The expanded historical account originally prepared for this website, preserving the Tribe's foundational historical and spiritual teachings in their fuller context.
The principal source designated for this section is The God Tribe of Shabazz - The True History, by Elijah Muhammad, edited by Nasir Hakim. The original PDF contains visible scan and text-conversion artifacts in several places. The website presentation below has therefore been normalized for readability without changing the underlying teaching.
The source places knowledge of history at the center of knowledge of self. It teaches that a people cannot properly understand their present condition or prepare for their future without understanding who they are, where they came from, and how their history was interrupted or concealed.
Within the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Black man and woman are identified as members of an ancient Original People. The teaching presents the recovery of identity as necessary to restoring dignity, direction, responsibility, and collective purpose.
The history source teaches that the Tribe of Shabazz reaches into a past measured on a vast timescale and that the Tribe existed long before modern racial classifications, colonial records, or present-day national boundaries. The Official Tribe of Shabazz presents this as a foundational historical and spiritual teaching of the Tribe.
The source describes the Tribe of Shabazz through accounts involving the Earth, the Moon, ancient scientists, East Asia, Africa, Arabia, and the movement of peoples across vast periods of time. These accounts are part of the historical worldview transmitted through the teachings of Master Fard Muhammad and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
The Official Tribe of Shabazz understands the public restoration of the name Shabazz in North America as beginning with Master Fard Muhammad's teaching mission in Detroit in 1930. The Tribe's position is that Shabazz identifies an ancestral people and predates the later formal organization known as the Nation of Islam.
According to the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Black man is the Original Man and the history of the Tribe of Shabazz extends into timelines measured in trillions of years. The Tribe presents this as a foundational historical and spiritual teaching.
Conventional archaeology and geology presently use a different chronology. The Official Tribe of Shabazz recognizes that scientific conclusions are limited by the evidence, instruments, and methods presently available and does not treat the current limits of scientific knowledge as the final measure of what is historically possible.
The Official Tribe of Shabazz recognizes the Black and Indigenous tribes and peoples of the Americas as family. The Tribe respects the names, histories, traditions, and identities by which those peoples know themselves today. Different tribal names need not divide people who understand themselves to be family.
The Tribe seeks unity without erasing identity, cooperation without domination, and family without requiring uniformity.
