January 26, 2000
Web posted at: 10:26 a.m. EST (1526 GMT)

(CNN) -- The question put forward in the preface of "The Messenger" is written in simple words, yet is complex beyond measure: "Who, exactly, was Elijah Muhammad?"

"Asking that is tantamount to quizzing college freshmen on the nature of 'truth': it will beget answers as varied as the faces in the classroom," writes Karl Evanzz, author of the recently released biography of the founder and "prophet" of the Nation of Islam.

To the followers of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad was a messiah whose coming was foretold in the Bible and the Quran. "Muhammad himself fostered this idea and, for years, tried to convince his family that he, Elijah of Gilead, and the 7th century prophet Muhammad were one and the same," Evanzz writes.

"To many Jewish groups, he was an uneducated anti-Semite," while orthodox Muslims saw him as "a heretic," Evanzz writes.

"All these perceptions, like the tactile experiences of the 10 blind men describing the elephant, reflect elements in his persona; any one or group of them fails to capture the complete picture of the man," Evans writes in the book's preface.

A simple answer to the question is that Elijah Muhammad, born Elijah Poole, a sharecropper's son, was the co-founder of the black separatist sect called the Nation of Islam -- now run by Farrakhan. To this day Muhammad remains, as Evanzz puts it, "the undisputed major influence in the conversion of nearly 4 million African Americans to Islam." Muhammad died in 1975.

Evanzz, a researcher and online editor for The Washington Post, is the author of "The Judas Factor," which deals with the assassination of Malcolm X. In "The Messenger," he deals with some of the same figures and details, including the events leading up to the assassination of Malcolm X. The details come from interviews as well as transcripts of FBI wiretaps.

"I was at a tremendous advantage in writing this book because the FBI had Muhammad's telephones tapped for many years. After interviewing Muslims -- including some of Muhammad's and Malcolm's siblings -- I was able to decipher many names" that had been blacked out on the declassified government documents. "By studying the subject of a document, them comparing it with what I already knew and what was reported in newspapers during a certain period, I could figure out who was talking to whom, and what they were talking about."

And while Farrakhan never agreed to an interview, Evanzz says that "many people who are or were in Farrakhan's inner circle" helped him put questions to Farrakhan. "Without (Farrakhan) knowing it -- or so I was led to believe -- they would present questions from me to him, then relay his response to me."

The portrait Evanzz paints of Muhammad is at odds with that presented by The Nation of Islam. In material provided by his publisher, Pantheon Books, Evanzz is blunt: "When children of the 22nd century study our time ... they'll find Farrakhan and Muhammad in the section on infamous African Americans."

He goes further: "Both placed too much value on material things, unlike Malcolm and Dr. (Martin Luther) King, who made spiritual progress and social justice their priorities."

Muhammad's "greatest contribution to African Americans was in restoring their sense of pride and offering them an alternative to Christianity, for which slavery left a bitter aftertaste," Evanzz says. "But his greatest failure was in refusing to lead them beyond the pride of race and to do what his son Wallace has done: to guide black people beyond a race-based version of Islam to orthodox Islam."

Evanzz says he himself came close to joining the Nation of Islam when he was a teen-ager, after King's assassination. "His murder filled me with a nearly uncontrollable rage ... so yes, I changed the spelling of my name to make it sound more Islamic -- or so I thought. But I never joined."

Evanzz says he spent five years researching and writing "The Messenger," documenting a person he terms "a scandalous and corrupt hypocrite who violated virtually every ideal he pronounced." Evanzz says the biography details how Muhammad's life was shaped by what he calls "white racism, predawn police and FBI raids, ritualistic homicides, incestuous love affairs, the betrayal and murder of friends, shameless exploitation of his charges, and the ceaseless espousal of high black principle in his mad grasp for power."