Five Percent Nation

← Encyclopedia

The Five Percent Nation, which calls itself the Nation of Gods and Earths, is an African-American movement founded in Harlem in 1964 by Clarence 13X, who took the name Allah. Its central teaching is direct and deliberately provocative: the Black man is God — not a god to be worshipped at a distance, but the living embodiment of the divine, the original man from whom all human life descends. Women in the movement are the Earths, who reflect and complete what the Gods build.

The name comes from a doctrine inherited and reworked from the Nation of Islam, from which Clarence 13X had broken. Humanity, the teaching holds, divides into three parts: eighty-five percent are the uninformed masses, kept ignorant and easily led; ten percent are those who know the truth and use it to deceive and exploit the rest; and five percent are the poor righteous teachers who know the truth and tell it freely. To call the movement the Five Percent is to claim a place among that last group — those who have woken to their own divinity and carry the work of waking others.

The system of knowledge is its most distinctive feature. The Supreme Mathematics assigns a principle to each of the numbers one through nine and to zero — one is Knowledge, two is Wisdom, three is Understanding, and so on — and the Supreme Alphabet does the same for each letter. Members “build” by reading the events and names of daily life through these correspondences, treating ordinary numbers and words as carriers of a deeper order. The practice is less a creed to recite than a discipline of interpretation, learned through lessons passed from those already grounded in it.

The movement keeps a complicated relation to Islam. It draws its vocabulary, its lessons, and its founding split from the Nation of Islam, and its members have at times used the language of submission and of Allah; yet it rejects the worship of any god outside the self, and most observers, Muslim and otherwise, do not count it as a form of Islam. Adherents have generally resisted the label of religion altogether, describing what they hold as a way of life and a body of knowledge rather than a faith.

Its widest mark has been on culture rather than doctrine. From the 1980s onward the movement’s terms and cadences entered hip-hop through artists raised in its orbit, so that phrases such as “dropping science,” “word is bond,” and the greeting between Gods circulated far beyond anyone who held the teaching. That diffusion is part of why the Five Percent is better known by its idiom than by its tenets — the language traveled, and the doctrine behind it stayed mostly where it began.

→ Related: Father Divine S Peace Mission · Islam · Gnosis