by Master Elijah Muhammad

        I want you to wake up and know yourself to be people of the first order, not of the last
order, but of the first order. We are to respect each other as brothers and not as enemies.
We are to respect our woman as our mother. I say, my friend, this mean that we have to love
each other; we can’t do these things if we hate each other. That’s why we are very careful
with you. We know the poison in which the devil has put you. He has poisoned your mind
against self and has deceived you into wanting to be like him; hoping you would be like him.

        Hope that you don’t become like him. These people were made for hell fire. They were
made to live only until a certain time. He tells us himself, some places he goes now, that the
children of the natives see him and say, “there goes a foreign devil.” They know him better
than you. A real devil is one who is made by nature of evil – his very nature and material
from which he is made. I don’t use the word created, because he is not from the creation –
he’s a made man that our scientist Yakub made here 6,000 years ago, but we have been on
this earth every since it was created.

      Your history has been taught to me as far back as the atom that first burst forth to give
away sound and that was beyond 76 trillion years ago. One trillion years is a long time, but
when you put seven 10’s of them together, it runs you out of reading. I want to talk with you
on the time. If I don’t do it, God will hold me responsible; for Him giving me the knowledge
that you never have dreamed of getting out of the head of God – the knower of all things, I
will be held responsible. I go slow with you at times, because I know your disbelief. You are
a people who were raised by the devil, who hates the truth and loves lies, but I defy him to
disprove any word that I teach to you. If you could go outside and bring me a white man that

says he can prove that I’m lying to you, I will give you $10,000 dollars for every word I have
said that is a lie.

        I defy them every time they’re among us and they don’t do it. If that door was slung
back on its hinges to let them in, you wouldn’t have sitting room. They want to be here
listening to that which they never knew, because a baby cannot tell mother and father what
he’s doing when he comes forth, he’s got to live long enough for the action of matured brains.
He’s only a baby to us and a very young baby at that. He has our number, because he could
not have another since we are his father; whereas, he was not made of himself. We made
him, so says the Bible and Qur’an. He was made by the black man, the original man, and he’s
not hard to make, we could produce many of them.

        I’m quite sure you’re asking yourself, “When is he going to teach what he said?” I am doing
it. I’m teaching you what I said I would teach you, but I’m coming in such way up to it so you
will be able to master it, if you accept it. It’s useless to have something of wisdom that you
cannot master. Give that wisdom to another one. The way I’m teaching you, you can learn to
master what I’m teaching and you’ll be just as big a boy as I am, of which I don’t call myself. I
hope to make you the big boy, then I get behind the door and peep at how you will react.
The truth, the Bible says, will make you free. That is true. If you know the truth, you
will be free, having the knowledge of yourself, others, God the devil and both of their worlds,
it will make you free, that’s right.

         We must take you out of this flag [American] so that we can get going with the creator
and the one that did not create it. The main thing is to know who is the right one that made
the creation and the one that didn’t make it. This flag over here to the right [Sun, Moon &
Star] was not made for white people. They can’t produce a flag like this. This flag over here
[American], we had to use some of the material of ours to make his.
If I can get 30 million people to believe, here in America, I can take that 30 million
people and rule the whole earth. I don’t think that anybody here is so hungry. He can’t be
any hungrier than I.

       Theology is not so easily taught, especially to people who do not know theology. In
teaching theology of religion, you have a very hard job with people who don’t know it and
who are wrapped up in the belief of religion which the true theology opposes. What we have
to do is bring you out of that which you do not know and into that which you and I can make
others believe is true.

       I love to stand before you and teach you the science of religion and others. If I didn’t
know and understand the science of other religions other than Islam, I couldn’t prove to you
that Islam is superior.
But I know other religions who boast that they have a place in the sun to rule the people
with and these religions is not worth their name, not even worth the name. As the Holy
Qur’an teaches you and me, that if you come up on the day of resurrection before God with a
religion other than Islam, it won’t be accepted, because the religion of Islam is over all
religions and it’s work and science proves itself. Not that you have to get somebody to come
and prove it, it proves itself; for it is truth without help to make you believe it is the truth.

       So, brothers and sisters, I see somebody getting white-mouthed around here looking for
other food and I better let you go. We must know truth to join and become members in a
fully-recognized society. We can’t become members of recognized societies without having
the knowledge of truth and this is what the American black man needs most of all – he needs
to be shaped so that he can be accepted in the best moral and educated society of the people
of the Earth.

[Excerpt from Theology of Time lecture series]