Tynnetta Muhammad was a journalist. In the 1960s, she wrote articles and columns for the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks. Having worked as a secretary to Elijah Muhammad, she made it known after his death in 1975 that she was one of his widows. After the revival of the NOI under Louis Farrakhan she wrote the weekly column of NOI theology and numerology, Unveiling the Number 19, in the NOI's official newspaperThe Final Call. She was regularly referred to as "Mother Tynnetta Muhammad" in the movement; she is considered one of the Mothers of the Faithful.
Early life and education
Born Tynnetta Alethea Nelson, she grew up in Detroit. After her conversion to the NOI in 1958, she worked as a secretary for Elijah Muhammad. Under the name Tynnetta Deanar she wrote for the Women in Islam column in Muhammad Speaks. In some publications her first name is spelled "Tynetta".
Marriage and family
While working as Elijah Muhammad's secretary, she became one of his wives, and gave birth to four of his children; Madeeah, Ishmael, Rasul, and Ahmad.
Ideology
In ''Muhammad Speaks''
In the 1960s, Tynnetta wrote regularly in Muhammad Speaks on women's issues, condemning the immodest dress of the era. She concentrated on the subjects of proper deportment, dress and behavior of a female Muslim. She emphasized modest attire and cautioned "the Black Woman" to put away "the short western style of dress and social habits." She also stated that "the white woman" apparently "does not feel the sense of modesty in the strict manner of her darker associates". In addition to her women's column she wrote articles quoting Biblical and Quranic passages to affirm Muhammad's prophetic status. She defended black separatism on the grounds that "as all bona fide divine spokesmen of the past, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is carrying out the divine work of separating our people from the nation and people responsible for our captivity."
In ''The Final Call''
After the death of Muhammad in 1975, Tynnetta rejected the reforms of his son Warith Deen Muhammad and sided with Louis Farrakhan's faction, becoming one of his earliest supporters. She praised Farrakhan as a great visionary and as the modern equivalent of John of Patmos. In her writings in the 1980s and 1990s, she became increasingly preoccupied with The Wheel sightings and a supposed forthcoming apocalypse, predicted by Elijah Muhammad, in which a "Mother Plane" from space would destroy the white race. She predicted this event using numerological analyses based on the sacred number 19, an idea derived from Rashad Khalifa. She stated that the UFO was seen after the 1986 bombing of Tripoli. She also argued that the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in the same year was divine punishment delivered on the USA, because "the aim and purpose of America's Space Program beginning in the 1960s with the landing on the Moon in 1969, was to prepare for war against the Great Mother Ship and its companion wheels harnessing an entire New Civilization and an Advanced Technology that is not of this world." Her predictions were most fully communicated in her magnum opus entitled The Comer by Night in 1986, in which she asserts that Elijah Muhammad is still alive, living in a "space craft". By the early 1990s she was arguing that it would be "the final decade" before the apocalypse, which would occur in 2001. The bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001 was presented as confirmation of her predictions, and she insisted that it was accompanied by UFO manifestations. Tynnetta Muhammad continued to support Farrakhan's vision for the NOI until her death on 16 February 2015.
