1976-November-5

Bilalian News

The Family And The Community: Part 2

Imam W.D. Muhammad

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38. So give what is due
To kindred, the needy,
And the wayfarer.
That is best for those

Who see the Countenance,
Of God, and it is they
Who will prosper.

39. That which ye lay out
For increase through the property
Of (other) people, will have
No increase with God:
But that which ye lay out
For charity, seeking
The countenance of God,
(Will increase): it is
These who will get
A recompense multiplied.

Holy Quran translation by Yusuf Ali: Sura XXX: Verse 38 – 39
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In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful; Peace and Blessings upon His Servant and His Messenger, Muhammad, forever. Amen.

There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

As -Salaam –Alaikum

My Dear Brothers and Sisters:
In order to bring about life in the community, the people must bring themselves into the minds of people who are trying to establish themselves economically and socially. Just slightly over 100 years ago, many of our people were still in physical chains. We were no more than work animals for the society in America, and in many other parts of the world. However, we are here today, thinking as though we have never had a problem at all.

The Bilalian people of America think and act like people who have had generations and thousands of years of successful national leadership, and national wealth. We do not act like a people who have just come into the feeling of freedom and who have just gotten the opportunity to start moving to do something to establish themselves on the land.

We have been crazy and we have acted like people who suffered from a bad case of amnesia, who have forgotten what happened yesterday.

Poverty: The Bilalian Inheritance

Many of you wake up in the morning thinking that you are the son of a king, when you are really the son of a hustler. You live carefree and happy-go-lucky, you pass away from the world, and when the wind blows away the last scent of you, there is nothing remaining of you. Your children come up and follow the same old walks in life, with the same old minds. Pretty soon, they fall over, the wind comes by one day and blows their scent away just as it blew yours away, and there is nothing left of them.

Bilalians are coming up from one generation to another and inheriting poverty. That is a shame, especially when we compare our inheritance to that of so-called primitive people, who only in very recent years have emerged from wastelands and jungles to observe world civilization. These people who only yesterday have seen the first light of civilization and heard its sounds have far surpassed Bilalians in preparing for future generations.

Bilalians have 100 years of physical freedom with 400 years of knowledge of the greatest industrial civilization that the world has ever known (America). We have been in the heart of this country, hearing the noises of its factory hammers and its tools of exploration. We have seen skyscrapers erected and the building of bridges that stretch over miles of water, and every morning we are being disturbed in our beds by the sounds of production and the sounds of machinery rolling through the city over the pavement. But yet, all of these noises of industry and civilization are not enough to wake us up and make us stand-up as civilized people. This shows you that we are a seriously dead people.

Revolutionize Your Social Thinking

The only way that the Bilalian Community can come out of its dead state is that we have to start a revolution in our behavior and in our way of life. Revolution means change, and we need a major change in the way we (Bilalians) think, act, and habitually live. We need a revolution because we need major changes in the way we handle money, in the way we look at each other, and in the way that we look at our children who are coming up under us.

For more than 40 years, the Nation of Islam has been striving to bring about a revolution in your social thinking in order that Bilalians will become a new family of people with new ideas of social life. Without any ideas of social life that you can call your own, or with which you can identify, anybody can just blow a hint of social activity among you, and will catch it as though it is the plague.

The Superfly Mentality

Brothers and Sisters, what you have been given makes you bounce when you should be walking. It makes you take off all your clothes in the winter and put fur on in the summer. We see "superfly" brothers walking around in 84-degree weather with fur around their necks, and then when winter comes, if the manufacturers and retailers advertise some thin, feminine shirt, such crazy, superfly-minded brothers will be out there walking in the streets in 0-degree weather, wearing that shirt.

You find many of these brothers wearing expensive suits, mink coats, mink fezzes, and diamond rings, driving large luxury cars and living in rat and roach infested apartments and houses. This type of flamboyant, ostentatiousness is found where the mind has not properly developed or grown, and it is what happens when you grow materially and when you do not grow humanly. You will be sitting in the king's castle, with the king's clothes on, but the signs of ignorance and poverty will still be present and all around you. Brothers and Sisters, we have to come out of our foolishness.

Sacrifice For The Community

We in the Nation of Islam have a divine blessing of Almighty God's truth and we are not going to give up. The Nation of Islam provides us with the kind of structure and program that our people need all over the world in order to begin to grow socially in the dimensions and ways of a nation. But to grow in this direction, we all must be prepared to make sacrifices.

We cannot go around greedy and selfish, or like a baby, for whom everything may be pleasant all day, every day. In order to clean up the society, we must be willing to put our hands in filth, and to use our physical muscles with an ax to chop down trees, if we do not have any better equipment. We must be willing to have fewer clothing and to eat less expensive food, for our entire lifetime, if necessary, knowing that our sacrifices are pushing the whole family up the scale. This is the spirit that we have to take on in order to get down to business.

We must ask ourselves not what our individual flesh and mind need, but what our community flesh (both Muslims and non-Muslims) need. Each day, we must put our minds to work to think of what we may do to bring the right results for the whole community.

A Muslim Slaves Only For Allah

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1. In the name of God, Most Gracious
Most Merciful
.
2. Praise be to God,
The Cherisher and Sustainer of
the Worlds;

3. Most Gracious, Most Merciful;

4. Master of the Day of Judgment.

5. Thee do we worship.
And Thine aid we seek.

6. Show us the straight way.

7. The way of those on whom                              
Thou hast bestowed Thy Grace
Those whose (portion)
Is not wrath. 
And who go not astray.

Holy Quran translation by Yusuf Ali: Sura I: Verse 1 – 7
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Each morning, we should do something for the heart of the community. We must
pray the Muslim prayer: "Oh, Allah, guide us on the right path ....the path of those upon whom has bestowed thy favor." In the Muslim prayer, we are talking about people collectively, not about individuals. The Muslim says to Allah in prayer that it is only for Him that he would be a slave. He strives to convert people to believe in the one God, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, Who is responsible for all benefits in life.

Dignity comes to the society when we hear from the hearts of those people who have been physical slaves, and even from the hearts of free men: "God, it is only You for Whom I slave, and it is only You to Whom I cry out for help." True human beings would not want you to be their slaves, and we should not be slaves for any human animals. We slave for Allah because He is the One to Whom we owe everything and Who has a full share in our blessings.

The Muslim Prayer: A Community Prayer

The prayer of a Muslim is the prayer for the community because a Muslim does not pray as a selfish person. We should think in terms of the community, and we should think, feel and ask for blessings for each other.

Certainly, we should work to provide our own selves with food, clothing and shelter, but we should do so with a knowledge and a conscience that we are not the only ones that needs these things. We should remember that the whole family and the whole community need the necessities of life, and if we hoard all the wealth for ourselves someone in the community is going to be denied these essentials. There is only so much left for the poor members of our community, when we as individuals work to amass all of the wealth for ourselves. There is a sign here for the human being that we should not overfeed ourselves.

Waxing Fat Destroys You

The scripture says that there were people who came to their destruction because they waxed (grew) fat, meaning that they overfed themselves materially and that destroyed them. God teaches us through our individual body that overfeeding the physical body or being a selfish glutton leads to your physical death.

After you have fed yourself like a pig for so long, you do not have enough will power to save yourself from the death that you are bringing into your own body. Then you have to go to a doctor and ask him to put you on a diet, but some of you have become so much a slave to the habit of being a glutton that you are too weak to follow the doctor's prescription, even though failure to follow his advice might quicken your death. You ask the doctor to hypnotize you and he has to do this in order to get you to act like a human being is supposed to act so that you can control your eating habits.

This popular behavior in modern society tells us that the person in such a condition has lost his mind, that his mind is not good enough and that it will not work for him. Therefore, the doctor hypnotizes him and gives him another mind.

In hypnotizing the person, the doctor suggests and puts his own thoughts and will power into the individual's mind and after hypnosis, the individual goes around without his own mind and using the doctor's will power. This is a horrible form of the human being that has developed.

True Friends Love And Respect Our Work

Brothers and Sisters, you should love Islam with all of your heart, and you should attract people for your friends who love what we are doing. If you find someone who says that he is a member of the Nation of Islam and his friends who like him very much are people who do not care about the Mosque and who do not love and respect the work that the Chief Minister is doing, then that person is not a true believer. He is a lying, poisonous hypocrite, because whether they are Jews, Christians or whoever, the friends of true believers respect and love this great work that we are doing.

The Muslims Open Heart

God says that He has not narrowed the man's heart, He has enlarged the man's heart so that there is more room inside for all humanity, for the rich, the poor, the ignorant, the wise, the sinners and the saints. Everybody and every people — the African, the Asian, the European and so forth can find a place in the man's heart because he has given his whole heart to God. Since God is the God of all people and the God of all things, the heart that He receives must open itself to all people and to all things.

This is how the Muslim community of America should be; it should be a community that gives, not part, but its whole heart to Allah. In giving our whole heart to Allah, He tells us that we must not be selfish, and we must not wax (grow) fat. We must be willing to open our door to everybody regardless of their social status, economic position or skin color. We must not close our door to anyone who is dressed for the ceremony, and to be properly dressed for our house, one simply needs a sincere heart. A Christian and a Jew might be going to God on their respective paths and an atheist might be going to his greatness, his power, or whatever he dreams of as the power along the atheist path, but if their hearts are sincere, they can come into my heart.

Allah Is The Best Judge

Brothers and Sisters, many people are short of guidance and understanding and they cannot see the realities that are in the road. It is for that reason that they follow the blind sign of unreality, but their hearts are sincere. Therefore, God says in the Holy Quran that when the judgment comes, He is not going to take a Holy Quran and judge the Jew or a Christian. He says that He is going to take a Torah and judge a Jew, a Bible to judge the Christian and the Holy Quran to judge a Muslim. Then He will speak through all of us through our conscience and He will judge us by our intentions and by our deeds. In judging us in this manner, we can clearly see that Allah knows how to judge. We must forever give glory to His mighty, powerful and absolute truth, and nothing is absolute but Allah.

Thank you for honoring us with your time to read these few words.
Your brother,

W.D. Muhammad