According to the same source, Fard had said, "My name is Mahdi; I am God." And according to another source, Fard, when asked who he was by the Detroit police, responded: "I am the Supreme Ruler of the Universe."

Master Fard Muhammad is officially noted by the NOI as having arrived in Detroit on July 4, 1930, and departed on June 30, 1934. (There is an older tradition of an earlier arrival twenty years previous as well as attendance at the University of Southern California.) In the interim, Fard established temples in several cities and created a hierarchical organization composed of a men's military training unit called the Fruit of Islam (FOI), a ministers' corps, and a women's auxiliary called the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class (MGT-GCC). This infrastructure was built upon Fard's ideological foundation known as the "Secret Ritual," which, arranged in a question-and-answer format, became better known as the "Lost-Found Muslim Lessons" or simply as "the lessons."

Within these lessons were the basic elements of an ancient mystery school. It involved secrecy from outsiders; an esoteric ritual containing keys for recognition between fellow members; a cohesive world view; and a tradition that could be explained only to initiates. Central to these teachings were the knowledge of self and the Black man's godhood. According to these teachings, the Black man was by nature divine, and in fact was the original man, ancestor of the human race (antedating Louis and Mary Leakey's discoveries of early human remains in Africa by nearly thirty years.)

White people, on the other hand, were produced out of Black people by a scientist named Yacub approximately six thousand years ago. Discovering a recessive gene in the Black man, Yacub used a system of eugenics on a group of sixty thousand people on an island and, after six hundred years, was able to create a biological mutation: the White man. Of course Yacub did not live to see his creation, but he left behind an infrastructure to propogate his system, as well as the ideological basis for White supremacy. Bleached of the essence of humanity, Whites were "without soul." Nonetheless the race was destined to rule for an allotted period extending to 1914 A.D., though, as Fard's messenger Elijah Muhammad put it, "a few years of grace have been given to complete the resurrection of the Black man, and especially the so-called Negroes whom Allah has chosen for this change (of a new nation and world). They (so-called Negroes) have been made so completely mentally dead ... that extra time is allowed." It was also taught that the supreme god amongst this mighty nation of Black gods commanded the name of Allah. This title was claimed by Master Fard Muhammad himself.