1979-January-19

Bilalian News

The Shackles of Slavery: Part 3

Imam W. Deen Muhammad

With the Name Allah (In the Name of God), the Gracious, the Compassionate

As-Salaam-Alaikum

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from Mujeddid Wallace Deen Muhammad's "humorous exorcism'' delivered at Malcolm X College in Chicago, Nov. 30, 1978 — Continued from the Dec. 29, 1978 issue of B.N.)

All praise is due to Almighty God, the guardian evolver and sustainer of all the worlds. The blessings and peace be upon Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah to us all.

O Allah, guide us, forgive us our faults, and grant us the blessings of faith. I bear witness there is no deity except Allah and I bear witness Muhammad is His Servant and His Messenger. Peace be upon him, his descendants, his companions, the righteous servants, all of them, and upon us in America and throughout the world:

This is their (Jahcubites) strategy, their plot or blueprint for retrogressing and retarding the society. Your individual nature and the nature of the whole society is retarded by this method.

Believe it or not, the method is first to drown you in water. Water means your own human ignorance. They want you to drown in your ignorance.

The second one is fire. Come out with knowledge that burns you because you are too ignorant to deal with it. You don't know how to handle it. You don't know how to take it and put it in a lamp and use it as a light or put it in a stove and use it to heat the house or cook your food. You don't know how to do that so the fire burns you up.

We have to know something about our nature.

The human being is made of motivations. When we use those motivations in the general sense of the word, we're talking about anything that motivates us, anything that stimulates us, anything that acts to move or influence us in some way. I'm not talking about that general definition, I'm talking about the first push that gets something into- motion.

Where do we get this first activity? Our original nature gives us this first push, this first movement. That's motivation in the real sense of that term. You need motivation first. After motivation, then what? You can't just live in this world and progress just with motivation. You'll have to respond to that motivation with an interest, and that will give you drive.

Your drive sooner or later is going to get you into deep water, because the Earth is noi all land. You get the drive and you're going to run into the ocean pretty soon. And when you .come to an ocean, you have to check your drive and develop your moral nature, you human sentiments to check your drive so that you don't abuse and destroy innocent society.

After you check your drive with your sentiments so you can move and progress among good people and bad people, what do you have to do then? If you want to keep progressing, you will have to have a vision. You need a new vision. One, two, three, four — you need a vision. In the name of God, the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost: that's three, but you need one more — vision.

If you got all Holy Ghost and no vision, you're in trouble. We call this "vision" for better things in our life or for a better world, human aspirations. The human aspires to greater things.

These are the principles of our nature that we have to understand, that the human being should be motivated by nature, not by spookism; not by a world that we imagine existing in the sky somewhere. That comes from ancient Egyptology and other mythologies that the Gentile wrongly interpreted. Those people didn't believe in the foolishness that the Gentile bought.

Let me explain the word "Gentile." Gentile means in the nature of the passions. The passions of both good and bad. You can have a passion for sin and a passion for holiness; whichever one it is, if you have all passion and no sense, you're a jinn.

A jinn belongs in a bottle. You keep them locked up. You can't put him in a jail, he'll come out the bars — he's a jinn. You have to put him in a bottle and put the top on it and let it out when you want him to work. You don't let the jinn work when the jinn wants to work. You decide when the jinn works. Say, "Okay, come out and fulfill this wish for me, jinn."

Do you ever watch "Jeannie" on TV? A lot of things on TV you should be paying attention to.

There's another program, I don't know what it is, but it has a Bilalian; we call him Bilalian and I think "Bilalian" dignifies us more than "black." I think before we leave here, if you can spare the time, you'll understand why I say that. Black is not as deep as Bilal. Black is skin deep. Bilal goes all through the whole being.

I'm not here to change the color of the flag you have on the building. Keep it up there, I like those colors — black, red and green. In fact, you see I have them on right here. I've even got on red suspenders. And I'm a fireman, too.