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Indestructible Black Conscience |
The Power of One Minister Louis Farrakhan - DVD - $20.00 |
by The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
In The Name Of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.
Why should we gain education? What is education? What is the purpose for education? No one should go after knowledge with a vain motivation. If all we want out of knowledge is a good home, a decent car and a little money, then we fail to see the real purpose for the creation by the God of knowledge.Since we recognize from the Bible
and the Holy Qur’an that this universe is created by a wise Creator called the
Author of the Truth, then He must have a purpose for authoring the truth by
which all of us exist, subsist and maintain and perpetuate our lives. What is
his purpose for learning? Surely, the wise Creator did not intend for us to
learn to come to any of these fine institutions to come out and get a fine home,
car and a good paying job, and then become totally corrupt.
What is the purpose for
knowledge? The Honorable Elijah Muhammad has taught us that the purpose for
knowledge is to feed the development of the human being until that human grows
into divine and becomes a true manifestation of the characteristics of God. Both
books, Bible and Holy Qur’an, say that from God we had our origin and to God
we return. Does that mean we came up out of the earth and we go back to the
earth, and that’s our return? No. It means that the Author of your
intelligence is the Creator and the evolution of your intelligence is to the
Creator.
***
Our first beginning is from a
watery substance called sperm. The Holy Qur’an teaches that man, in his first
state, is nothing to speak of. The first state in the evolution of men and women
from ignorance into knowledge is also nothing to speak of. Beloved Black
Brothers and Sisters, you are right now in your first state along the path of
human development. You are a long, long, long way from where you and I yet have
to go. White people today rule the world. They are not in their first state of
development, but Caucasian people should not mock the development of those who
are coming out of colonialism, up from under imperialism, up from under a dark
night of ignorance as they struggle to evolve. They should not make their
evolution make them think that they are superior, lest it produce an arrogance
that stops their growth and development. The first stage of the Caucasian people
was not something great to think of. They, too, struggled with the life in the
hills and cave-sides of Europe. They did not know how to bury their dead or cook
their food. They lived the life of the lower animals until the divine light came
to them through Musa or Moses. They do not talk about their beginnings. It is
nothing to speak of. You do not find Caucasian people glorifying the caves. They
put that behind them, because they have put it behind them. One day, we will
never look back at this stage of our development. We will have evolved so far
above where we are that we will never speak even of this condition that we find
ourselves in because, like sperm, it is nothing to speak of.
***
The cell becomes a clot in the
second stage. The cell is where you begin and you cannot begin until there is a
unit and a union. Likewise, our progress as a people does not begin, Brothers
and Sisters, because we are fragmented. It begins when we recognize the value of
each other and come together as a unit; then, life begins for us as a people.
In the Holy Qur’an, the first
word that Prophet Muhammad of Arabia (PBUH) heard was “Iqra” in Arabic,
which means “read.” The words appear in the 96th Chapter of the Holy
Qur’an, but it is the first word that Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had and the name
of the chapter is “Al Alaq,” which means “The Clot.” It says, “Read in
the name of thy Lord who creates.” Read “and thy Lord is most generous who
taught men by the pen what man knew not.” A clot is a lump of congealed blood,
but intelligence is hungering to grow within that clot. It just needs to be fed
and it will evolve.
It is only through reading that
your intelligence is developed. When you open a book, it looks like a bird with
open wings. When you learn to read with understanding, when you can open the
book of knowledge, when you can understand what you read, then that is like
giving a man wings. There is no condition that we suffer from that we cannot
rise from with knowledge. We are not oppressed because we are Black; we are
oppressed because we are ignorant. It is ignorance that keeps us on the bottom,
not Blackness.
The Blackness that we must fight
against is not the Blackness of our skin, but the Blackness of ignorance is
something we must remove. It is a scourge on Black people. As long as you do not
open the book, as long as you do not know how to read with understanding, you
will always be looking at White, Yellow and Brown people, crying about your
condition; but it is not anybody’s fault. You have to get up and learn what
there is in order to evolve.
The next stage of life is an
embryo. The head has to be formed first, because you do not need hands without a
head. It takes the head to put hands to work. God would not give you hands
without a head first. The head has to develop first, then calls into existence
the hands and feet, and gives them something to do.
How can we, as Black people, say
that we do not need a leader? No wonder our hands have not done anything. What
do you do with your hands and feet? You disco and party. What are you building
for your people? Nothing.
If you are building nothing with
your hands and going no place with your feet, then that is a sign that you
really have not developed a head to direct your hands and feet. This is why this
society has worked to destroy leadership among Black people because, once you
get the right kind of leadership, we have to get up out of the condition that we
are in. Every Black leader who has stood up for us has been castigated and
destroyed, because as long as you do not develop a head, then somebody else’s
head will direct your hands and feet.
People criticize underdeveloped
Africa and other underdeveloped countries, but you only have an underdeveloped
country because you have an underdeveloped intelligence. Nobody wants to sit
down next to or look at a lump of congealed blood. We are rejected in the
society and nations because we have not formed yet as a people of intelligence.
After the head is developed, the
fourth stage is called a fetus. And all of this develops in darkness. These four
stages are the basis of a life that is ready to come out of darkness into light,
and master the forces of life. When the baby is born, that is the fifth stage.
Within 12 months, the baby is
walking, doing things that none of us taught them to do, because there is a
native intelligence in that sperm that is of divine. That intelligence must be
fed in order for it to grow, as that sperm grew from a cell to a clot, to an
embryo, to a fetus, to a baby, to a child and then to an adult, which is the
completion of that physical development. How far can the intelligence grow if
the intelligence is properly fed?
The scripture says, “God made
man in His image and likeness.” Then, He says to man, “Replenish the earth,
and subdue it.” He wants man to master the laws that govern the earth. You can
do that. All we have to do is be fed properly.
***
The mind is created to feed on
truth. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that the brain cell is created to
think rightly because the brain cell is created to feed on the truth of the
universe.
When you feed on truth, you think
in harmony with the truth, you think right. When you feed on lies, you feed on
that which is against the nature of the cell of the brain, and destroy the
beauty of the brain cell. It is like planning wood against the grain. The more
you plane it against the grain, the uglier you make it. The more you think
against truth, the uglier you become spiritually, mentally and even physically.
This is how important it is for
us to be taught right. We live in a world in America where a people have not
treated us right. If we have not been treated right, do you think that a man who
will not treat you right would teach you right? We have never been taught right
from the cradle, and that is why we are in our current condition.
Thirty million Black people and
we do not produce anything. We all have on shoes, but we do not have one shoe
factory. We all have clothes, but we do not have one clothing factory. We all
eat food, but we are losing the little land we owned in the South. We are
totally dependent on Caucasian people to feed, clothe, educate, shelter and
employ us. What have we been fed in our minds?
Something went wrong in our
learning, but do you think it was an accident or was it on purpose? How far have
we gone in our development? In the darkness, we are like a clot in that we have
never developed a hint of leadership to direct our arms and legs to make
progress. As a beast walks the earth with his head down, following the plane of
the earth, a human being that is not fully developed walks the earth with a head
after low desires. We walk the earth following our low desires. In fact, man has
become so weak and wicked that his knowledge serves his low desires. His desire
is to rob, steal, plunder, exploit, enslave, oppress and suppress. His knowledge
is used to destroy, rather than build, because man is not a man. Man is a beast
in human form. We are not being taught by human beings; we are taught by beasts,
so how can we manifest human qualities when a beast is our teacher.
***
The education from these
institutions is worthless; feeding from archaic principles of a decadent mind
that is not keeping pace with the onward motion of men and women’s minds;
feeding these youngsters methods that have been dead a long time ago; feeding
them psychology that they cannot use. If the teachers do not grow, how can they
grow their students? They are already dead because they think they have arrived.
They do not study anymore, so they cannot grow others. When the students feed
from their teachers, they are feeding from death itself. All the teachers want
is a salary. The students are suffering for the lack of knowledge; the whole of
America is suffering for the lack of knowledge.
If you do not have character
development, knowledge will bring out the worst in you and it will make the one
who knows suppress and enslave the one who does not know. When the poor person
who does not know seeks to get free, you suppress and kill them to maintain your
position of preeminence that you cannot maintain by love and right; you can only
maintain it by force. This is the way America has become today. America cannot
maintain her position in the world by right, so she has to maintain it by might.
When you suck the blood of the peoples of the world, at some point there is
going to be a natural combustion because people are going to revolt against the
man who knows and kept knowledge from others to oppress, enslave and exploit
them.
***
They have allowed us to attend
all of the fine academic institutions, but there is something missing. With all
that we have learned, we cannot quite put it together to do something to help
our people. We have more education than the respected country of Great Britain:
over 14,000 Bachelor of Science degrees every year, 775 Master degrees every
year, 125 doctorate degrees every year. Every year, we are producing
scholarship, but the scholarship is producing nothing for the people. It is
because we have been deprived of the knowledge of ourselves.
The man that you have been
looking for all your life is to come from among a dead people that have been
dehumanized. Powerful wisdom of God is going to rise up in the last days from
out of a dead people. When you hear a people—whose intelligence was killed by
the world—speaking words of wisdom and the institutions of learning did not
teach them, then you know that God, Himself, has intervened.
The system is set up to destroy
the cream of the Black crop, because White people do not want to see a head
develop among us. They are watching at every turn for leadership, to destroy
that leader. But God has given us a leader who has put his thoughts and wisdom
in our heads. Even though he is absent from among us, he is very present in the
knowledge that he has disseminated among us. You can kill the man but you cannot
kill the plan. You cannot kill the idea. He is come to birth now in so many of
us, until you do not know where to start to kill.
The scepter of rulership and knowledge is passed away from the Jews, Christians
and Old World Muslims, and it has come to the despised, rejected, unloved and
unwanted. In the Bible, God says, “I will choose the despised and the
rejected. I will take a foolish people as my own. I will take a people that once
were a people, but now are no people at all, and I will bring to naught those
that are wise with a foolish people; and I will be their God and they will be my
people; and I will be in the midst of them and they will not need neither the
light nor the moon, for I will be in the midst of them and they will feed from
me.” By feeding from the pure truth of Almighty God, our minds will be
reshaped and reformed, and we will start to grow out of bestiality into
humanity.
Editor’s note: The above text is an edited excerpt from a message delivered by Minister Farrakhan at Wellesley College in Boston, Massachusetts on Feb. 16, 1983.