1981-June-12

Bilalian News

America The Beautiful and the Beast: Part 2

Imam Deen Muhammad

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from Imam Warith Deen Muhammad's publication. ''As The Light Shineth From The East. " Bilalian News takes this opportunity to provide its reading public with brief glimpses of this historical work. We not only recommend that everyone purchase a personal copy, but also additional copies for friends and relatives — continued from last week.)

It didn't say righteousness is the Muslim. The Muslim should be righteous if he is in accord with his Muslim nature and with the guidance given. But if he wants to rebel, he's free. God says, in the Quran, that if He had wanted to make people one community life, He could have done so. He is the God, the Creator, and has power over everything. If He wanted to. He could make us all one in the same community life. We all would be making Salat (Prayer) and facing the Ka'abah and we all would be practicing universal brotherhood. We would have no racism. We would have the true Al-Islamic concept. God said, if He wanted to bring it about. He could have done so.

And again God says in the Quran that I have made you tribes and families so that you would recognize each other and not despise each other. The Quran plainly tells us that superiority or righteousness, or piety is not to be looked for under skin color or under a religious label. It's a content that God makes. It should be the Muslim conscience. But, sometimes Muslims are not in agreement with their conscience.

So, if history shows me that an Arab or some Arabs or hundreds of thousands of Arabs were involved in the slave traffic, that would not change my faith. That would not make me walk any slower toward my Arab brother who is a Muslim. I will keep my same love and appreciation for my Muslim Arab brother. I will keep my same devotion to Allah. I will keep my eyes and my whole self turned toward the Ka'abah at Mecca - - I don't care what the Arabs did or what they do.

No Arab could ever do those things and come out with the Holy Quran in his arms. Question those who told you that the Arabs did those things. Question their history and see the evil things that they did with the Bible in their arms. There are pictures right now of them standing having parties, smoking, drinking, laughing and celebrating at the sight of a poor Bilalian being burned up at the stake or lynched on the tree. And there are pictures right now of some preacher in their midst holding a Bible under his arm.

I'm not trying to say the Christian is bad, but I'm saying you shouldn't throw stones if you live in glass houses. And I've just pulled out a little bit of the trash that's under your rug.

Dear beloved people, our concern with ethnic heritage survival is merely an expression of a need for ethnic or racial self-image, the need for that kind of image to grow with our real life history. Our four centuries in this country created a longing and a yearning. For over four centuries the desire for slave labor in the new world uprooted the captured and left the descendants, you and me, confused and reaching out in the empty darkness for a living connection, for true-to-life history and traditions, for ethnic and ancestral roots. Or in Bible language, for a place again in their own vine and fig tree. Let us first, preserve in our own minds a clear picture of those human and honorable aspirations that formed the force which kept the struggle for true-to-life history and self-image in us.

The traumatic separation of our family life from our ancestral life gave us to a miserable, anguishing loneliness. At the root of our whining and calling out is the natural need to belong. The need to have the common soil of human beings presented before the racist, before us and before everybody, and show our equal identity in that common human soil. That's what we've been yearning for. That is the need that has been tormenting us and making us feel empty, lonely and out of doors in America.