[Editor’s note: The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has spoken lovingly and poignantly about his beloved wife, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan. Below are just a few excerpts from over the years, of Minister Farrakhan expressing his sentiments about his beloved wife.]
Struggling beside him
The believers would bring old clothes and put it on the steps of the house. My wife would take them in and wash and iron them and my children would have clothes to wear. We used to buy dresses at the Salvation Army and slips and things like that.
I remember going on Saturday nights to the marketplace in Boston, K Market Square, where the end of the day when the merchant didn’t sell all of his produce. They would throw them in the street. My wife and I would get our shopping bags and go down and pick up food out of the street and fill our shopping bag and come back and feed our ever-growing family.
—”Closing the Gap,” pages 351-352
Helping him to become the man that he is
I must tell you, honestly, sisters. I could never have become a man if that same man, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad didn’t teach my wife how to help me be a man. Stand up Sister Farrakhan. Would you just … I want you to come up here a minute, come right on up.
They say behind every great man there’s a great woman. A lie. Beside every great man and sometimes, in front of every great woman, there’s a woman. Ain’t that right Sister Muhammad? Now, thank you for standing for her because she really deserves it.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught her how to help me to become a man. I ain’t gonna let her say this, but she would tell you—if I wasn’t here—that I wasn’t always the man that I am today.
She would tell you I was a mess. She might say that. But she learned how to control her mouth and how to use her mouth wisely because a man can’t take being cut down by the woman that he loves.
… In a couple of months we will have been married 41 years, but my children have never seen their father strike their mother and they have hardly seen an argument between us. Whatever she has to say to me, she says it, but they don’t hear it. Thank God.—A Nation Can Rise No Higher than its woman, Women’s only meeting Atlanta, June 29, 1994
A blessing and gift
I think my wife has been a great blessing to me, a gift to me and my children from God. Every man should have a wife like this. My teacher, Elijah Muhammad, helped my wife in a class that allowed her to help me to become a man.
—Minister Farrakhan and Tavis Smiley: One on One, June 20, 2003
Being patient with him
I have my beautiful wife right here with me. Stand up Khadijah. I acted a fool too, but I had a beautiful wife. I was trying to be a man. Brother Malcolm was my teacher. I couldn’t have had a better one for my beginning, but I was trying to be a man but didn’t know how. I saw Brother Malcolm; he was the only man that I saw in my life. He touched me very deeply and I thought in order to be a man, you got to be able to order your wife.
I soon found out that’s not the way. You can be a soldier, but you can’t make her your private. Wait, did I say something wrong? I mean you know how they treat privates in the armed forces. My wife wasn’t made for me to order her. My teacher was not teaching her to accept orders from a fool. She would accept my orders if they were given with love and they were intelligent. We have been married 66 years.
I live under a different system than the system of this world. My wife was trained by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad to respect me as I was not yet a man but be patient with me because the enemy’s destruction of us as men has been nearly 100 percent complete.— 30th annual conference for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, June 22, 2019, in Detroit
A wife who accepts a mission
“If my wife could not accept my mission, she would have got rid of me long time ago. And if my wife just married me for money, she’d have been gone a long time ago. You do not know the pain of a woman who marries a man that has a mission because she’ll always feel thatthe mission is before her. And it is.
And there’s no woman that can compete with a man and a mission. God gives the mission and God gives the wife and the wife should be to help the man in the mission, not to try to compete with him.—The Man and His Mission, September 12, 1990
On the M.G.T. Training Units
In The Nation of Islam, the sisters had sewing classes; and my wife would sometimes stay up days with the machine making garments. And I mean when they stepped out: They were a fashion model—not by the freaks of Paris and Rome, and New York.
—‘Save Our Girls’: A Nation Can Rise No Higher Than Its Woman, April 18, 2015
His love for her
I heard that Mother Khadijah is in the house. … Where is she? [I am told] she is two minutes away—so I have to stop when she comes in. (Smile) She is the most wonderful friend and wife that a man could have; to hold a position that God has placed me in.
And I couldn’t handle that without somebody by my side who helps me, and that is Mother Khadijah.—Address to The National Training Conference: ‘A Reason to Love’: Strengthen Your Ability to Protect the Life God Has Given You, July 29, 2023
I’ve been married to my wife, Mother Khadijah, for 68 long years and I knew her when she was 8 and I was 11 and this is the honest to God truth, I love this girl so much that when I became so popular as a young musician in Boston, all the girls loved their Gene—Gene is what they called me and they loved me but I was in love with Betsy.
And so, they liked me, but when they see me, they see me with Betsy; they see me walking with Betsy; they see us dressing alike, walking in a way—when I said dress alike, I didn’t put on no dress [laughs], but dressing alike.
If I had on blue, my wife would have blue slacks and a white blouse, and I would have a white shirt or whatnot and we had the same caps that I bought in Canada when I was playing up in Rockheads Paradise in Montreal. And we were just a loving couple to be seen. Everybody wants to see love.—Interview on WVON, May 16, 2022
A friend and companion in the struggle
“I think whatever success I have in my marriage is due to the wisdom, the patience, the fortitude, the righteousness, the strength of my wife. And her ability to see me in that role God and circumstances has cut out for me;
And to help me in that role, and to persevere with me, and to suffer with me and to grow with me. I would never be the man that I am if Allah (God) did not give me the woman that I have to be my friend, my wife, my companion in the struggle.
—The Teachings 2.0: The Twitter Sayings of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, Vol. 2
—Compiled by Contributing Writer Donna Muhammad