1976-March-19

Bilalian News

Self-Government In The New World

Imam W. D. Muhammad


The Honorable Master Fard Muhammad has been called by names. He was called Professor Fard Muhammad, Prophet Fard Muhammad, W.F. (Wait Fard) Muhammad, Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, and many other names. This should tell us something about this great personality. Obviously he was not known by the people to whom he was introducing himself. We have said here in the Lost-Found Nation of Islam that the only one who knew him was the one that be taught and prepared to do the job of resurrecting the black community -the Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad (peace be upon him).

The Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad taught very vaguely about the Honorable Master Fard Muhammad as a person. He said that he was a "saviour," he said that he was "God," and he said that he was "God in the person of Master Fard Muhammad. He also said that Master Fard told him that he would have to go away and that he (the Honorable Elijah Muhammad) would have to do the job. This did not please the Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad because he had become very much attached to Master Fard Muhammad, as were the other followers in the early days of the mission of the founding of the Nation of Islam. He said that he told Master Fard that he wanted to be with him. Master Fard told him that be would be with him, but that he should do the job because be did not need him anymore. Almighty God would never tell any creature that it did not need Him anymore. We always need Almighty God. But, Master Fard told the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, "You don't need me anymore." He also told the believers, 'Accept Elijah, follow Elijah, you don't need me anymore."

Master Fard Muhammad was a "shrewd" planner. He had observed the situation here in America and he knew the conditions that kept us down as a people. He, himself, was a Muslim who believed in the scripture called the Holy Quran. Master Fard let us know that by having his picture taken with the Holy Quran in his hands. In fact, the only picture that we have of him is a picture of him holding the Holy Quran in his hand, in a very pious, sincere and reverent manner.

If "God" cherished the Holy Quran, that should also suggest something to our mind. He was saying something very important to us, but he had to say it in such a way as to get us to come where he wanted us to come, without us discovering his shrewd plan. If we had discovered his plan, we would have walked away before we arrived at the goal that he wanted to bring us to.

Master Fard saw that the church was a failure in the Bilalian (black) community. In the early 1930's, the Bilalian church community was mostly a community of dead, so-called Negroes. Most of the church people were hating their own identity, and they didn't even know it. They hated their black skin, and they hated any connection or association with so -called Africa. They hated their so -called "Negroid" features. This is the condition in which Master Fard Muhammad found us in the early 1938's when he came to America. He observed that the so-called Orthodox Muslims had come here and tried to reach us, but they had failed. They invited us to Islam, to Allah, and to the Holy Quran. They told us that Islam was a better religion, bat only a very few of us listened to them. Master
Fard discovered the real problem, and then he designed a skillful plan to bring home the prize. Master Fard Muhammad is not dead, brothers and sisters, he is physically alive and I talk to him whenever I get ready. I don't talk to him in any spooky way, I go to the telephone and dial his number.

When be saw that our problem was that we were already too spiritual (too wrapped up in the Bible), he devised a plan. He knew he could not get us if he came at us with the Holy scripture. Whatever anyone had come at us with, it would not have been any stronger than what we already had in the way of spiritual force. Who was more spiritual in America or in the world than the Bilalian community in America? Our churches were filled with more spirit than anybody else's churches. No one could come to us telling us that we needed spirit. Anyone who would have come to us would have had less spirit than we had, and we would not have paid any attention to them.

Master Fard Muhammad discovered that what was absent in the dead Bilalian community was material - we were totally ignorant to material worth. So he began to study scripture, and he designed his plan step by step after the plan of Almighty God.

People had come to us with God and religion and they have approached us with the spirit, talking to us about holiness, righteousness, divinity, God and the saints. Master Fard discovered that that is not the way Almighty God develops the community of His people. When you study the Holy Quran and the Bible, you will see that that is not the way that God does it. The Bible says that God made His man out of the physical earth. The first thing that He made was a physical man and the next thing that He did was to give that physical man a physical world and a physical mate. After He gave the man a physical body and a physical world, then God told him that there were two kinds of knowledge in the world. One knowledge is pare divine knowledge that is from God, and the other kind of knowledge is mixed up with falsehood. God warned the man not to eat of the tree of corrupt knowledge. But, God did not give him that kind of instruction until he had already made him physically and given him an opportunity to live with other people. In Genesis, if you follow that story in the later chapters, you will see that God did not make just one Adam. The Bible says that God made the man and made for him a mate, but He made a society when He did that.

It says that God made male and female and that He named them "Adam." God made a society of physical people. He introduced them to a physical world, and He let their minds grow to become aware of the physical environment and to grow in the physical environment first. The physical world is not in existence for no reason.

The birth of the human being into the world is not a spiritual birth first. No baby comes from the womb as a spirit. The first body that comes out of the womb of the mother is a flesh body, and the first thing that the baby wants is some physical milk. Master Fard discovered this secret of the high knowledge that is in the scripture that people had overlooked. When you find a people completely dead, you do not come to them with the spirit. You can come to a society that is alive socially and economically by teaching them the spirit (the "heaven"), but you cannot teach the "heavens" to a society that has not yet been formed in the earth. You have to teach them the earth, first. That was the wisdom (the key) that Master Fard Muhammad discovered. 

He said, "The way to get these people, Elijah, is to hold out to them the bait that represents to them the things that they need and want right now. Tell them, Elijah, that if they follow you to me, they will get good homes, money, and friendship in all walks of life. Tell them that the streets of the holy land where their ancestors came from are paved with solid gold." That kind of description made us want to go there. He did not say that the streets were filled with spirits playing on invisible harps, walking around with golden slippers that did not really exist. He said to tell us that there was real gold over there. This bait of a well-to-do society was the right bait to attract our people. He said that we would get money, good homes, and friendship. He included friendship because the Bilalian people in America were friendless. We knew that we did not have any friends. We could not even trust each other as friends.

Master Fard offered friendship because he knew that the only friend we identified with was the friend "Jesus." We identified with that friend because our suffering resembled his suffering. Master Fard began to take our minds off that Jesus because he realized that until we could see our own suffering, we would never be able to be serious about doing something to remove that suffering - so he began to tell us about our own suffering. The church had made the mistake of telling us about the suffering of the Hebrew boys in the fiery furnace and the suffering of the Jews under Pharaoh. They made the mistake of telling us about what was happening "over yonder across Jordan" instead of bringing our minds home to see what was happening to us right here in America.

Master Fard Muhammad sneaked into America and used a name that made it hard for them to identify him. Because he did not wear a turban, he looked like an
American. He called himself "Wallace Fard." He was wise because he knew how to hide his identity, to do his job, and sneak out. Master Fard Muhammad worked for almost three years in Detroit and Chicago to bring the dead Bilalian community to life so that they could grow into the religion of Islam. What was his objective? What did he want for us?

He wanted us to be free when the new world came. He was wise and he had vision and foresight. He knew that the America of the 1930's was a dying America and that the hand of God was against it. It would only be so long before it would be killed, or die outright. He did not want to see the Bilalian people of America come to life in that new world under somebody else's leadership. If it was not for him, we would have come to life under somebody else's leadership. We would have come to life because everything was moving us in this direction. The reality of the many African nations that had come into independence would have affected our minds over here and forced us to get together and come into some kind of idea of self-government or leadership in the society. If Master Fard had never brought Islam to us, the natural development would have eventually brought us together as a family. I do not mean that it would have "integrated" us. Integration with the society is something that you do after you have integrated with yourself. How can you integrate before you put yourself together? We would have as a family if we had not received Islam and we would have had a voice as a family, but that voice would have been under somebody else's voice. We would have come under the socialist voice, the capitalist voice, or some other established voice. Anything other than what Master Fard Muhammad brought was not designed to bring about the total birth of the total person. It was designed to only take care of part of your human needs.

The Bilalian people of America were a different people in the world. You can go to poor people on any continent and you can teach them civilization if they do not have it; you can teach them science and industry if they do not have it; you can teach them religion if they do not have it; but you do not have to teach them everything because they have not lost everything. You can deal with the people, teach them, build them up, and bring them into a self-government, pride and dignity without going about a thorough restoration of the human form. But, over here it was different with us. We had nothing at all but the false picture of ourselves that was given to us by a people who were intent upon keeping us empty-headed slaves for all of our lives.

How do you bring that kind of man back to existence? Can you teach him economics and bring him back to existence? No, the man is not even alive as a human being. You have to teach him what it means to be human. You have to teach him that a human being is a natural creation. You have to first put the life that belongs to the empty vessel back into the vessel. This world was putting foreign life into the empty vessel, and the foreign life could not grow in a vessel that was foreign to it. They wanted to make us anything but ourselves. So the Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad said that we should know ourself. For the first time, thanks to Master W.F. Muhammad, Bilalian people in America began to act naturally. The Muslims who followed the teachings of Master W.F. Muhammad and the Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad, were singled out in the community as "foreign people" or "crazy people." Those people who were pointing at us were unnatural people themselves, so they saw us as being unnatural.

Master Fard Muhammad's masterful plan was to do first things, first, and keep last things out of sight until we could first get the people established in first things. His first aim was to get us firmly grounded in reality, as we were capable of knowing reality. The community of poor, robbed, deprived, dejected, so-called Negroes was not capable of knowing a spiritual reality since they were not yet alive in a social reality or a physical reality. He first had to establish us in a physical reality, doing it as Almighty God did it according to the Holy Quran and the Bible Genesis. He formed us physically and then put desire in us. When he brought our attention to our physical needs and showed us that we were obligated to do something about fulfilling those physical needs, the desire in us for physical pleasures and physical wealth increased. 

We had been satisfied with a little of nothing, but the more Master Fard's teachings went into our ears, the more our appetite for physical things expanded. Pretty soon we were not satisfied to have a little apartment and a few shabby pieces of furniture in the house. We wanted our own house and our own automobile. Before, we had no incentive or desire in us for these things. Our only desire was to be accepted by Caucasian people because that is the way this world had fashioned our minds. We were an artificial society, it took this real teaching to make us real. Master Fard told the Honorable Elijah Muhammad to get the people to come into the temple at any cost. Once they were gotten into the temple, they would gradually come into the knowledge of themselves and their own. When they woke up, they were then able to value and to appreciate Islam. He did not worry about teaching them Islam then, he wanted to teach them to know self, to do for self, and to separate from the destructive relationship that they had with the Caucasian people. That is what Master Fard did, and he was successful.

He told the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that he could not attract the "fish" to come into this ideal society (the Lost-Found Nation of Islam) with knowledge alone because the fish had been mentally, spiritually and morally killed. He was not able to see the value that was in this heavenly order. He had to hold out to him the things that he knew in his life, and attract him with the bait of meat that satisfied only the stomach -money, food, good homes, and good clothes. He said, "Put that bait on the hook, Elijah, and bring him into your self. One day you will be able to put that fish into the waters of the new world, but it will take time." When we examine the works of the Honorable Master Fard Muhammad and the works of the Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad, we can see the terminology in the real substance, the real sense. We now see that what was said also had another meaning.

When we examine these great lessons, we get a message out of them that is tied in with the Bible scripture and even with the Holy Quran. Master Fard's first lesson asked the question, "Who is the original man?" We know now that "original man" did not mean original flesh man, but it meant the original form that man takes. Man is first a physical person before he becomes a moral person and a spiritual person. When the Honorable Master Fard Muhammad found us, we were the original man. The Caucasian man was not the first man. The first man was a man of the earth that knew nothing of moral values or spiritual values, he was just a earthly man. Adam was a man formed of the earth and then God breathed into him His spirit. If you go to primitive societies, you will find that human beings come up first like animals, desiring physical food and things to take care of their pressing needs. As they progress, they grow up the rungs of civilization in the ladder of society to a level where they desire moral and spiritual excellence.

Master Fard called us the original man in such a way as to make us think that we were the best man, and in a sense we were the best man. We were more natural and more human in our feelings, and our conscience was more human than the conscience of white America at that time. We were also the original man in that sense. He was referring to the fact that man takes steps or stages in his growth, and his first step in flesh. He discovered us to be nothing but a fleshly community, only begging for food, sex, and some good entertainment. The original man (the flesh man) progresses and evolves from the flesh man to the moral conscious man. After he becomes morally conscious, he rises up to still another stage of development, which is a spiritual conscious man. These are the natural steps of human development.

First (original) things are not always superior. When we look at the growth of nature we find that first things are always inferior, but they grow to be superior. If you study the germ of life in any family or species, you will see that the first form is inferior or weak. Then it grows to reach its strength or superior form.

The work of Master Fard Muhammad was the work of change or revolution.
Revolution is not the final object or the final aim of his great work, revolution is a means for reaching the final object.

If you design a revolution to bring people out of their condition into another condition, you cannot continue to always put emphasis on revolution. The emphasis has to be taken off of revolution and put on objectives or aims one day. Master Fard Muhammad had a design to bring about changes that would bring us into a new world, a new life, and a new mind. The steps of the change cannot be looked at today as part of our world structure, but they are steps towards the structure. Now, we are at the structure. The emphasis should be taken off of change and revolution and be put on building and construction. We want to save our people who are in the hands of strong people. We know that we cannot just go and ask for them - we have to take them. So the first thing that we had to do was to design a plan to get our people. Once we get our people, we cannot continue to preach to them the philosophy of attack and capture. We have to teach to them the philosophy of construction because, if we take them out of one world, we are going to have to build another world for them to live in.

Master Fard Muhammad taught us the plan (the philosophy) of reaching our goal and the Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad began to gradually take the emphasis off of battle strategy and put it on building.

Today we have arrived at our goal and the trip was successful. The great plan achieved what it was designed to achieve. If we get busy right now and build the new world, I assure you that we will not be ruled by any other government in the new world but our own self -government.

Your brother, 
W.D. Muhammad
