06/08/1975
IWDM Study Library
Be Fruitful and Multiply

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
Imam: Of all the prophets, from Abraham to Muhammad, greetings of peace. Asalaam Alaikum. We must thank Minister Naim Akbar for his most valuable words on the subject of cultivation and development of the self. Today, we are taking the subject that we find in Bible; Genesis 9:7. I quote, "And you be ye fruitful and multiply. Bring forth abundantly in the earth and multiply therein."
We will make briefly some comments on this subject, be fruitful and multiply, and then we will discuss some terms that are very popular and well known in the teachings received by Master Elijah Muhammad from Master Fard Muhammad. These terms are 'Devil' and cavey. We'll discuss these terms with the hope that they will make us understand better the meaning of our subject, be fruitful and multiply.
Many who are not trained in religious knowledge believe that when G-d said to Adam and Eve or to the family of Noah after the flood, be fruitful and multiply, that he was speaking to the physical person that we should have children, many children and that we should multiply as a physical people.
This is not a bad interpretation or not a bad meaning. Righteous people should multiply. I heard the late Honorable Elijah Muhammad say, may peace and blessings be upon him forever, say that the righteous people, they should have many children. Well, we can understand this without going into any explanation of it. But certainly, we should be able to understand also that we don't need a commandment from Almighty G-d to come to us to get us started with families. Among the animals we find that they multiply abundantly and many of them are faster, more productive that is, in that sense, than human beings.
So it seems that we are playing up an unimportant and insignificant message when we take the statement in the Bible, be fruitful and multiply, to mean or to be speaking to a physical multiplying. Physical birth and a physical multiplying. Actually, this is referring to the mind. It is referring to intellectual birth, development. Intellectual cultivation. That is, the cultivation and the growth of the mind. And G-d is saying, "Now that I have given you the words, the way to develop your willpower, and the mind, the world that your willpower lives in, now be fruitful. Cultivate your mind. Produce abundantly."
This understanding will lead us to a strong society. But the other understanding, if we put emphasis upon physical multiplying, physical birth and physical multiplying, it will lead us to a life of mental death. We will ignore our mental needs while trying to develop the physical. The physical develops because of the internal strength of the being developing and getting enough strength to feed upon the external world. That is the physical.
For that reason, we have schools to train the minds of the youngsters and develop their minds before they come into adolescent age or into puberty and be bothered with the urges of the physical body. If we can get their minds developed first, then their minds will rule over their physical urges and save them from becoming just a big population or numerous population of physical bodies.
So, I don't think it's necessary to go into any great length to try to show us that it is more important to cultivate the mind than it is to put emphasis upon the physical body to populate the earth physically. Those people who will fill the earth with their knowledge are the rulers of the world. Those who will fill the earth with physical bodies only, are the slaves and subjects of those people who have filled the world with mind.
Now, we would like to briefly go to the term jinn as it appears in the Holy Quran. I read now from chapter 72:1; "Say, it has been revealed to me that a company of jinns listen to the Quran. They said, 'We have really heard a wonderful recital.'" This chapter on the jinn, it goes on to show us that the jinn people here or the jinn, they came to believe in the Holy Quran after listening to it and hearing it.
We read in the footnote of the translator, that is Abdullah Yusuf Ali's translation of the Holy Quran, we read in his footnote, footnote 5727, wherein, he identifies the jinn as people. But people who have not cultivated their divine nature. So, because they haven't cultivated their divine nature, these jinns are not worthy of us calling them human beings or people. In religion, that is in Bible and in Quran terminology, man means a developed mind that rules over the forces of the physical body. People mean, a collective group of human beings with well-developed minds that rule over the forces of the physical body.
Because of this, those people who are not able to rule over the forces of their physical body and because of that, they have neglected the cultivation of their mind, they are called jinns.
Also in the Holy Quran we are told that this jinn stage in the life growth of man and woman is a natural first development in the growth of human society, or in the growth of civilization. We are not saying that one has to become a jinn, but civilizations normally come through the jinn stage before they reach the stage of the civilized well-developed mind. To better understand the Quran term "jinn" we should refer you to the Bible term, "gentile."
In the Bible when we study the life of the gentiles, we find that they are those people who did not belong to Judaism, or to that religious order or social order that put emphasis upon the development of the intellect, the mind, and the higher human aspirations. Those people that were more engaged in a life of war, physical war, a life of physical sport, a life of sex, and sex worship, those people who had not yet come into the real light of civilization and had taken on a desire and a love for knowledge for the higher cultivation of the mind, those people were called gentiles in the old Bible, days of the Old Testament.
These gentiles were identified as Europeans. They were the Romans, the Greeks and other people of European or Caucasian origin. It is not simply because they were Caucasian that they were gentiles, but because the Caucasians- the Europeans- had not come into that cultural development we call religion or divine knowledge, they were living a gentile or a life of uncivilized people, living under the forces of the physical nature. They could not control their hunger for such as physical food and drink, wine and physical pleasures. They could not control their hunger for sex. They behaved vulgar and immoral in public.
They were people who even had spiritual rites or spiritual services that involved very low, bad, filthy, unclean habits, phallic worship, and a lot of other very indecent things were associated with the Europeans called gentiles in the Bible. This is a stage of development that we can fall into if we don't know our true identity, and our true identity is the human will power and the body that will power takes on by feeding on the mind, a world of excellence, a world of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
We continue now reading from the Holy Quran. This time, we quote from Chapter 47:16. In this verse, men are described as worshipers of the forces of their physical body. I read, "And among them are men that listen to you, but in the end when they go out from you, they say to those who have received knowledge, "What is this he said just then?”, "Such men whose hearts G-d has sealed, and who follow their own lust." These men, the meaning here for the expression "has sealed their hearts," it means that they have turned their hearts from G-d, and because they turned their hearts from hearing divine knowledge, then G-d turn away from them and leave their hearts closed or sealed, and who follow their own lust.
This is not necessarily speaking to the sex, the lust that the powers or desires that we identify with sex, but it is speaking to all those forces that arise in the physical body or in the biological form, such as hunger for material wealth, hunger for sex, hunger for physical worship, what we call vanity. All these forces are forces of the physical body. These forces can influence one's other appetites. Those appetites we have for culture, appetites we have for arts.
If we pursue a life, a cultured life, a civilized life, a life of civilization, wisdom, knowledge and understanding of the human excellence while not yet being able to control the physical forces of our body or the forces of our physical body, these forces can influence our culture. Though we may be wise in some respects in human history or in human culture, we will find ourselves characteristically or outwardly by image, by our social image, we will find ourselves to be a people as jinn or undeveloped, given to barbaric desires, given to vulgar, savage nature.
The Quran goes on to tell us that the devil himself was once a jinn. From this, we should understand that devil means one who has knowledge and understanding, one who has come in contact with some revealed knowledge, some divine or some spiritual guidance, but he has not been strong enough as a human being; that is as a creature of will power and mental development.
He has not been strong enough, so he has given in to the forces of his physical body, and he uses the revealed knowledge to promote the acquisition of material wealth. This is the devil. The devil means "an evil person." The Holy Quran says, "And the jinn, we created before." The Holy Quran again says, "and Iblis, that is the Satan, the devil, was one of the jinns." He was a leader of the jinn people.
We can easily understand this when we look at the society today, and see among the people who give themselves to working for and advancing the savage, vulgar nature of the society that these people often have leaders, and their leaders are more knowledgeable than they are. Therefore, they have power, more mind power, and they are able to lead them. We find that these people they often disguise them, these leaders of the jinn, leaders of the people who can't develop their mind, willpower and mind nature.
These people, they follow these wiser leaders and these wiser leaders are able to disguise themselves and pretend to be members of a good order, members of a religious order. They can pretend to be respecters of faith and divine truth, but their life tell us where they are. Therefore, they are in truth, devils.
Master Fard Muhammad, he used the term "Devil" just as scripture uses it. Jesus himself, he called the white man-- Not the white man as we know the white man, but he called the Jew a devil. He called the Jew a devil because the Jew was deceitful and trying to trick the prophet Jesus, so Jesus called him a devil. He even referred to one of this disciples as a devil. Not meaning that the man himself was a devil, but that he at that time was giving himself to that particular nature, or to those particular forces of the physical body that bring about the growth of devil in the person.
Jesus said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan." He told the Jews that "I know your father," he said. He was not speaking to all of the Jews, he was speaking to the hypocritical Jews, those who were fighting the march of truth. He said, "I know your father. Your father fell from heaven like lightning, that he was a liar and a murderer from the beginning." He called them the children of their father, the devil.
We see that these religious master teachers have used the term devil to describe a person who give themselves to the rule of physical forces over the rule of intellectual forces, moral forces, the forces of the higher human form.
They have called them devils, and Master Fard Muhammad did not do anything different. He did not bring in any new language. He only used the old language of scripture and called the Caucasian people devils because they had done so many wicked things in their history that when taken as a body of knowledge and when seen in association with the people who carried out those acts, we cannot help but say that that is the description of a devil, and the people who did those things were a devil people.
Now, we have also a term 'cavey.' Cavey also addressed that European Caucasian who build the world of bricks and asphalt, big cities, of great material structures, and they live in mighty giant structures they call homes, skyscrapers. Living in these homes, these physical homes, they have not been able to come to life as a real divine person. He called them cavey meaning that they have built around themselves an environment like a cave.
A cave is a dark hole in the rock. There's not much life in the rock, in the cave. There is only the human life, they only see each other, they don't see the natural life. They live in a
dark, in a dead environment. When you come to the big cities, you find a dark and dead environment. The trend now on the part of the builders, of the remakers of the urban communities, the trend now is to bring in more of the natural life, to bring in natural trees, natural flowers, natural scenery.
We see that they have discovered themselves, that this life of all stone and brick and cement and asphalt does produce a kind of caveman environment, a kind of cave that keeps out the natural light of the natural world and the natural beauty.
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This is bad for the development of the higher forces in the human being. The higher forces in the human being, they need the natural, to be in contact with the natural beauty of life and of the world. It's all right to live in a skyscraper and a big house and to drive around in a big car and to spend your time in the big cities, but if you don't have something in your life, like scriptural guidance to keep you in touch with true reality, you can become materialized like the material environment that you live in.
Being materialized, you will stop growing as a mind, as a willpower, and as mind, as a divine being. You will stop growing, and you will start to be insensitive to real human needs. Master Fard, being a master teacher, he came with terms that were from Old Testament, and also from New Testament. He came with terms also that is from the Quran text, such as cavey. Taking all these terms together and studying them will enable us to see exactly what Master Fard meant when he called the Caucasian people a race of devils.
He did not mean that they were not a creation like all other creation. He meant in the physical sense, they're creation like all other creation, but in the sense of spiritual or mental development, they are a grafted creation because they have taken on scriptures that have been interpolated and taken out of the original text and made very hard to understand. Bible teachings that if one read it without correct understanding, he may think that G-d intends to create and exhort white supremacy.
Such teachings that you find in the Bible coming to the European people made them grow strong physically and emotionally, but they grew slow morally and intellectually. Their knowledge of the physical world is vast and very profound, but their knowledge of human nature and the real human excellence grew slow and is very shallow.
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