2004/05/02
IWDM Study Library
Our Life in Community and Prayer
Pt. 2
By Imam W. Deen Mohammed


00:00 Imam W. Deen Mohammed: That's why Islam is called the religion of the original nature.
Deen-al-Fitra-fitrata-llahi allatee fataran-naasa alaihaa,(30:30)
[foreign language]

00:11 IWDM: It is the religion of the original nature, the pattern upon which God patterned all civilized societies. And they didn't lose their civilized standards until they left that pattern. Yes. And that brings us back to prayer. Where it is said, "No people have fallen until they left off their devotion to prayer, abandoned their devotion to prayer." Now, how is it that prayer is gonna preserve my original life pattern? The blueprint for me being successful as a human being and as a human people, how is prayer going to help that? Prayer is sincere, prayer, when it's offered to the higher authority, not to a popular figure, not to somebody because he's popular or to some thing because it excites my imagination, but to the one that I reason to be the creator of everything. The one to who I owe my own good existence, and my own good life and future. That's the one.

01:48 IWDM: When you find that one, just that connection alone preserves the pattern for our life, our behavior, our future. It preserves that pattern. Just consciousness and faith in that high authority to whom we owe everything good. Our parents before us, this generation and our children to come, everything we owe it to him. Everything that we're able to produce out of the earth, we owe him for that. When we come to that kind of thinking and we pray to that one, we try to remember him. We don't wanna forget him. We don't wanna go to bed without recalling him and thanking him. We don't wanna get up and open our eyes on the world without thanking him. This is your world. We didn't make it for ourselves. We couldn't have created these things. A person like that keeping in mind that God created will not lose their excellent human nature and the blueprint for their life and future in that nature made by God himself. He says, "Remember me and I will remember you." It doesn't mean the way we remember things. It means that "If you keep your life for me, I will keep your life for you."

[background conversation]

03:27 S?: Takbir! 

03:27 S?: Allahu Akbar! 

03:27 IWDM: Allah Akbar, God is greater. Oh, he's the greatest really, man. Not greater, the greatest. Well, that's Trinitarian thinking and I'm a Muslim. God is greater. Now, whatever you're thinking about, he's greater.

[background conversation]

03:57 IWDM: This bring us to human rights. The best of life that God created you for, is your inheritance. Why do you have to use this language "inheritance?" Because of Satan, the enemy of man. He wants to take human beings out of that life so he can have that production. He can have not only their life, but have their production. He's more interested in what you can produce, your production. You go and make a salary and you don't have any plan for your family that requires you to invest some of that money into your family. You're gonna establish a business, you're making thousands, maybe millions in a year. But you don't have any plans to use that money and improve life in your neighborhood, conditions in your neighborhood. You're just making it. Well, there's somebody that has use for it, a plan for it. If you don't wake up to your own value, resources, and that old resources should go. If you don't wake up good, there's somebody with a plan for it. That's Satan, that's Satan. "Oh, he talks about the devil like he's real." Not only is he real, but in Islam we're told in our holy book that hell is a reality. To let you know there's no dream. Although you can catch hell while sleeping, but hell is real. And [05:44]Al-narul-haqq, the hellfire is reality. It's real. That's in the Quran, in our holy book.

05:58 IWDM: Jesus Christ, peace be on him. I read the gospel, I went to churches, and I read the gospel as a young man. And I began to pay attention to what my family expected of me, my father, my mother, my sisters, my brothers. Some of them here right now, my sisters and brothers. My brother. My sister's not here. I have one sister, she's not here. She's in the home, a home for the elderly. And I wish I was with her right now. And I will be with her, I hope, soon. But my brother's here, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than one of my brothers was here. My brother, Elijah, I saw as I was coming in. And I didn't pay no attention as a boy coming up to what they said about me. I just heard it, what they said just went into' my mind, passed right through my mind.

07:00 IWDM: I was an obedient child, always obedient. Very obedient. Not only did I obey my parents, I obeyed my sister. My sister tell me something to do, I obeyed her. If she led me wrong, it was her fault. I was obedient. And she didn't lead me wrong. One time she pulled a trick on me just for fun. She knew how crazy I was about Momma's lemon cream pies. [chuckle] In fact, I got tricked twice. One time she was the cause of me being tricked. Another time, I tricked myself.

[laughter]

07:50 IWDM: How I tricked myself, my mother would sometime make the custard, and she would wait till the next day or wait till when she wanted to do it. She did, she put the custard in the pie, most likely the next day, in the crust and put it in the oven. And I liked it so much, I looked in the refrigerator and I saw a bowl and it looked like that custard, lemon cream pie custard. Not that stuff you buy from these fast food places, not that kind of lemon cream pie. The kind of lemon cream pie you go to Georgia to get.

[laughter]

08:29 IWDM: They make it from scratch and they cook the custard in a double boil to keep from sticking. One pot got the water in it, the other pot's sitting over that pot to keep it from sticking. That's the lemon cream pie I'm talking about. Now you know it's good, right? So anyway, I looked in there and I saw this in the bowl, I just grabbed it. [chuckle] It was the fat from some lamb she had cooked. [laughter] And she had put turmeric in it or something like that. It looked just like lemon cream pie custard. I got my punishment for doing that. Yeah, that taste in my mouth sure punished me, when I was expecting the custard taste. Oh boy, that was punishing. It was like a beautiful sweet girl and then...

[laughter]

09:43 IWDM: And you say, "What have I got myself into?" [chuckle] Punishment. Punishment. Punishment. So anyway, my sister, she knew I liked that custard, knew I liked that lemon cream pie. And she took a spoon and handed me something that looked just like the custard. Now this was much earlier now. So I'm a teenager now when I'm stealing that custard out of my mother's refrigerator, trying to anyway, thinking I was going to get it. She put the spoon into my mouth and I'm thinking it's custard. She had to tell me about this because I doubt if I was three years old. Probably two years old, around that age. She put it into my mouth and she told me about it more than once. She said, "You should see your little face, frowned up." [chuckle] And it was funny to her. But I was obedient, and she used to tell other people how obedient I was. She said, "I could tell Wallace to sit over against the wall on the floor." She said, "He'd sit there all day long." Say, "He wouldn't move until I'd tell him he could move."

10:53 IWDM: So obedience was in my nature. God created me with obedience in my nature. Strong obedience in my nature. You all should know your imam. Imam's a very special guy. And he didn't make himself this way. Left up to me, I'd be with that girl. First girl I fell in love with, I'd be at her house right now. But it 'ain't left up to me. I have to do what I was created for. Yeah. So anyway, and I want no attention to myself. That's not to make you look at me any differently. No attention to myself. Only to what Allah wants. That's all I want you to see is what Allah wants for us. Yes.

11:40 IWDM: So getting back away from that and back to prayer. So prayer is more than begging God. Prayer is more than responding or acting out of fear, or out of even admiration of love or praise for God. Prayer is more than that. Although we know that this is the nature of the human soul to express itself like that. But this nature is put in us to connect us with Creator. And once we connect with Creator, if we are thinking beings and the Quran puts more, very, very strong emphasis on thinking. Thinking. Nothing is stressed more in the Quran than the exercise of the mind. Thinking to find it's purpose and its obedience that it was created for, or begins. It's God, it's Lord. The Creator. Yes. So prayer is to bring us to eventually see with our minds how we are to identify human life, and how we are to protect it for it's great future as the inheritor of all that God has created for the good of living things. Yes. God in the Quran, He says, "Yes, you are going to inherit a garden of paradise. But don't think it's up there only," says, "It extends throughout the skies and the earth." Yes. Throughout the skies and the earth.

14:04 IWDM: Man with his imagination and his hopes, his dreams, have traveled with his thoughts, with his good thoughts, out into space. And if he never thought on space, he would have never reach space. But thinking on space enabled him to create things using the power, and the tools, and the substances God gave us in making the earth, man got out of the earth those tools, those powers, those substances and he put it together and made a ship with power to jump up through the spaces of earth, through the skies around the earth. And go beyond the gravity pull or the gravity belt of the earth. Escape it and go out and penetrate the space beyond the gravitation of earth and reach the moon and other bodies up in the sky. Man is only doing what God created him for. Man is only doing what God said he could do. And where is the black leadership? Where is the African leadership? Where is the African-American leadership to connect us with that kind of thinking, so that our society of African-Americans, our communities of African-American can be moving in the road of progress for the destiny of man, not just for the destiny of a Super Fly. He ain't going far. Destiny of a drug pusher, a drug addict, a woman chaser, a lover of big cars, expensive cars, a show off, want to show off his diamonds and his long coats.

16:05 IWDM: No, that definitely is short. They got a decorated casket for him already. The funeral home man gonna make $50,000 on him 'cause he wants the casket to be bedecked with diamonds, maybe. That's foolishness. God didn't create you to think in no small terms. God created every man, woman and child to think in big terms. This world is big, and this world engages your mind. It touches your thinking, it touches your thinking, and it cause you to look at it and admire it and think about it. Like Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. When we look up at the Heavens we see a bigger world than the one we have on earth. We see a world of worlds. We see space that we can't measure. We see distances that we can't reach. We see something that invites our mind to grow, to expand, to think bigger. And we see a great big world of order, of laws, of constant behavior. Not behaviors changing, going from one extreme to another like these fads that we live by.

17:48 IWDM: You wanna cover your nakedness in this season of the fashions. Of the fashions, the creators of the fashions. And in another season you wanna take everything off. You are modest in one season of the fashion makers, and you are brazen, very indecent in another season of the fashion makers. So you are not even having constant morality. Your morality lives and dies. Comes in and lives and then is killed for disobedience to God, and for shameful behavior. Huh? Yes. So when the prayer, it's mentioned in the Lord's Prayer, "Give us on this earth as it is in heaven. Thy kingdom come." Meaning give us an establishment on this earth. A way to live with each other on this earth. Like the order and the laws that are constant in the heavens. And the prayer says, that is your will God. Because you made that up there and you made this down here. But we've left the order that is universal. For the fads that are local and temporary.

19:24 IWDM: So in this time on earth, a preacher that is not preaching the return to the best of human life, and is not trying get to organize and love one another at home, and love one another in the neighborhood, and support each other in all good doings, and be the friend of your brother and sister and your friend. And don't support each other in bad doings and bad behavior, just to keep friendship. Don't do that. This time is too critical for any of us to turn our eyes or attention away from self-destruction. Whether it is in us, or in another person, or in our neighborhood, it's too critical for us to turn our eyes from self-destruction.

20:16 IWDM: And we are going to self-destruction when we let every other neighborhood Polish, Danish, Irish, no matter what it is, Jewish, every other neighborhood stands up on its own feet, and it supplies its people, the neighbors, with the goods that that particular people are creating, are producing. And you come into African-American neighborhood, and we're leaving it all to others. This is a shame on our race. How can the African in Africa have any spirit over there to take responsibility for his life and how he is living it, when he looks to the greatest country in the world, in terms of freedom to produce, freedom to get and have and to produce more? This is the greatest country on earth. He looks at the greatest country on earth and he sees his flesh called 'African-Americans', or 'blacks' in America, he sees us in our neighborhoods, and we have no more responsibility in our neighborhood as we we did on the plantations.

21:22 IWDM: The plantations belonged to the slave master, not us. So we couldn't put stores and businesses to serve us on the plantation. Now we're in these cities and our neighborhoods are showing that we're producing nothing. Nothing. We just have a neighborhood to sleep and eat in and have sex in, but leave all the structures to other people. That's got to stop! Even if we have to declare a revolution, and stop beating and killing blacks in America. And I'm serious. And I might be off the air, but I want you to know I'm a peaceful man. I will search for every other answer. I will search for answers all night and day, for weeks and months and years before I shed blood. But I'll tell you the truth, I'm ready to shed blood. I am. I'm ready to kill people for my inheritance. And thank you very much. Peace. As-Salaam Alaikum.

[applause]

22:50 IWDM: He came up to my hand real slow. I told him, I said, "This is a dangerous hand you're shaking. [laughter] You might lose your job." He's hired downtown. That's my brother see. I thought I had another brother here. This is my brother Jabba. We all should know Jabba. Jabba Mohammed is here. We thank you, and we have activities. Dinner too, I think. So please enjoy, do some shopping, got excellent clothing. We got beautiful shirts for big guys too. Big guys, big guys that they got about three or four average person's weight, and just want their weight. Yeah. So we got those XXXs, whatever they call them. And they are made by members of our community. There's a sister and her daughter. Her daughter is even a senior citizen almost. They're both up in age, but they have had a factory now for better than five years. And I think been in the business for maybe almost 10 years or more. And they make excellent garments and they make 'em for prices that we can afford. So they have excellent shirts, big shirts, and regular size shirts. And I believe they're selling for promotion price right now, $19.95. Leisure suits for 49 something and a little bigger or a better grade or bigger... 59, around $59, 59.95 or something like that. And we have business tie suits imported from Asia and the price is excellent. Now, if you [24:47]want the price to go down, I won't help you out that's not going to happen. This is a promotion price...
