Any objective evaluation of the Black Muslims as a religious body must begin with a fresh look at religion itself, its origin and meaning. The current, widespread antipathy toward the Black Muslims makes such a basic review of the roots of religion all the more necessary. Above all we must shut out the voices of those who insist that the Black Muslims are not a religion because they--the critics--don’t like what the Muslims preach and do. After all, the Mormon Church holds, among other things, that the Negro is inferior because he is the descendant of Ham, the accursed son of Noah. As a result Negroes are allowed to join the Mormon Church, but are barred from high church office. But none of us will take the position that the Mormons are not a religion. To understand the Black Muslims--and the Mormons, for that matter--we must retrace that contorted and tribal path man and God have walked together en route to the here and now. _Religion as a Group Experience_ The world has always been a mystery to man. It excites his imagination, challenges his courage, and piques his intellect. But the individual never meets the world alone. He is of his group; the group is part of the world he inherited on the day he discovered himself and the other members of his group--like the thunder and the lightning and the sun and the trees and the rivers and the canyons and the hurricanes and the manna trees that are part of that which confounds him. Collectively confounded, then, the group members react as one. They create a god almost always in their own image and attribute to him all of the omnipotence and omnipresence required to account for a plot of matter spinning dizzily through space into nowhere. And if he is in their image, then he is their father and they are his children. He watches over them and protects them from the pestilences that come by day and the evils that crawl by night. They are his chosen people and he walks with the warriors of the tribe as they go forth to battle temporal evil, which is to say, anything and anybody that differs from their tribe.