1979-July-27

Bilalian News

Humanity Is One

Imam Wallace Deen Muhammad

With the Name Allah (In the Name of God), the Gracious, the Compassionate. As-Salaam-Alaikum

(Editor's note: The following are I excerpts from Imam  Wallace Deen  Muhammad's     address at the Radisson Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, Mo., June 23, 1979. —  Continued from last week.)

All praise is due to Almighty God, I 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:

Dear people, we have to live together, and that's what life is all about. God intended from the very beginning that human beings know this—that human life is one. And when life is one, trouble for any part of that life will eventually trouble all the life.

1 remember a time when dope was (primarily) a problem for Bilalians, the African-American, but it didn't take too long (to spread). We've been the victims of dope for 20 years — the only victims of dope. But all of a sudden we find Mexicans the victims of dope, Caucasians the victims of dope, even the very members of the   elite   class—their   sons,   their daughters, victims of dope.

The weak will spread, and they spread quietly. You can keep human beings separated and sheltered while you are spreading or giving freedom for evil to grow in a certain section or a certain section of the | world, but pretty soon it's going to creep in like a poisonous smoke and sift into the nose of those that you have been trying to protect.

So this world is one, we've seen it—dope was once our problem, dope became all of our problem. Slavery was once our problem, slavery became all of our problem. So dear people, we have to live together, we have to live as one and this is the purpose of the great prophets coming to us and preaching to us that we are part of one great reality. The whole universe is Muslim, meaning that God has made you to obey His will; every creature on this Earth, God has made that creature to obey His will.

We may escape the Judgment of God for many, many years—we might think for many, many lifetimes—but when time comes and God begins to enforce His will on our conscience, we don't think it's been a long time.

God is alive, He lives and does not die. They should know this. I'm telling you the situation; the circumstances have been created in America for great victories for man and his love for God and for his fellowman. You know, we look at the evils of our society and we see them isolated from the universal scheme.

But if we put all of these evils into a universal scheme, with the good that has happened (the bad and the good all together) in one frame or in one picture, we could see how things have progressed, how good forces have moved throughout the history of this young nation called the United States of America, and see how evil has moved over this duration, better now than 200 years, and how people have come to cast aside concepts, beliefs that were really grounded 'or rooted in their concepts of God.

But now in this present atmosphere, in this new world, this new society, the real America, people all over start coming alive to human conscience. They are conscious now and they know it's wrong, that it's an evil; they are demonstrating, they are protesting. But before America protested, I didn't hear any rumbling anywhere.

People only cried out when you took dollars out of their pockets or when you lynched a member of their family. The poor African-American was being lynched, burned, brutally killed throughout America and some other places of the world, and no rescue crew came, no help came, no one came to say, stop this thing. No one said, we will demonstrate against you, we protest this, we will fight you. The same people now want us to stand up and follow them and battle for them, but we've got to fight at home.

"We are all human beings—come get us out of the noose, come take us down from the tree, come fight our political wars" (they say). No, we're not going to have any local call for help, no one answered our local call for help. We answer the universal call for help; whatever man is crying for universally, that's what I support. We don't have time to go and get people out of their small political fires. We have to unite together to free the minds of human beings.

For a long time we have known that the slavery, the death of the human being is a mental death. We were taught this long before I became your Imam. The words of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad comes to my mind: "the mentally dead" (as he referred to African-Americans).

Genesis speaks of Adam as falling into a deep sleep. It is said Adam fell into a deep sleep and the sin of Adam brought death to Adam, but we never read in Genesis exactly when that death took place. In fact, you get the feeling that Adam continued to live, he died a natural death. God said, (in Genesis) sin is death. The moment you disobey My orders to stay away from the tree of sin and eat of that tree, you will surely die. So I thought of this and I said well it is clear to me that the Bible Genesis is saying the same thing that Professor Fard Muhammad said to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The death here is mental death.

Then I recalled the Quranic verse very clear, that says Adam forgot. Now that's a mental thing—he forgot. That's what brought about his fall, he forgot. We (too) forget ourselves. America forgot herself and she became a spoiled, arrogant, racist, materialistic brat.

But over the past few years America has been trying to remember herself—and what makes you remember yourself? When your false self becomes "hell" to you, you will start trying to remember your true self.

We have a great job to do and we can't do it alone. Man has been growing in the world, and his work and products have been growing in the world. Man has filled the world up with his own creation and he has become a prisoner in his own environment. He has put himself in the dark with his own intellect and with his own hands. The pressures of his own work now drive him to the mental institution and give the psychoanalyst, the psychiatrist too much work to do.

Dear people, it is time to come back to respect for our Creator. Creator connects us with nature and nature connects us with the reality of our own being. We may imagine ourselves to be super-creatures; we may imagine ourselves to be black supremacists, white supremacists; we may imagine ourselves to be self-righteous Christians, self-righteous Muslims or Jewish geniuses. We should come to know what we are as individuals naturally.

You know the Jews pat themselves on the back sometimes. The Christian doesn't pat himself, he just reminds you that you're blessed to be in America. And the Muslim is still trying to find the Kaabah. So I think it is the works of our own hands tormenting us in this modern day and time. I think the Muslim is going to find his way back to the Kaabah, and when he finds his way back, he's going to tell the whole world what the Kaabah is. When he does, the whole world is going to shake his hand and say, "Look here, you're a human being after all. You're all right baby, you're my man."

What I'm saying is that we have allowed the Sisyphus tendency in us—the tendency to follow unstructured vision of life—we have allowed that tendency to take us away from the fundamental structure of our faith. When we come back to the fundamental structure of our faith, we will see that God has intended that all of us live together and work together.

Allah says this in the Quran, and I take this as an instruction to cooperate with Christians and Jews as a Muslim. It is not an instruction that comes directly in that way, but nevertheless, an instruction. God says that if he had not raised up one group of people to check another group of people, their blind aggression, the monasteries, synagogues, churches and mosques in which the name of God is held sacred, precious, would have been trampled down. But God is telling us that we have to hold each others' place of worship sacred and be willing to physically take the one who disrespects the sacredness of our Holy Places, in a war to stop their aggression, to stop their desecration of these Holy Places. The Muslims should fight for the Christian's church, the Muslims should fight for the Jewish synagogue, and that's an invitation to the Christians and Jews to do the same thing for the Muslim Holy Places.

It so happens that today is the day that we observe the ascension of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). God took him up in a night visit or vision from the Holy Place or the Holy Mosque in Mecca and carried him in this night vision or night visit up into the heavens and brought him down at the Holy Mosque, the place of the Holy Sepulcher, where the Mosque of Jerusalem is now. There is a mosque there because a great Caliph built a mosque there, or a mosque was built in his name there: but the church is still there, too.
Why? Because the great Islamic leaders wanted to preserve the church for the Christians. The Wailing Wall is still there too. Why? Because the Muslims want to preserve that for the people who hold it as sacred; it's still there, too.

Muslims have dominated that part of the world for most of the history since the advent of Al-Islam under Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him and the righteous servants. They have dominated that area, but they have not destroyed churches, they have not destroyed the remains of the temple because our religion teaches respect for each other's Holy Places. But the Muslims just recently have witnessed the desecration of the Holy Mosque that was built in Jerusalem; the Mosque of Al Aqsa was set afire, the Holy Place of the Muslims has been desecrated.

We all feel for each other and if we want brotherhood in the world, if we want Christians and Muslims to come together, then we have to be more honest, we have to be more just towards each other, we have to feel for the Arabs in Arabia, for the Palestinians in Palestine—we have to feel for them.

I appreciate the new sentiment that's growing in America. I appreciate the fair-handedness of President Carter. I appreciate him wrestling very tediously with the Middle East problem, and I appreciate the press, at least the good press that we get that has also shown that the Palestinians have rights too.

The Palestinian has been denied his rights, and his case is a little more fresh than the claims of the Jews to a land that was supposedly given to them better than a thousand years ago. Or better than 2,000 years or maybe near 3,000 years ago, and they are still holding to that old claim. The parchment has been rotted away, it's all gone and they have printed new paper many, many times, and they are still holding to those old claims.

And here is the Palestinian who had to be pushed aside because the great power didn't have room for the Jews in their own country. Because they, themselves, had a problem with the Jews in their own country and the Palestinian had to get up out of his bed and give his home to a newcomer who said, I am a Jew. this land belonged to me about 3,000 years ago and I've come back in order to take it, to occupy it.

These are some of the things that we are going to have to come to grips with; and believe me the most ignorant people in the world regarding what is happening in the Middle East and in other parts of the world are the Bilalians or African-American people. We carry hate and don't even know where it came from; we carry evil prejudices and don't even know where they came from.

Dear people, this kind of world will not bring in the new world that we are after. We have to come into a world that is moved by the force of truth, righteousness, decency. We have to listen to our hearts more than we listen to the brainwashing we have been getting. We have to listen to our hearts.

Our world has been filled with lies, brainwashing, that have not been done to serve you or me, the Caucasians or the blacks, but it has been done just to protect the material interest of some materialistic people who don't mind seeing the concept of religion as foreign, or don't mind seeing the concept of humanity ruined. They don't care, they live by convenience. They are only counting dollars in the banks and they are not worrying about what's happening to the moral nature, the spiritual nature of the human being or even the rational nature of the human being.

They tell us to become irrational crazy, cattle people, wild beasts. They don't care. They ask the psychiatrist, they ask the social psychologist how they should deal with this problem.

So the materialist goes to the political psychologist and to the social psychologist and they write him up a prescription to contain you. When your life becomes so miserable for you that you become a rabid beast they say, "Oh, yes, he looks like nothing can contain him. We brought our National Guard, they beat their heads with sticks, they shot them down, nothing will bring them back to their senses.''

They say, "Don't worry, we don't have to bring them back to their senses. They are good like they are; they buy plenty merchandise without thinking about it. We want to leave them just as they are-bring a musician, the dope pusher, the chemist and the fashion designer, and pretty soon you will see they will be harmless sheep again."

There we go, skipping down the street—all of our aspirations, social goals forgotten. We have reached the destiny, sitting behind a Mercedes Benz wheel, dressed up with thousand-dollar mink covers on the seat, alligator leather...maybe snake leather on the feet, or some of us tipping down the street with no clothes at all. Others with a pair of blue jeans cut off at the knees and slippers; a cross or some bones around our neck and we are happy in our new thing.

What am I trying to get at? I'm trying to get at this: There are not many ways to live if you want to live as a human being. There are very few ways, in fact, there's only one way to live if you expect to live as a human being and that is as God created us to live, that's the only way to live. If you lose respect for Creator, eventually you are going to lose your real connection with the reality all about you because they are tied together.

God has revealed to us the concept, the pure concept of God: one God and Creator of everything— that is His reality. He has revealed to us that reality to save us from a life of falsehood, a life of self-destruction. He has revealed that to bring us in touch with reality. God is one Creator, everything else is creation and you have your place in creation, and God has made the nature of the creation. If you get out of that nature, it's going to punish you, if you stay in that nature, it, is going to reward you. This is the way God has made His creation.

The human being is a marvelous creature. God has given him nature  that  punishes  him,  brings him back to the path even when his ears have become dead to the voice of  a  call  from God. Eventually nature itself will force us to come back to the path of God, and that's what we are witnessing in America.

Allah is the perfect being. Allah is all righteous, truthful no in perfections in Allah.    Allah Supreme and Perfect without an imperfections.

O Allah. Make as of those who purify themselves and of those who repent, and guide us in your path Amen.                    

Peace be to you
Your brother in service to Allah
Wallace Deen Muhammad

(To be continued)