COLUMN ONE : A Growing Force and Presence : The young men of the Nation of Islam are a common sight in the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Despite recent confrontations with police, they have considerable backing from black community leaders.

They can be seen on the weekends on street corners throughout South Los Angeles, hawking the bean pies that have become a signature product of the Nation of Islam.

Clean-shaven, close-cropped young men dressed in conservative suits and bow ties, the members are invariably courteous, addressing women as “ma’am” and other men, black men at least, as “brother.” By reputation, they are fastidiously conscious of health and fitness, drug-free and law-abiding.

Yet despite all appearances, members of the black American religious group today are engaged in a conflict with Los Angeles law enforcement that has unsettled sections of the city and focused attention on the escalating role of the followers of Louis Farrakhan as a societal force in the nation’s black communities.

Twice in less than a month, groups of Nation of Islam members have clashed violently with law enforcement officers. The first incident occurred three weeks ago and left three Muslims and four members of the Los Angeles Police Department injured. Last Tuesday, in the latest confrontation, a Muslim was shot to death by an L.A. sheriff’s deputy, and another was wounded.

Law enforcement officials said that in both cases the officers were attacked first. Some community leaders, however, have rallied to the Nation of Islam’s defense, saying the confrontations resulted from the heavy-handedness that young black men have come to expect from police.

They also contend that the incidents were rooted in a lack of understanding by police about the Nation of Islam and, in particular, what it has attempted to accomplish in embattled neighborhoods.

In the last year, the Chicago-based organization--once labeled subversive by the FBI and fanatical by some black activists--has heightened its activities across the country. It has dispatched teams of young men--called “God Squads”--to cities plagued by drugs and the violence associated with them. These men make themselves a visible community presence, proselytizing gang members and others with the message that violence and drugs are self-de structive.

The Muslims also train young men in martial arts as a means to both physical fitness and self-defense. This activity and the sometimes-controversial rhetoric of Farrakhan contribute to a perception held by some outsiders that the Nation is militaristic and bent on violence.

Others in the community call this a misperception. Said Abdul Karim Hasan, imam of Masjid Felix Bilal on South Central Avenue, an orthodox Islamic mosque:

“I don’t believe they are aggressive or as militant as some are led to believe. . . . Yes, they do take martial arts training but they’re not being trained in weaponry . . . only physical alertness, and there isn’t much you can do with that except self-defense.”

Hasan said he knew “most” of the local Nation leaders and considered them friends, although the two groups have no regular contact.

Joseph Duff, president of the Los Angeles branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, praised the Nation of Islam for its “unique . . . ability to make a moral statement to black people--from diet to religious values to self-respect--and ability to reach troubled youth and people in prison.”

Duff said the Nation has “gained the respect of other black organizations within the community . . . not always agreement, but always respect. . . . They do some things other groups in the community do not do, and they do them very well.”

Officials of the Nation of Islam, including Farrakhan, rarely grant interviews, and would not for this story, but their goals and beliefs cover the entire last page of every issue of the organization’s newspaper, The Final Call.

Many of the objectives are no different from those of traditional civil rights groups--freedom from economic injustice, an end to police brutality and equal opportunities. In addition, however, the organization wants black people to be allowed to establish a separate nation, for all imprisoned members of the Nation of Islam to be freed and for black people to be exempted from taxation because, the group claims, they are deprived of equal rights. It also calls for a prohibition against “intermarriage or race mixing.”

Its religious doctrine incorporates traditional teachings of the Koran, the Islamic world’s holy book, and the Christian Bible.

Farrakhan remains a controversial figure. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles, said the Nation of Islam “evokes fear and concern. . . . Farrakhan’s message is extremist and negative toward Jewish people, the Jewish religion and Israel.”

Farrakhan’s past references to Judaism as a “gutter religion” have not been forgotten, Cooper added, and “responsible black leaders have not been willing to come out and condemn this divisive kind of ideology.”

Ill will between Farrakhan and the Southland Jewish community boiled up in 1985, when Farrakhan attracted more than 15,000 to the Inglewood Forum after Jewish leaders had asked Mayor Tom Bradley to repudiate the Muslim leader. Bradley remained silent, triggering a furor among Jews and some Christian church leaders.

However, even those who do not agree with the group’s separatist views or what some see as its anti-Semitic and anti-white stances praise its doctrine of economic self-reliance and its ability to turn even hardened criminals into productive members of society.

In recent years, Farrakhan has crisscrossed the United States, speaking at colleges and political rallies, selling his programs of black pride and economic independence and preaching about what he calls the “wickedness” of white America and the impotence of modern Judaism.

In the process, he has gathered a wide following of blacks from all classes. Community activists in Los Angeles and other major cities have voiced their belief that the Nation of Islam has proven many times that its doctrine can help turn around young men whose lives otherwise appear headed for self-destruction.

William Rathburn, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau, said he was impressed by Nation of Islam officials who met with officers in the wake of the Jan. 3 confrontation in which Muslims fought with officers after a routine traffic stop, heightening tensions between the two groups.

Khallid Muhammad, a special assistant to Farrakhan, said in an interview shortly after the Jan. 3 incident that members of the Nation of Islam would rather fight to the death than to be humiliated by police.

The Muslims disputed the police account of what happened, but declined to give detailed accounts of their version. Others close to them, however, say the men involved contend that the fighting--involving 11 Muslim men, two teen-agers and 24 police officers--began after the officers tried to force one of the men to lie face down on the ground.

A police spokesman has said he doubted such an order was given. The so-called “felony-prone position,” he said, is ordered only in rare cases in which an officer feels physically threatened. An LAPD internal investigation of the incident is incomplete.

After a meeting about Nation-police relations last Monday, Rathburn said of the Muslims, “They have some of the same goals that the Police Department has.”

It was only hours after the meeting that the lethal confrontation between sheriff’s deputies and Nation of Islam members broke out, fueling new animosity.

Prominent members of Los Angeles’ black community have rallied to the defense of the Muslims. They assert that misunderstandings on the part of police about what the Nation of Islam is about and trying to achieve have contributed to officers’ perceiving them as a threat and dealing with them in ways that lead to trouble.

Contrary to being a negative influence, these activists and church leaders said, the Nation of Islam may be one of most positive forces around. And many note that there had not been a major conflict between the Nation and police in Los Angeles for nearly three decades. The last occurred in 1962, when a Muslim was killed and six others wounded, a police officer was shot and two others were hurt at the Muslims’ old mosque on South Broadway.

In a measure of the Nation’s community support, the Rev. Cecil L. Murray, pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal, Los Angeles’ oldest black church, said he has twice sponsored appearances at his church by Farrakhan and that his church works with local Nation of Islam leaders to fight drugs and crime and provide emergency care for the homeless.

Murray said the Nation has achieved “unbelievable results, beyond the walls of traditional religion,” and has “sought bridges of understanding with non-Muslim bodies.”

Danny J. Bakewell Jr., executive director of the Brotherhood Crusade, one of the most prominent activist groups in South-Central Los Angeles, described the Muslims as “the best friends the police have.”

Bakewell contended that the recent clashes between the group and the police stem from a larger problem: police officers’ behavior in the black community. He said that all black men have become targets for harassment in Los Angeles and surrounding communities as officers respond, sometimes in inappropriate ways, to the gang crisis.

“I don’t care about what anyone says,” Bakewell added, “there is nothing you can say to me to turn me against the Nation of Islam.”

The Nation has operated a mosque in Los Angeles at least since the early 1960s, when authorities estimated their numbers in the region to be about 3,000. Current enrollment numbers are not disclosed by the organization, but some outsiders estimate that as many as 5,000 Southern Californians consider themselves followers of the group.

If true, that would make them a small segment of the region’s Islamic community. The director of the Islamic Society of Orange County estimates that there are about 400,000 Muslims in Southern California, half in greater Los Angeles and about 40% to 50% of them African-Americans.

The organization that has come to be known as the Nation was founded in the 1930s in Detroit by a mysterious man named Wallace Fard Muhammad, a door-to-door rug and silk salesman.

Fard Muhammad proclaimed that he had come from the holy city of Mecca with a message to blacks: Prepare for the biblical battle of Armageddon, which he interpreted to mean the final confrontation between the white and black races.

The foundation of his teaching was that Allah is God, the white man is the devil and so-called Negroes are the Asiatic Black people, “the cream of planet Earth.”

He took under his wing Georgia-born Elijah Poole, an unemployed auto worker and one of 13 children born to a Baptist minister and sharecropper. Poole quickly rose in the organization and in 1934, when Fard Muhammad vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared, Poole became his successor.

The burgeoning movement was forged by Poole--now Elijah Muhammad--into a social and quasi-religious program for blacks and came to be called the Nation of Islam. At its zenith in the early 1970s, it boasted about 500,000 members.

Sense of Dignity

Many blacks readily accepted Elijah Muhammad’s message, says C. Eric Lincoln, a black sociologist at Duke University who coined the phrase “black Muslims,” because he had “given them a new sense of dignity, a conviction that they were more than equals of the white man and are destined to rule the Earth.”

The movement’s message was quickly spread by the fiery speeches of Malcolm Little, an ex-convict who adopted the name Malcolm X during the 1950s and became minister of Temple No. 11 in Boston. But Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964 and was assassinated a year later by men alleged to have ties to the Nation.

In the years from then to Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, the aging leader toned down his most strident public statements about whites. His son and successor, Wallace Muhammad, later known as Warith Deen Muhammad, further softened the group’s stances and sharply changed its image.

An orthodox Muslim well-versed in Arabic who had studied at a Muslim university in Cairo, Warith Muhammad lifted the ban on outsiders--including whites--sold off most of the large businesses that his father had amassed that were piling up huge debts, and disbanded the “punch your teeth out” Fruit of Islam bodyguards who were assigned to protect the ministers and keep followers in line.

“My main concern when I became the leader,” Muhammad said in a 1982 interview with The Times, “was to bring the community in line with what I see as world Islam. . . . I felt that our community founded by my father would come to the mainstream of the religion of Islam.”

Many Dropouts

Warith Muhammad’s arm of black Islam was thus phased out as a separate organization, and many followers dropped out along the way as he instituted sweeping changes.

Among the dropouts was Farrakhan, who in 1977 said he would restore the “true” Nation of Islam.

Farrakhan had become familiar with the movement in 1955 while he was a silver-voiced calypso singer named Louis Eugene Wolcott. One night he wrapped up a set in a southside Chicago nightclub and headed for a mosque of black Muslims.

The speaker, Elijah Muhammad, made a believer out of the young singer. Wolcott soon gave up his musical career and began a swift climb to the top of Muslim leadership, taking the name of Louis Farrakhan.

“The Nation of Islam under Farrakhan continues all the teachings of Elijah Muhammad,” said Lincoln, the Duke black-studies professor.

MEETING GROUND--Sheriff’s officials and Muslim leaders begin discussions to try to ease strained relations. A24