1979-August-3

Bilalian News

Humanity Is One

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 front Imam Wallace Deen Muhammad's 4th Sunday address delivered at the Radisson Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, MO., June 23, 1979—Continued from the last two weeks.)

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:

When I became the Imam, I looked around the mosque — they were called temples then, they had stopped calling them mosques. For almost 40 years they were called temples. In the middle '50s the Honorable Elijah Muhammad called them mosques, then they went back to temples. Now that shows that we didn't exactly know what we were doing.

When I became the Imam, I said, "What is this?" I used to sit with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and his ministers. I was one of them, I was over Philadelphia. I didn't see any pimps among the ministers.

"What is this?" Who is this dude over here wearing the high heeled leather boots and Sherwood Forest tights, a big old beaver hat and all of this? We took people like that and brought them back to nature.

How did, they get among us? Look — if God has given the moral force of the old black Nation of Islam the freedom to overcome a demoralizing trend that set hi with the Super Fly days, don't you know, America, that's a sign there is no evil in society too big for a right thinking human being to overcome?

The moral life of the human being is spiritual. There is no way for us to have moral strength and moral stability without us having spiritual life also. Moral life and spiritual life are one and the same for the human being. That was| discovered a long time ago by ancient religious men.

We think that a lot of our modern science is modern, but" much of it is very ancient. Many thousands of years ago,;' faithful religious people discovered that water was a good symbol for the moral and spiritual elements in the human being. They found that water was really composed of the same elements that are found in the air — hydrogen and oxygen.

God doesn't want us to remain oxygen in water form always. He wants it to become aggressive, and if you bring those elements into a gas, it becomes aggressive. The wind will move from one side of the world to another. The wind can take the water and carry it to the land that needs it.

This is scripture. In fact, scripture gives it in more beautiful poetic language than I can give it. God has shown man in ancient times, long before we discovered the world all over again, that his spiritual and moral life is one.

When we see the water, we think of moral life. We use the water to clean, we use the water for ablution — the Christians use it for baptism. But we have to come into the spirit, we have to become aggressive.

There are many people who will stay in the water of religion. They say, "Oh yes, I have my religion, but it belongs in the church. When I go to work, I leave it there. I sell dope because my religion belongs in the church not in my business."

Muslims say, "Yes, I sell pork. This is a thing between me and God." The Jew has a greater reputation for that.

We have to understand our fundamental nature. We have to understand the unique nature that is universal for all human beings. It is moral, it is spiritual.

The intelligence just doesn't come to light until we respect the moral element in human life. If we don't respect the moral element, the intelligence works against itself and we think we are progressing rationally, and wake up to discover we have created a monster with our rational minds. A monster for us to deal with.

We all should try to retain that element of moral consciousness in us. We should feed it, we should cultivate it, we should do what Allah instructs us to do in the Quran — give to your soul, spend on your soul, spend on the moral, spiritual development of your soul.

How powerful a revelation this is. When you spend, you have to give up something. A lot of us don't like to spend on things that don't give us material gain right away so we won't spend on our moral development because we don't want to take time from all of this money and other things.

We forget our moral development and pretty soon the world is oppressing all of us. Then the masses of the people rise up under the knock of nature on their conscience and say, "Nixon is a beast." They say the "system is wrong, the institutions must be remade."

Man doesn't have to live in such a dilemma. God has sent Prophets to bring us out of that dilemma, to guide us to logical religion, to structure our spiritual and moral life in a sound, rational way.

I wouldn't be a Muslim if I didn't say this. The Quran is the book to guide all of us back to the proper structuring of our spiritual and moral life — back to sound religion.

We have the ascension of the Holy Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, as a good sign. I have asked all Muslims to look at it and accept it and be proud that you are the newest in the path of God and nevertheless the oldest at the same time; that the old time religion has come back and it has come back to the newest community.

There is a saying in the old lessons of the Nation of Islam that goes like this — in a kind of catechism. It says, "The roots of civilization are in Arabia at the Holy City of Mecca... where civilization first started when the planet was found."

Without the presence of Fard Muhammad — called Professor Wallace Fard, Professor W.D. Fard, W.D. Fard Muhammad — many names; without him here to guide us with his own hands, God has blessed us to see the light of truth, and now the symbolism, wherever it is.

It might be in the old song, "Do the Camel Walk." It might be in the history of Yacub — the mystical teachings of the island of Patmos, creation of the Caucasian race by a big-headed black scientist at the age of 6 who could see this idea at that very young age. It might be in the Bible or it might be somewhere else.

The light comes because nature has risen. This is what I have been waiting for, the very creation of God.

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

O Allah. Make us 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