We are publishing a transcript of remarks given by Student Minister Abel Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, at the Saturday Free School’s event “Claiming the Gift of Humanity: James Lawson and the Future of Revolutionary Nonviolence” held in Chicago on August 16, 2023.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful, I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, who we believe intervened in our affairs here in North America in the person of Master Fard Muhammad who we know as the great Mahdi. Mahdi means, in Arabic, a self-guided one, who comes to guide others to the straight path, the correct path, the proper path.
As the son of Mexicans, the first of my family born in the United States of America, I can never thank you enough for raising here in America someone to lead, teach, and guide us here in America and ultimately through those who would heed that call, the rest of the world. A man who you saw in one of the photographs and that beautiful video that was put together, another son of Georgia, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad.
Though I never met him, because I was born in December of 1974 and he departed from amongst us just a few blocks from here at Mercy Hospital in February of 1975—yet, I’m blessed to have been introduced to his teachings because of one man who is my teacher, and the example that taught me not only what a man, a human being striving to live right looks like—but he taught me what it meant to be a Mexican.
He taught me what it meant to be a Christian, because I was a Christian. And I still am a Christian. He taught me what it means to be beyond those limited labels because none of those labels can identify us. We didn’t call ourselves the “Black Muslims”—others called us the “Black Muslims”. We used it, but we never said we’re the Black Muslims.
When you read the Final Call, what used to be Muhammad Speaks, it didn’t say “the Black Muslim program.” It said the Muslim Program, and it’s because of that kind of forward thinking that I’m blessed, and I was blessed not too far from here in the middle of the city where I attended high school, Whitney Young High School. I was introduced to the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad through The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. So I have to start by acknowledging my teachers and greeting you in their names and the greeting words of peace which we say in the Arabic language, “As-Salaam-Alaikum”—
[Audience] “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.”
En Español, significa que, “La Paz sea contigo.” Or in English we would say, “Peace be unto you.” And that’s the big thing, the two words that jumped out of me in that video. The two words that Reverend Lawson and Dr. King used: Peace. And then something that Reverend Lawson was saying in that TED Talk video about healing and how we can never really heal because the system doesn’t change. And it reminded me of a beautiful passage in the Holy Quran that said, had we wished to take a pastime for ourselves we would have taken it. You know, a pastime is when the Cubs are playing the Sox, that’s a pastime, that’s America’s pastime; they call it—baseball.
It’s unproductive though, you’re just literally passing time. God doesn’t just pass time. So He said, “If I wanted to take a pastime I would have taken one.” But He said no. We hurl Truth—since we’re using the baseball analogy—the Holy Quran says, we hurl Truth at falsehood until we knock out its brains.
The problem in the world today is not that people don’t recognize things are all messed up—I believe now the level of dissatisfaction, it is acknowledged—everything’s messed up. That’s why there’s so much division. And we keep changing people in office, but feeding people into the same system. We keep altering educational tent poles that we want people to reach, economic maneuvers that we think will improve things, and no matter how much we do that we keep getting not just the same results—worse results. As beautiful as the area we’re in is right now, if you walk just a few blocks south of here—and you don’t have to wait for it to be dark.
If you walk a few blocks south of here, it’s a very different situation. Because people are willing to invest in buildings and beautifying them, but that doesn’t change people. What would be a better investment, which was read at the beginning of Reverend Lawson’s words—if we were to take that money and invest it into human beings, we could get rid of poverty, we could get rid of want, we could get rid of war.
Because the wars exist not because there’s a lack of anything on the planet. The wars exist because there are people on the planet who rule, and their rulership is based off a wicked idea. And that is where Dr. King and Reverend Lawson were pushing us to face that reality. The problem is not with our lack of resources, except for one most valuable one: what is our thinking based on? That’s the resource that Mexican, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Portuguese, Spaniard, Nigerian, Ghanaian, the people of the islands of the Pacific and the Islands of the Caribbean, Latin America, Central America, Asia.
Wherever you go on the planet, when you see the condition of the people, it mirrors other people. Different languages, different shades, all of them—the masses being ruled by a few elite who are not even native to the place where they rule. Why? Because there’s an idea that has enslaved all of the people. So our war—and to be true revolutionaries—is to seek real freedom.
But not freedom in terms of, “Oh, do you have the right to work where you want to work, live where you want to live”—of course, that’s the most basic of rights. But if your thinking is limited because it’s restricted by thinking that our success means we get to live next door to our oppressors—or worse, we just want to replace our oppressors, but we carry their thinking—then all we’re doing is replacing one color for another color with the same mind. And we get the same results. And what nobody wants to deal with the ugly truth of, is that yes, nonviolence is the answer. But who are we exercising that principle with? ‘Cause if you walk a few blocks south, nobody’s teaching us to be nonviolent with one another.
There’s a promotion of violence. Mexicans are the number one killers of Mexicans. Black people are the number one killers of black people. Christians are the number one killers of Christians. Muslims are the number one killers of Muslims. And we ignore that fact in reality. How can we expect a war-making society to accept the idea of nonviolence and peace?
All of these years and generations before Reverend Lawson, before Dr. King, there were emissaries that came to try to reason with the thinking of those who are wicked, who rule. To tell them, to appeal to them—there’s a better way. This starts—and you can read about it in the prophetic books of the Bible—you have a Moses coming to Pharoah. And in the Quran, the Holy Quran, it says he’s advised by God—Moses is told, speak a kind word to Pharoah. That’s not violence. It’s not.
Violence is about intent. Pharaoh had a wicked mind, and he said, “Well not only do I reject your kind words but I’m going to make it worse on your people,” according to the way that the history’s written. And what happened? Moses didn’t do anything, he remained humble. But the forces of nature intervened to recreate a form of balance and to justify the removal of those who were enslaved by their enslaver because they didn’t have the weaponry to fight even if they wanted to fight.
So, many times in the history as it’s given in America, the Nation of Islam is always juxtaposed as “versus” the nonviolent movement. When, if you look at our history, we’re not even allowed to carry so much as a knife. We’re not trying to integrate with them. We want to get along with them in peace, but we don’t want anything they have to offer—we’re not out there asking for grants. We’re not asking for scholarships.
All we want—and tell me if this is not a method of peace—leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Isn’t that what happens in court if two people are married and can’t get along anymore? You’re told, “You know what, stop calling the police, why don’t you separate for a little while? You have someplace you can go for tonight? If not, we have a prison for you.”
And I’m making light of it because I want us to see how reasonable what we’ve been offered by God is. He didn’t send Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Integrate the children of Israel.” He called those people out. But it wasn’t a physical exodus that was needed, it’s a mental exodus that’s needed. Well how can we keep going back into this educational system thinking we’re going to produce that which will allow us to exit out of it?
That’s why the Saturday Free School is so valuable. You have a brother here, Dr. Monteiro—he’s gone to their university and he’s mastered what they have to offer there, but he’s able to formulate it in a way that doesn’t reattach us to a system that’s broken. He’s trying to get us to see we don’t need that system, but we do have to exist.
Give him a round of applause, because he suffered because of that. Everyone who comes with an idea that is counter to the accepted norm of those who rule, they have to suffer. They have to be punished. They have to run from city to city, doing what? Just to teach the people that your unity is okay? My teacher The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan said about the nonviolent movement in America, that God could not have given to us a more gentle or beautiful example of the principle of nonviolence than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Nobody could have said it better, appealing—if you have a heart, how could you reject such a beautiful human being, who wasn’t just great in oratory, but you could feel the sincerity he was appealing to them.
How can you speak peace here but send us to war there? How can you talk about the plenty in the resources you want to distribute, but deny your own people if they are your people right here in the United States of America—this was his heart completely willing to suffer whatever they would treat him with. And what did they ultimately offer to him? Death.
As an example, not for just him—if you read in the histories, this is how they treated all of the prophets and messengers of God. Not because they were threatening them with anything. All they were offering them was, “Turn from your wicked ways.” That is where we are right now. Whether we call ourselves Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hebrew, whatever it is that we call ourselves; if we call ourselves none of it: spiritual, seeking enlightenment. Okay, well how are we going to be enlightened in the same system that has poisoned us? And that takes me back to the point I want to close with, that word that Reverend Lawson used: healing.
The scriptures tell us that there’s a figure who comes with healing in his wings. Well, human beings don’t have wings—you do know that right? But it’s symbolic of something. When we open a book, it looks like wings. So it’s a human being that comes with a knowledge and a teaching that when the people hear it, if they will adhere to it and allow it to affect their mind, the healing will begin. If we were to be left alone, we could heal on our own, but we’re stuck in their system, and their tentacles and claws are wrapped around every aspect of what we do.
If you and I turn on the radio, we’re in their system. If you turn on your computer, we’re in their system. If you walk out and see a billboard, it’s in their system. There’s subliminal as well as overt messages that are implanted there with the desire to effect a negative impact in you and I. So even though we know from the tradition that we see ourselves as the people of God and His promise—we may believe that, but these wickedly wise ten percent who rule the world—they don’t believe it, they know it to be a fact.
And they implement plans to counter that reality which they can’t stop, but they’ll do what they can to stop it. How do they do it? Counterintelligence program of the United States. That’s not a myth, that’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s a reality that was and is. Only they’re better at it today. What did they say in their counterintelligence program? They wanted to stop the rise of a black messiah.
Well, the messiah is the one who’s promised to the people who are going to suffer under the prophecies of those messengers that were sent. There is a book that tells us that they’d be in bondage for 400 years. Wow, that’s pretty specific. That they’d be in a strange land that is not their own, that’s very specific. And that after four centuries, God himself would come, and he would do something with them that would prove that it is these people who are the people of the promise because of the presence of the one that was promised. Where else do you have, anywhere in the world—we all have revolutionaries, but amongst the black man and woman of America you have a movement that started with Elijah Muhammad but then spread out after the 1930s to include a Black Panther Party.
That’s one extreme of a consequence of an effect of something that began a movement. From that movement, at first not organized properly, but the movement begins and you get on one side the Black Panthers, on the other side the nonviolent struggle. Both of them with the same goal in mind yet separated by ideology. Why? Because the movement needed to work the polarities out so that eventually we would find our way back.
So today you have students of Gandhi, students of the Black Liberation theology, a student of the Latin American struggles and the struggles of the United States, as well as the Nation of Islam—and we’re talking the same language now. Why?
To show us that our teachers were right. It just wasn’t the right time.
But now, since we’re together, we’re at that critical moment, a critical mass. Where something is about to happen. There’s going to be an exchange of energy and possibly, if it’s not controlled properly, a destructive force that could be unleashed. That’s where we are right now. And the construction or destruction that will come from this will be based on what we decide to do.
If we believe the legacy of Dr. King and Reverend Lawson was proper and correct, if we believe the teachings of Gandhi, the teachings of Christ, the teachings of Moses, the teachings of all the messengers whose names we may know or may not know—their validity will be proven at this time by what we, as their students, decide to do with the time that we live.
As I close, the Holy Quran has the hundred and third chapter. It’s called “Al-Asr” which means “The Time.” And it’s a very short sūrah, it says, “By the time, surely man—human beings—are in loss.” Except—those who are Muslim? Nope, it doesn’t say that. It says, “Those who believe and do good.”
In this time, we can believe whatever we want. But if you’re not doing good based on what you believe, then we’re lost. So we have to believe and do good and enjoin or extol to invite others to truth, into patience. That’s where we are right now. Everybody’s anxious, everybody’s frustrated, everybody wants a change. And the enemy is orchestrating all of this knowing that if he could just hold on and keep us fighting with one another, he remains in power that much longer.
It is when he’s exposed by us hurling the truth at the false idea of white supremacy, at the false idea that war is what sustains and maintains a government—Rome thought the same thing, where are they today? Egypt thought the same thing. America believes the same thing ‘cause it’s the same mind evolving through time because no one has struck at the core of the idea, because no one has had that truth.
And you know what the number one—if you will, testament—that that truth is present, is? It is that the people unify. Because it is organization, unified around truth, which will sustain and validate our struggle. So what if we took that same principle of nonviolence and we decided we’re going to go teach that in the black churches? We’re going to go teach that in the Mexican barrios. We’re going to go teach that in the Puerto Rican hoods. We’re going to go teach that in Chinatown. We’re going to go wherever we are, in our churches, in our cloisters, in our synagogues.
And we start telling our people: we must be nonviolent with one another. It would change the dynamic of the community. And if we did that, the external enemy would not really be an issue. It’s all what’s happening and not happening within ourselves, but it starts because our mind hasn’t been fed from the truth. So Jesus said it would be the truth that sets us free. What truth? We know white supremacy’s bad. That’s a start. But what do we have to counter it? Not a myth—what is the truth?
We’re the original people of the planet. No matter where we are, no matter what our shade is, today because of mixture, when you go to the root of our essence you can’t go beyond what is called the Asiatic black man, the Asiatic black woman. Why Asia? That’s a good question.
Because the whole earth at one time was called Asia. So when you call and look at us, you’re looking at the black man, black woman of Earth. Some today are called Mexican, but that’s only a couple of hundred years old. Some are called Chinese, that’s only a couple thousand years old. We’ve been here for eons and eons—what were we called then? So when we get to the root of that truth, we’ll be able to find unity and a bond of respect for one another.
And it is in our mind, I’ll leave you with these words—from the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, it’s in point number five of What the Muslims Believe. “We believe in the Resurrection of the Dead,” ‘cause I keep saying it’s in the head that we’ve been wounded. Not in physical resurrection, but in mental resurrection. We believe that the so-called Negroes—at that time, it is from the 50s—are most in need of mental resurrection. Listen to the words: most in need. Most is a comparison, meaning there’s others in need, but the one in the worst condition—like when you go into an ER the first thing they tell you is, “What’s your pain on the level of 1 to 10—oh you’re a 2? OK. I got a guy with a missing arm—I’m going to go treat him first.”
Most in need of mental resurrection, therefore they will be resurrected first. Furthermore, “We believe we are the people of God’s choice.” As it has been written that God would choose the rejected and the despised, we can find no other person’s fitting this description in these last days more—there’s a comparison again—meaning others fit it, but nobody fits it better or more than the so-called Negroes in America—and listen to this last sentence: “We believe in the resurrection of the righteous.”
This is pointing us to the fact that there’s a special group in America that will begin a movement that isn’t limited to America. It isn’t limited to the South and West sides. It’s a movement that when it grows, it will encompass the whole earth; I believe that’s why someone so powerful as Mahatma Gandhi—he could see that it is amongst black people in America. Because of what black people have suffered, they have a heart now which allows them to feel the pain of all the other people, because all have suffered. But nobody has suffered more or worse than the black man in America, so when they are resurrected it will begin a righteous revolution that will allow every human being—not to have to now accept a black ideology or replace a white ideology—no, all we want now is access to the truth, so that we could accept our own and be ourselves. Thank you.
Avant-Garde: A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science 
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