The Nation of Islam vs. Muslims over alcohol

This is very interesting: The just wanted to leave a message: Stop selling alcohol to fellow Muslims. In urban America, friction between poor residents and immigrant store owners is nothing new. Nor are complaints that inner-city neighborhoods are glutted with markets that sell alcohol and contribute to violent crime, vagrancy and other social ills. But the recent attack at San Pablo Liquor — and an identical vandalism spree at another West Oakland store later that evening, along with an arson fire there and the kidnapping of the owner a few days later — have injected religion into the debate. The two episodes highlighted tensions — and different interpretations of the Quran — between black Muslims in this struggling, crime-ridden city of 400,000 and Middle Eastern shop owners, many of them also Muslims. [...] "I think it's pretty clear that the number of these stores in low-income communities is not good for people," she said. San Pablo market owner Abdul Saleh, who has kept his store open following the attacks, said his decision to sell alcohol is "between me and God." "We're just coming here to make a living like anyone else," he said. While black and Middle Eastern Muslims may pray at the same mosques on weekends, their worlds do not tend to overlap beyond that, said Hatem Bazian, professor of Near East and ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley.The Middle Eastern store owners tend to live in the suburbs, the black Muslims in the cities, Bazian said. The immigrant shopkeepers also interpret Islam to allow the sale of alcohol. I am not sure those are the only differences though. Black muslims usually follow the Nation of Islam's version of Islam, which, let's face it, had nothing to do with actual Islam, no thanks to their founder Elijah Mohamed. For them Elijah Mohamed is god's messenger, and the white man and the jews are to blame for everything. To say that the organization and its followers are a lil unhinged would be an understatement. Even Malcom X figured it out in his last days and wanted to get his people to understand this, only to be killed by Louis Farakhan's goons. Anyway, how weird is it that the muslims and the nation of Islam don't clash over the gross mischaracterization and alteration of Islam that the Nation indulges in, and end up clashing over the sale of alcohol with regular muslims being in support of it? What a strange millenium!