s there, and he sees it on the page. You’ve made a grimy street sacred! Reading my hometown of Geneva, New York mentioned at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night awakened me to an irrational sense of holiness; my childhood haunts were real not only in this universe, but also within a meaningful imagination. You can call it shirk, but what do I care?

So for me to write effectively about Bombay Unger standing at the grave of Elijah Muhammad, I would have to stand there myself. I couldn’t risk mentioning a nearby tree that wasn’t really there or grass that was freshly mowed if they let it grow tall; I couldn’t take the chance that somebody might read the story and then stumble into that cemetery to have the illusion shattered.

On the way there I thought about my Bombay Unger and what he might do at the grave. I’d expect more of myself than to just have him piss on it. Driving by the Glenwood Post Office, I figured that if the stone wasn’t too big and heavy I could have him steal it and ship the thing to a girl with hopes of impressing her. That’d be kind of cool, right? Here honey, I know we’re broken up but I got you Elijah Muhammad’s tombstone. I tried to imagine how much the stone could weigh and what it might cost to ship somewhere like Syracuse.

Back in his campier days, Farrakhan proclaimed that Elijah had never died and was up in space flying the Motherplane with W.D. Fard, the arcane seller of silks who came from nobody-knew-where, found himself proclaimed to be Allah in the Flesh and then disappeared back to Parts Unknown. Tradition said that Fard had been born of a black father and white mother, allowing him to move freely in both societies undetected. I had read somewhere that his mother had been spared identification as a “white devil” because she was a Chechen Muslim. Some explained his disappearance with theories of an FBI conspiracy; others believed that Elijah himself had Fard killed in a grab for power. Some even held that Fard’s followers slaughtered him as a blood sacrifice. The true believers, of course, knew that Allah could enter and leave His world as He pleased.

I thought about the Motherplane and the 9-foot tall black Martians and that nut in Kansas City claiming to be the only real Allah. Taking Louis up on his dare and digging the grave up would be a story.

When I got to the place I jumped out and walked around thinking it’d be no problem to find, images dancing in my head of old sad-eyed Elijah in jewel-encrusted fez and bowtie. Turned out to be a reasonably-sized cemetery. I walked back to the office and went inside to ask the lady at the counter, middle-aged with fake blonde hair and a lot of makeup.

“I’m looking for an individual’s plot,” I told her. “His name was Elijah Muhammad.”

“Elijah Muhammad, King of the Moozlems?”

“Yes,” I replied, “King of the Moozlems.”

“And what is your name, sir?”

“I’m Ibrahim Hooper.”

“Mr. Hooper, I’m sorry; but we have an agreement with the Moozlems not to disclose the location of Elijah Muhammad’s grave.”

“I understand,” I replied with a smile. “Thanks anyway.” If they thought I’d go away that easy, they were sadly mistaken. I went back to my car, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and snuck around back to the cemetery. If I had to I’d examine every last stone in the place, odd man out and against all odds, until finding Elijah.

Most of the recent years’ burials were clustered in the same areas so at least I could cancel them out along with family plots and the decorated graves of U.S. military. The ground-level stones, however, were almost all shrouded under old dead leaves that burrowed in and escaped the lawnmowers. I had to uncover each one myself, for a time sweeping the leaves away with my foot until suddenly feeling guilty about it when I realized that these were once actual people. All the names I scanned over in chasing Elijah, some of them engraved fresh on crisp stones and some of them old with weird old names like Ebenezer and none of them mattering to me, but at some point each one must have mattered to somebody. I went through the process along one far side of the yard, making sure to check each stone. There was one with no name on it. I wondered if the Nation could have legally kept his grave unmarked. Wasn’t there a law about that? I would think that a grave had to be accounted for and recognized, if there was a dead body down there. The uncarved stone had a baseball-sized oblong rock on top of it. Could that have been an arcane Fard thing? For all intents and purposes, I fatwa’d to myself, if I couldn’t find Elijah that stone would have to do.

A shiny black car rolled down a distant winding lane, appearing to pause whenever I turned to face it. Must have been an employee of the cemetery, I figured, sent out to keep an eye on me. It finally went on its way and I resumed the hunt.

I walked along the side all the way to the back where a railroad track stretched itself out and disappeared into the woods on either end. A train went by quietly, but the one that followed rumbled past us. I looked at some more graves, skipping one here and there and then finally passing whole packs of stones, all but surrendering. If Elijah needed his rest so damn bad, he could have it. I staggered over to sit on a stack of smooth unused stones, thought about who they might be for, imagined that one of them could be mine and whipped out my phone figuring that I was far enough removed from the actual graves for it to be a disrespect—or at least no less offensive than the trains going by.

“Yo,” I said.

“Yo,” he said back. “What’s good?”

“I’m in Thornton,” I told him. “Around Chicago—I’m at the cemetery where Elijah Muhammad is buried but they won’t tell me where he is, they have an agreement with the Nation of Islam to…”

And then the shiny black car was coming my way. I hung up on James, pocketed my phone and watched the driver’s-side window roll down. Behind the wheel sat a ruddy-complexioned, middle-aged African American man with scant gray facial hair and a birthmark or perhaps freckles on his face.

“What are you doin’ out here?” he asked.

“I’m looking for an individual’s plot,” I answered.

“Who you looking for?”

“Elijah Muhammad,” I told him.

“What do you want to see him for?” At that moment I launched into my well-rehearsed ramble of Muslim Credibility—I was no poser, I lived for two months at Faisal Masjid in Islamabad. I read Malcolm’s autobiography at 15, took shahadah at the Islamic Center of Rochester, New York at 16, went to Pakistan at 17. I told him that I loved history, entertained a passionate interest in Islam in America and couldn’t pass up the chance to see Elijah’s grave while I was in the area.

The man replied that Elijah Muhammad was his grandfather, and he’d show me the grave. “Come on in,” he said, nodding to the passenger seat. I ran around the front of his car and felt bad about my muddy feet—the inside was spotless. I never caught the make and model but it was some money, leather seats and all. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Michael,” I replied.

“I’m Walid,” he said. “Where are you from?”

“Buffalo.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Visiting friends I met at the ISNA convention,” I answered, hoping the ISNA reference gave me some added weight. Walid drove us to the grave.

“There it is,” he said. And there it was, with a big ground-level stone: Elijah Muhammad, though they spelled it Muhammed. There he was. Walid explained that much of the family was buried there too, pointing out Sister Clara, and that a great deal of the living family lived around Chicago.

“Where do they side on the whole Farrakhan-Warith Deen thing?” I asked. Walid answered that that was all in the past, Farrakhan and W.D. Mohammed had made amends and were both Muslims doing what they could for the deen in this country. After all, he said, they were both students of Elijah twenty years ago; why fight? Farrakhan now goes to Warith Deen’s events, Walid said, and Warith Deen chills with Farrakhan too.

“I mean,” he explained, “there was a time when, you know—“ he pointed to me with an open hand. “You know, you’d be the devil.” I smiled. “But we weren’t reading the Quran back then, you know, we’ve moved past the white-devil stuff.” He looked at his grandfather’s grave. “There was some bad, and some good, but his intentions were good.”

“It’d be really cool to see W.D. Fard’s grave,” I said, “but nobody knows what happened to him—right?”

Walid then told me the deal, alternating between calling him W.D. Fard and Farad Muhammad.

W.D. Fard/Farad Muhammad died a few years ago in or near Haywood, California.

He was Pakistani and a Sunni Muslim, his real name Muhammad Abdullah.

Warith Deen Mohammed communicated with him regularly until his death.

Everyone in “the circle” knew Muhammad Abdullah, but only Warith Deen knew that the man was Fard.

“After he passed away,” Walid explained, “Warith Deen just said ‘that was him.’” I wondered how Farrakhan took that, having claimed to party with Fard on the Motherplane.

I looked at Elijah’s plot like Fard was in there too. Farad liked to be mysterious, Walid told me; that was how he spoke and carried himself and perhaps why he disappeared the way he did. Walid speculated that Fard had some form of mental illness. “It’s kind of perverted,” he said, “you know, that we all believed this man to be Allah.”

Even dead, Fard/Farad/Muhammad Abdullah kept the mysteries coming. After driving 647 miles the night before, I found myself standing in an Illinois cemetery with Elijah Muhammad’s grandson. Wasn’t that something?

And he was a cool guy, drove me around the cemetery in his car and revealed things that blew my mind more than he probably expected. There was a positive energy when he spoke, enough to make me feel like a real bum. He also seemed to have a warm and true down-deep Islam that I had lost by my own fault long ago. What a bucket of crap I was, and Bombay Unger too.

Walid was there that day, he said, to find the missing headstone of his father. I wished him well with it, shook his hand and said as-salamu alaikum.

Wa alaikum as-salam, Walid Muhammad replied.

I realized as I drove away that I didn’t catch how the leaves crunched under our feet or whether it was cold enough to see Walid’s exhalations when he spoke. I drove around with no idea where I was until ending up at a gas station in nearby Lansing. Went inside and bought a gallon of water to wash my hair. Got the shampoo out of my trunk, sat on the parking lot’s curb and poured water on my head. It came down so cold that it almost wasn’t cold at all; it just hurt. Then I rubbed the shampoo in. Using the reflection in my car’s side windows to make sure I got it all, I rinsed with a steady stream from the gallon-jug. Just as I began to pour, the winds picked up and that water hit my skull’s vertex ice-cold to stream down my scalp like liquid razor-cuts. I propped myself against the car, grimacing and hunched-over looking like a genuine New York maniac to these good gas-station patrons. Threw a towel over me to at least keep my wet head from the wind, the ends flapping around my face quite dramatically.

Michael Muhammad Knight is author of The Taqwacores, a novel available through the legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles.