“WE BELIEVE in the resurrection of the dead—not in physical resurrection—but in mental resurrection. We believe that the so-called Negroes are most in need of mental resurrection; therefore they will be resurrected first.
Furthermore, we believe we are the people of God’s choice, as it has been written, that God would choose the rejected and the despised. We can find no other persons fitting this description in these last days more than the so-called Negroes in America. We believe in the resurrection of the righteous.”
—The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, “The Muslim Program,” What The Muslims Believe, Point No. 5
The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, published the above words as a part of The Muslim Program that was published on the back page of Muhammad Speaks, on the inside back page of The Final Call and in His monumental book, “Message to the Blackman in America.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan explained that, “Master Fard Muhammad taught the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for three years and four months, night and day;
And then left him with the Mission and the burden of raising the Black man and woman of America up from a dead level to a living perpendicular; and His work is called in the scriptures of The Qur’an and Bible, ‘The Resurrection of the Dead.’”
He delved into this significance in part 2 of his 2010 Saviours’ Day message, “The Time and What Must Be Done: ‘The Wheel,’” delivered in Chicago.
“Not the dead in the cemeteries or the graveyards of America and the world, but a people that have eyes but cannot see. Have ears, but cannot hear. Have tongues, but cannot speak. A nation of people that has been killed mentally, morally, spiritually, politically, economically and otherwise.
His mission was to raise this people up, and place them back where they once were: On top of civilization, where we have not been for 50,000 years,” Minister Farrakhan explained.
In a message titled “Revelation: The Hidden Truths,” delivered on April 1, 2001, at Mosque Maryam in Chicago, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan defined “resurrection” as “to rise up again,” in particular for Black people who he described as a people who built civilization.
This important job of resurrecting the Black man and woman is a critical one, and as Minister Farrakhan explained in his 2018 Saviours’ Day message, “Here I Stand,” every man with a job needs help and every man with a mission needs help.
Allah (God) in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad taught the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and gave him this special assignment and mission.
“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was given ‘the hardest job,’ Master Fard Muhammad said, ‘of any man that ever lived,’” Minister Farrakhan explained.
“You ask, ‘My God, what kind of job is that?’ I want you to go to the nearest cemetery and start talking to the graves and see what kind of reaction you will get from what’s buried there.
After a while, people say about you: ‘Now, let me tell you something, that man is absolutely crazy!’—because nothing dead has ever come back from the grave. Elijah Muhammad said to me,
‘If there were any symbol that I could choose to represent me and my work, it would be a trumpet.’ And that’s what we represent: The resurrection of our people,” Minister Farrakhan stated, referring to the Nation of Islam.
“We were for a long time in society referred to as Negroes, and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad used the term the ‘so-called Negro,’ because he insisted that the term ‘Negro’ was not our identity, but that it reflected our condition;
That after what our people have experienced in this society, not only being owned and enslaved but being mentally, morally and spiritually assaulted, we had been rendered mentally dead,” author and researcher Student Minister Demetric Muhammad of Mosque No. 55 in Memphis, Tennessee, said to The Final Call.
“When we talk about mental resurrection, we’re essentially talking about the raising of the so-called Negro back to his or her original self,” he explained.
“Jesus comes out of the tomb, and I think until we have God in our lives, we all are in the tomb, and it’s our relationship with God that brings us from the tomb, from the darkness and into life and into power,” Father Michael Pfleger of Saint Sabina Church in Chicago said to The Final Call.
“And once we enter that resurrection spirit, that power of overcoming, that power of victory, then I think our job is to live and walk in that victory and live and walk in that more than a conquering spirit, and not just for our own lives.
But I think our responsibility is to make sure that we are taking authority over a world that has people down—the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, the forgotten.”
Father Pfleger explained that people of faith must be the contrast between America and the world when it comes to dignity, respect, equality and justice. “But we also, with that power of the resurrection, dismantle the systems that are keeping people downtrodden,” he added.
Conditions of life
Father Pfleger has seen the hopelessness of many people. “So many people have become hopeless and overwhelmed with the conditions and the situation that we see in our country going on and the injustices and inequalities that have become so emboldened with White supremacy,” he said. “I think we want to remind them that this is a spiritual war.”
He spoke on the need to wake people up “from the tomb” and “from the darkness” and remind them that they are children of God. “Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb. Our job is to call our brothers and sisters from the tomb into that righteous power and victory which God has given us,” he said.
Black people in particular have lived in a state of oppression, survival and death since their sojourn in America. Experts describe many of the present-day conditions of Black people in America as the vestiges, or remnants of slavery.
“How do you know that a people are ‘dead?’” the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan questioned in a lecture titled “God Has Come To Answer Our Cry For Justice,” delivered on Nov. 29, 2015, at Mosque Maryam in Chicago.
“They are not engaged in the business of life,” he answered. “What is the business of life? God gives every creature the desire to do something for itself.”
“Minister Farrakhan said that where we live, it’s more analogous to being a colony, because all of the stores, all of the businesses, all of the goods and services that predominate in Black spaces, by and large, are owned by people who are not Black people and who don’t live in those spaces.
That is a manifestation of mental death,” Student Min. Demetric Muhammad said. “We don’t own our homes. We don’t own our businesses. We don’t own our institutions.
Even our beloved HBCUs that we celebrate, and we love, they are by and large financed by the government and by other generous, philanthropic entities that, for the most part, are from the White community.”
He explained that a person who is alive sees the need to do for self, as taught by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
“An alive people see the need to own where they live, to police where they live and to make where they live a clean and decent place for themselves and their children.
So, looking at how the Black community has de-evolved from community to colony is just one of the indicators of mental death being still a pervasive condition among our people,” said Student Min. Demetric Muhammad.
He explained the impact the resurrection work of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has had on Black people, including the term “Black,”
The Black Power movement, Black or Islamic names, the rise of Islam in America, hip-hop culture and building bridges between the Black church and the Black mosque.
“Minister Farrakhan has been a watchman on the wall, alerting the Black community to those various existential threats that many of us were too asleep to even know had been formed against us,” Student Min. Demetric Muhammad said. “He was simply pursuing the resurrection of our people.”
The resurrection work
“Life, light and power” are words often used to describe the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the effects and impact of His work amongst the downtrodden of America.
During a series of interviews with the National Television Network, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad described His mission which is printed on page 306 of “Message To The Blackman in America.”
“My mission is to give life to the dead. What I teach brings them out of death and into life. My mission, as the Messenger, is to bring the truth to the world before the world is destroyed. There will be not other Messenger. I am the last and after me will come God Himself.
I do not say I will live so long as that, but when God comes, if it pleases Him, I may be with Him. However, if I am not with Him, this is the final. This truth I bring will give you the knowledge of yourself and of God,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad said.
Father Pfleger believes that the power of God “is useless if we don’t put it to work.”
“The reason we have the power, the reason we are anointed, is to do the work,” he said. “All of our celebrations are meaningless if they don’t catapult us out the doors of the church to do the work in the community, in the streets and for the people.
So, it’s not only necessary, it’s also essential if we are to be resurrection people.” He warned against falling into the “mistake and the tragedy of celebrating the resurrection of Christ and not live in the resurrection of Christ in us.”
“We are resurrection people, and if we don’t live that, then the whole celebration of resurrection of Christ becomes mockery,” Father Pfleger continued. “To walk in, live in and operate in that authority. We need to be the shapers of this world, not allow it to shape us.”
In a 2010 message delivered during the Islamic Holy Month of Ramadan Minister Farrakhan expressed gratitude to the F.O.I. (Fruit of Islam, the men of the Nation of Islam)
“for their work in helping me to spread the Message of the Teaching of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that is designed by Allah to lift the most downtrodden of the members of the Human Family:
The Black man and woman of America first, because we have been put in the worst condition of any people that ever lived, so much so, that the prophet of God described us as ‘dead.’
“And as difficult as it would be for us to visit the cemetery and blast a trumpet and cause the dead in those graves to rise up out of those graves is the difficulty of The Mission that Allah placed on the shoulders of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
The Resurrection, first, of our people, and the Resurrection, after that, of all of the members of the human family who have been blinded by the touch of Satan, and the falsehood that he has introduced into the world;
The rebellion that he has introduced into the world, making evil fair seeming to man. We thank Allah for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and this Invincible Truth that He has given to us that begins the process of raising us up from a dead level, and standing us upright before God and Man.”
Final Call staff contributed to this report.
