it's funny, just a couple of weeks ago mrs. noz and i watched get on the bus. afterwards we both wondered what happened to the nation of islam. they used to be much more visible, at least in my life. but maybe that was because i was living on the south side of chicago, just blocks from the NOI HQ. were they laying low since 9/11 or do they just have less of a presence in philadelphia?
apparently they're still around. the issue of their relationship to mainstream islam has always fascinated me. it's only touched briefly in today's article. just north of our chicago apartment was an NOI mosque, but a bit further south there was a bigger mosque for people who had broken away from the group with warith deen mohammed (NOI founder elijah mohammed's son) and had adopted "orthodox islam", i.e. the islam practiced in the rest of the world. but even during the nineties the general impression i had was that farakkan was slowly bringing the NOI more in line with traditional muslim teaching, ditching a lot of the wackier racial-based theology.
