My father was a preacher. When I got old enough I used to sit on the speaker's stand with him and every body would try hurrying to get me on the speaker's stand.
Those days are much different from these days.
My father was poor and he never could by me a good suit of clothes. And I would sit up there, about two or three years old, with a little dress on. They put little dresses on us.
I used to hear my father preach in the South. He was a preacher of the Baptist church and used to preach about that fire, hell fire. He would teach it so frightening until I, being his son, would be trembling sometime, thinking, "I wonder will I live to get to heaven before that ever comes?"
I was lucky, I didn't have to go to heaven. Heaven came to me!
Our subject is the Theology of Time. We are still working on Time. We want to take hold of the real root of Time.
This has been our subject for many years. It is what we've been looking for.
What you've been looking for is The Time of Judgment.
If you've been looking for the time of Judgment, this is just what we are preaching - TheTime.
We must remember, as the Holy Qur-an teaches us, we just cannot be so proud that can reach the height of a mountain or a hill.
Since we cannot even teach the height of trees and hills and mountains, why should we be so proud when these things are higher than we are.
So, if we cannot reach the height of mountains, hills and even some of our animals that are walking around by us - are much taller than we are, why should we feel proud?
I think that we should relax, take a seat and sit down, then look and see around us all the things which are really higher than we are.
We cannot step through the earth, not by any means.
The earth is approximately 8,000 miles in diameter, through it. Our legs don't measure that.
I'm only asking you to not be proud.
We can't reach the top of the mountains and we can't step through the Earth, so why shouldn't we be on the level on the earth?
This is what has ruined the black man in North America. He's taking steps after his slave master, wanting to be proud and act like a big boy. You cannot be a big boy. You were with him. He has the world and you have nothing.
We have men of all types and these men want to know if whether or not we have something above what they have or something equal, on which we can listen to each other.
We don't believe in criticism, because we all came from slave-parents.
If we want to criticize each other, we have to go back and get a hold of the devil slave-master and see how many of us did he raise higher than the other.
I love common language. I love to be equal with you. I don't like raising myself above you just because I believe I know more than you. No. We don't do that. I may have insulted you when I said what I said, but I am a man taught by God. ...Lived with God for three years and a half and He taught me His wisdom.
I know you didn't hear all of this as I did. I know you did not see all of this which took place forty years ago, of which I'm teaching you about today.
I want to let you know that I am not proud over you, in the way that we say the enemies' proudness comes to us. I'm not that kind of man. I'm a little old man that just loves to talk with you and loves to see you in a better condition than you're in.
I love to make you acquainted with my God and your God with you.
This is the kind of little fellow you see standing here. He doesn't like showing off by any means.
If I have to hurt your feelings, I will try to rub the soar down somewhere in what I say. But if I hurt your feelings I'm hurting them for the better. Sometimes the doctor has to hurt before he can heal.
So this may come to us in our talk or discussion, since we have preachers here.
Who do we say sent preachers out to preach? According to the readings of The Book, God never sent an army of preachers out.
The English language uses the word "preach". This is alright for us because we understand it.
We don't intend to make fun; however, we want preaching from the right source to send to the people, so they will be taught what is about to come to pass.
They are sent from God and He has never sent a whole group of them. He made the responisbility to lay on one man.
He sent Jonah to Ninevah, acccording to the history of Jonah in the Bible, to call upon the Ninevites to warn them that in just forty days and forty nights Ninevah would be overthrown.
Why does he specify the forty days and the forty nights? We want to find out why did He give them that length of time. Because forty days and forty nights are used in the end of the world. To compare his preaching with the end of the world, and the sermon of the man, there, in that time.
He should have that number to give us a picture of what the end of the world's figure will look like.
Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness.What wilderness did Jesus fast in?
We must clean up as we go.
This is the way scholars and scientists get after you. Everything you say, they chase you on it.
I've been chased by scientists, scholars, and are still being chased, but not much now, because they're starting to see me as part of something new.
I just want to teach you science. I'm just grieved over that. I want to teach you the science which you should know. I want you to learn about the presence of God and the presence of His Messenger. I want you to learn them, then you can battle if you want.
There's no Messenger of God that comes to bully people that he's sent to teach. He let's them do that, but he's not to mock and bully them. No.
We have thousands of preachers of Cristianity in the country of America.
You can't find in the Bible where God ever sent a thousand people.
The preacher may have to go there and get a thousand, but he never sends a thousand to the people.
I'm not making fun, but I only want you to understand. If there had been sent, with me, a thousand more Elijah Muhammads, you would have seen me bowing out of that group, because I don't think God was so weak that He would have to send in a thousand.
I just want to tell you the truth. I want to give you the Theology side of the truth. This is what I'm here for.
I know where we came from. We came from an enemy. Think over the time of slavery. The enemy made his own preachers and then had them to preach what he tells them to preach. He's still like that.
Remember Reverend, I'm not after you, I'm just trying to teach you the Theology of time.
At the present time, you see that he will back up any Reverend if that Reverend continues to believe what he tells him to teach.
He will give him money to teach his Christianity.
Reverend, let us look at when Christianity began.
Did not God create Adam, as the Bible says?
If God did not give Adam the true religion, what does He look like, then, saying to you and I that, "Here it is, now since Adam died I raised up Jesus."
We have to remember, if Jesus has brought to us that true religion; yet, Adam didn't have it, what are we going to say to Jesus if Muhammad in the 7th century, after Jesus, brought out another religion which is sweeping the Earth and have more followers than Jesus. What shall we say?
If God needed a prophet in the day and time of Jesus to tell the world that they didn't have the right religion, and here He is to give you the right religion, what did He say? Did he say that He came to give the right religion or to preach the religion of Moses, or Abraham?
He said, "I came not to destroy the law of the prophets but to fulfill."
I got my promise from God, the God Who was to come and has come.
I'm not saying that you believe in a man being a God; maybe you don't. Im not going to argue with you. If you don't believe man is God, I don't want to argue with you, just show me that which you believe in.
Lots of people out there in the street criticize us saying that in the schools of Islam, you can't learn anything there, because the head of it is not a graduate of any school.
They do that to keep you from coming here.
I want you to remember that there isn't a Prophet in the Bible nor Holy Qur'an who was a graduate of the people he was warning. Not one.
If you can find me a Prophet in the Bible who was a graduate from some university of the land, I will pay you ten thousand dollars for lying.
The Bible says that Moses was highly educated, brought up in the house of Pharaoh.
That particular Moses, we don't find in the Bible where he was educated under Pharaoh's school in any degree.
We find that Moses, whom they say was well-educated, was educated out away from Pharaoh.
When Allah called him to go to Pharaoh, he was not in Egypt. It was out of Egypt where he was taught.
We talk a little too much on that which we know very little about.
Moses was educated, but he did not boast of his education to Pharaoh. If he had, he would have been talking to Pharaoh in his own language. But he didn't do that. The argument they had between each other was about his non-expert language. Pharaoh didn't argue with him about giving him an education, but he condemned Moses for not having an education capable of talking with him.
We want to be right in these things. Some of these places where you find Pharaoh and Moses exchanging arguments, takes place in this time, not in their time. I won't go too far with it, because we don't have much more time.
Question: You mentioned that the ten thousand (10, 000) angels were here in this country, and I wanted to ask, would they be from among the dead?
Messenger: Yes brother. Yes, they are here. They are not to be pointed out to people who will point them out like in the day of Sodom and Gomorrah's destruction. There was the angel there with Lot that was going to do the job, but they couldn't tell the people before the day that they was going to do it, then the people would have tried to kill them before.
The same way it is today. You can't point out the destroyers of the world to no one. Do, you are pointing them out to the enemy to take attack on them, at once, because they are human beings like you and I. And we can be killed. And if we have power to keep you from killing us, well then, we may bring about the total thing before time that the others get right and get ready to go out.
These things is used by...brother...by wise people and not by people who just would like to tempt God or tempt His Messenger for just your self. You got millions of people in America and they may all not be ready, and God wants to save us all.
Not to do something just to please someone who would like to tempt God. You can't tempt God brother. This is dangerous to try. And to satisfy one person and his desire, you can't do that. We have millions here to please, or rather to try to save, and we hope they'll be pleased with our safety.
Question: Mr.Elijah Muhammad, about two years ago I had a cousin that joined with the Muslims and she was a Orthodox Muslim, and she was one of three wives to her husband, and I can't understand why the two are so diverse and why aren't they just a whole?
Messenger: I'm not up here to go over the laws of the Islamic world with you. If you read these things, you read them. So I'm not up here to condemn nor take away anything.Only to teach you which Allah have give to me to teach you.
If there's anymore of this kind of talk, we're dismissing. Because eighteen hundred to two thousand people could talk on the Orthodox Muslim rules of Islam, while they don't know it themselves. But you have to come to school for such. You have to be schooled into that. Not come and ask questions, because your question demands more than just a word or two. It demands a lot of answers to your questions and that the people that is not interested in what you are asking will not like me to keep them in here listening to what you have to say and question until night.
It's getting late and the people would like to go home, and that I don't care to get involved in a lots of Orthodox Muslims rules, regulations, and laws of Islam.
We are bringing to you a new Islam. As I tell white people. They ask me sometimes, they say, well, they those over there, they don't believe in your teaching. I say, that's natural. I say because this is something new, which they never heard before. I said it takes time. I said but nevertheless we have the key to the whole world of man whether you believe it or not. I have the key, and it's written in your book, that I have it, "and God give him the key".
Question: Mr. Muhammad I would like to know why was Yakub allowed to rule for six thousand years?
Messenger: There was no God in his time that could prevent him, and it was necessary for us to learn from one that was in us, in out midst, what he had that could rule others for six thousand years from 9,000 to 15,000.
Question: Can you tell me why is the white man going into outer space and how far will he get?
Messenger: Going up in space. It is to fulfull the scripture that "thou may ascend up to heaven, above the clouds, but yet I will bring you down to hell".
Question: Mr. Muhammad, I'm a old time Detroiter, and I remember along time ago there used to be a Temple on Theodore and Hastings street way back in the twenties. I wanted to know is it the same set up or has it changed since then.
Messenger: We haven't changed Islam we go into more knowledge of it but we don't change it.
Question: Have you heard anything to the effect that government officials are trying to put pressure on the Black Muslims similar to the pressure that was put on other Black organizations in the past?
Messenger: I have been doing this work for forty years. I have known many groups to rise up since that time and carry into practice what you have in mind. But actually our people in L.A. and New York or any other place, here in Chicago, they have been mistreated right along. They go to prison and the federal penitentiary, as they call it institutions. But, that is all given to us. The trial of the Black Muslims in America must come to pass. We must be tried!