Minister Don Muhammad Temple No. 11 Q
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MINISTER DON MUHAMMAD TEMPLE NO. 11 Q: How did you come to join the Nation of Islam? A: We were Baptists, and I remember my father said, “Make sure you listen very closely to the message, because even sometimes the message may not be clear to you, read the Bible and ask God to guide you.” And we believed in Christianity. And to a great degree, I still do today. Sometimes my friends say that I sound like a frustrated Baptist preacher. My blood brother invited me to attend Mosque Number 11 at 35 Intervale Street (in the Roxbury section of Boston). Minister Farrakhan was speaking. The first day that I went, I was not persuaded to join. He said that the following week he was going to talk about how God created the devil. And I came back that week, and I really wasn’t interested in joining that week either. It was when he said, “Next week my subject is ‘Who is God, what is He, and where is He?’” He talked that day for nearly 5 hours on the reality of God. And that message that day helped me to confirm that there is a God, that He is very interested in the affairs of human beings, and I was further a-able to see the intervention of God in establishing His kingdom. And that is why I decided to join the Nation of Islam. Q: What do you think attracted black people to the Nation of Islam? A: Mr. Muhammad was absolutely teaching black people how to be proud of themselves, how to respect themselves. And it worked. That kind of unity produced Don Muhammad page 2 “This Far By Faith” Hour 5 Tape 5053 all kinds of black social organizations: black police, black social workers. It encouraged people like James Brown to write songs like “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” That whole era in the early sixties brought in the Afro, the daishiki wearing, where blacks were going on college campuses demanding that they had rights just like anyone else who was a citizen of this country. We can thank Elijah Muhammad for that. He even gave us an overdose of blackness. But it was needed. At that time, black people used to bleach their skin, trying to get white. They would absolutely put [J-Bar], which is a hair straightener, on their heads (these were black men) to straighten their hair. Black women would go to bed with clothespins on their nose, trying to have their nose look keen as whites. In all this backdrop, we can see why it was important for Mr. Muhammad to teach the importance of blackness, to be proud of black. Q: How did Elijah Muhammad bring his message to black people? A: He brought his message by establishing temples all across this country. At that time, there were some 250 locations where Islam was being taught. And he wrote books. He wrote articles in the Pittsburgh Courier, the Los Angeles .. Dispatch, the Amsterdam News. And then subsequently in 1961, he started our newspaper called Muhammad Speaks. And we, at the height of the Nation, were selling and distributing a million newspapers per week, carrying his message. And this was the way of distributing, getting his message out, getting people to read it. Q: Talk about how he used the Bible. Don Muhammad page 3 “This Far By Faith” Hour 5 Tape 5053 A: The Bible was used specifically because we, as black people, had never seen the Holy Koran. We’d never heard of it. The Bible is the book of faith of so many. There’s much good in the Bible, though it was referred to as a poison book by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. But penicillin too is poison. But it will help you if it’s administered by a good doctor. So there are many parables in the Bible, allegories, and there are a lot of things that the poets, in our opinion, deliberately did to try and create confusion. And it would take someone to really decipher that kind of information. It doesn’t say “black people” or “Negroes,” but we’re in there. As a matter of fact, it has really provoked some black Christian ministers to write an African Bible. And I can’t believe that-that God would leave us out. I can’t believe that God would leave America out. And America’s in the Bible, but it’s in hidden under captions. It’s hidden under a lot of things. So the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, “We really need to resurrect our people from the Bible.” So his thorough knowledge of the Bible was tremendous. I can remember, in February of 1968, Martin Luther King had gone to see the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. They had started a relationship in 1966, after Dr. King had been abandoned by most of his colleagues, most of his fellow ministers, who did not want to take the pressure that Dr. King was receiving because he stood up against the Vietnam War. Dr. Martin Luther King was a courageous individual, and he was a minister. But after the– his difficulties around those issues, he sought and received a visit to go and see and hear and talk to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. There were a few of us in the home that day, and we were sort of Don Muhammad page 4 “This Far By Faith” Hour 5 Tape 5053 listening to what Dr. King and Mr. Muhammad were talking about. Dr. King was asking him questions about the Bible. And because the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in our eyes is the divine messenger of God, he had a thorough knowledge of the Bible. And he said to Dr. King, “Brother, you know a lot, but you don’t understand very much.” That meeting lasted for 6 hours. It was a Saturday. All of the major networks in the United States were there. Dr. King was asked upon leaving, around 3:30 in the afternoon, “What did you and Elijah talk about?” Dr. King said, “We agreed that we wouldn’t say to anyone what we talked about.” But if you check Dr. Martin Luther King’s messages after that date in February until April 4th of that year, it was different than the “I have a dream” speech. We believe, as Muslims, that God is into– leaning into the affairs of us in this country and all over the world. We believe that the kingdom of God is being established now. And we believe that that kingdom of God is not going to draw black or white, rich or poor, Jew or gentile. The kingdom of God is going to be people who are of like mind as far as goodness is concerned, who desire to see unity and brotherhood among all people. And we’re having indications of that going on now. Q: Who does the Nation of Islam believe W.D. Fard to be? A: As is indicated on the back of our newspaper (today it’s called The Final Call, and it used to be called Muhammad Speaks), the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that Allah came in the person of Master Farrad Muhammad. No, Master Farrad Don Muhammad page 5 “This Far By Faith” Hour 5 Tape 5053 Muhammad is not God. But God has the ability to really put himself in anyone. The scriptures say that we would be all made gods, children of the most high God. We believe that God spoke through Jesus. There are some people who even believe that Jesus is God. We believe that God spoke through Moses, and it’s in the Bible that He spoke to them from a burning bush. We believe that God spoke through Abraham. We believe that God spoke to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And the man Master Farrad Muhammad is he who brought this message. So he is not Allah, but we feel and we believe that Allah used him to bring this message to resurrect black people, not just for the sake of black people but to really resurrect the entire world. But you have to start with whoever’s on the bottom. And the scripture said that there was a bottom rail, they said that there was a last, and these people would be resurrected first. And we can find no one that fits that description better than us, who was called the rejected and the despised. Q: Was there a connection in the late 60’s between the philosophy of the Nation of Islam and the black nationalist, black power movements? A: Yes. Some of the brothers who started the black power movement would actually attend Mosque Number 7 in New York. A lot of them came out of the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area—the Huey Newtons, the Eldridge Cleavers. The difference is, they did not include God in their movement. And I-I once heard the Honorable Elijah Muhammad say that, “You know, if we deny God, then we don’t want to be put in a position where we would do the same thing under the cover of blackness that had been done to us. What benefit would we gain, or what benefit Don Muhammad page 6 “This Far By Faith” Hour 5 Tape 5053 would we get, if we didn’t do anything different than mistreat one another?” So the desire here in the Nation of Islam is to believe in God. And if you believe in God, you won’t do anything to anyone who– Whether or not they even believe as you believe, you have an obligation to treat every man the way that you would like to be treated, irregardless of his color, his race, his religion.