The ministers filed down the stairs, hearts heavy, souls shaken. Up until Elijah Muhammad's last breath at 8:10 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1975, many believed The Messenger would live forever. They could not imagine he would leave them behind in the wilderness of North America to face the blue-eyed devil alone.

For more than 40 years, he had lifted them from the gutter, plucked them out of the fire, resurrected them from the mentally dead. He did it using a theology of love and hate, sincerity and science fiction. The white man was the Devil, the black man a human God. He preached a separatist gospel of self-reliance. And he turned thousands of his brothers and sisters--the so-called Negroes, a phrase he used only with disdain--into proud black men and women.

They thought he was divine. He didn't argue.

Now that he was dead of heart failure at age 77, what would become of his people? Their Nation of Islam?

Gathered in the depths of the mosque on the South Side of Chicago, they soon learned the answer. The Messenger's 41-year-old son, his successor, held up a Holy Koran. "We have to take this down from the shelf," declared Wallace D. Muhammad, staring into 200 somber faces. "We say we are Muslims. What my father taught that is in this book, we will keep. What is not in this book, we have to give up."

So much had to go: There would be no more lessons about white devils or hovering spaceships ready to destroy America for its racial sins. There would be no more prohibitions against going to the movies or demands for a separate black nation in the American South.

It was nothing less than a religious reformation that Wallace Muhammad began that bitter winter 27 years ago. He and his followers took the first steps in a mass march of tens of thousands of African-Americans away from the cult-like margins of a fierce faith to the mainstream of one of the world's great religions. Wallace Muhammad later started using the name Warith Deen Mohammed as he and his community waded deeper into Islam.

To Mohammed, his father's Nation had been more concerned with property than prayers. It was more social movement than religion, more small-business incubator than house of worship. "My father was a great social reformer," Mohammed now says. "But when I came in, all I cared about was the soul."
  
Today, there are 6 million to 8 million Muslims in the United States, and nearly 30 percent of them are African-American. The vast majority sit solidly in the Islamic mainstream, pledging allegiance to Allah and America, balancing Islamic piety and Western values. America isn't the Great Satan. It is home.

To get his community to this point, Mohammed, the conflicted prince of the Nation of Islam's "Royal Family," turned his back on his father's kingdom. He tore it down myth by myth, replacing it with something new and, he is confident, truer to the faith. A year after taking over, he renamed the group the World Community of Al-Islam in the West, consigning the 45-year-old Nation of Islam to history--or so he thought.

Several disaffected Nation officials, including Minister Louis Farrakhan, refused to give up the old ways. They broke away, taking some of Elijah Muhammad's followers with them. New but significantly smaller Nations of Islam soon began popping up in Detroit, Atlanta and most famously in Chicago under Farrakhan. Most of The Messenger's followers, however, stayed with the son and his Koran-based message.

Mohammed thus "was able to do two remarkable things," says Sulayman S. Nyang, a professor of African Studies at Howard University. "One [was] the re-Islamization of the movement; the second, the re-Americanization of the movement. Here's a man who inherited an organization that most scholars of Islam would describe as heretical before [Mohammed took over]," Nyang says. "That mythology has been replaced by sound theology rooted in Islamic orthodoxy. The people had to make a 180-degree turn."

Yvonne Haddad, an Islamic expert at Georgetown University, agrees that Mohammed shepherded a remarkable transformation in his followers' religious life. While his father shunned patriotism and cursed America for its crimes against the "black man," Haddad says Mohammed proudly waves the flag. "He still knows there is much about America that is racist," she says. "But he's working with it to change it. He is extremely important in making Muslims look at themselves as Americans and emphasizing their American identity."

Yet his own identity is not well known. His is the face of Islam we seldom see, the personal story we seldom hear. It is the face of a bearded and balding father of 9 and grandfather of 10 who has been married four times, loves to cook and putter around his modest south suburban home--and professes a surprising admiration for the music of Prince, the sexually charged rocker. "He's cleaned up his act," he says. "Now I don't have to go sneak to see him."

Mohammed currently calls his group the Muslim American Society, its third name since the death of the old Nation of Islam. With nearly 200,000 active followers, he is the chief imam, or spiritual leader, for the largest community of African-American Muslims in the United States. Some scholars say the number is closer to 1 million when all the group's supporters are counted.

Under Mohammed's leadership, the community became increasingly active outside its mosques, launching and supporting new businesses, becoming more politically involved and reaching out to Christians and Jews for interfaith dialogue. "We were really making progress," he says, sighing deeply. "We were on the move."

Then terror came roaring out of the September sky.

Mohammed says the true picture of Islam has been buried in the debris of the Sept. 11 attacks. The image of his religion, he says, was hijacked by a band of extremists; a group of desperate, depraved men whom he insists are no more representative of Islam than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was of white Christian Americans.

Still, he says, "We have not been doing our job of presenting Islam correctly. The whole world is looking at the Muslims, wondering who we are. We shouldn't have waited for this terrible thing to happen to show them."

His followers call W.Deen Mohammed "Brother Imam." They also call him late--a lot. One even suggested that the initials W.D. stand for "Way Delayed." Of course, he often has 50 people demanding his attention every day. Plus, he's a 68-year-old man with a 12-year-old son. Time has a way of getting away from him.

So none of his followers was surprised recently when there was no sign of Brother Imam 30 minutes after he was scheduled to deliver the khutbah, or sermon, for the Friday afternoon congregational prayer.

The mosque on 71st Street was overflowing. One family drove all the way from Michigan to hear him. Mohammed doesn't have a mosque of his own and travels around the city and country as a guest speaker.

The mosque is a converted nursery school. But inside it looks like a shoe store as the faithful come in, slip out of their shoes and line them up against the wall before finding a spot on the rug. There are chairs set up in the back for the old and infirm.

Outside, vendors were setting up their tables. Wherever Brother Imam goes, vendors follow a la a Grateful Dead tour. They sell sandwiches, tapes of his past khutbahs, copies of the community's newspaper, the Muslim Journal, and bean pies.

"Assalamu alaikum [Peace be upon you]" one vendor said to another as he set up his table under a tree. "Man, where have you been? I haven't seen you in a month of Sundays."

"Wa' alaikumus salam [And upon you is the peace]," the other responded, throwing his arms around his friend. "I've just been working hard, trying to get into Paradise."

Inside the mosque, someone said excitedly "Here he comes," and the men sitting on the floor in the middle and front of the room edged closer to the rostrum, so the men in the back could squeeze onto the rug. The women and girls were in the next room. A thin, elderly man with a white beard entered, and people strained to get a glimpse. False alarm. It was Mohammed's 68-year-old volunteer driver, Yusuf Abdullah, a former Baptist church deacon. Mohammed does not travel with bodyguards or an entourage of aides. He either drives himself or Abdullah climbs behind the wheel of his Chevy.

Mohammed came next, slipping out of his shoes and bestowing a sweet smile on his patient congregation.

"Assalamu alaikum," he said to the faithful.

"Wa' alaikumus salam," they responded.

In his sermon, he said that Allah invented the heavens and the stars and the moonlight. He invented weather: the wind, the rain, the snow. The believers should study Allah's creation and become scientists and scholars and use their knowledge to help their communities learn and prosper.

Always give back, always reach out, he added. No one should go to school just to become rich for themselves. They must help the poor. They must help the world.

They must, he said, try to follow the example of "the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him."

"That's right," someone shouted.

"Teach."

"Allahu akbar [God is great]," someone said, and several other voices joined in.

Brother Imam beamed.

It has been a long and sometimes dangerous journey for Mohammed, who turns 69 at the end of October. His followers call the period when he took over the Nation "The Change" or "The Transition." It could have been The End. Ten years, almost to the day, before his ascension, Mohammed's friend and religious confidant, Malcolm X, was gunned down in New York City. Malcolm, too, had tried to bring orthodoxy and other reforms to the Nation of Islam.

Even before Mohammed took over, there were several outbreaks of violence across the Nation of Islam, including a deadly shootout with police in Baton Rouge and an assassination and two beheadings in Newark, N.J. In some cases, the violence was criminally motivated, in others ideological disputes seemed to be the cause.

Mohammed "took a major risk in leading the Nation" to mainstream Islam, says Lawrence H. Mamiya, a professor of religion at Vassar College. "There were many threats on his life. There were many splits in his movement."

Farrakhan is responsible for the most famous fissure. He broke away in late 1977 to form his own Nation of Islam--heavy on charismatic leadership, light on the Koran. Just like the old days. Farrakhan declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mohammed recalls that, before he left, Farrakhan came to him "with a heavy heart." Farrakhan told him, Mohammed says, that he had disgraced his father and chased away the Nation's young members. Elijah Muhammad's Nation had worked miracles, Farrakhan argued. It had pulled up the lowest of the low--the addict and the pusher, the criminal and the just too tired to go on. It had reached into the prisons and the worst of the ghetto and transformed despair into dignity, pain into pride. There was no reason to change--not yet, maybe not ever.

Mohammed, who recognized Farrakhan's talents and popularity, pleaded with him to stay. But the men could not come to terms, and ultimately Farrakhan was asked to go in peace. Mohammed says he was firm in his position: The old Nation had its day, now it was done. It was plagued with thieves at the top and the misguided at the bottom. It was time to worship God, not myths. It was time to grow up.

And so these two sons of Elijah-- Farrakhan, his ideological son, and Mohammed, his flesh and blood who succeeded him--went their separate ways. Tensions were high in the weeks after the split. "Hints of Violence in a Growing Feud," declared the headline over Vernon Jarrett's Chicago Tribune column on Jan. 20, 1978. But five days later, another Jarrett column was headlined "A War of Words, but no Violence."

Over the years, the fiery and flamboyant Farrakhan easily overshadowed Mohammed in the media, though his following remained much smaller. Farrakhan was the charmer, Mohammed the plodder. Farrakhan was outrageous. Mohammed was invisible.
 
"He's a great man but nobody knows it," says his sometimes frustrated son-in-law, Najee Ali, a political and social activist who converted to Islam while in prison for robbery 10 years ago after listening to a tape of Mohammed.

"We need to be doing more out in the streets. We need to be more involved in people's daily struggles."

Mohammed's low profile is partly his own doing. Perhaps "turned off by the leadership of his father," says historian Claude Andrew Clegg III, Mohammed seemed purposely to fade into the background, taking his community with him on a years-long retreat into religion.

Agieb Bilal, a Muslim since 1969, said that in a lecture to the faithful shortly after taking over, Mohammed "told us he was planting a new seed, and we would be going out of sight for awhile until it was time for the new growth to emerge."

In the early days of The Change, Mohammed was relentless in pursuit of his mission, focused to the point of obsession. "One day, Uncle Wallace started teaching at 5 p.m. We didn't leave until 2 a.m.," recalls his nephew, Wali Muhammad, a Chicago radio talk-show host. "He was trying to overcome almost 45 years of [his father's] teaching. When he came in talking the Koran, it was like he was talking a different religion. He really upset the apple cart. He made a lot of people mad."

Some simply lost interest. "I got bored and left," says Zakiyyah Muhammad, 56, a neighborhood activist and resident of the Near South Side. She had joined the Nation of Islam in 1973, and stayed through The Change. By the early '80s, she reluctantly decided it was time to leave. The community, she says, was "dead, dead, dead."

"They weren't doing anything. Praying five times a day and reading the Koran wasn't enough. I wanted to be involved in making life better for black people." She considered joining Farrakhan, but finally dismissed the idea. "There were some things about Farrakhan's Nation of Islam I liked," she says. "But after learning true Islam, I could not embrace them again. I could never go back."

What she and many others wanted most was a mosque that combined both politics and prayer, the kind of place Malcolm X envisioned. But he is long dead, and Zakiyyah Muhammad is still searching.

Munir Muhammad also could not abide The Change. He joined the Nation of Islam in 1973 and left not long after Wallace Muhammad took power. He later founded a group called the Coalition for the Remembrance of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. "I saw in this man a strength I had not seen prior to or since in any human being," he says. "There are people who say [Muhammad] is still alive. We are not those people. We say he lives in us."

He says that while Elijah Muhammad was alive, there were several attempts to destroy the Nation over the years: hypocrites from within, traitors from without, the government. All failed. Then along came W. Deen.

"We lost just about everything," Munir Muhammad says, referring not only to the Messenger's fiery spirit and vision but also the millions in property and businesses his son sold off to settle tax debts and probate court rulings. Farrakhan's group purchased the Stony Island mosque and Elijah Muhammad's Kenwood mansion.

Many friendships also were lost, but some rifts are slowly being repaired. After nearly three decades apart, the two old rivals, Farrakhan and W. Deen. Mohammed, both near 70, are carefully making peace with their past after Farrakhan's brush with death a couple of years ago as he battled prostate cancer. The two talk of economic cooperation between their communities, and they speak at each other's conventions. Farrakhan attended the Muslim American Society's recent gathering in Chicago.

"It's good to be home," he told 7,000 Muslims and guests at the UIC Pavilion on the last day of the convention in early September. When it was time for Mohammed to speak, Farrakhan sat behind him, smiling and nodding. "Go ahead, Brother Imam," he said. "Preach."

Afterward, a middle-aged woman with tears in her eyes approached a security guard. "I just have to tell them how happy I am to see them together," she said. "I've been praying for this for so long. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad would be so proud."

Mohammed talks a lot about his father these days, in glowing terms. The old man's picture is featured in some Muslim American Society literature and Mohammed often is introduced as the son of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. In the first months and years of The Change, however, he was much more critical, even harsh. He was trying, he says, to free himself and his people of what he calls the "old mind." Now they are free, he believes, and he can reclaim his father. He even claims that the Messenger knew his son would lead the Nation into the mainstream. In fact, he says, that's exactly where Elijah Muhammad wanted his movement to go. Some say that's wishful thinking, a son's sentimentality.

"I suggest what he is doing is engaging in a bit of myth-making, reinventing the story to reach out to Louis Farrakhan's group," says Herbert Berg, an assistant professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who writes on Islam.

If so, it seems to be working. It is Farrakhan who appears to be walking the farthest across the dance floor in this cautious courtship. Farrakhan is the one who moves closer and closer to a philosophically constant Mohammed. In recent years, Farrakhan has toned down his angry race rhetoric and talked up the tenets of mainstream Islam, which preaches universal brotherhood. His followers take classes in orthodox Islam, and he is being tutored in Arabic.

But the wall isn't down completely. "I don't see Louis Farrakhan ever disbanding the Nation of Islam," says Clegg, the historian and author of "An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad." "In a sort of messy way, Farrakhan has been moving toward more orthodox Islam since the early '90s. But you won't see [Mohammed and Farrakhan] in the same organization, I don't think. It's still a very divided community."

Indeed, in the literature his aides have been distributing at recent appearances, Mohammed chides Farrakhan and his followers for not keeping up with changing times: "Minister Louis Farrakhan is educated and very intelligent, therefore I don't excuse him. And I don't excuse many intelligent, educated African-Americans who follow him in the wrong teachings of Islam. That is because the world has changed, the discrimination laws have been abolished, and race relations have improved."

Mohammed says he considers himself a "rational man" who thinks through every possible angle of an issue. But he admits with a big laugh, his eyes twinkling, "I've made some female choices that weren't rational."

He has been married four times, twice to the same woman, his first wife. He has nine children, ranging in age from 12 to 42. Several of his children work for him, including NGina Muhammad-Ali, director of advertising at his community's newspaper, the Muslim Journal.

A few years ago, he and NGina attended a Prince concert together. He greatly admires the rock star. "I've been following Prince since he was outrageously nasty," he says. "I was able to see past the nastiness. I saw him as a very intelligent man with a cause. He was in a spirit to lead people away from the grip of the world and free their minds."

Mohammed also has a lifelong love of movies. He used to have to sneak to see movies when his father was alive, because movie-going was prohibited in the Nation of Islam. He once put on a fake mustache and sunglasses to slip unseen into a show. When he took over the Nation, he lifted the ban.

For decades after it was founded in 1930 in Detroit, the Nation of Islam thrived and survived on rigid rules, discipline and blind loyalty. Conformity was a virtue, independence a sin. In the Nation, a Muslim man better have his suit pressed. His hair cut. His fingernails clean. His weekly quota of Muhammad Speaks newspapers sold. The Fruit of Islam, the Nation's security force, was watching.

Wallace Muhammad was always different. Quirky. When he wore a suit, folks say, you'd remember, because it didn't happen often. He had other things on his mind.

It was easy for Wallace to be different then. He was The Messenger's son, a prince of the "Royal Family." When the Royals came to a Nation gathering, the sea of believers would step aside to clear a path. But being Elijah Muhammad's son did not protect him from Elijah's wrath, especially when he questioned his father about the Nation's theology. Physically, The Messenger was a small man, frail and tormented by asthma. Yet he blew away challenges to his authority like a hurricane. The Nation was not a democracy.

Over the years, Elijah Muhammad banished his son at least three times for heresy. Wallace never could accept the idea that God was a man who walked the Earth in the person of Master W.D. Fard Muhammad, the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam. The man Wallace was named after.

The believers called such banishment being "put out." For the devout, it was a harsh punishment: Friends wouldn't talk to you; your own blood would turn their backs if they saw you coming down the street.

In the early 1960s, Wallace was put out for being too close to The Messenger's former acolyte, Malcolm X. Both were disillusioned by revelations that Elijah Muhammad had children outside his marriage. Both loved The Messenger, but questioned his message. Both wanted him to change.

"I was influenced by my father all my life," Mohammed says, a trace of sadness in his voice. "And by Malcolm."

The Nation sought to be self-contained, and it had almost everything a believer would ever need--grocery stores, restaurants, schools, clothing shops, cleaners, a bank, farms, a fleet of trucks, a jet, an army of men, office buildings, apartment houses and 80 temples around the country and overseas.

"We were isolated and insulated," says Imam Darnell Karim, Mohammed's friend of more than 60 years. "We shut our ears to everything. We heard only one voice, the leader's."

Then in the late 1940s, Elijah Muhammad invited in the outside world, hiring a Muslim from the Middle East to teach Arabic at the school. Wallace, still a teenager, began reading the Koran with fresh eyes and started seeing more and more discrepancies between the Koran's Islam and his father's. What he learned greatly disturbed him. "All my life I had been trying to understand what my father was teaching," he says. "When I decided it was not acceptable, I really started searching the Koran, looking for answers."

Still, he tried to keep his doubts to himself. He wanted to be an obedient son. He went into the family business, becoming a student minister in the Nation of Islam, speaking publicly at the mosque for the first time at age 17 or 18. His friend Karim remembers him being so nervous that he gripped the rostrum like a life preserver as he spoke. Mohammed remembers speaking for only a few minutes. But he says his closing words shot through the Nation: "We give more attention to the Devil than to Allah."

Mohammed quickly climbed the ranks of the Nation, from foot soldier in the Fruit of Islam to student minister to chief minister of the high-profile Temple #12 in Philadelphia in 1959. "He didn't teach like the other ministers," says his nephew, Wali Muhammad. "He talked much more about the spirit and the soul. He talked much more about the Koran."

Two years later, on his 28th birthday in 1961, Mohammed was sent to federal prison in Minnesota for refusing induction into the United States military. Once again, he was being the obedient son: His father and many of his followers had been imprisoned during World War II for refusing induction. They considered themselves citizens of the Nation of Islam, not the United States. They would not defend a country that lynched their brothers and humiliated their sisters, segregated their families and told their children they were no good, a country that had turned its back on them and pretended they were invisible.

In his 14 months in the Minnesota prison, he spent most of his days and nights studying the Koran. He became even more convinced that the Nation of Islam had to change its message. But he had no idea how. His father had all the power, befitting the Last Messenger of Allah.

When the prison gates opened in 1963, Mohammed returned to the Nation, looking for allies. He found one in Malcolm X, who was becoming openly critical of Elijah Muhammad. In 1964, this association was what got Mohammed "put out" for the first time. His rejection of his father's basic teachings that Fard was God led to his banishment again in the late '60s and for the last time in the early '70s.

On the outside of the Nation, wanting back in, Mohammed and his family were living in Chicago in the early 1970s. To make ends meet he drove a cab, worked as a welder and did whatever else he could find.

When Mohammed was finally readmitted to the Nation in 1974, Elijah Muhammad had only six months left to live. Mohammed says his father gave him great support in his last days. "He told [his staff] I was free to preach. He wasn't holding me to their language any more."

The Messenger died the day before Savior's Day, the annual celebration honoring W.D. Fard Muhammad. That year the 20,000 Muslims who filled the hall roared their approval when Wallace, with his family's backing, was proclaimed the supreme minister. According to family and Nation legend, Wallace had been preordained for this moment. The story goes that when Clara Muhammad was pregnant with her seventh child, God, in the person of Fard, told her husband Elijah that the child would be a boy, a special boy, whom they should name after him. The boy would help his father someday and do many great things.

One Muslim says family legend wasn't the only reason Wallace was named the new leader. Many of the ministers who supported him did so "because they thought he was like King Tut, a fool they could control. He fooled them," the man says. "He fooled them all."

Mohammed knew he had to move fast to assert his leadership once his father was gone. "I felt there could be trouble," he says, from potential rivals who might emerge "and maybe start preaching the old way. I also thought the people should have a change right away, while they were mourning my father's death. That would be the time they would be most serious and respectful."

The changes came fast and furious. He had years of pent-up ideas and frustrations. He ordered the chairs ripped out of the mosque so worshipers could prostrate themselves in prayer on the floor like Muslims all over the world. He stepped from behind the rostrum to teach the congregation the proper way to pray. Bilal, the mosque secretary, remembers the "officials gritting their teeth when they bumped their heads on the floor."

He disbanded the Fruit of Islam security force. When he was in exile in 1964, openly criticizing his father, he accused the FOI of stalking him and threatening him with harm. And he once described the FOI as a "punch-your-teeth-out" squad.

He ended the policy of requiring male members to sell 300 copies of the Muhammad Speaks newspaper each week and buy any they did not sell. The circulation of the paper dropped. So did the revenue. "I could have kept the money coming in, just like my father," he says, "but I knew it was un-Islamic. Getting poor people to pay more than they can pay is against the religion. As a Muslim, you should be helping them."

He decentralized the mosque structure, giving individual mosques across the country control of their own affairs.

He said whites could join.

Heads were spinning.

He moved too fast, says Aminah McCloud, an Islamic expert at DePaul University. The people did not have a chance to soak in one change before another came hurling at them from the rostrum. "The people were being psychologically whipped to death."

One of the first whites to join was Dorothy Fardan, a 35-year-old former Catholic with a doctorate in sociology. She walked into the mosque in Albany, N.Y., in the summer of 1975. Her musician husband, Donald Elijah Muhammad, was a longtime member of the Nation of Islam, and she had tried to join years before. The Messenger, however, had disapproved of interracial marriages, and certainly did not approve of devils in the mosque.

"I felt no resentment towards the Honorable Elijah Muhammad," Fardan says. "I admired him. I felt he told the truth about the United States. I never personally felt I was a devil."

Fardan, who now teaches at Bowie State University in Maryland, eventually drifted away with her husband from Mohammed's community, though she is still a Muslim "under the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad." They were unhappy with The Change, although she thought Mohammed sincere and not lusting after power.

One of the things Fardan objected to was Mohammed's embrace of patriotism in 1976. He walked across a stage carrying an American flag, saying it was time for Muslims to recognize and celebrate the U. S. as a great country. Today, he has American flag decals on his car and his hat.

It wasn't easy selling patriotism to his followers in the beginning, he says. He argued that black people had fought and died in every American war. They had blazed trails across the West and designed cities in the East. They had contributed their blood and brains to building the country.

"They bought the logic, if not the spirit," he says of his followers.

He is not selling a love-it-or-leave-it brand of patriotism, he says, more of a love-it-and-make-it-better. He knows that race matters, that black boys and girls still have a higher hill to climb. And he is not happy about talk of a unilateral invasion of Iraq or about the treatment of Palestinians by Israel and its chief ally, the United States.

"Muslims," he says, "get whipped on too much."

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, he notes, there was harassment of Muslims, including his 12-year-old son, the youngest of his nine children. "Even now," he says, "we have to be somewhat fearful." But he says the attacks also "woke everybody up" in his community to the need to be more involved in the larger society and its political life.

"I think we have some of the best Americans around," he says. He particularly wants them to get busy in businesses. "Now that the soul is right," he says, "we have to finance the religion. Our imams have to depend on charity."

But he does not want to repeat the mistakes of the Nation's past. He does not want the imams or their mosques controlling and operating the businesses, as was the case in the old days when temptation led to corrupt management. He wants a high wall between God and commerce.

His plan is to find Muslim entrepreneurs and support them with loans and other assistance. His followers operate a meat-processing plant in Hazel Crest and an export/import business and other concerns across the country.

Meanwhile, Mohammed fights the cult of personality every chance he gets. It bothers him that people still want to know if the imam approves even the smallest tasks before anything gets done

"That's from the old school," he says ruefully in an interview. "My father had such control over the people. When he passed, a lot of people were numb, dead almost."

He tells young Muslims at the annual convention not to put him on a pedestal. He insists he's a little guy, and he rattles off some of his I-don't-haves to prove it.

"I don't have a PhD," he says. "I don't have a master's degree. I don't even have a BA. But I'm connected to something mighty great," he continues. "It makes me respectable, honorable in the company of kings, queens and presidents."

What he has, he says, is the same thing the roomful of 250 teenagers share with a billion people around the globe.

"That," he says, "is Islam."