Pakistani Muslims moved to the United States,
many members of the Ahmadiyya movement, who
served to reassert its identity as an international
Muslim fellowship (while at the same time deal-
ing with its rejection by other Pakistani Muslims
as a heretical movement).
The death of Elijah Muhammad led to fights
over succession. While his son assumed leader-
ship over the largest segment of the membership,
a variety of smaller schismatic groups appeared.
Their claim to being the true successor to Elijah
Muhammad was strengthened when Warith Deen
Muhammad (b. 1933) began to move the Nation
of Islam toward Sunni Islam. That move had
begun with one of the nation’s most prominent
leaders, malcolm X (1925–65), who had gone on
the haJJ and discovered how different the nation’s
doctrines were. His advocacy of a move to ortho-
doxy was among several factors that led to his
assassination. In leading the Nation of Islam to
orthodoxy, W. D. Muhammad changed the name
of the nation several times and in the process lost
his most capable lieutenant, loUis Farrakhan (b.
1933), who moved to reconstitute the Nation of
Islam as it was in the early 1970s. The movement
led by W. D. Muhammad eventually disbanded
as it completely aligned with the larger orthodox
community.
By the end of the 20th century, approximately
30 percent of all the mosques in the United States
were serving a predominantly African-American
constituency. The number of mosques indicated
the inroads made into the black community, long
dominated by Baptist, Methodist, and Pente-
costal Christian churches. It has gained an even
greater level of acceptance from the conversion
of some outstanding American athletes, such as
mUhammad ali (b. 1942) and Karem Abdul-Jab-
bar (b. 1947), who adopted Muslim names as
their careers soared. There are an estimated 4 to
6 million African-American Muslims in America.
Most attend mainstream Islamic mosques, though
a significant minority adheres to the Ahmadiyya
movement, the several schisms from the Nation
of Islam (the largest led by Farrakhan), and other
smaller sectarian groups.
See also slavery; sUnnism.
J. Gordon MeltonFurther reading: Steven Barboza, American Jihad: Islam
after Malcolm X (New York: Image/Doubleday, 1994);
Martha F. Lee, The Nation of Islam, an American Mil-
lenarian Movement. Studies in Religion and Society
(Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988); Richard
Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).African languages and literature
The variety of Islamic experiences in Africa can
be seen in the diversity of languages and literature
through which Islam has expressed itself. The
most influential literary language has been Arabic.
Culturally dominant in North Africa, Arabic has
often been the language of religious instruction,
devotional practices, and pious writings in sub-
Saharan Africa as well. Arab geographers such as
al-Bakri (d. 1094) and explorers such as ibn bat-
tUta (d. 1368) wrote the oldest existing descrip-
tions of sub-Saharan Africa in Arabic. A couple of
centuries after Ibn Battuta’s travels in West Africa,
the earliest sub-Saharan chronicles were written
in Arabic. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the
Ulama of Timbuktu produced original scholarly
works in Arabic and copied great Islamic texts
from North Africa and the Fertile Crescent in the
same language. Religious scholars would continue
to use Arabic as the language of instruction into
the 19th century.
In the realm of oral tradition, Muslims were
more prone to compose and transmit works in the
indigenous languages. Storytellers passed down
epic tales in the vernacular for hundreds of years.
The best known of these is the West African epic,
Sundiata, which dates from the 13th century. In
East Africa, the tradition of Swahili-language
poetry developed in both oral and written forms.K 18 African languages and literature