My late father (who has had a few questions answered by Cecil Himself in print, notably the one about Grape Nuts, and is a great believer in the truth) once told me that when Elijah, of Nation of Islam fame passed away, they discovered financial records indicating a lot of the church donations had been spent on wild boozy hooker parties. Having lived in the Hyde Park/Kenwood area, and having a friend who lived across from Mohammed Ali’s place I had seen a lot of “functions” at the big house on the corner, with limos and scary looking bodyguards outside, etc.
Yet my Google-Fu is weak today, and the story was not given a lot of play. Wiki doesn’t seem to help. Dad is no liar, but sometimes his humor was a little dry. Could he have been making a joke based on the Nation of Islam’s politics that I was too dense to get at the time? Anyone else remember anything about this? I know there are a lot of Dopers in Chicago, so howz bout it?
It’s well known that Elijah Muhammad wasn’t as faithful to his wife as he could have been – this was the source of Malcolm’s disillusionment, for instance.
Well, they seemed to be partying in there, there were limos, etc., but mostly I saw men around. I didn’t surveil the place after all. The whole thing looked fishy, and I have a vauge rememberance about actually seeing some article, but memory is tricky. Maybe someone with Nexis?
In brief, Muhammad’s message went as follows. Blacks came into existence 78 trillion years ago, and through the eons they lived an advanced and righteous life. But their paradise ceased 6,000 years ago when a deviant black savant named Mr. Yakub, also known as “the big head scientist,” rebelled against the black gods and set about creating the white race. When blacks learned what Mr. Yakub was doing, they exiled him to an island in the Aegean Sea, but he was able to continue his work and within 600 years had succeeded in bringing the white race into existence, with a mandate to reign over blacks for six millennia. That reign ended in 1914, though a seventy-year period of grace would extend it to 1984; W.D. Fard had come to proclaim its end and to show blacks how to reclaim their rightful place through the Nation of Islam-a goal they would definitely accomplish by the year 2000.
Mmmkay. Dude, did you ever meet a guy named L. Ron Hubbard? Fascinating link, thanks!
WOW. I mean, I had inklings not everything was upright in there, but that’s just mind bending. 78 trillion years? How does someone pick these numbers, especially in the late 20th century?
** "The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Mother Plane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the Original scientists. It took $15 billion in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this Mother Wheel, which is a half mile by a half mile (800 m by 800 m). This Mother Wheel is like a small human-built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.
“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said these planes were used to set up mountains on the earth. The Qur'an says it like this: We have raised mountains on the earth lest it convulse with you. How do you raise a mountain, and what is the purpose of a mountain? Have you ever tried to balance a tire? You use weights to keep the tire balanced. That's how the earth is balanced, with mountain ranges. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that we have a type of bomb that, when it strikes the earth a drill on it is timed to go into the earth and explode at the height that you wish the mountain to be. If you wish to take the mountain up a mile (1.6 km), you time the drill to go a mile (1.6 km) in and then explode. The bombs these planes have are timed to go one mile (1.6 km) down and bring up a mountain one mile (1.6 km) high, but it will destroy everything within a 50-square-mile (130 km²) radius. The white man writes in his above top secret memos of the UFOs. He sees them around his military installations like they are spying. **
What is it with exploding mountains and bombs and volcanos and weird stuff going down on islands? I’m thinking L. Ron and this guy were cribbing from the same sheet. And the stuff about the earth being balanced like a tire, only with mountains. Sounds real balanced, allright.
So nobody can come up with any booze/drug references? It would have been in the Tribune prolly.
