JABRIL.MUHAMMAD
I’m about to end this series of articles with this question. This series involves those “baby planes.” I intend to tell why I asked the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan this question and put it in context.
Brother Jabril: Brother Minister, on the night of June 4th, right after your Phoenix speech in 1995, you spoke to a little over 40 of us, at your dinner table, about the relationship between the mission of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and your mission, with your mission coming out of his mission.
You spoke of your mission and his mission being mutually compatible and complimentary. Would you please elaborate?
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Minister Farrakhan: If a man is to be a helper of another man, the question becomes what help does he need? And based upon that necessity, persons are probed. Persons are sending their resumes. Persons are interviewed and persons are selected to help in whatever phase of the work or assignment that the main man has.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad like Moses desired a helper. That desire was in him from the time he started his mission. He knew that he needed a helper but not for the reason that he thought. But it would later come to him, as he grew in understanding his assignment, exactly what kind of help he would need. So he scanned the persons that surrounded him.
And he measured them based upon his knowledge of the scripture and the help (in persons) that God gave to former prophets that shared the assignment of those prophets. So in Surah Taha, Surah 20, Moses asks God for a helper.
And the first thing he says is, “Expand my breast for me and ease my affair. And loosen the knot in my tongue that they may understand my words. And Make him to bear of my burden or an aider to me.”
Now if we look at those words, “Expand for me my breast…” well that could mean when your breast is expanded you can take in more oxygen. The more oxygen you take in the more power you have taken in to give your body more power for the energy of life is in the oxygen that we breathe into ourselves. So this also goes for the spiritual world and these words mean, “Expand my breast for more inspiration, more understanding that would give me more power to do a greater work.” Again, since in the chest cavity or in the breast cavity there are the lungs and the heart, then he’s asking God to grant him broader compassion; broader sensitivity; a greater love coming from his expanding breast for an expanded mission.
As you may recall, the mission of Moses was one in the West then in the East. So his breast had to be expanded; for first he had to deal with a savage people in the hills and cavesides of Europe and later, according to the scriptures, deal with another type of sickness in Egypt. So he has two assignments. One West; one East. So the Honorable Elijah Muhammad has an expanded assignment. He has an assignment in America. He has an assignment in the Caribbean. And he has an assignment that covers the whole of the children of both the first and the second Adam. So his breast has to be expanded to fit that requirement. Well it takes time to expand your breast. It takes time to open you up to the depth of understanding of your mission. He said that he had come to fully understand, the last aspects of his mission at the time that he was to leave.
He’s only given forty nights. Thirty and then he was given ten more. And after those forty nights he then calls his helper and says to the helper, “Take my place among the people and follow not the way of the mischief maker.” So the helper is not [to] look exactly like the person he is helping but the helper helps in his expanded version of the mission of the master who preceded him and laid the foundation for him. So the master, when he leaves, with his fully developed understanding of the depth and the breath of his mission, he can now guide him in an expanded way. Thus, his work compliments the initial work that was done by the master.
In the scriptures, Jesus’ focus at one point was exceedingly narrow. So he told his disciples, “Go ye not in the way of the Gentiles. Go ye not in the way of the Samaritans. But go ye to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But then at another point he says, “Go ye into all the worlds and preach this gospel to every nation, kindred and tongue.”
Well those disciples who preach the gospel only to the lost sheep–how would they be prepared to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth except their breast expanded except their understanding was expanded?
Now, lets look at the quality of the persons with whom the master first dealt. What was their condition? They were totally in the dark. They were a very ignorant people. So Master Fard Muhammad, to Whom praises due forever, taught them in a language that was the way you teach babies. You teach babies using words that conjure pictures. The picture is not the truth. But the truth is contained in the picture. But as long as the picture remains in the brain as you mature in understanding then you can reach into the picture and extract the principle of truth that lies therein.
So the Honorable Elijah Muhammad was teaching me this lesson, one day, as he was spanking me for reciting the history of Jesus as he taught it forty years earlier. He said, “I don’t want you to teach it like I said it forty years ago. I want you to give the meaning of the history.”
Thus when he said, “And loosen the knot in my tongue…” tongue here represents the language of revelation. God’s grace to him came in the words that He gave him, which was a compliment to the Qur’an. It was an opening or a key to unravel the depth of the Qur’an. But the lessons themselves had to be unraveled over time.
I’ll end this series, next issue, Allah willing.
