JABRIL.MUHAMMAD
[Editor’s note: This article was published online on Feb. 9, 2005.]
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan: So, Dr. Alim went away with my words and he thought. He thought critically on the Nation. Then, he wrote me a letter. He thought that I might be upset because of his critique of the Nation. But when I read his letter, I got him on the phone and told him that is the exact thing that I wanted to hear. So, let’s come on. Let’s get busy.
Then, he came up with the thought of the caterpillar and the forming of a chrysalis, out of which comes the butterfly. Nothing of the caterpillar phase is lost in the chrysalis. Nothing in the chrysalis is lost in the caterpillar. It’s an evolutionary process that brings us to this beautiful thing.
So now, I mentioned the nine ministries and the tenth being the light of it [them] all must be the spiritual.
Then, we tried to figure out what should these nine ministries be? If you look at the systems of the body, now you’re coming back to look at this. What is the endocrine system? What is the circulatory system? What is the digestive system? What is the muscular system? What is the structure, the bone? When you look at the systems and how they function, then you make a corresponding ministry to serve the same function as that system.
So, I started looking at God. I said OK, how did He form Himself? The Honorable Elijah Muhammad gave us clues. Christians say “stepped out on space.” Ah, come on. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad calls that “his fancy.” But in the darkness, he said, “The first atom of life sparkled. He made Himself up out of the material of the darkness.”
So, there’s matter in the darkness. It is considered nothing because it has neither form nor function, but it’s matter. So, now He’s forming. As He forms Himself, He studies Himself. Then, He makes a reality that corresponds to Himself. Later, He said, “Let there be light.” There was already light in Him. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says, “He was a light of Himself.” So what He did was to bring out of Himself a reality and put it in a beautiful form and gave it purpose to manifest who He is.
I thought, since He was before the universe, then we would have to be before the Nation is formed. It has to form out of us. When Jesus said, “The Kingdom of heaven is within you,” how did he mean it? The thing that we have to do is study us and then see how the Kingdom is in us, and then bring it out of us and make it real.
Then, I looked at governments and their various ministries–the Ministry of Culture; the Ministry of Trade; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Ministry of Defense. All of these things began to feed my mind and then I said, if the Minister is tax-exempted, then ministries that do this kind of service should also be tax-exempt. So when you have a Ministry of Information, then how does that ministry function? How does the Ministry of Culture function? How does the Ministry of Health function? How does the Ministry of Education function? How does the Ministry of Defense function? What are the sub-organs coming out of these various ministries that make it relevant to a structure that now represents the Kingdom of God?
Now that’s where I am.
Now, where are we?
But, all of these things took place, in my mind, over years. But it was brought to fruition when I became painfully aware of my mortality and the reality of the Nation and not wanting to see a repeat of what happened when the Honorable Elijah Muhammad departed. So all of those things were motivating factors in my coming up with the thought of the nine ministries.
Brother Jabril:
Dr. Alim came back to you with a letter within about two months of the conversation between you two, during the first part of 2001. When did the Commission actually begin forming? When in 2001 did this occur?
Minister Farrakhan
: He had begun meeting with friends that he knew in the mosque in Washington, D.C. who shared similar dissatisfactions and a similar desire to see the Nation progress. So over many weeks and months, they met. Then, out of that meeting, he came to me with–I think he was the one who came or I called it “The Commission”–and the title was “The Commission For The Reorganization and Restructuring of a Nation.”
Brother Jabril:
When did the Commission become formalized?
Minister Farrakhan:
In the latter part of 2001. They had their first big meeting in the fall of 2001.
Brother Jabril:
The timing of all of this is Divine. Allah determined it.
Minister Farrakhan:
Yes, and I felt comfortable with the ministers that were in the commission; with the Believers that were in the commission; with the youth that were a part of the commission; with an element of dissatisfaction that was a part of the commission.
As I went back to think about how the Saviour structured the Nation and the laws that He set up, I realized that He set up laws to protect us against ignorance; in other words, slack talk.
Here you have an unqualified person trying to be a Laborer. We would tear him down before God could build him up. Since that’s the way the slave-masters made us–slack-talkers–He had to set up a law that would protect us in the days of our ignorance so that we could evolve, and unity could evolve, so that the idea could make progress through the darkness until we could mature.
We see everybody that criticizes us as an enemy, because we are so ego-deprived, if I could use that term, that any criticism of us is taken as an attack on our hurting egos. Most of us who were the helpers of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad could not handle severe criticism because we never had authority. We never were involved, as such, in something like this. It was a very brand new experience, and we needed to be protected and shielded from that which would destroy us before he could build us up to take criticism.
When Dr. Alim came up with the idea of lawful dialogue–which is brilliant–in that it’s lawful now to critique, not you as a person, but an idea to flush out its weaknesses.
The enemy’s government has built-in opposition in it, to help with balance, because they have moved away from dictators.
You may remember in the web cast, I mentioned that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad asked me in 1972 to bring the intellectuals and the professionals to Chicago because he wanted them to help him save and build the Nation. He gave a picture that he already has a tree; it’s already grown; there’s fruit on it. He said, “Why don’t you come and help me fertilize the ground where the tree is growing and then we all can have something to eat from that tree.”
More next issue, Allah willing.
