A Study of History Rewards our Research

By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad (8/14/13)

The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, patriarch of the Nation of Islam, wrote concerning history: “Of all our studies history is the most attractive and best qualified to reward our research, as it develops the springs and motives of human actions and displays the consequences of circumstances which operates most powerfully on the destinies of human beings. The wise man is the one who has made a careful study of the past events of ancient and modern history. The knowledge of the future is judged by the knowledge of the past.”

1. Research begins with a “good” question. Much can be found using a Google search if you know how to phrase the question.
2. Questions arise from trying to solve a problem. However if you are not trying to do anything then you have no problem, no questions and no need for research.
3. Information with no context or question to be answered is useless, unless the information itself causes you to ask yourself a question.
4. When one looks at the Actual Facts in the Supreme Wisdom, the question must be asked “why” do we need such facts? If you are preparing to drive a vehicle, you need certain actual facts about the vehicle and the environment or roads on which it is to be driven. Therefore, if you are being trained to run a portion of the universe that your Father built for you, then you must first have some actual facts about that universe. After acquiring some knowledge on this universe and planet, then you must understand what powers and options you possess in order to manipulate, change or improve your surroundings and yourself.
5. The Problem Book in our Supreme Wisdom is not just asking us to do the math, but to improve the condition of our people described in the problem. The Minister Farrakhan’s Tuskegee address was a paradigm shift in our purpose for education. No longer are we waiting on God to bring in a new world, we must prepare ourselves and our children to start building that New World now. We must now become thinkers and doers, not just repeatologists. It takes a more in depth understanding of science to build a building than it does to talk about or admire a building already built. It is time for the revolutionaries to produce a vision for our children of what heaven or the Hereafter should look like and not just tell them that the white man is the devil and the Black man is God.
6. The Research Team of the NOI starts out with the Teachings of The Messenger or the words of The Minister as the bones, then we go out looking for the meat to bear witness to the bones. We cut that meat up into bight sized morsels for the rest of us to digest and grow stronger in our faith of what we have been taught and to defend the Teachings with the scholarship of this world. We know that the Believers are confronted by disbelievers, so we want to arm them with arguments that will defeat the opposition’s intellectual positions. For instance when The Minister says, “We are the Real Children of Israel”, we go to our lessons such as “Why did Musa have a hard time to civilize the devil?”. We then go and seek information that shows that Musa or Moses never brought millions of people out of bondage in Egypt, therefore the claim of the Jewish people to have fulfilled the prophesy of Abraham is nullified and we must seek a new people to fulfill that prophesy. This now makes history very relevant to today with big political implications such as should America be supporting Israel or the Black man and woman of America?