2002 January 11th to January 18th

Muslim Journal

"A Day" In The Judgment

Imam W. Deen Mohammed


(The following address, given here in excerpts, was presented by Imam W. Been Mohammed in San Francisco, Calif., for the San Francisco Muslim Community Center's Grand Iftar Buffet Building Fundraiser and Public Address on Nov. 18, 2001.)

Praise be to G-d, the Lord and Cherisher of all the worlds. We witness that He is One, the Creator of all the worlds, the heavens and the earth. And we witness that Muhammed, to whom the Qur'an was revealed about 14 centuries and more ago, is the Seal of the Prophets.


To Know The Prophet Is To Know Us

It states of him in our Holy Book, the Qur'an, that he is the unschooled Messenger/ Prophet mentioned in the Bible, in the Torah or Gospel, what is now called the Old Testament and New Testament. He is mentioned as one coming as the leader of purification, to take the yoke of all forms of slavery off from our backs  not just the enslavement of the human body, but also the enslavement of the human intellect and the total life that G-d intended for the human being to have on this planet earth.

It is said also of the Prophet of the Qur'an the last revealed Book to the world, that he is not sent to be any except a mercy to all the worlds. That wonderful man, that G-d also says of him: "Surely, you will find him to be an excellent model to emulate, for any who believes in G-d and believes they have to be accountable to that G-d one day."

I haven't told you those things that are common knowledge in the Muslim public, just to tell you about the Prophet, prayers and peace be on him. I told you these things about him order to tell you about us. We are to be, also, people with charity in our heart's for all people, with a desire in hearts to help all people to the best life that G-d created us for.

It is to tell you that our Prophet, as given by G-d is our Holy Book, as a mercy to all the worlds, we who follow him must also have it in our spirits and in our hearts to be a mercy to all the worlds. G-d did not ask any less of us than He asked of the model that He established for us to emulate. Again, upon the Prophet be the prayers and the peace.


Times Of Trouble, Times Of Hope

We are living in times of trouble and sadness but also the time of hope and happiness. But I am aware of the struggle of the people of faith over the centuries behind us, back to the days of Muhammed the Prophet, when he lived on this earth as a physical person and carried out his responsibilities to Almighty G-d.

I see great progress for the religious communities on the earth, even in the days of the Prophet and even in the good days of the 500 year life of Muslim rule in Spain that witnessed intellectual Jews and intellectual Muslims scientific minded Jews and Muslims  working together to do what the American people have done on this continent in this part of the world.

It was to improve the material conditions in the lives of the people and to improve the social conditions in the lives of the people, where they could have "an abundance" as the Christians would say: "To have life and to have it abundantly."

We thank G-d for these times  a time of trouble for families trying to hold themselves together, a time of trouble for cities to keep civilized behavior on our streets, a troubled time for the world to keep national borders safe. But also it is a time of great rejoicing', when we sea the leaders of Islam and the leaders of Christianity and the leaders of Judaism and Buddhism and other religions all wanting to sit down and dialogue, to get to know each other better.

G-d says one of the purposes of Him creating human beings with this freedom of will, freedom of life that we have, is for us to get to know one another. So this is a good time and a bad time. It is a dreadful time and a time to brighten up your faces and have hope for a better future. I So I call it the small day, if not the big day, of religion.


A Day Of Judgment

Our Holy Book, the day of religion is the Day of Judgment. I believe that this is "a day" of Judgment for the whole world. Scriptures before Qur'an and the Qur'an tell us that this time will be a time of great trouble, of great sadness, of weeping and moaning and groaning, insane behavior. Scripture told us this hundreds of years before it happened here, and that also it would be a Day of Rejoicing.

It is a great and dreadful day. It is great in all the wonders and the beauty that the human soul needs and dreadful because of the extremes of insane behavior. Many of us failed to read the scripture and see the whole picture that G-d is giving to us of the Last Day, the Day of Judgment.

This is a day of rejoicing for the people who are straight, sincere and innocent and having no bad intentions against anybody. And it is a dreadful day for those who are out of their human form that G-d created them to be in. It is the form that G-d shows us every time we have a new baby coming from its mother, nothing but an innocent life there. There is no Marquis DeSade. There is no Al Capone. There is no criminal in the nursery, nothing there but innocent babies. They come into the world of sin and become bad.


Believers In Mankind

Christians think we were born in sin. I know I wasn't born in sin. I was born good. Then I thought, they don't mean that, really. They mean we were born into a sinful world, into the sins of those who sin. But we are not created sinners. G-d created nothing but Muslims, and the Christians will say, "Christ like" people.

This is a great time for us, a time for rejoicing and to brighten up our hopes and have faith not only in G-d but as Dr. Schuller said also faith in one another, to believe in one another, to believe in mankind. We are required to believe in G-d and to believe in His Messenger, and we also are required to believe in each other. Belief in Islam comes from the word for "to trust." Isn't that the essence of belief or faith? Trust.

How can you have strong faith, when you have strong doubts? This is a time to get rid of our doubts that stand in the way of us believing in our G-d. Christians who believe in G-d should believe even stronger in G-d today, because there are so many evidences in this present world to support us believing in G-d.

We don't have the prophets of old to speak to us and address the mysteries and the unknown and tell us of miracles too big for the perception of man to grasp totally. We don't have that kind of mind in the world any more, for the world has been changed by scientific development and thinking.

Our minds are not sensitive any more to mysteries like the earlier man's mind was. Our minds now are more rational, more scientific and less of a tendency to look for unexplainable causes to explain what is happening and what we are seeing. We now look for explainable causes. We now live in a world of complete new and different sensitivities.

If I were a man born a thousand years ago, I would be pointing out to you all the great miracles of the modem world. The reason why we don't see them as miracles from G-d and as messages from G-d is because we are conditioned to see the concrete and look for all concrete explanations. But if you could become spiritually sensitive, as many of us are, and if you would believe as a few of us do that G-d is still speaking to us  not only through man but through the creation and through the works of man.

G-d's Presence is more evident now than ever, more recognizable now than ever. This is "a day" of Judgment. I want you to know that just as the Prophet said, it has happened. It is reported that our Prophet Muhammed said, who brought the Qur'an and his own model to the world G-d gave him to us, the sun would set on his religion. It means on his community, his following. This meant that we would lose the pure light, the pure way.


Sun Rises "Again" In The West

He also prophesied that the sun would come again and rise in the West. Some scholars in Islam believe that that has already happened, when Morocco which is in the west of the Old World became a strong Islamic nation and made great contributions to the development of human society. They believe that was the rising of Islam in the West, and perhaps it was.

But just as the sun sets and rises everyday, I believe it is rising again in the West. The whole Muslim world seems to be stagnated, thrown off center, and in America there are Muslims from all over the world taking advantage of this freedom we have to live our religion as we choose to live it and preach it openly as we choose to preach it. This freedom is not given to us in other places on this planet earth.

A long time ago, about 68 years ago, a strange teaching started in Detroit, Michigan. It was started by a stranger, who was not American and not Black. It was a stranger who taught Elijah Poole Muhammad and Clara Evans Muhammad, my father and my mother. And before I was born, he influenced my life and destiny by naming me to be a helper to my father and to himself, this man who left ' my father with a strange language.

Oct. 30, 1933, I was born in a house on Yemen Street. Now Yemen goes back to the Arab world with the Yemenites, which is not far from Saudi Arabia  the country of Yemen. A lot of people from Yemen had migrated from their country to Detroit, so many until they were able to get a street named for them  the street I was born on.

I was raised up not to believe in anything after death. We were taught that death ended life and that was it. If you didn't get heaven while you lived on this earth in this material body, you would never get it. That was the end of it and you were gone forever. That is what I was taught as a baby and the religion I was raised on.


See The Signs Of G-d

Also, I was taught that no spirit could do anything; that G-d is only a man. Why am I telling you these things? To show you the Signs of G-d in this life and in this time. It is not to point you to me. I dress casual. I love to work in my yard. I work in the meat department in the business we started up, and I love to make sausages. I am a welder by trade, and I miss my work because I have to . work for you all. Here I am, but I want you to know what has happened to me and what has happened to us.

So it was a boy taught like that, who had something in j him that G-d created all of us ' with, and that was a pure ' soul and a determination to do only what is right, to believe only what is right. Then would you believe that I was taught what was wrong? Yes, I was taught what was I wrong: That G-d was a man 'and couldn't be anything but man.

The same person who was over the religion and locked up in jail for refusing to fight in World War II, my father, sent my mother a letter from prison and it had Qur'an quotes in it. He told my mother to read this to "Wallace" (myself). First, it said that this was from the chapter of Qur'an titled "Luqman's Advice to His Son."

The advice said: "If your parents strive to get you to believe something concerning Me (G-d) for which you have no knowledge base to support it, don't follow them  don't believe  but keep good company with them in this world." It means to continue to be a nice obedient respectful son to your parents, but
just don't buy the lie they are trying to sell you.


Prayer To See G-d Correctly

I can guess at how old I was, about 12 years old, when I got that message. And I know when I had this experience, where I was home alone one night and became afraid. I began to pray and saw before me the face of Fard. And something stopped me. So I prayed: "Oh Allah, if I am not seeing You correctly, please help me see You correctly." And then I made my prayer. I didn't know how to see G-d.

That same child (Wallace D. Mohammed), who was taught to see G-d the wrong way, is now accepted in Saudi Arabia by the Supreme Council of Mosques, and I am a registered member there. That says that they think I am legit! And that same child now has a gold medal, the highest honor bestowed upon a religious preacher, from Egypt. These two high places of Islamic knowledge and respect have recognized me. I couldn't do that on my own.

The Hon. Elijah Muhammad had no way to give me the mind and education and perception and direction that G-d has blessed me with. My father had no power to do that, and not even his teacher had any power to do that. They only had prayers and hope, and their prayers and hope were answered. And we thank
G-d.


Miracles Of Modern Times

I am not the only "sign." There are so many in the Muslim world. Not only in the Muslim world but also in the Christian world, there are signs as individuals who G-d blessed because they had innocent hearts and minds and souls to come to the pure way. They are from the various religions. To me, these are miracles of modem times.

Not only that, we look at history and see what happened in Russia. There were two nations competing to be the leaders of the world. One has an idea that didn't respect the Real G-d. Not that they all didn't believe in G-d; I'm sure many of the members of the Communist Party believed in G-d but they didn't want it standing in the way of their program.

They had their idea of dialectic materialism, that everything is based upon matter and evolved upon matter, and they dismissed the idea of the supernatural and the higher spiritual reality, that we believe is really The Reality and this life is only a reflection of it  not the real thing.

What did G-d do? He showed us that He is with the ones who acknowledge Him and not with the ones who dismiss Him. The two were racing to reach the moon. We thought that Russia was going to get there first, but America got there first.

Chrechev said he was going to bury America, but Russia (USSR) died in one lifetime not in generations. Russia lived only about 70 years, and many of us live that long. My father lived over 70 years. The great and mighty Communist miracle turned out to be nothing but a fiasco, a failure. They are lost now and need the West.

For me, that is a miracle. G-d wants to show man, who doesn't know: "If you didn't have Me over you, if you didn't have the church and mosque over you or the monastery, if you were free just to think on your own, you would not be successful even with your material world."

The Communist based their idea and concept of reality in the material world, and they failed to succeed with the material world. Economically, they collapsed. That is a miracle in these times. I could write a book of scripture and guarantee you that it would be respected and get some stronger believers than there are now. But we are not to do that. The best and stronger way is to show the support for what we already have in what has happened in modem times.


Read Life: "I Know There Is A G-d"

We shouldn't have to preach to make people understand that there is a G-d. We
should just read "life," read "history," and people should say: "Hey, I know there is a G-d." I shouldn't force you to come and pray with me in my way and have you follow my rituals. I should be happy that you witness that existence of The Real G-d. Let us start there and be happy with those who witness the existence of The Real G-d and believe that their life ought to respect The Creator that made that life.


Free To Make Choices

Let us be satisfied with that, firstly, and then let the world be as America wants it to be  free to make choices. Allah says, "Here is the way. Let him who has a will to follow it, follow it. And him who does not, let him reject it." This is the Qur'an.


How can we force people to believe, when Allah says, "Man does not have the power to make a person become a believer. Only G-d can grant that they become a believer. Muhammed, no matter how ardently, you desire to give them faith, only G-d can give them faith."

If we would just accept what has been revealed to us  the best thereof. I'm sure he Ku Klux Klan had a few pages of the Bible they were following, but they took the worst thereof, not the best .hereof. They followed that that suggested to them the mind that they had. We have to understand that Scripture is not only revelation for man's soul and spiritual side. Scripture is also the history of man's behavior, his bad behavior and his good behavior.

Scripture is also an explanation to help us to understand why bad is in the world
with good, why hell is existing with heaven. It wants us to understand these extremes, and in doing so it shows us both of the extremes. It shows us how some people earn the worst of punishment and how G-d did not help them to come out of those punishments but let them be free to go on deeper and deeper in the groove that takes them deeper and deeper into hell.

Why is that? It is because they would of respond to G-d. After He created a world to make them good and then they went astray and misread the world, He comes and sends to them good souls to bring them away from that and back to the way. And they don't listen to them.

All kinds of kind gestures are made to them. And the more kind gestures are made to them, the harder they become, the more rigid they become in their defiance.

G-d then takes the good Angels away from them and the Angels that take you to hell have their way with you. There are the defiant who never change, who the more good is done to them, the worse they get. We have the history of those people in the Bible and in Scripture. And we have the history of how G-d lets the Angels take them on to hell, where they want to go. They have help to go to hell.


"And Take The Best Thereof"

We will read that and think that is the direction for the believers, but it is the direction for punishment. In the Qur'an, G-d says, "And take the best thereof." There are many Muslims who read the Qur'an and read into it something that is not there.

Do you think my father was the first one told that "man is god?" No, he was not. There was an Arab from the Arab world centuries ago who told his followers: "I am god." He spoke to them with this and it is in history. His country brought him to court and judged him and executed him, but his followers continued to believe this even after he was executed, that he was god.

You can take something out of context and firmly believe in it, but that will only happen to those who have an incomplete soul to present to G-d. If you are like Abraham, who presented himself completely to G-d, you will never fall into such a trap. You will not be looking for something to fight your enemy with, as much as you will be looking for something to help you get to G-d the way you are suppose to get to Him. You will never go astray.

"This is the Book. There is no doubt or defect in it. It is guidance for the G-dfearing." (Qur'an 2:2) This guidance means that your mind and consciousness and everything are for G-d. You have reverence and respect and regard for G-d above everything, and you want G-d to release you before you get involved in things.


Corrupt Heart Prefers The Allegorical

It says in the Qur'an that "this Book is allegorical and basic." This means that it has language that has to be interpreted, that has one appearance on the surface and when it is understood, you dismiss the surface and see everything. It is allegorical and mystical and metaphorical.

It also says, "Those in whose heart is a corruption, they prefer the allegorical over the basic." They prefer the mystifying language over the common sense language. G-d says: "And take the best thereof." If you are not innocent, you are not going to get it. If you are deceitful, you are going to be deceived. G-d says: "And deceive not, and you will not be deceived."

The way is open, but you have to enter it correctly. "Enter the door humbly." not
proud, not wanting to be a dictator, not wanting to be a master with all men serving you. A person with that mind will find something to destroy himself with, when he takes up the Qur'an or the Bible. And those who follow him will be taken to destruction with him.

Isn't that what we are seeing in the world today and in the world of yesterday? Men claiming to be believers in G-d and in the scriptures and in their own warped minds, they are being honest and believe in what they are saying. But they are blinded, because they did not have the right disposition to start with. They are taking themselves and their followers to hell in this life and in the Hereafter.

We want to take advantage of every opportunity to dialogue with Christian leaders and Jewish leaders who want to see Muslims included in the work to make this United States of America and the world a better place for us to live in.

Peace. As-Salaam-Alaikum.
