"As The Light Shineth From The East"
The First Mother
By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
(The following is a collection of edited speeches delivered during Ethnic Heritage Survival Week, Feb. 19-26th 1978)
Then the Bible goes on to say that the first mother was made from the rib of our first father, that God had made our first father complete. Then He forgot that the man had a lonely nature. Then God said: "Oh, I've got to make him a mate." Now, I'm not laughing at the Bible, I don't laugh at it. To tell you the truth, I respect it. But I'm giving it to you in this language so you can see the kind of childish ideas that we grown-ups have been holding on to. It says, He took a rib—one rib —from the man, and filled up the hole—no ... it gives you the impression that it was just gouged out—He's not even a good surgeon. He put the flesh that was taken out, back in its place—just a patch-up job, a butcher's job—and then made the woman with this rib. What does that make the woman? It makes her a different creation from the man.
How can the Bible say, "Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone?" How can she be flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone and she was just made from the bone? Just one bone. In the forming of human life in the womb of the mother, bones don't come first, flesh comes first. So if this woman is made from one bone she doesn't have the full value, the full human worth of the man. Right from the beginning the woman is put in an inferior image.
If you don't believe that this is the trend; keep reading about the woman as her story is told from Genesis to Revelation. She becomes more and more ugly, inferior and wicked. I'll just name a few of the stars for you in the Bible: Eve, Jezebel, Delilah, Salome. We can look right into the language of the present environment and see that these evils, these destructive concepts in human ideas or in human minds are still hurting human development. They're still being preached and they're still hurting our human development. God gives us the most beautiful concept of the man that He creates. The man that He creates is a mind, a human mind—a rational and compassionate human mind; and from that mind is born, not a woman, but society. And the rib of the man simply tells us, in symbolism, that society was made from the man that God inspired called Adam in the Bible and that society had a law, a principle. Not many, but one.
The Bible says God made the woman from a rib of the man. Not from all of them, but from only one. This is symbolism, telling us that this generation or this genesis of the man that the Bible is telling us about is the story of the church. You may ask how can that be the story of the church when the Genesis was revealed and written long before Christ Jesus? But it was interpolated, interpretated, and changed, and reformed long after it was revealed. They formed it to speak thechurch doctrine, and the church doctrine says that Jesus gave only one commandment—that you should love ye one another.
The scripture gives us the proper concept of man, that man should not be seen in the individual, the male or the female, or any single individual, but in the creation of society. Man should mean humanity and humanity includes both male and female; he or she is a part of a unit. The male has to mate with a female to reproduce his physical self. And the female has to mate with a male to reproduce her physical self. How can we see society as male and as female separated one from the other? And how can we think that the whole society was generated from one man called Adam? How can any sensible, intelligent people think that God made a man and then reached into his body and deformed that man after forming him rightly, and made a female of his rib? That looks like guesswork to me.
What do they call the tornadoes and the hurricanes—these terrible violent forces that make human beings fear for their very lives, that take away their houses and their cattle, destroy the hard earnings they have worked so hard for and built up in homes and businesses? These strong violent forces are called by the names of women. Isn't that proof that the same mentality exists. The mentality of the writer of the Bible is still existing. "Will you attack the writers of the Bible?"
You don't want to see the contradiction. You don't want to see the ugliness in the Bible, so you suppress it. You push it out of your mind. But remember, every time you push something out of your mind, you're only pushing it out of your conscious mind. It goes into your subconscious and causes mental problems if the environment doesn't do something to bring about the kind of healthy change needed for you.
We've been saying that God made man in his own image and likeness when we should have been saying that God intended humanity—society —to be in His image and likeness, character-wise or morally speaking. The scripture has meaning. The scripture can attract the rational mind, the logical thinker; the scripture can attract the shipbuilder, the banker, the chemist; it can attract all men if it's taken back to its original purity: if we just take off the false dress of poetry, mythology, symbolism and allegories that take us into wonderland instead of the promised land.
