by Master Elijah Muhammad

        Help me make a nation that is unsurpassed by any nation on the Earth. That’s what we
have to do now since the enemy of ours make us unwanted and unrecognized by all societies
of the Earth’s people. We got to regain our place in society and you’re capable of doing it. If
I can give you a sample, why can’t you and I make the goods. If I, a little blind man from
among you, have taken some of the worst that ever lived and got them over here to the
machine, making them better dresses, and they like them, why can’t you help me do this?

      You know how. Don’t think that the enemy will not recognize you. He will respect you if he
respects me. What God has taught me, you and I can force him to respect us, because we
have better knowledge of cleanliness, better knowledge of what we need in the field of
mathematics, and a better knowledge of the pen. You are the best in all of that. Let us get
together brother and sister and let the world know that we are capable of demanding
respect. We shouldn’t wait for them to respect us on their initial step, we’ll do that
ourselves. We will force them to do it.

      The time that we are living in is both a time of love and hate. Love is growing among us;
wherein, it never was before, and hate is growing in us, wherein, it never was before. We
just learned the source of our trouble, which is loving an enemy who was born and made to
be an enemy for us. We loved him and called ourselves following after Jesus Christ. Jesus
hates the devil himself and he wrote that if you love the devil you will not see Heaven – in
these words, “He that love this world…” think over that “he’s an enemy to God.”

       I think the professional people should join up with the Muslims, not wait for the Muslims
to join up with you. We can’t join with you, then we will go right back into slavery. If you
feel like you want to lead and preach to your people come over here and I will teach you
how. You’ll get you a houseful overnight. You let me teach you how to preach and what to
preach, I will assure that you will have a houseful overnight. You don’t have so many at your
churches. We pass them daily. If you come and accept your own, which is Islam, and go back
to your church and start preaching it, you will fill your church up. The people are waiting for
something now. They don’t want that slavery stuff of telling them that they got to die to go
to heaven. They want some of this Heaven they can see. No, the heaven that they are not

sure of, is the one wherein, if he dies, he can’t come back and tell you if you told him a lie or
the truth.

         Let’s get together on what we see and not on what we’re promised we’ll see when we are
dead. There is no man that ever lived and died and then came back. When he’s dead for
sure, go and call him all you want, go and lay down in the grave with him, he don’t answer.
One or two words can stop that kind of teaching. Show me one that was once dead, went
back to the Earth and he’s now living. Show him to me. “Jesus rose from the dead.” Tell
them to show him to you.

          What is meant when the scholars and scientists said Jesus rose from the dead, means a
man with ideas and teachings like that which Jesus wanted to give us, but he was before time
and he died. We want to say to you that there is no such thing of anybody being put down in
the ground and he return to that which we had taken him from. He came out of the earth,
now we return him to the Earth. No one has ever seen one come out of the grave. You can
say you dreamed something like that, but dreams are not always true. If Jesus has come
back, none of us have met him yet and all the prophets of old died. The Creator of this
Heaven and Earth, in which we live, he died. We don’t meet with Him. We have not met
Him, no sir. I want to teach you these things that you have misunderstood. There is no such
thing as a human or any flesh or life, whatever it may be, dies and comes back, it doesn’t
come back. The white man taught you this, but you never did know what he meant by this.

         He meant this: “You are dead now nigger, but you can live again, because you are God’s
people and He’s coming after you one day to take you away from me, then you will come alive
in the knowledge of what I have done to keep you like you are.”
Today is the resurrection of the dead. The resurrection of the mentally dead slave. You
are the mentally dead, not physically dead, but the mentally dead. “Blessed is he,” the Bible
says “that died in the name of the Lord.” You and I died in the name of the Lord, “hence
forth,” says the spirit, “they shall live again,” because he’s already from God and he just died
in the knowledge of his God, so he’s going to be awaken one day and he’s going to live again.
“But…,” says the scripture in another place, referring to his own Apostle, “he’s my first born,
the first to rise from the dead. I called him and he answered me, and I’m going to give him
the key so that he may call others, and bring them to light.”

           I was put here by God Himself. There is no class of scholars and scientists that could say
that they had anything to do with my mission; yet, I work as the book says, concerning God,
“Who shall hinder us.” I do my work that is assigned to me for you, and there is no scholar or
scientist of this devil or any other nation that can stop me. It is the very first time since we
have risen from servitude slavery, that one not educated in the schools of the slave master,
stood before you with more power than a professor of the land. There is nothing that you
would want to do in the way of building a nation for self, like all other nations have built for
themselves, that we cannot do if you would just accept my advice. You have the education
and I will show you how to rule and take over the world. Ask some of the scientists about
Elijah Muhammad. Ask them, “Do you think he’s on the way to building up a nation for his
people?” They will say, yes.

         Any scientists of the black man, or yellow man, if you go ask them these words, they will
tell you, “Yes I have heard of him.” Just as your Bible teaches you in a symbolic language: He
said the sound went throughout the Earth, meaning that the news of this man’s work, his
teaching, has now been heard all around the Earth; and it is. You certainly don’t have a
frightful rabbit of a man that will run every time he hears a hound bark. I will teach you how
to chase the hound and let the rabbit bite him, instead of him biting the rabbit.

          I’m known all over the Earth. One brother was in Russia and he was talking to some of
the Muslims there and they reminded him of some Muslims having been there. He said, “Oh,
you’re talking about Elijah Muhammad, is that his name, yes.” He said he never did meet with

such clambering people for Muhammad. He said they wanted to learn how could they get in
touch with me. There, we have a lot of Muslims in Russia and we have lots in China. Come
on if you would like to be known; come follow me and the world will know you.

         Let us get together and build something out of the American slave people whom the
world will be happy to meet, as they are you. Come on all of you men and women that have
professional diplomas, and professional degrees, let’s get together and make our people glad.
Ask them, they will tip their hat, scrape their feet to you, to build them up. I have untold
amount of material to give you to build them up, come on. Let’s unite together and make a
nation out of ourselves, that the world will respect.

[Excerpt from Theology of Time lecture series]