[Editor’s note: The following article is based on excerpts from a lecture delivered by Minister Farrakhan on August 9, 1987.
It was the fifth and last part of a series by the same name. To order this series in its entirety, visit store.finalcall.com.]
In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.
My subject is dedicated to all the Sisters that are here today and it is really dedicated to my dear Brothers. I have been working on this subject for over 15 years and it crystallized for me two weeks ago and I started this series of lectures. I am so proud of this series of lectures that, if I died tonight, I would feel that I have done my job; that if you get these series of lectures, I do not need to ever talk again.
For what is in these lectures, be it the Will of Allah, will be enough for you to get up out of this condition, totally, completely and forever. And the key to getting up out of this condition is our woman.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to us, “Where there are no decent women, there are no decent men, for the woman, particularly the Black woman, is the Mother of Civilization.” The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said to us, “No nation can rise any higher than its women.” In the Book of Proverbs, Solomon said, “A wise child maketh a glad father, but a foolish child is the heaviness of its mother.” If you have an ignorant woman, more than likely she will produce children after her own kind. Whatever you are, that is what you produce.
If the Nation is going to be elevated, the woman has to be lifted up. If the Nation is going to be a wise Nation, then our women have to give themselves to the acquisition of knowledge. If the Nation is going to be reformed and made better, then the Black woman today has to give herself up to be reformed.
As long as our women are in this low condition, they will always produce men in a low condition. Our women reject men like that. We are not what our women are happy over. We are not what our mothers are pleased with. But, mothers, your children are yours. Society has to take its part, but you have to take the full weight, because the scripture says,
“Train the child up in the way it should go and when it is old, it will not depart from that way.” If you put the right things in children, then society cannot take them out. But the right things have been absent from the mind of the Black woman and the Black man, so from generation to generation, we keep on repeating history. We do not make a new step.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that 75 percent of his work was with the woman, only 25 percent with the man—because when you teach a man, you teach an individual, but when you teach a woman, you teach a nation. When you reform a man, you only reform an individual, but when you reform a woman, you reform a nation. So, how important are you, Sisters, to the future of Black people? How should you look upon yourselves and how should we, as men, look upon a woman?
Marriage is a key institution, if we are going to build a strong family. If we are not concerned about family, then we are not concerned about our people and our Nation. If we have a weak family, we have a weak Nation. If we have a strong family, we have the potential for a strong Nation. Strong family is only built upon a strong relationship between the male and female, called husband and wife.
The union of male and female in Arabic is called, “nikah,” which means “the uniting.” When two people agree to marry, they are not agreeing that they are, in fact, married. They are agreeing that there are things in both of them that are mutually compatible and they both desire to go down life’s road together.
They both solemnize their intention in a marriage ceremony, which does not say that they are, in fact, united, but it solemnizes their intention to struggle for that unity. Unity is a word so easily spoken, but it is a difficult thing to achieve. The union of sperm with ovum that began our life was a very difficult journey and process. It is only a sign of how difficult it is for a male and female to intend to be one and then work at it, until you make it so.
Prophet Muhammad, Peace be upon him, said, “Marriage is half of faith.” This is very powerful. If marriage is half of faith, then what is faith? “It is the substance,” as Paul says, “of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”
Faith is that hope, that spirit that makes an individual journey toward his Creator, to find oneness with God. That is the real aim of life itself, that you come from sperm mixed with ovum and you begin a journey, and that journey does not stop when you come forward out of your mother’s womb. It does not stop when you get a Master’s degree or a Doctorate degree. It does not stop until the soul of the one who is born into the world becomes united with the essence of his Creator and they become as one.
Then, the Qur’an says, “Oh soul that is at rest, well pleased and well pleasing.” Well pleased with God and well-pleasing to God, that you struggled with all of the vicissitudes, trials and tribulations of life to become one with God and you finally made it. That is a blessing. Marriage is half of that journey and any man or woman that will quickly walk out on marriage, you will quickly walk out on the struggle to become one with God.
The journey to God is fraught with danger. So many people say they love God, but to walk toward God, you have to walk through difficulty, opposition and struggle with yourself to overcome weakness in yourself. Sometimes you give up, because the greatest struggle of all is the struggle to unite with God. Second to that is the struggle to unite with your mate that you have chosen.
If you can make it with your mate, 10-1, you are halfway on your journey to God, so says Prophet Muhammad. This is a struggle that is not easy. It is not laying in bed and enjoying each other sexually. Marriage is the sincere struggle of two souls to unite, not two bodies. Bodies can unite instantly, but it is the soul uniting that makes the body uniting really joyful.
When the two parties in a marriage become dissatisfied with each other, the spirit of love is reduced according to the level of argument. The more argument in the marriage, the more dissatisfaction. The more dissatisfaction, the more the loss of the spirit of love. Where there is no love left, there is nothing on which to base a marriage.
One of the worst things that can happen in any marriage is for a man to become an abuser of the woman, either mentally or physically. It is one of the most wicked things that we can do, Brothers. I do not care how uptight she gets you, Brother, it is better to walk away than to beat a woman. This is serious. The reason we are in the condition that we are in is because the woman has actually been abused. She really does not know what true love is.
Once in your life, Sisters, you have your virtue. After your virginity is gone, you cannot get it back again. You can only love perfectly once. Only God can bring it back the second time and make it as sweet as the first love, or sweeter. But without God, when you get a woman that has been used and abused, she never gives the man the second time what she gave the man the first time who abused her. It is the same way with a man, when he has been hurt by a woman.
After that, it becomes a business deal; it is more a contract and proposition. A little light love and passion, but it quickly fades. This is the way we live and into this kind of circumstance we bring our children. Half of us who have children, they are accidents. There is no plan on our part to have a child. It happens as a result of passion.
You have children, but you do not want them. They are accidents that happen on a lust-filled night, not a love-filled night, because if it were real love, you do not want to get rid of a baby for the man you really love. When you really love a man, the greatest thing you could do is to bring him again, reproduce him, into the world, nurse him from your breast and make him better than the man that you fell in love with.
We have been ruined as a people, and there is no sense in talking about liberation, Brothers, “Let’s get a gun and shoot White folks or the racist institutions of America, etc.” and then come home and degrade our women, use them and throw them out like toilet tissue. Then, you really do not want liberation, because liberation is a process; it is not a one-generation event.
You liberate to a degree, but only the womb of a woman can advance the cause of liberation. No matter what you gain in your lifetime, she can produce a child for you that will go further than you, with your desires and her desires at the root of that child. But when she is destroyed and does not know what to do with the life that is in her womb, then she will eat the wrong foods, like we do.
She will drink the wrong drinks, smoke death, put crack in her veins, while forming the brain cells of a new life. She is killing the future for you, because you do not know how to protect the future, because you are only a one-dimensional, pleasure-seeking animal who lives for today and does not make any thought for tomorrow.
Jesus said, “Take no thought of what tomorrow is going to be,” but tomorrow is built on today. Sisters, you are today, but you are our tomorrow. If you do not take care of yourself today, then we have no tomorrow. You do not need a man to love you, in order for you to love yourself and do good by yourself.
When a woman is pregnant, what covers the womb while she is in the period of gestation will also become a part of a predisposition of that unborn child. Every thought is chemistry. Every thought produces a chemical manifestation of itself, which can be a poison to the system, which travels in the blood and into the brain of the baby that is being formed.
We have children today who are painful to their mothers and fathers, because of the rebellion of Adam and Eve, symbolically. When you rebel against God, you pay a price and the price of rebellion is death. The form of death is the fact that you produced a life that cannot live beyond 40, because death pervades our community. It is not only the White man putting death in our communities; we gravitate towards death.
Lying and murder is in the womb. We project it from our minds onto our wombs. So the baby comes out with a predisposition to lie, steal and murder. You have produced a generation of liars, thieves and murderers who are now consuming our own flesh and blood, as though they were programmed like robots to destroy their own community and family.
We did this. We did this by not caring for the woman. We did this by calling her a b—- and treating her like a b—-. We did this by calling her a dog and turning the process of making a god backwards. She produces little dogs, because you made her what you call her. And Sisters, you are so bad today that you perpetuate your own destruction.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us, and the Holy Qur’an bears him witness, that we are supposed to reverence the womb that bore us into this world. To reverence the womb means to hold the womb with deep respect and awe, because the womb is majesty. It is the laboratory where God, Himself, operates. Allah (God) neither begets nor is begotten. If He is the Living, then how did He get here?
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches that Allah (God) created Himself out of triple darkness, which means that the space or universe was a womb for Him. Then, He went back into that womb of darkness of space and, in His Mind, He saw the sun, said, “Be!” and brought it out of the womb of space. The sun, moon and stars are here and they all came from nothing. That is how God uses the womb.
That is why He called the universe “she.” The universe is pregnant, always bringing forth new things. How dare you think you are nothing, Sisters, when God blessed you with a double womb? He blessed you with a mind that is a womb and He blessed you with a physical reality that is a womb. Then, He makes you a co-operator with Him, an assistant to Him, if you will, in forming that which is in the womb.
As men, we have to realize that the sperm we carry is the future. The head of the sperm is like a computer, with all kinds of information of past eons engrained in it. Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” There is a record of everything that is created, and that record is in the sperm. When the sperm is emitted, it has the potential of growing to master this universe, but it has to be nurtured properly.
When we are young, sometimes we already are ruining our lives. We have to understand our connection to the future. Teenagers have to start building the tissues, blood and bones of their bodies; that is the future of our people. If you love your people, you do not want to produce a weak specimen. You want a strong child. You cannot have a strong child if you are putting poison into your bodies. This is a sacred vessel.
When we smoke, the thousands of poisons in the cigarettes become a part of us, therefore it becomes a part of the sperm. As smoking and drinking weaken the human being, smoking and drinking attack the head of the sperm, in which is carried the genetic coding. So, wise scientists continue to feed us cigarettes, alcohol, crack, marijuana, pork, de-natured food and canned goods that do not have any life in them. The more we ingest and digest these poisoned chemical products, we begin to kill, not only our brain power and beauty, but we kill our future.
