W.D. Fard and the Unincorporated Margin of South Asian America

Abstract

This essay proposes an examination of W.D. Fard, the founder of the U.S.-based Nation of Islam, under the aegis of South Asian American literary criticism. While white American adoptions and adaptations of South Asian religious thought have been culturally and theologically validated, parallel innovations in black religious thought, African American Islam in particular, have been dismissed as pathological, uninformed, or spiritually bankrupt, though they involve no more speculation or imagination than white Indophilic movements. The history and writings of the Nation of Islam form a rich body of text for South Asian diasporic studies. Fard's ideas, via Elijah Muhammad, offer a useful way to understand one of the most creative literary negotiations with race in South Asian diasporic literature. And they deserve to be examined and challenged as a discourse that has privileged a geographical relationship between “Hinduism” and South Asia, while relegating “Islam” to some place west (Persia, Arabia, or Central Asia).