01/02/2005
IWDM Study Library
FIRST SUNDAY SPEECH 
Pt. 1
By Imam W. Deen Mohammed

Allahu Akbar.

Imam W. Deen Mohammed: Allahu Akbar. We say G-d is greater, greater than anything imaginable. G-d is greater. We greet you on this second day of the new year. And by the way, we wish you all blessed new year. We greet you in peace, as we always do in this religion of Islam, Our greeting is peace be unto you. As-Salaam-Alaikum.

 Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.

IWDM: We praise G-d, Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alamin, that is, we praise G-d, the Lord and cherisher of all the world, all of that is in the sky and all if that is down here. We witness that he is one and he cares about all of his creation and especially his special creation, the creation of human beings. And we witness that Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets, the last prophet. We salute him with the traditional salute, the prayer and the peace be upon him, in the Quranic language of Arabic, Quranic language, (Sallallahu alaihi wasallam wa mabad) and what follows of that traditional salute to the last prophet. We are grateful to Allah for our health and our presence here to address the radio and listening audience, and we appreciate you caring to tune in for this occasion, for this live broadcast. However, there is something that has to be done before announcement was overlooked and we do have an announcement. So I will now give way to Laila Mohammed, the supervisor at The Mosque Cares, she has some announcements.

S2: With G-d's name, the merciful benefactor and the merciful redeemer, As-Salaam-Alaikum, peace be unto you. Just briefly, I'm going to read this first announcement. The Mosque Cares is accepting donations for the victims of tsunami. 100% of your donations will be given towards this effort. Send your tax deductible donations to The Mosque Cares, PO Box 1061 Calumet City, Illinois 60409. Please put "tsunami" in the lower right corner of the envelope, cashier's checks or money orders only. Allahu Akbar. We also have on sale, trinkets made specially for The Mosque Cares from Mexico. These trinkets have 'Allahu Akbar' engraved on them as well as 'I love Allah'. They are made from a stone from Mexico in beautiful, natural colors. They are $5 each. Excuse me, I believe $5.95. Finally, the last announcement is, we are making plans for our African-American history program, the first Saturday of February, which is February 5th 2005. Details will be announced in the next Muslim general or you may call The Mosque Cares at 708-798-6750 for more information. Thank you. As-Salaam-Alaikum.

Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.

The Imam Mohammed has just said that the trinket price has a special lower rate at $3. Thank you. Al-hamdu-lillah.

[background conversation]

 Again, we greet you in peace, As-Salaam-Alaikum.

 Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.

IWDM: We praise G-d, the Lord sustainer of the world. He is most merciful, the merciful benefactor, the merciful redeemer, or as it's translated often, the magnificent, the merciful and the compassionate, the merciful. He is Ar-rahmaan Ar-raheem, those are the two names that we translate, both meaning the G-d of mercy, the G-d of mercy. Mercy, firstly, in that he gave us the life we have. He made us human and he made the world to support us, to support our life. And G-d says that he has made the earth to give us everything that we need for our life, all of our aspirations, G-d says, can be fulfilled on this earth. Praise be to Allah, that is, praise be to G-d. We are addressing community, the individual life in community, how we ought to build up our communities so that our souls will be pleased. The human soul cannot be pleased unless you do what you're created to do. When you do what you're created to do, then your soul will be pleased. But as long as you have not fulfilled what you were created to do, or are created for, then your soul will not be happy, and you can't be happy if your soul is empty and sad, and pain or hurting. G-d want us to care about ourselves. G-d want us to value ourselves.

Nothing communicated to man or brought to us as education or news has respected our value as G-d has respected our value. In the world today, there are publics, populations influenced... Their way of thinking is influenced by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are other publics influenced by Buddhism, Hinduism, and many other religions. Great numbers of people, the great majority of people on this planet are influenced by those major religions.

 And all of these religions place great value on a human person. And all of these religions invite the human person to wake up to the human value that they have by virtue of their creation, by virtue of their creation, that they were created human. If you were created human, you have special, special possibilities for your lives, possibilities that are not open to any other life but human life. Not even the angels, according to Revelation scripture, not even the angels have the freedom that human beings have, not even the angels have the freedom to alter creation and recreate, and get the great satisfaction in their souls and in their spirit and minds, the great satisfaction of doing things worthwhile, beautiful, and helpful to society, to community, not only of the community of the family of man, but to the community of animals as well.
 
 Man has made history, history. And if you would study history, you'll see that man has made progress. If you go get a book that is a thousand years old, and look at the environment, the human environment, its mysteries and etcetera, its diseases, etcetera, and look at it now, you'll see that man has made progress. If you get a history book, and read of what was existing for us just 200 or 300 years ago, you'll see we have made progress.

 I've been living in the Chicago area for most of my life and I know Chicago 70 years ago. I know Chicago 70 years ago, okay? When I was a baby in Chicago, that Chicago was not the Chicago that I look at now, it was backwards, it was a backwards city, when I look at the city of Chicago now. Traveling around in the city was not as convenient as it is now. The smell of the air in the city was not as nice as it is now because horse-drawn vehicles or horse-drawn carriages were going down the streets, and the horses were dropping their wastes on the streets, and you could smell that sometime as you walk or ride down the street.

 So, man is making progress. And how are we making progress? We're making progress by building upon that work that others did before us, building upon that work that that others did before us. Building upon that that was good for human life that others left with us. Building upon the progress and the material environment that others left with us. Fathers and mothers passing on their life story, passing on the life story of their mothers and fathers, passing on to their children, passing on the wisdom, and the good advice. Passing on the good nature to their children. This is how we have made progress. If we stop doing that, then we will not have progress. We start to go backwards instead of forward, we start to go down instead of up. This is life and this is history.

 So let us all recognize this, become aware of these things and think seriously about life. Don't make a joke of life. Don't take life for a joke. Don't make your life a life of play, a life of play. You're not babies anymore, I'm looking at an audience here of mostly grown-ups, very few children in here, very few babies that I'm looking at. So you don't make your life a life of play. G-d gave us play to train us for adult life and adult responsibilities.

 When you play, you use your muscles, you use your reflexes, you use your endurance and that's building you up to be able to have a good job, and manage a good job and not get tired so fast. It's building you up to have physical skills for an adult responsibility, for a life of adult responsibility. So don't even think playing children for fun, no, it's fun alright but G-d gave that fun to teach the children skills that they will need for an adult life of adult responsibility.

 We should understand these things and wake up. We should prepare ourselves to live in a world that offers a human being much more than the world of the past offered human beings. We should be thankful to G-d for that, if we don't believe in G-d, we should thank whatever we imagine is responsible for that. We should be thankful, the point is to be thankful. Be grateful, be thankful, be appreciative, and when you do that, you're soul will like you more. But when you don't do that, your soul won't even like you, and your soul will make you destroy yourself because your soul wanna see you punished. Your own soul hates that you disrespect the wonderful creation that G-d has made you. No other creature has been made free to manage his own life and manage his or her own nature. No other creature has been made free to do that.

 The animals can't manage their own nature, they can only live within and under their own nature, but a human being can manage his own nature. You can take your nature into your own hands as your responsibility, and you can improve upon your own nature. Every child that's born, is born crawling around or lying around and eventually crawling around on four like animals. No matter how beautiful the baby, no matter how high the parents were, and culture development or whatever, the baby comes here crawling around, lying around and crawling around like an animal, and not able to speak a language, it learns the language from us.

 And according to those who study the development of society, scientists, they say if you leave a child alone and not have that child supported by human beings or intelligent human beings, leave it alone, if it's found by animal and live with animals, it will think itself an animal and it will try to behave and even try to speak like the animals, make sounds like the animal that they're surviving on. History, this is history too, history have show us that. So don't think that G-d wants you to stay on your all fours, G-d created you to stand up on two feet. And there're monkeys that stand up on two feet, and apes, and other primates standing up on two feet, and there're some birds that stand up on two feet.

 I like to watch the penguin do their little shuffle, they walk on two feet. So two feet is not enough, to stand on two feet is not enough, but that's a start. You have to elevate yourself. And we learn from the wisdom of the ancient, we learn by way of revelation that if you care about yourself and you invest in yourself, you spend time on making your nature better, you spend time on making your intelligence better, you spend time on making your morals better. If you spend on yourself, if you spend on your own self to increase your own value, you can become the person that can bring relief and happiness, cleanliness, civilization, education. You can bring the beautiful life that we can imagine now in this time. Don't you know that was... Just 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago human beings couldn't even imagine living like human beings live now? They had no education, no science, they had no evidence that would give them that kind of mind and thinking.

 That they would think like we think with the opportunities that we're looking at and be able to proceed, to go forward with our life, like we can go forward with our lives. So we're a very special people. In spite of all the trouble you're facing and all the bad news you're getting, by way of television and whatever, in spite of all of that, we are blessed to be on this earth at this particular time. And sometimes, it takes disaster, natural disasters to wake some of us up. Look how the people who have suffered that quake in the ocean, the drowning, seeing a wave 30 feet high coming at them, that's frightening, that's enough to wake up the real person in that body and maybe that's what we need to happen to us sometimes. A great tragedy, to wake up the human person in our bodies because most of us are not respecting the human person in our own bodies. And we wonder how come we have so much trouble.

 We wonder how come we're suffering so much. We wonder how come drugs is being taken by everybody, because those bodies are only flesh, the human being is gone. Bring the human being back in to those bodies and you'll see a difference. You'll see a difference in the way they behave, you'll see a difference in the way they behave before the temptation of drugs, before the temptation of violence. When the human being is in the body the way he's supposed to be or the way she's supposed to be in the human body, we can handle drugs, we can handle the temptation of drugs, we can handle the temptation to become violent, we can handle the temptation to put our burden on everybody else. To go out pour our misery on the public, on the public transportation, on the public traffic. Drive so we get somebody killed. Drive so you deny them the opportunity to make a left turn at the corner. This is what's going on, rudeness, rudeness and cruelty on the streets. Motorists out there make another motorist miserable. This is a sad time for the state of human life in the human body.

 So come back home, to have that human mind come back into those flesh bodies you got. And appreciate that G-d has made you more valuable than any other living thing. We degrade ourselves. We put ourselves down, when we mistreat human life, especially our own. I respect a suicide bomber who has a cause, who thinks he will get attention to his cause by killing himself, and hurting his enemy by killing himself. I respect him more committing suicide in that fashion, although it's not permissible in our religion to do that. We leave that only to G-d. We never should take our own life. Only G-d can say when we die, not us. We don't say when we die. We didn't say when we should be born or when we will be born and we shouldn't say when we die. That's G-d's right and we take a right from G-d, and we have to be punished for that, if we do that.

 So we know that's terrible. But what is worse than that is those who are committing suicide taking drugs. Those who are committing suicide just beating up on people and killing people. They're committing suicide, for eventually somebody gonna beat up on them and kill them. And they're dying fast, many millions are dying all over the planet earth because of insane behaviour, suicidal behaviour. So this is a suicide that is ugly and more degrading than the suicide bomber. Let us wake up. It's wake up time.

 We should want to know something about this fine life that G-d has given to only humans. We should wanna know something about it. And every religion that I know, that is practiced or lived by great numbers of persons on this earth, they attend that need to bring to the consciousness of their following human values, human values. So that they will respect human life and the society can make progress. We cannot make progress if you don't respect human life. If we respect human life, we can make progress. If you don't respect human life in your home, you may be in an apartment or you may be in your own house, but if you have members there sharing that environment, sharing that space, if they don't respect human life, that space will be made a hell for all the members occupying that space.

 There's no difference for the town or the city. If the people are not respecting human life, then their behaviour is gonna make a hell for the rest of us, a hell for everybody. And really, that's what life is in most of these, the quarters of these big cities is hell, is hell, it's a virtual hell. The suffering that goes on on this earth today, it doesn't look any less frightening to me than what I learned that hell has for those who are going to hell. Hell is a place where you'll burn, you'll burn. And you'll burn and won't be burned up. Well, I see families miserable, mothers miserable, grandparents miserable seeing their sons and daughters on drugs, going to the grave yard, violent, violent prone, sick with immorality, sick with moral corruption. They're looking at that and can't do anything about it, that's hell fire. That's a fire that burns all the time. That's a fire that burns and won't stop burning, and we're living in it, and we are not burned up, but we just burn, burn, burn, burn, burn. With no end coming in sight, we think.

 Yes, but we can turn this thing around. Bring the human being, put the human being back in the body. Put the human being back in the body and we will see a great difference. That's what religion is all about, if it's about anything, that's what it's about. Religion is not about you going shouting and pretending holiness, and failing and carrying on. And go out and leave the place, leave the church or the temple or the mosque, or the whatever it is. You leave that and go right back to the same old life of the self destruction, making others miserable and making yourself miserable, that's not religion. Religion is beautiful. Religion is intelligent. Religion respects human life so much that it wants us to have the intelligence to manage human life for ourselves. This is Islam, this is Christianity, this is Judaism, this is Buddhism, this is Hinduism. Every religion wants you to have the intelligence to manage your own life, to manage your own self. And to get the satisfaction of seeing your life progress and knowing that your actions, your behaviour is what made that happen.

 I came up in bad circumstances, and I'm not the only leader that's doing well who came up in bad circumstances. I came up in bad neighborhood circumstances. I was a child and I could walk out two blocks and run into a prostitute or run into a wine head. Sometimes I didn't have to walk anywhere, as soon as I stepped outside, there was a prostitute or the wine head on the street, or sometimes a drug addict. And people who didn't care about themselves. For one thing they were victims of the instruments of the devil, like drugs and whiskey and stuff. But now, we are victims of the instruments of our own selves. We're not hooked on drugs. We are not so poor that we have to drown our misery with alcohol. We live in nice apartments. We have colored television. We're doing very well. But still, the human life is not respected. We're mistreating our own human life, mistreating the lives of other human beings, neighbors, our loved ones, our friends, our relatives. Parents abandoning their responsibility to their children, and I am not talking about responsibility to see that they have food on the table or to see that they have clothes to wear.

 The greater responsibility is to see that they have good sense, to see that they have intelligent human behaviour. And parents are abandoning that responsibility and letting the children do their own thing and say, "Well, what can you do? Everybody doin' it." Well, I'm telling you, those who think they'll go to hell by themselves or with a whole lot of company, you're wrong, you're wrong. You don't have company when you go to hell, you go to hell alone. And if you have company, the company increase the hell so, you're still alone. [laughter] You're still alone. Yeah, hell will surprise you. In fact I think it has surprised most of you already, because you don't even know you're in hell, [laughter] it slipped up on you.

 Yes, there are some religions that believe hell and heaven start in this life while we are physically living on this earth, some religions believe that. My religion is one of those religions, that believe that hell starts in this life and heaven also starts in this life. But you don't get the fullness of either until this life goes away. Then you'll wake up in another reality and you will get the fullness of your good life or the fullness of your bad life, it'll be completed for you. This is a belief that is in at least two of the major religions that I am aware of and maybe more than that. There are not many religions that are leading the publics of the world today, not that many religions, thus there are religions that you don't know of and there are many, thousands of them. They have very few following, very few followers. They don't have big followings, the big followings belong to the major religions.

 Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, these major religions, they have the majority of the people in the publics of the world, in the publics of the world. So, can we then say, "Well, the state of the world is to be blamed on these religions?" No. Because I read these religions, I've been studying these religions for 40 years or more, and I know these religions. And I know I can read the beauty of these religions, that there are various religions, I can read any of those books and I am put in a mind to respect what I'm reading, appreciate what I'm reading and put great value on what I am reading. If I can go into these religions, that is go to their holy books, and read this and get this kind of feeling, and get this kind of a lift, lift in spirit, it lifts my spirit when I see their beauty and their wisdom, and their purpose, their good, pure purpose, when I see it, it makes me feel good, it makes me happy and I am soothed by what I read. So, it's not the fault of these religions, it's the fault of the publics, the public life goes astray from the religions. And we, as individuals, get weak for the public life and we leave the good teaching the good family gave us, our good parents gave us and we join the public life, and go to hell.

 The public life, especially in the modern world... Or I should say not modern anymore, I should say the industrial world. The public life in the industrial world is a life that lets you know right away it's all about money, it's all about money. You step out in the public, you see people trying to get your money. As soon as you step out there, and you'll see some activity in the public, most likely somebody's trying to get your money. In our neighborhood, sometimes, certain quarters we live in, poor folks and people that have lost the respect for human life, we come out in our neighborhood and we can hardly find a dog, dogs are disappearing.

[laughter]

 I used to see a lot of dogs around Des Moines. Dogs are disappearing, everyday disappearing. Tonight, a prostitute gone, she ain't selling nothing, she ain't out selling no more, she gone. She done found another bag, or another gig. Yeah, this road is really strange now, it's really strange. Now, in order for us to appreciate human life, we have to approve, appreciate, community life. There's no way to appreciate your life, or human life, your individual life, without us and you, any of us appreciating community life. G-d didn't make us to live outside of community, G-d made us to live in communities. G-d didn't make us to go with the mind that life is all about me. G-d made us to go with the mind that life is indebted to my family, life is indebted to my community, life is indebted to my city, my state, my nation.

 Yes. That's how G-d makes us. G-d makes us with an intelligence to appreciate life in community, and to understand that that's the only way you can have life. "Oh, I don't want nothing, I'd rather just be by myself."
