JABRIL.MUHAMMAD
I’ve taken many photographs of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, some years ago to now. I’ve never made public my reason for doing so. In part my reason for taking photos of him is to see him working his assignment that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad gave to him.
The word “assignment” means “a task or piece of work assigned to someone as part of a job or course of study; the allocation of a job or task to someone; the task or post to which one has been appointed and much more.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad first saw Minister Farrakhan in the Bible and the Holy Qur’an in 1955 when he saw him in February, in Chicago.
In the book Closing The Gap you can read: “Since you and me are witnesses here this afternoon in this world that we live, we have been so greatly misunderstood that I desire that Allah send to me a little helper.” Those words came from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad when he spoke to others in 1954. What caused him to use those words in 1954?
What caused me to use his experience, some years later? I was not there when he spoke those words to others.
In 1955 the Honorable Elijah Muhammad first saw the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan as his “little helper.” He saw and then he gave Minister Farrakhan his “assignment,” right then.
In the book Closing The Gap, pages 332 and 333, you can read:
Brother Jabril: You’ve said that you were 19 years old when you first heard that God had chosen a Messenger for our people?
Minister Farrakhan: I was standing on the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus Avenue. I heard that God had raised a Messenger for our people.
And I started walking because I was a little sad and I questioned God and I said, “God why didn’t you choose me?”
“You know I love my people.”
And as I walked, I think I had tears in my eyes. I said when this happened in 1931, I wasn’t even born. So the sadness went away, right away, and I knew I had to go and meet this man and offer him my help. That’s what happened.
Brother Jabril: Please tell us a little bit of your mother’s efforts to fill you with love and concern for our people through the kind of material she gave you to read.
Minister Farrakhan: My number one remembrance was The Crisis Magazine. In it was the writing of W.E.B Dubois. She would always bring home Black newspapers, The Afro-American, The Pittsburg Courier–those two especially.
In those papers there were stories of lynching and mistreatment of our people. Of course, that deepened my desire to see someone who would come along who would free our people.
That’s what led to my questioning my Sunday school teacher, that if God had raised Moses for his people and He always sent some prophet, or somebody, to deliver people who were oppressed, why hasn’t God sent somebody to deliver us?
Brother Jabril: How old were you then?
Minister Farrakhan: About seven or eight.
Brother Jabril: How old were you when you stood on the chair, in your uncle’s home and saw the picture of Marcus Garvey?
Minister Farrakhan: 11 years old.
I’m writing these words in this article because some don’t have the book Closing The Gap, the Bible and/or the Holy Qur’an. But many will study this article–carefully.
I did not study the Bible and the Holy Qur’an until I entered the Nation of Islam. I did not know Minister Farrakhan or even see him, until November 1955.
In this same book you can read:
Brother Jabril: What were you thinking the first time you looked at the Honorable Elijah Muhammad?
Minister Farrakhan: I was a little frightened that he seemed to know what I was thinking. But then he told me “Don’t pay any attention to how I’m saying it, you pay attention to what I’m saying and then you take it and put it in that fine language that you know. Only try to understand what I’m saying.”
(That event was in 1955.)
That event was the fulfillment of prophecy.
This also was the fulfillment of prophecy. “… In 1972 the Honorable Elijah Muhammad purchased the Mosque on Stony Island and the lecture series of Theology of Time began.
Minister Farrakhan: “He starts his lectures, and I ask him, ‘Dear Apostle, may I come out?’ The Honorable Elijah Muhammad replied; “For what Brother? You has your assignment in New York and I has mine.”
Minister Farrakhan continues: “I stay in New York. The believers would come out and hear the lecture and come back. I would ask them, you know, about the lecture and they would be telling me what the Lamb said.
“I would be sitting like a student listening. For them to tell me the word of my father who barred me to come, after maybe six weeks, somehow we’re on the phone and I either asked him again, I said, ‘You know believers are coming back and telling me the wonderful lectures and I’m reading it in the paper.’
He said, ‘Yes Brother. I wondered why you was not out here.’ I didn’t want to remind him that, ‘You told me to stay.’ But I said, ‘I want to be there.’
“He said, ‘Well come on.’ ”
“Now I think I’m on the outs with him. So when I come the ministers are seated on the side. I sit in the back row and he starts preaching and he hears me bearing witness. ‘I hear my minister back here.’
“Then he brings me and sits me–they made room for me on the front row.
‘What is he doing back here? He should be down front here.’ They get up and make room. Then when they make room on the front row he looks over at me and say and he points to his seat.
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What does the word “why” mean?
More next issue, Allah willing.
