1977-May-27

Bilalian News

Quran: A Book Of Guidance For All People

W.D. Muhammad


The following article is from excerpts of a Jumah Prayer that was delivered by Emam W.D. Muhammad on April 8, 1977.

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

Dear Readers,
I would like to begin with a verse or line from the Quran. Allah, Most High, says, "Help ye one another in righteousness and piety but help ye not one another in sin and rancor."

As Muslims, we have to keep the light of Islam before us at all times. If we fail to keep the light of Islam before us, then we will only be wearing the name "Muslim," but we will not be Muslims indeed.

In the Quran is guidance for all affairs. In the Quran are solutions for all problems. The Quran is the perfect book, the perfect guide. It says in the Holy Quran,"...in this book there is no doubt." Allah also says in the Holy Quran that there has not been allowed any crookedness in it.


An Address To The Whole Of Humanity

As Muslims, we are always to go to our sources for guidance and never to follow the ways of other people. None of them have light for us equal to the light of Islam. Almighty God revealed the message of truth down through the ages, and with each prophet He advanced that truth more. So if we go back in time, we weaken our lives. We can only strengthen our lives by continuing to follow that which God has given to us for the present world, for the present time. We know that the messages that came to the people of the world through our prophets of God came to solve local problems. Many times it came to solve family problems or tribal problems, and other times it came to solve the national problems. But not until Allah missioned Prophet Muhammad of Arabia about 1400 years ago was the whole humanity addressed and were all of the human problems dealt with. The world was addressed as a whole.

The Holy Quran says over and over again many times, "Oh, humanity." It does not always say, "Oh, Arabs." It only says that when it is specifically addressing the Arabs, but more often the address is to the whole humanity. This book is a book for all the people. Believe it or not, the book revealed to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be on him) is the only book that is a book to be read and followed. It is called the "Quran" because it is a book to be read and followed. "Quran" is from the Arabic root word which means "to read." Quran means the book that is revealed for you to read, to recite, and to follow. This is the only book that is in the hands of people today that is a book given by God for us to read, to recite, and to follow.


Bible: Mysteries, Riddles, Secret Doctrine

You may say, "What about the Holy Bible?" It is a book for you to study, but you must be careful while you are studying it. It is a book filled with mysteries, it is a book of riddles, it is a book of secret doctrine. All the teachers of Christianity and Judaism know this and they will tell you this when you enter the Bible schools. This is not a book for people to read. It is a book for a secret class of people to study and to do research with it.

It so happens that the Gentile world was blind to this. They thought that all of the scrolls they found were books to be read, and they canonized them with the help of some deceitful conspirators. They canonized those books and presented those books to the Western world as "the Bible." It was presented as a book for family people, a book to keep in your home. Look how carefully you have to search the Bible to find something for your home. If you are not careful you will find something to destroy your home. So you have to be careful to select something from Psalms, something from Proverbs, or something from the New Testament. Even then you must be careful so that you will have something for your family as guidance. We need a book that is meant for people (everybody) to read, not just for a certain class or for a secret order to read. It must be a book of guidance for all people. That is what the Quran is. We do not have another scripture like it in the world.


The Messengers Of God

Muslims in the Quran are cautioned against becoming people who just give lip service to religion and who do not really have it in their hearts and who do not really practice it. So this verse says, "Help ye one another in righteousness."

There is a section of the Quran, Chapter 2, the Cow, which tells us just what righteousness is. It says that righteousness is believing in one God and not mixing up other gods with Him. It is believing in all of His messengers, not just one of them. Muslims do not discriminate between the messengers of God. Do not say, "Well, I follow Moses and you follow Jesus, and they follow Muhammad." No, we all follow God and God has revealed a message to all of these men. Some came before others and some succeeded others.

If I say, "I follow George Washington," how does that sound coming from a citizen of the United States in 1977? We have a President right now who is the last President to date. We do not follow those Presidents that went before, we follow the last one. So because Prophet Muhammad succeeded Jesus (peace and blessings upon them), we do not say that we are the followers of Jesus. We follow Prophet Muhammad, but Prophet Muhammad led us to Allah, the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and all the righteous servants. We are brothers and sisters in one family and we do not discriminate. The Holy Quran says that we should not make discriminations or differences between God's messengers. We must believe in all of them and in the books that they brought.


Bible: Unsafe To Follow

You may ask, "If we should believe in all books that prophets brought, what about the Old Testament and what about the New Testament?" These books have been distorted. These books were not put into our hands from the hands of Jesus, from the hands of Moses or from the hands of their upright followers. These books came into our hands by people who followed them. They admit that nobody gave them these books, but that they found them. They found some here and they found some there. Men were sent out to look for other books (scriptures) before they put them all together in the "Bible."

So here comes somebody who says, "How does this look?" They look at it and say that it looks pretty good and that they will accept it because it sounds like the rest of it. Then he comes up with another piece of scripture and says, "How does this look?" "Well, that doesn't look too good. I don't think we can go along with that. It makes trouble for the Gentile people." Another one comes up with another piece of scripture and they say, "Oh, we don't like this. The Jewish included."

So look what we have here. Material that has been put together like this is not safe material to follow. Believe me, the Western world leadership knows that it is not safe material to follow. They don't follow the Bible like they tell us to follow it. Some of the ignorant people in the Church tell the people that they have to "believe in the literal word and take it exactly as it is." You cannot take the Bible literally word for word.


Faith Is The Necessity

The Quran says further that righteousness is to believe in all that God has given us to believe in. We can't believe just in the things that we accept, we also must believe in that which we reject if it is the truth of God. Accept it because God says it. We have to understand that a Muslim believer is not one who just believes what his mind accepts. We have so much inferiority in the society today because people are not brave enough and don't have the courage enough to trust higher knowledge. So they say, "If I can't understand it, I am not going to accept it." If you do that, you will stay on that level. You can only go so high. Your mind can only take you so high. You have to accept that someone high. You have to accept that someone lift your mind higher than your mind is capable of going. That's why faith is the necessity.

God says that we have to also believe in what He has promised to us. He has promised us that when we die on this earth and become rotten bones or something less that (so the Quran says) God will reproduce us in a new creation. We have to be careful in all that we do and say because one day Almighty God is going to call us into account for everything that we have done with our minds, our hands, our actions and our thoughts. God is going to call us into account.

Prophet Muhammad also says this to us in his saying that God is going to call everything (member) into account. The Quran which was revealed 1400 years ago says of God's great power that He can even reproduce the very fingertip. The people in that day didn't have the knowledge that we have today. I hope that you have the understanding to appreciate what was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). God says that not only will He reproduce you, but He will reproduce your very thumb print. Today we find in criminology that it has been discovered that the thumb print is the best identification for a person. It wasn't yet discovered 1400 years ago, but God revealed it to Prophet Muhammad. The best challenge is that God will not only bring the bones and the dust, but He will also reproduce the very fingerprint.


Prophet Muhammad: The Preservation Of All The Prophets

We, as Muslims, have to cooperate with each other and encourage each other in that which is righteous. Being it is not just looking a certain way. It is not being physically clean and internally filthy. It is not being self-righteous. It is being straight all the way. The Quran says that this righteousness is giving what is due. We cannot just believe and have faith in God and His messengers and the angels and the books that God revealed and the resurrection from physical death after we are bones and dust. But we have to also believe in practicing good deeds. We have to believe in practicing charity and kindness, and that has to start at home and spread abroad. The good Christian who is reading this today can hear the ring of the pure teachings of Jesus Christ. You do not hear the ring of that which is not in accord, but when you read the scriptures you get something from Jesus that you cannot identify with. You look for a Jesus that you want to live with. Then comes of Jesus something that you do not want to identify with and something that you can't live with. We have in the Bible a peace-loving, compassionate Christ and then we have a cruel, ruthless, unreasonable Christ. We have these two Christs in the book and they all are under the same name.


Generation Of Vipers

An American author, Philip Wylie, questions the churches' presentation of Jesus Christ in his book entitled Generation of Vipers. In the chapter entitled "The Man on the Cross," Mr. Wylie makes some of the following statements: "Jesus Christ was not trying to teach what the churches say he tried to teach...The pagan cast which the church has given to the doctrine of atonement would throw him into convulsions...He had one message — one only — and it was fundamental. But the message has escaped the church."

Mr. Wylie goes on to say, "The church never thereafter could recommend realism; it never has; it seems unlikely that it will. Two thousand years have gone into the monkey business of creating dogma, departmentalization, denominationalism, and theological rigmarole which serves the sole purpose of establishing authority and conceals the core and the heart of Christianity. Every possible kaleidoscopic combination of the ritual, tradition, and scattered dicta of religions before Christ, molded with irrelevant material surrounding the life of Christ, has been made the basis of every imaginable body of creed and so become a religion..." Mr. Wylie continues, "...every solitary one of them (various Christian denominations) has a particular bill of goods to sell that is recommended as the one and only true, divine, inspired, fundamental, literal, real, one—dollar—the bottle elixir of sweet—and—bleeding Jesus Christ and none genuine without this signature. Remembering how Christ tore into the dogma of the synagogue, one wonders what he will say about the dogma that has been derived from him today."

Mr. Wylie characterizes the dogmatic, so -called Christian church of today as, "a generation, in solemn truth, of vipers." "Religion, if it is anything, is a way to peace. If it is not a way to peace, then it had better be avoided, because, God knows, there is war enough that cannot be avoided." In questioning the ability of most so-called Christian Ministers to understand the real teachings of Christ, Mr. Wylie states, "But Ministers do not have any such natural honesty of approach to the religions they rig up for in-line Sunday production. They are afraid of the Bible. They are afraid of Christ. They therefore fawn on, drip over, and butter up their Lord, like the detestable sycophants they are, or else they convert their apprehension into an exaggerated form of whistling in the dark and yell and scowl from their pulpits to hide the fact that they, themselves, are terrified. Thus they engage in a foolish attempt to escape their fear by handing it on to their congregations and so make fear commonplace enough to be tolerable.

"These simpering or clamorous windbags preach Christ the Redeemer, Christ the meek and mild, Christ who died for your sins, Christ who suffered agonies unparalleled, Christ the mystical, Christ the worker of miracles (who, since the invention of the steam engine, can work only spiritual and no physical miracles due to Ohm's law and the relation of hydrogen ions to acids), Christ the simple man, Christ the great academic philosopher, Christ the Torquemada of Jehovah, Christ the prince of peace, Christ the tolerator of adultery, Christ the bigot, the spigot, the wellspring of joy and man of sorrows, Christ the scourge of the temple, Christ the physician, Christ the know-it-all, Christ the Miss Fix -it, Christ the mineral spring, Christ the autocrat of the breakfast table, and bingo on Friday night. They never preach, teach, screech, or beseech the truth, come hell or holy water. If they knew how, they would get the scientists back into the pews.

"The Bible has caught these infantile delinquents into such a morass of quandaries, from which Christ himself could not altogether extricate his mind and heart, that they preach the Bible in even more ways, and more fantastic ways, than Christ and all his whiskered contemporaries. The fact that the Bible is full of libidinous poetry, four-letter words, startling accounts of murder, violence, bestiality, infidelity, whoring, crime, revenge, contradictory precept, and old wives' nonsense is, indeed, reason enough for them to be alarmed. 

They know nothing about legend, and hence nothing about instinct. They have no training in the direction of their feelings and no true values of their own, hence the parables are lost on them. They cannot remotely hope to reconcile Biblical dogma with scientific fact. All the learned textbooks they have studied provided them with no more than top-spin of technical verbiage, which further confounds them and their hearers. They have the moral sensibilities of dinosaurs and do not know they have even that much. Their utterance, for hundreds of millions and billions of people for two thousand years has been about man and a book and moldy assortment of churches.

"Christ reviled those who wanted to preach the goodness of himself. He often repudiated the old book: it is full of legend, history, scandal, and all manner of claptrap — a museum of a race, interesting, amazing, and at times illuminating. -Christ, who had insight, eschewed all the symbolic forms of worship and recommended realism alone. But the hordes of squeaking pips who followed him, the apostles and the saints, the reformers and protesters, the popes and the prelates, snatching back the values of the Pharisees, took back also, willy-nilly, the dreadful creed of Jehovah, the aimless quidnuncery of the theologians, the rattling dither of dead swarms of barbarians and Dark Age bores, and made their denominations out of whole cloth, so far as anything Christ tried to say was concerned. Then, of course, they worshipped the cloth and the cloth worshipped itself. It is a. pretty study of costumes designed to hide frustration."


What Is "Jesus"?

But when you listen to the teachings of Islam you hear the sound, the ring, the echo of the true Christ, of the true Jesus. That is because Prophet Muhammad is the true prophet. He succeeded Jesus and God sent him not only to advance us beyond the point of Jesus Christ, but He sent him also to establish for us for all time what is clearly "Jesus" and what is not "Jesus." So in him the prophets that went before are preserved.

Thank you for honoring us with your time to read these few words.

Your brother in service to Allah,
W.D. Muhammad


