(Editor’s Note: As the Nubian Leadership Circle held its fourth summit in efforts to build a Black Nation, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan delivered a special message to close the Dec. 4 virtual gathering convened by Sadiki Kambon and enjoyed by growing numbers of our people. Please find below an edited transcript of the Minister’s important remarks. To learn more about the Nubian Leadership Circle and join in this great work, visit www.nubianleadershipcircle.org. Visit the Nubian Leadership Circle page on Facebook to see the Minister’s address and for more about creating a nation of our own.)
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
As Salaam Alaikum. (Peace Be Unto You.)
To my dear and beloved brother Sadiki Kambon, to all of the wonderful presenters, the cadres and the work that you have done over this first year of the effort of Brother Sadiki to make this Nubian Leadership Circle a great success, I thank you.
›I thank you Brother Sadiki and I thank all of those whom I had the pleasure to hear and the beautiful work of the cadres, may Allah (God) bless each and every one of you to continue this great calling and this great work.
As I lay in my bed thinking about the summit meeting today, honoring one year from the first meeting to the fourth summit, and honoring the success that Allah (God) has brought to our effort, I was deeply concerned about what to say to this august body of brothers and sisters. And as I listened to you, I heard the nuts and bolts of a nation coming together.
I heard the deep and loving concern of us for one another and for Black people wherever we are found on this planet as part of our family and the connection has to be made between what is going on in the West, what is going on in the East and what is going on in Africa and the Caribbean and wherever Black people are now scattered.
I wanted to talk about the vision for a nation. What kind of nation do we really want? We are coming up, talking about building a nation at the end of the 6,000 year rule of our former slave and colonial masters. Surely America is the greatest of those nations that came up in this last 6,000 years, but we’re looking at the death of America. We’re living to see the fall of a great nation, and it is unraveling before our eyes.
So surely America cannot be the example of the nation that we desire to be. And so in this last 6,000 years, we have the history of the rise and fall of nations. Nations have come, become great, become corrupt and fallen. Nations have extended their power and reach over many smaller nations or tribes.
But where are they today? We have not an example of perpetuity in any of these nations. They come and they go, they rise and they fall because something inherent in their rise, and in their fall, has told us that they are not a good example for us to follow. So I began thinking, what should be our foundation? What will make the work that each of you are doing, and others are coming to join us in doing, what will make this work live beyond us? I soon will be 89 years of age. I know I don’t have as much time in front of me as behind me. And when you reach a certain age like Brother Sadiki and others on this board, we have to think about what we are leaving and who we are training to take the best of what we do, make it better and keep it going.
What will make our nation survive rise and fall dynamics? What will make the New Black World survive the dynamics of the rise and fall of nations? The Bible says it like this, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is the reproach of a people, to any people. I want us to just look at that for a minute because we’ve come up in America, in the Caribbean, in Europe, in Africa under European leadership. We could say we came up under the devil himself. There’s nothing that they have done that is in harmony with the law of good and righteousness. They are very strange people who have been our masters and our teachers, and in reality, being under them for 462 years in America, they have literally made us into themselves.
I’m going to quote some scriptures from Bible and Qur’an, but I want us to take it, the principles of it, and apply it to wherever we are. In the Book of Revelations, an angel comes forth and he declares Babylon the great is fallen is fallen for she has become a habitation of devils, a hole of every foul creature and a cage for every hateful bird. We grew up in Babylon. Babylon taught us not to love ourselves, but to hate ourselves. And that’s why you can have a cadre talking about what we are doing to one another. As much as Malcolm X has taught and Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey and others have taught us, for us to be at this time in our lives and our own people are becoming our worst enemy.
It’s not their fault, but it is a reality. Who made them this way? Our Art and Culture cadre, who’s feeding the filth over the radio that makes our young people rap in a foolish way? It’s not like the early rappers who rapped with knowledge of self, but today it’s filth, it’s indecency; it is debauchery. It is the glorification of niggerism, the glorification of something that we should never call each other, “nigger,” and make it seem like it’s something nice. We are descendants of the Creator Himself. So when I say to you, “my brother,” it’s because God is our Creator and our Father. So you are my natural brother, my natural sister who has been made unnatural by an unnatural enemy.
Beloved family, I hope I’m not disturbing us in a negative way. I want us to see how difficult it is for us to meet and be successful in what we’re doing when inside of us there’s a boiling cauldron of dislike for each other. And that comes out every time we try to do something together, we end up destroying it ourselves. Not that we are the destroyer, it’s the enemy operating in us that is making us self-destructive. We become traitors of one another. We become stool pigeons. We become the agents of our enemy against our own rise.
What kind of nation do we envision? Do you know that God who created life didn’t make it so complex, really to live right is simple. It is the burden of unrighteousness that bends us toward a lower level of human existence.
My beloved family, righteousness exalts a nation. I didn’t say religion because we have used religion as a crutch. And if the religion does not make us better, does not cultivate the divine essence of our being, then that’s the religion of the enemy. But the religion of God is what lifts us up and cultivates the greatness of God that He’s put, not in some of us, but in all of us.
What kind of nation do we want when we sit in these cadres and we talk about what’s happening to us as a people? In Africa, please, my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters don’t think that I hate you. I love you as my family, but the way of life that we are living is counter to the nature of God and the nature of the universe and its creation. God created everything in pairs. There is male and female grass, male and female in everything that keeps the life of that species continuing.
I love you as a brother. I love you as a sister. The love of the same sex for one another that’s rooted in righteousness is wonderful. But when we take it to the extreme, which Satan has caused us to do now, we have gone under the tutelage of a real Satanic mind. Now we want to marry each other putting the name of God on something that He refers to as an abomination. I am not speaking down to you. I love each and every one of you. The sickest of our people, I love the most trifling of our people.
I love because I know who you are and I know who made you into what you have become. So I am not an enemy and God is not your enemy. He will save us from our own selves because He has chosen us out of the furnace of affliction to help him build not only a nation, but a world.
After we have suffered what we have suffered, why would we treat each other, and others, like we have been treated? A self-hateful person cannot be trusted to love anybody. So we have a big job in the Nubian Leadership Circle, but we have to start in each cadre to accept being right. How about that? I want to treat you like I want you to treat me. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, we are not a Muslim until we love for our brother what we love for ourselves. Not love for our dog what we love for ourselves, or love our nigger what we love for ourself. No! We are flesh of each other’s flesh; blood of each other’s blood and we are the children of one Mighty Creator. And if we can’t see that we are connected to God in the way He created us, then we are still lacking sight.
If in the cadres, we commit, not to join some religion, but commit to try and to do what is right. That’s so simple. It’s not a complex thing to do what’s right. Look, if I love you as I love myself, I’m not suicidal. If I harm you, I’ve harmed myself because you are a part of me. Our sisters are suffering because we don’t fully understand her value to us. She’s a creature from the Creator. She’s created to complement our nature and our nature complements her. We aren’t going anywhere without our women and we can’t build anything successfully without them.
They have to be in our hearts as we build. Free the woman and let her be what God created us to be. No man should be envious of a talented Black woman. You should see her as an instrument of God. And when she brings the sweetness of her talent to the fore, salute her and thank God for a helper in such a cause as building a nation. But not any nation, a righteous nation because if we do not practice righteousness whatever we build will have no perpetuity on this planet. None whatsoever.
So if you want as a living dead person to pass on unrighteousness in our work to our children, thinking that it’s going to be alright, no, it won’t be alright.
We have to set the example. And I have to say this, I’m not a hater. I know why God made devil. The devil had a job to do, and he’s done it very well. I’m not hateful of White people, but I can’t follow them in their deviation from nature’s laws. I can’t follow you and act like you because you’ve been the God of your world that our nation that’s coming up will have you as the God of it too. We’ve had enough of you. It’s us and God, it’s us reflecting God and the love of God in us for self and for one another. Nothing can hold us back. Nothing can hold us down. Look at envy. Envy is a disease of the heart. And sometimes when somebody gets up and does something so spectacular, our brother, we can’t praise him.
We can’t say to him, “Wow, wasn’t that great?” We can’t say to her, “That was great work. Thank God for you.” We can’t. An envious person is a hater of God because an envious person will say, “I’m better. Why don’t I have this gift that so-and-so has?” That may not be your gift, but God didn’t leave you out. He blessed every one of you with a piece of Himself in a gift that is unique and it demonstrates your connection to the greatness of God. If you’ve ever watched a dead person deteriorate, as much as we love our loved ones, we can’t stay in the bed with our beloved wife, mama, daddy because we love them.
As they deteriorate, they excrete from themselves toxins, poisons, bacteria. They have to be put away from the living. Envy, the Bible says, is more cruel than the grave. And the Bible says the grave cannot praise God, nothing coming out in the grave is praising God. So we don’t hang around graveyards. Even if it’s a graveyard with a great one from ourselves in it, we go visit it. We put flowers down, but we’re not standing there because the dead cannot help the living to be alive.
Each of us soon, we’ll be gone. But I want to see our people free indeed, not just free from the White man, but free from the manacle of enmity, hatred and the burden of envy and jealousy. You’re a slave when you are bound to sin. That’s why when Jesus was talking to the members of the Jewish community, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” They said, “How come you say we shall be set free? We have never been enslaved to any man.” Yes. But if you’re enslaved to the covetousness of yourself, where you see what God has blessed Africa with, or the Caribbean and other nations with, and you call it your self interest to rob others of what God gave them, a covetous people. That’s not your example. We have to separate from that mentality, put it away. And if they want to be like that, then put them away with it.
Because the poison, the toxicity of their way of civilization, will destroy our nation before it even gets up. I’m going to say a few more words. I’m so grateful to Sadiki. I’m so grateful to each one of you. I’m so grateful for your desires to build a nation. That’s what God is calling us to do. Build a nation, not a nation to glorify our enemies, but a nation to glorify God. And you know, man is not made to accept praise. I want to say this because all of our great ones, all of them, the media starts writing, “Oh, what a great basketball player. What a great singer. What a great this, what a great that.” And it’s true, they are great. But once you accept the praise, you have accepted a burden on your soul because you didn’t give yourself what you got.
You exploited what God gave you and it benefited you. It benefited others, but who does the praise belong to? To my beloved Muslim brothers, when the prophet received the Qur’an and in the arrangement of the Qur’an, the opening surah or chapter is called Al-Fatiha. We want a nation. We want a nation that will stand the test of time. We want a nation that will live when we have become grandmothers and grandfathers and babas. We want a nation that will be a light to those coming behind us. We want a nation that’s built on righteousness. So if righteousness exalts a nation, how can we be great helpers in building a nation and we don’t want to be right? Come on. Everything that’s in us that is not right is a burden. We must get rid of that burden. Take it off you because it’s weighing down the power of your soul.
You can never be the great man that you were born to be with the burden of evil hanging around our necks. So you know what? The moment we say, we want a nation, here comes the corrupter. “What can I do for you? What can I give you?” “I want you to honor me,” Satan says. You remember when Satan took Jesus up on the mountain? I don’t know why Jesus went up there with him. But the Bible says he went up the mountain with the devil. Satan waited till they got to the top of the mountain.
I imagine they were talking on the way up, but when they got to the top of the mountain, because when you are at the top of something, you can look out and see many things that you couldn’t see while you are climbing the mountain. But when they got to the top of the mountain, that’s when Satan dropped the log on Jesus. “Jesus, your father promised you a kingdom. Well, I got one right here. Look, look, look at all the cities that I control. I’ll give it to you. You just gotta bow. It ain’t gonna take much for you to bow.
I mean, look, look at what I got. Look at what I can give you.” See White folk can give you anything you want in the material world for bowing. How many of you have been invited to a place that you, you have never been used to going? And then the question is asked, what can I do for you? How can I help you? Like our president, “Oh, take the vaccine. Oh no, it will help. I wouldn’t lead you astray take, take, take it.” And you are so afraid, afraid to die because you feel, if you took the vaccine, you could stave off the coronavirus. So you’re frightened. How can you be of God and be afraid? Fear is not a companion of righteousness. When you are afraid it doesn’t mean that you’re weak. God is going to try us with something of fear. But my teacher told me that God never created a creature that He was afraid of.
And every creature, he said, fears God. So when you, and I know that we are direct descendants of God, now listen to this, the creatures are willing to bow to us if we bow to God. When I first learned that I had cancer, a friend of mine had a place down in Southern Arizona, Dr. Goss, and I visited his place. I found out I had cancer and I wanted to go to myself and fast and pray. And Dr. Goss was so sweet, so kind, so loving. Dr. E. Faye Williams, if you’re listening, when I was trying to rebuild the Nation of Islam, it was my brother, Dick Gregory, who offered me space on his farm to go and meditate and get myself together. None of us are here of ourselves. All of us were made by others who helped us to become who and what we are. So for us to get the big head, it’s an insult to those who helped to make us.
I thank God for Dick Gregory. I thank God for his wisdom and his righteousness, a good man. I’m saying that to say this: In the Bible, God makes nations great and He destroys them. He enlarges nations and guides them. What do you envision for the nation we want to build? Do you want sirens blaring because we got in an argument and we had a weapon and we grabbed it and shot each other, or killed each other? Is that what we want? Or do you want the peace that comes when two people love each other and even disagree, but not become disagreeable. Because each of you is my teacher. I’m going to say it again.
Each of you can teach me something that I did not know. How dare anyone who has greatness not respect the greatness of God in his brothers and sisters who share the burden of his labor. I’m not saying this that I’m just saying it. I know you can teach me something that I didn’t know. That’s why I love listening because every time I listen, I learn. And when I listen and learn, I love deeper. Every one that I heard was so happy over their cadre, over what they shared together today. Let me close with these words from the Qur’an: Travel in the land and see what was the end of the rejectors. Travel. Well, we can’t travel and see what happened in the days of Noah or Lot. But when you read the history, you’re traveling.
When you see the history of nations that have fallen down, nations that have been destroyed by God, what does it bring up in your mind when you and I want to build a nation? The nations always start off pretty good. I’m going to close with the nation that I live in. America, righteousness exalts a nation not the power of your weapons, or the richness that is dying. Or your gold that is cankered, your garments that are moth eaten. America is unraveling as we speak. She’s dying a slow death because of greed, because of the lust for the resources of other nations. She’s dying because of the evil way she has treated not only us, but her own people.
What kind of nation do we want to build? Can it be built on our bloodshed of each other? Or can it be built by our love for each other? Our willingness to forgive each other for the mistakes that we make in trying to be right. In the Lord’s prayer, you say, forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me. How many people have hurt you on your way to being the great you that I see today? Not one of us has come here without being hurt and stung by the pain of enmity and envy and jealousy.
Can you forgive? How could you forgive the White man for all the evil that he has poured on us, even to this very moment of time? How could you forgive him but won’t forgive your mother who made a mistake or your father or your brother or your sister? We’re going to build a nation that’s going to live, so death has to come off of us. The death of this world has to come off of us as we wash and become clean. Each one of you is a great component, each one of you is a master—if not yet—potentially you are a master. Each one of you has lived life, I know I’m looking at Dr. Ray Winbush and I know my brother has been through hell. Manatee Smith has been through hell. All of us who come to greatness, come through affliction.
May God use us. May God bless us as we go through the next year. Now if I did something wrong, if I said something that I shouldn’t have said, and in the manner that I shouldn’t have said it, will you forgive me? Will you help me to be a better person by telling me the truth? If we will be loving and kind and gracious to each other, the work of Sadiki, that’s a great work that our brother is doing and we are helping him to do it. And in so doing we’re helping ourselves. Thank you, Brother Sadiki. Thank you all.
Now the Qur’an, I love to quote the Qur’an, the Bible too. But in the Qur’an, listen to these words of Allah (God), “You are the best nation raised up for men. You enjoin good and you forbid evil. You believe in Allah (God).” By whatever name you call God, our belief in the Supreme Power of the Supreme Being, He must direct our lives. Will you let Him direct our building of a nation for His glory, a nation that will have perpetuity? Like Jesus said, a nation that will never die. Eternal life is only in righteousness.
The brothers that are buying land, the brothers that are making food. Remember when you look at the land, look up. Not to a Space God, but look up and say, “Ah, if this land is not connected to that sun, that moon, those stars making clouds rise from the water of the earth to rain on my land so that my land will produce my food, how can earth live without heaven?” Heaven and earth work together. I want us to live in the light of God and know that He will bless your every effort for food, clothing, and shelter.
He will open doors that are closed, if we pool our resources and act. I’m not talking about being a Muslim, you already are that whether you know it or not. But I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about natural principles that our African forebears lived. That’s true religion. And by the way, I was with Elijah Muhammad one day and he asked me, he said, “brother, what’s the best religion?” I thought it was a trick question because he’s my teacher and he’s asking me what’s the best religion. So I said, “Islam.”
He never said yes. He never said no. Here is what he said, “The best religion is that you do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If we just practice that the Nubian Leadership Circle is going to grow. It will get stronger and stronger every day that we love like that, every day that we act like that, every day that we think like that. Then God will open up our brain and we’ll see and hear things for a nation’s growth. Because we’re growing a nation that we want to live forever.
Thank you, Sadiki. Thanks to all of you. You had a wonderful few days and I’m so proud to have been connected to my brother Sadiki to produce this and what I see, let’s keep it going. There’s much more work we can do. Just treat yourself right. Treat each other right. Don’t lie on each other. Don’t lie to each other. If you’re supposed to do something, you didn’t get it done. “Yeah, I did.” No. Shut up. If you’re going to lie, you’re going to defeat your own character building. Stop lying. Tell the truth. It’s so freeing to be truthful.
May Allah (God) bless you. Can we have a prayer? Oh Allah (God), I come to you on behalf of this great Circle that our brother Sadiki and those with him has formed and it’s getting larger. Every time we meet the Circle is getting larger, more coming in. And even those who went out will come back because it’s the right Circle to be a part of. Oh Allah (God), guide us, bless us, protect us.
Give us the power of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that we may put Satan to a perpetual flight. I ask this in your holy and righteous name. I bear witness there is no God but You. And I bear witness that there’s only one God, by whatever name we call him, you are the One that gave us life. You are the One that has ordered this Circle and we thank You. Ameen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
As Salaam Alaikum. (Peace be unto you) everyone.
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