1992-October-9

Muslim Journal

Excerpts: Al-Islam, Unity and Leadership

Imam W. Deen Mohammed

Prophet Muhammed Exemplified The Best Muslim

We must do more to live up to the content of our Muslim life. Pretence and weak contents are hurting our Muslim unity now. If we strengthen the content of our Muslim life, then the unity of Muslims will definitely improve. We will have greater and better unity. Allah is not going to unite us upon a corrupt basis. He will only unite us upon the true bases for Muslims. Let us accept that.

We pray prayers and blessings upon our Prophet. And we pray that our Lord takes us into the Company of the Righteous. That is the prayer of the best of the believers. We are not perfect. We are subject to error, to do wrong, to commit sin. But at the same time, we have faith in our Lord that He has all power to forgive our sins. We turn to Him and ask Him for forgiveness. We should have a desire always to be identified with the righteous and not with wicked people of the world. Our prayer should be that Allah enter us in among the righteous people.

This religion of Al-Islam is perfect. Nothing can be improved upon it. Take it from Qur'an and the Life of the Prophet as it has been established and given, and you will be successful all the way. You will be successful internally and externally, with yourself, with your family, with your associates, with your endeavors and everything else.

You may say, "That is not so. He is promising too much." No, I am not. Even in myself, and I do not consider myself to be any special person deserving any great page in future books. If I do get such attention, it will be because of favorable circumstances and opportunities for me that others have not had. I only see an ordinary page for me. But for the "ordinary ", I look back on my efforts to please Allah five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years back, and I have been successful. You are unsuccessful, when you stop getting benefits. So when you feel this strength and support, you just want everybody you like to have it also. The believer loves believers! That is not my teaching, for that is the teaching of the Prophets and especially of Prophet Muhammed, the prayers and the peace be on him.

The best of the believers is the Prophet, himself. And Allah requires of us that we love him more than we love ourselves and our near relatives. When we understand that, it is so beautiful. Look how many of us send our best sons to war for the government! Now doesn't that mean that you have to love your nation more than you love your own child? When we tell you to love Muhammed, remember that Muhammed is better than all of the nations combined. He is the cause for the nations having life, if you understand.

That goes for the nations of today and for those that have real life in the degree that they have it. The nations of today may not have that life in the full degree, but they have some of it. They would not be surviving and progressing, if they did not have a portion of it.

We pray that Allah will save us from hardship, difficulty, misery and especially from bad spirits. We know how easy it is m America to pass on to someone bad spirits. Let us remember the Prophet's teachings to us that, "The believers are as soft as milk in their dealings with believers." We are not supposed to be harsh, ugly, and hostile towards believers. Let us practice love, the love of the ummah and the love for each other.

Let that spirit dominate in us, and don't take out our hostilities and bad feelings that we brought from other situations on to somebody we find that looks like a sheep. I will look like a sheep a lot of times, but if you take your hostilities out on me you might see something else. I've gotten older now and can have more patience and can take a lot of abuse, but still I have a breaking point.

Good fortune is always with the innocent and the justified and not with the guilty. The guilty can pull out a stick to hit you and miss. Then (he innocent may try to hit him with the right hand and miss but hit him with the left and knock him out cold! The innocent will look and wonder, "How did that happen?" The Lord was on the side of the innocent. We do not want war. We want good treatment from each other. We want to live up to the best Muslim behavior.

Understand this. Muslims think of behavior usually as moral behavior. But more important for Muslims is to think of behavior as intelligent behavior, for moral behavior graduates It is when you just know good and bad, beautiful and ugly, or hot and told. That is on the baby level of morality. But as we graduate, we come up into what we call ethics or moral rules for the intellect and for the total behavior, flesh, mind, and spirit. We graduate from moral sentiment and moral feelings to the understanding of moral logic. Understand that Muslims are to try to present the most intelligent behavior at all times.

Over those centuries that witnessed the authority and power and influence of the United States and the Western powers. Muslims have become reactors rather than having the deciding purpose' before us. We are given more to react than to what should be the group conscience Muslims. This is something that we have fallen into unintentionally because of bad situations and bad circumstances for our Muslim life in most of the international world.

As you know, I am the son of the late leader, Elijah Muhammad, who led a great following called the "Lost-Found-Nation of Islam". It was also called "Black Muslims" by one outsider, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln. Dr Lincoln gave us the name "Black Muslim" that caught on, and afterwards we were commonly called that. As a child of Elijah Muhammad, I was raised to believe that Islam was the right religion and that the Qur'an was the right Book and that Muslims all over the world were my brothers.

I am not addressing the problems we had back then. We had many serious problems, but obviously there was enough positive influence in my circumstances to make it possible for me to take the stand I have taken and to be accepted as I am today Still I must say that in total those circumstances were unfavorable Those circumstances did not favor us being at peace and in unity with the Muslims of the international world. Therefore, our unity has been hurt because of circumstances for us in America and because of circumstances that we ourselves were creating in what we called the "Nation of Islam." I should say I hope you do not see us as "Black Muslims now. If you do, I hope you have here a good surprise or an explanation that will satisfy all of us. The message broadcasted by the expression "Black Muslims" is that the Muslim world is also "black and white" racist.

I want to say also that I have been blessed. And I say "blessed" because if any of us can come out of the dark, it is because of the blessings Allah. The Almighty God. So I have been blessed myself to come to the essentials of this religion and to discipline myself upon those essentials and to see the real essence and the real inclusive purpose in our religion. I have also come to believe that our circumstances here in the United States are more severe than those for Muslims of the international world. However, most of the Muslims of the international world are also in circumstances that do not favor them living at peace and in unity with their brothers all over this planet earth.

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