The Imam’s Next Move : W. Deen Mohammed has moved the black Muslims in his ministry toward reconciliation with other races and religions. Now, he wants the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to put aside his separatist sentiments and join him.

In the cluttered basement office of the Imam W. Deen Mohammed, on a wall behind his desk, hangs an illustrated poster depicting the history of black Muslims in America.

Among the portraits are his own, his friend Malcolm X, and his father--the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the builder of the Nation of Islam from 1934 until his death in 1975.

Conspicuously absent is the face of Louis Farrakhan.

Both Farrakhan and W. Deen Mohammed served as top advisers in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation. Both claim to be carrying out Muhammad’s wishes--Farrakhan through his Nation of Islam and Mohammed through his Ministry of W. Deen Mohammed. Both touch hundreds of thousands of lives as teachers and spiritual leaders. They are nearly the same age--Farrakhan, 61, and Mohammed, 60--and through relatives who have married they share family ties.

But the two men have chosen strikingly different paths since they formally severed ties 17 years ago. They espouse philosophies that contrast as sharply as Farrakhan’s commanding demeanor and Mohammed’s thoughtful presence.

While Farrakhan’s scalding racial rhetoric has propelled him into the center of controversy and onto front pages, Mohammed has labored more quietly to bring African Americans to Orthodox Sunni Islam. He has emphasized ties to world Islam rather than social change in the United States, and is seen internationally as an important leader in the faith. He also works to improve relations between Islam and other religions in this country. Fittingly, his first initial stands for both his birth name, Wallace, and his Arabic name, Warith. He does not chose between them.

Now, a challenge is brewing. Mohammed expects to move next year to Newark, N.J., a Muslim center with a large African American population that is “ready-made for conversion,” as C. Eric Lincoln, who has written extensively on black Muslims, observes. Mohammed will be closer, too, to the great media crucible of New York City, where reputations are forged and burnished.

Even sooner, on Aug. 13, Mohammed plans to journey to the Harlem mosque where Malcolm X and, later, Farrakhan preached as his father’s followers. On handbills advertising Mohammed’s “special address,” he assumes his father’s mantle: “The son of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad is coming . . .”

Under a tent on an adjoining lot, Mohammed says, he will call upon Louis Farrakhan to change.

“I believe that he is a person who’s in conflict with himself, in serious conflict with himself,” Mohammed says. “I believe he’s not living the Farrakhan he wants to live.” He will urge Farrakhan, he says, to “say nothing in the name of Islam that would be damaging to the name of Islam.” And that means, he says, that it is time to put aside separatist sentiments and to accept all people, no matter what their skin color.

For, while he praises Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam for the strong attractions of “the neatness, the discipline, the love of family, the loyalty to husband and wife, the better showing of business,” he condemns as “trouble” the minister’s bitter talk about whites in general and Jews in particular. Most of Farrakhan’s disciples, he says, “are good people. I want to save them from something that I see as a time bomb.”

Farrakhan has nothing to say at this time. He did not return telephone calls and faxes seeking a response to Mohammed’s remarks.

Other Muslim leaders are leery of criticizing Farrakhan publicly, but they support Mohammed’s plans. “This is a good idea,” says Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County. “Of course, everyone feels that way.”

The timing is crucial for Mohammed. In the past, he has appeared to be the most mainstream of the two--Mohammed was the first Muslim to offer morning prayers before the U.S. Senate and was the Muslim representative at Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Interfaith Prayer Service. But Farrakhan is becoming accepted in the United States as a major player and was given forums this year by such established organizations as the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus.

And while Mohammed has represented American Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco, Farrakhan’s message is gaining a hold in Africa and the Caribbean. His Nation of Islam plans a convention in Ghana this year.

“Wallace either has to be confrontational or he has to be eclipsed,” Lincoln says. “And he knows that.”

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Confrontation does not appear to be his strong suit. Mohammed is short, bearded and graying, with a paunch and an unassuming manner. “He has all the charisma of an accountant,” says Steven Barboza, a New York journalist who is both a practicing Muslim and a chronicler of the faith’s progress in the United States.

But Mohammed has now secured his own base, Lincoln notes.

He may have as many or more supporters than Farrakhan, Lincoln says, while emphasizing there is no way to accurately determine how many people look to either of them.

Although Mohammed willingly concedes that he is no match for Farrakhan as an orator, his lectures and tapes are popular enough to afford him a pleasant life in a southern suburb of Chicago near his office. He has a house in Little Rock, Ark., too, and the home his followers are building in Newark for him and his fourth wife will stand on 12 acres of land. He also has eight children and five stepchildren.

He will have no trouble finding differences with Farrakhan to point to.

It would be hard to imagine Farrakhan publishing a brochure like Mohammed’s introduction to his ministry, which features testimonials from whites--including a Washington, D.C., rabbi, and Sens. Paul Simon and Orrin Hatch--as well as from Muhammad Ali and television host Tony Brown.

And it would be hard to imagine Farrakhan discoursing at length on the positive side of race relations in the United States, as Mohammed did last week.

“We have made so much progress,” he said, “that I’m sorry that we’re not living in the days of the Prophets so it will go down in a piece of Scripture.”

African Americans “should love America,” he added. “We should love America passionately now that America has changed so drastically within a relatively short period of time.”

Although racism is far from dead, he said, “a lot of what we read now as racism is not racism; it’s just human weaknesses. We tend to identify every bad experience that we have now as racism and it’s not so.”

Unlike in Farrakhan’s movement, Mohammed says white people are welcome in his followers’ mosques--although whites, he noted, smiling wryly, “are not knocking on our doors.”

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Despite his soft-spoken persona, it was Mohammed who was the rebel during the Elijah Muhammad years, when the Nation of Islam was transformed into a mass movement.

Twice the son was excommunicated from the Nation. The first time for providing Malcolm X with information about his father’s private life--information that led Malcolm X to leave the organization in 1964; the second for preachings that contradicted his father’s teachings.

One of eight children, he was educated in the Nation’s academies, but when he learned Arabic in high school, he went on to read the Koran in the original text. Looking for the basis of the Nation’s claims of black superiority and the evil of whites, he concluded that “these ideas are not supported.”

Mohammed never brought up to his father the subject of his changing views--”I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable,” he says--but he figures Elijah Muhammad knew quickly enough. He could tell by the way his father started pointing out that “the greater knowledge is with us, not with the so-called Orthodox Muslim order.”

And yet, he says, his father encouraged his inner circle to be curious and to study. At his dining room table, Mohammed recalls, where the most faithful of the faithful gathered for staff meetings, Elijah Muhammad began to talk about how the Nation’s creation story--with whites cast in the role of demons--just might be more symbolic than literal. “In the latter part of his life, he was a more educated man,” Mohammed says.

The son says that by then, his father intended for the Nation to someday move to a purer understanding of the Koran, and eventually for black people to lead the Islamic world.

A few years before his death at 77, Elijah Muhammad even introduced white Turks who were his special guests at the Nation’s annual Savior’s Day convention.

He never publicly recanted his earlier teachings about whites. Mohammed says that his father was deterred by his strong loyalty to the Nation’s founder, W.D. Fard. But the inner circle, including Farrakhan, was well aware of his father’s attitudes, the son says.

As evidence, he cites his own ascension to the leadership of the Nation by the staff’s consensus the day after Elijah Muhammad died.

Those were violent times. Malcolm X, who had also been moving toward a more Orthodox Islam, had been assassinated 10 years previously. Mohammed says that members of the staff, including Elijah Muhammad himself, may have incited the killers--although he suspects outside forces took advantage of the hostile atmosphere.

“I heard him use language at the table (that) he would have no regrets if he were to hear that Malcolm had been killed,” Mohammed says. But afterward, he says, his father told him: “I regret that happened to the boy. I wish it never had happened.”

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This was the backdrop, Mohammed says, when he took the top position. He says he began hearing about death threats against Farrakhan and that he brought Farrakhan for his own protection to Chicago from the East Coast, where he had succeeded Malcolm X as the Nation’s spokesman. He denies accounts that he transferred Farrakhan because he perceived him as a rival.

Mohammed also began dismantling his father’s empire. He sold off the businesses that had been highly profitable examples of black entrepreneurship and self-reliance. He decentralized the mosques, calling himself an Imam--”model”--rather than Supreme Minister. He preached that people should be judged only by their piety, not their race. He repealed the clothing requirements: dark suits and natty bow ties for men, gowns and veils for women. He changed his name, and his organization’s several times.

Within two years, Farrakhan informed Mohammed that he would strike out on his own to form a new Nation of Islam. Recalls Mohammed: “He said, ‘You have discredited your father.’ I’m sure he said, ‘You’ve slandered your father. We’re losing a lot of your young Muslims.’ ”

Mohammed heard another message: “I feel the real reason was he was not enjoying the attention, the popularity, the money that he had enjoyed before.” He hints that Farrakhan does not himself believe the words he and his top aides hurl before their vast audiences. “He saw a following out there,” Mohammed says.

The split has affected both men’s lives in private as well as in public, and the lives of those who love them. Mohammed’s daughter, Laila, says she and a son of Farrakhan were close friends as teen-agers and still see each other at family reunions, but “we don’t drop by each other’s house like we did.” They are extremely careful to observe the old rule of etiquette prohibiting discussion of politics or religion.

The two men do not seek each other out, but they also have crossed paths in the intervening years. They even embraced after Farrakhan professed his faith in Islam at a 1990 luncheon.

Now, Mohammed says he wants to tell his onetime colleague: “Come the rest of the way.”

He expects no immediate result other than “a warm rush of blood to his heart.” Whether it will be a rush of joy or anger, Mohammed doesn’t say. In “American Jihad: Islam After Malcolm X,” published in January, Farrakhan tells Barboza: “I wouldn’t care and don’t care if none of you believe that I am a Muslim. You are not my judge.”

But Mohammed says he still has hope that Farrakhan “will himself work out a plan for real changes.”

There are risks to this strategy. Perhaps the old legacy of bloodshed has not completely disappeared. The May shooting of Farrakhan’s former aide, Khallid Muhammad, bred countless conspiracy theories, although all may be groundless. “I don’t fear for my life,” Mohammed says. “I fear for these youngsters’ lives. . . . They might make an attempt to hurt me, but their life is in more danger than mine.”

More likely, Mohammed will be tagged as a tool of the whites. He knows that. “You can’t be worried,” he says, “that people will call you Uncle Tom, a patsy. You reach a point where you really can’t waste any time. If they want to charge me with selling out, then I’ll just have to live with that.”