04/20/2008
IWDM Study Library
San Francisco CA

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
We've been tried in the furnace prepared by satan and also the furnace that G-d tests the soul in. We've come through both and we are still here having faith, still here wanting to work for our future in accordance with the will of G-d. We are very special people and our life and our history and our culture was taken from us by slavery and we started out as souls without bodies. Yes, and G-d blessed us to first get bones, strong structure to support our flesh. Then G-d blessed us to get flesh on those bones. And then G-d blessed us to stop speaking like a donkey and speak with a man's voice.
All that has occurred and a new people who lost their life as a people to slavery in the South and discrimination throughout America. And now we have got it back because WD40, W.D Fard came and put a seed in our soul that worked itself up to our brains and now we know just what to do with our lives. Praise be to Allah. This is no exaggeration. I'm not exaggerating anything to you. This is a fact of our life in America. When I thought I said, "We're getting a blessing of suits coming to us, poor people. All we have to pay is $60." First, it will $60.61, I think, but we just made $60 even. $60 for suits.
You go to the website yourself; these suits sell anywhere from 400, 500 all the way up to 1,000 and somebody say they saw a price even $1,100. $1,100 same suits we buy. Business suits for men. Super 140s, super 120s, super 140s, super 150s, and some super 180s, very expensive. What I'm wearing here right now, this is a suit that I would quickly pay $500, $600 for. I would have no problem paying that for it. You can get it for $60. “Oh, I can't buy that suit. We heard you have to have $4,500 to get it down to that price.” Do you have $4,500 in your CPC account?
If you do, you can get one suit for $60 or you can get $4,500 worth or more depending on how much you got, you'll pay $60, if you were an investor, with enough to cover that distributorship amount, $4,500 and a lot of you are. I know the records. A lot of you are. A lot of you have much more than that. If you will give CPC, the Group Volume Buy, that's the account name. If you will send Group Volume Buy and a copy of proof of your investment, you can get these suits for $60. One, you don't have to purchase in a big volume and pay $4,500. You already got it in your account and we have to honor that.
You send $60 you will get the suit like this and maybe better than this. We have some with even vest. Then we have with the tall guys. If you just sold them to these professional guys, these young guys in basketball and whatever, if you sold them to them, look how much money you can make. See how Allah rewards us for our faith and our steadfastness. That's what these blessings are coming to. These blessings are coming to us for our sincere faith and steadfastness. I conclude there. We have to build a strong financial community. As long as we can't pay for decent teachers, we can't pay for decent books and decent equipment for our schools and our decent school facility, we can't pay for all the things that we need in order to express our religion in the public life.
We have to have money. So, don't think money is a sin. How you use it may be a sin but money is a blessing. Peace be on you. As salamu Alaikum.
[applause]
G-d says He created us for His mercy. And when we think of human life and then look at all other forms of life, it is certainly a gift from G-d, from Allah, a gift from Allah, the human life and the human community life is a special gift from Allah. He could have made us stones or trees or animals beneath human life, inferior to human life but He made us human beings and it is very special. He reveals to human beings. We know He reveals to other life too but He reveals particularly to human beings. He sends the revelation from Himself to Prophets before Muhammad and to Muhammad the last of the prophets.
And the gift from Allah to us is mercy. Mercy in two measures, mercy in two areas of life. The first mercy is the mercy of our natural life. That is a mercy. And if we are conscious people and are not warred against too heavily or too strongly by the satan and his company, most of us, if we mean well, we can keep our good life and progress with a good life. That is without even revelation, without religion, without revelation, without religion. Because He has created us spiritual as well as material. And we naturally come into our religion. In that connection, I want to share with you the teachings of Al-Islam and the Quran and in our prophet's life of inheritance.
We are inheritors. We are inheritors of the decent and excellent life G-d deposited in us when He created the first of human beings. We are inheritors of that human excellence, humanity in humanity.
Muhammad the prophet as other prophets, they had their tradition, sunnah and the Prophet has his tradition. And they had their excellence and the Prophet has is his excellence. And G-d says, “He raised some of you above others. We are not all equal in that essence. And He sends us lastly to the world, Muhammad the prophet, Salla llahu alaihi was salaam, upon him be the prayers and the peace, as an excellent model. Uswatun hasanatun, excellent model for any who believe in G-d and the last day. This doesn't just speak to Muslims but it also speaks to any who believe in G-d and believe that they have to be accountable to G-d.
Belief in G-d and the last day means you believe in G-d and you believe in being accountable to Him. Because the last days will be the days when the accounts will be given. All of us will have to account for how we lived with ourselves and how we lived with others, our families, our neighbors, others, the stranger. We have to give an account for how we lived on this earth. That's the last day. So, any people who believe in G-d, the G-d, the creator and they believe in the last day, they believe that they have to answer to that G-d one day, they have in Muhammad the most excellent model of human life. The life G-d wants us to have. Jesus Christ was a sign of that, Abraham is a sign of that. But with Muhammad comes the teachings, the scriptural teachings and also the common sense teachings that we need so that all of us will have the light in our life and on our hands and on our pathway so that we go a right and not error and go astray from the excellent human life that Allah created us for.
The first mercy then is natural excellence. Adam was created with natural excellence. He's our first father and the second is intellectual excellence that has to be born in community. When we live in community altogether and we want to see our community life advanced, we have leaders rise up, leaders make themselves known among us and they lead us to a way that satisfy the needs of community. And the most precious tool for that achievement is true to nature education. Or education that has been reconciled with the excellence of nature, the creation
G-d made and the excellence of human life or human nature.
This is very important for us to understand as Muslims in these days, especially in these days when the satan is separating people from their original nature with all that he has in his power. He's separating people from their original nature, influencing their pleasures, influencing their appetites for pleasure and influencing their cultures so that their cultures become as John Paul II said, "May G-d give him paradise. May he be in paradise." I'm not a Catholic you know, I'm a Muslim. A Catholic wouldn't even think of him that way.
But nobody is perfect but Allah and everybody is subject to sin so that's human, all mortals. He referred to this culture we have in America today as a “culture of death”. Now in religion, especially in the Bible and the church, “sin is death”. I'm giving you the exact words of the Bible. “Sin is death.” When we read and hear of death, a warning against death in the scripture, we shouldn't think of physical death, the death of our flesh or the death of the physical body. We should think of the death of good conscience, when good conscience leaves us and we don't care how we think, whether we think morally or not, we don't give much importance to moral life.
In fact, we become abusive, very abusive of moral life. We corrupt moral life and that becomes our pleasure. Just living a life of corruption, corrupting the moral life of society or contributing to the corruption of the moral life of society and that is death. When that spreads enough, the whole society comes under the influence of death, immorality, corruption, moral corruption, a life of indecency. And we have seen that increase in America's public and at home too, for most of the people living in their homes. We have seen that spread and the Bible warns and the Quran also repeats that warning, “and corruption spread over land and sea.” Meaning the whole life of the people on earth became corrupt.
Many of us from the days of the Temple of Islam or from the days of the leadership of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, we need to understand what he was all about. He said that, “America was doomed, America would be destroyed.” And some of us wonder. We're still waiting on the physical destruction. It's not a physical destruction. It's a destruction of the decency of the American people. That they would more and more lose their decency and they would become more and more sinners. Give themselves more and more to sinning and their life would be consumed by sin. And that is the end of their world, when their life becomes corrupt and consumed by sin and the great majority of the people are seen as straying from the way of G-d and giving themselves to a life of sin.
We have come to see that. The world that the honorable Elijah Muhammad was addressing, it did die. It was destroyed by their own indecency, by their own injustice that they meted out to their subjects or to the weaker of the people and even to nations. They have been consumed by the sin that they lived and they spread. That sin has come to be so great and so powerful in their public life that it has consumed their strength as a people. The American people are not strong anymore, very weak, only a few are strong. And there's always a few that managed to hold on to their decency from the different religions, from the different quarters of life, always a few who hold onto their decency and that is a prediction.
Satan said, and told G-d, “you have chosen this mortal and I'm better than he. You made him of the earth and you made me a fire." And G-d did not change His will or His command, His plan. And satan resented it so much. He said, "When I have finished working on them, you won't find, but a very few worthy, very few." He didn't say he was going to get everybody.
There'll always be a few that hold onto their decency. So, he hasn’t gotten everybody. But when the majority has been gotten, then the end has come. We're living in the end of time for the issues that we find in scripture, the issues for human life on earth. We are living in the end of time. And everything we see is pointing to that and saying that. The time has been concluded for the main issues in scripture; the issues of decency and indecency, the issues for good sense and no sense. All of that has come about. And it’s very hard to find a leader who can inspire the American people, a president who can inspire the American people.
Years ago, there were, I can name several of them, they captured the American people and they inspired the American people and they led the country into more achievement for the American people as a society, but here lately, we get disappointment. I'm not saying it, but I think most of the people are saying it; president George Bush is a disappointment and it seems that he doesn't care. He goes on doing what he pleases. He doesn't care. How can he do that? How can he just behave that way, insulting the American people and getting by with it? He's standing on his grounds. What is his ground? “The American people, as on a whole, do not deserve my respect. They have corrupted their lives, they're full of fun, foolishness, and indecency, I don't have any right to respect them.” That's his position, believe me. That's his position. He would never tell anybody that, but that's his position. I was watching him on TV when he was running for the second term. He had a little small dog. The little dog, “woof, woof, woof, woof,” on TV. He looked at the little dog and he said, "You'll get your turn."
Now, who was he speaking to? He wasn't speaking to that dog. He was speaking to African-Americans and poor people in situation similar to ours and wanting to see a leader work for them, or a leader, at least, recognize their needs. And he was saying you'll get your turn, but not now. This ain't your turn. And President Reagan, who is much loved by the American people, and I'm one of them, who loved him for his values and for his leadership, his good leadership. He responded to the saying of black leaders in America, "Our time has come," they said.
So, he responded to that. He said, "Yes, your time has come and gone." Meaning, we're through babysitting black people. This is not the leader that's going to babysit you. "Your time has come and gone," he said. Are we living in another time? I think the time of President Reagan is over. Certainly, the time of President George Bush is over. We're living in a new time. A time that has to, is forced to respect the urgency, the moral urgency in the world, not just in America, but the moral urgency in the world. We have become so unconscious of what our nature supported us having; moral decency, consideration for others who are lost from moral decency and a sense of obligation to call people back to decency when they are morally blind and are losing their decency.
The Prophet Muhammad, prayers and peace be on him, he was told of behavior of a Muslim that was witnessed by other Muslims in the public. And he asked them, "What did you do?" He told them that they should have checked him right on the spot for his disobedience and shameful display on the public scene. He said, "You all should have checked him." You know there is no police force in the time of Muhammad the prophet. No one could call the police. There were no courts where you arrest someone and take him to court. You took offenders to honorable men, and sometime women too would be witnesses to it, of decency and who knew how to follow the way of the Prophet, knew the path of Al-Islam.
They would handle the problem. There were no jails. You never heard of anybody being locked up and put in jail. No jails in the time of Muhammad the prophet. All of these institutions came much, much later for Muslims. Although others had jails, dungeons and everything for punishing people, locking them up and punish them, but not the Prophet. No jails. The people were trusted with their life. If you educate the public, and direct them in the right way for their good life as humans and for the future of their children or the generations coming after them, you don't have any need for jails. The people themselves check. He fulfilled the scripture, where the scripture says, "In the end of time, and the law shall be written upon their hearts."
They won't have to have the law imposed upon them. They will have the law in their hearts, they will love the law. No one would have to force them to live the law. The law would be in their hearts. And that's true of good Muslims. If you're a good Muslim, you're not out their breaking laws. And we thank the Honorable Elijah Muhammad for teaching us the way of decency and telling us, "Do not break the laws of the land." He situated us to come into this religion without a lot of struggle, a lot of effort to change from bad habits to good habits. One thing he did do is establish good habits for us.
Good diet, good physical behavior, manners, respect, et cetera. He concentrated on that and he said he was preparing us. "I'm preparing you," that was his expression. So, he did his job, and he did an excellent one. He didn't dream up the idea of the grafted devil. That was not his work. He didn't do that, that was given to him. And if you understand that, it's a marvelous, marvelous way of addressing the evils of the West. I say a marvelous way because if white people hear what he said to us about the creation of the devil, there are those among them who have enough scriptural insight to know when he says, “the white man is the devil,” he doesn't mean flesh.
He's not speaking of flesh. He's speaking of Lucifer, whose ego or whose selfish pride caused him to want to go up to heaven and take a seat in heaven and perform there as G-d and have people worship him as G-d. The Bible say, "Lucifer, that bright morning star, why has thou fallen? Why has thou fallen?" Though he went up there, he had to fall. He fell, and when he fell, his light went out. Like all of us, when we fall to sins, our light goes off, but not the white of flesh, the light of the intellect and the heart. The light of the intellect and the heart goes out when we give ourselves to wrongdoing.
Eventually, it's going to catch up with us and we're going to fall from our high pedestal that we put ourselves on to dominate or rule over the people. This is the real devil. That's the devil in Scripture. That's the white that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad was given from his teacher, W D Fard. That is the white. That's the white devil. Who is the black devil? Yes, there is a black devil too. It's the ignorant sinner. The ignorant sinner is a black devil. The wise and learned sinner is a white devil. This is all throughout the culture, all throughout scripture, all throughout the culture. We have to get away from sticking to the physical picture and look at the more important picture. Some of you all say you know me, and there are perhaps many who know me only from what people have told them about me. Or they know me from hearing me on the tape or radio or something, but they don't know me as a physical person that well. To know me as a physical person is not to know me. You know me I'm so tall, physically in physical statue. My color is brown and this and that, you know these things about me. That's not about me. That's about my temple.
I live in my temple of flesh and G-d created a wonderful temple of flesh. If we respect it, it will even caution us when we are bruising ourselves. Something inside will caution us. “Don't do that, stop.” What a wonderful temple and it serves us very, very dutifully. You want to work it harder? It said, "Okay, work me harder. I'll measure up to what you expect of me." And if you’re doing something physical, you put more pressure on your body, say, "I want you to run a marathon." The body will try to run the marathon and many of these bodies run the marathon and succeed.
In Al-Islam, we have to know that the word of G-d, the Quran and Muhammad's model life living that religion, says to us, “your flesh body is your servant. As long as you want to have a good life, your servant will support you to have a good life. But if you change, you want a bad life, your servant will warn you a couple of times. It’s not going to warn you forever and after a while, your servant will keep quiet and let you go to hell on your own.” This is the human body, so let us try to see our religion not only with our heart and with our sensitivities but let us see our religion with our rational mind. Abraham our second father, he is a sign of the excellence of the human brain and intellect.
The promised land that is associated with this Father of ours and this prophet, the promised land is education supported by natural creation. The Sciences and all the other beautiful, beautiful things that come out of the search for better life through the material world. The nature of the material world or the order of the material world. Scientists are born when they give themselves to this focus, scientists are born. Quran inspired that focus in the early following of our Prophet Muhammad, Salla llahu alaihi as salaam. In an amazingly short time, universities, centers of higher learning sprung up and people came from distant places to see those universities in Iraq, and in other places.
They came to see those universities in Africa, Morocco and Fez, they came to see the wonderful places where education was dawning afresh on this planet earth and because of that the West was aroused. The intellectuals of the West were aroused to devote themselves anew to the study of the creation and the development of the sciences. So, all of this, I'm saying to you to say that we living in a conclusion of the great issues for man in scripture. That he starts out innocent like a new baby from his mother, haven't been influenced, haven't been led astray, he starts out innocent as though in a garden of paradise, an Eden of the Bible.
He starts out like that in an innocent life and in an environment that supports his innocent life developing and progressing. Accomplishments, especially for his comforts, began to take his focus away from obedience to consuming and creating comforts for himself. He falls a victim to his need to have comforts or pleasures and the pleasure appetite eventually destroys him. I'm not giving references because it will take too long to give references for all of this. I'm sure you know most of the references. Some of you were good people in the church before you joined the Temple of Islam or before you joined us here in San Francisco.
Some of you all were good Christian people. I know that you're familiar with certain language. I don't have to teach you that language. A hint to the wise is sufficient. We're living in the end of time. One of the signs of the end of time that Prophet Muhammad pointed to, he said, “one of the signs of the end of time is that the maidservant, the servant girl will give birth for her mistress.” Give birth to a child for her mistress, for the master, the head of the house, the head lady, top lady. Well, right now America, the maidservant, African-Americans have given birth to a child for the mistress, for the United States of America, the mistress. And that child's name is Barack Obama.
See, I'm telling you, I'm pointing to the signs to show you this is the end of time for the old world going out. Old world is dead, it's dead and it cannot rise. There are many other signs, but I won't go to point any human person again. Obama is the strongest sign we have in a human person of the conclusion of time and the end of the old-world order. I'm not saying he's going to come in and bring a new constitution. No, but he's going to be effective and get a lot of support from in America and from outside America. The nations will listen to him and the American people are listening to him and they're knocking him.
They have to test him, so they're hitting him left and right and even behind his head to see if he can take it and survive. He's proven that he can take it and keep his honor and decency. Yes, we are living in the conclusion of time for the great issues in scripture for how a man lives his life on this earth. What caused him to fail, what caused him to succeed. Allah tells in Quran, those who will invest in their own souls, not just invest in a house, a car and things like that, those who invest in their own souls, they will save their souls and those who neglect to invest in their own souls will lose their souls.
They will be debased. They will fall lower than the dogs, lower than the lowest of the animals. Haven't we seen that? Don't we see that in the public?
Participants: Yes.
Don't we see it on television and in the movies?
Participants: Yes.
But don't feel sad now. This is the time to feel good. Good is on the rise, and wickedness is being pushed out. Yes, being pushed out. This is time for believers, true believers in all religions, this is time for us to rejoice. And this is the time for us to do some soul-searching and see if we still carry some of the burden that satan put on us. We want to get the burden, all the burden that satan put on us, we want to get it off of us so that we will have a light burden. Believe me, the truth from G-d whether it's Christianity, Judaism or Al-Islam or some other religion, if it's a truth from G-d, it's a light burden. Yes, “innama al-Usri, Yusra.”
If you will face the difficulty, G-d promised you ease. You won't be under a lot of strain. No, G-d says He doesn't want more difficulty for you, but He wants that you be purified. So, what is the great difficulty we have to face? The difficulty of checking our own souls, checking our own behavior, so that we will live a decent life. There is much more I would like to say to you, but I'm going to conclude that effort to get the fish to come out of the water as a man and walk to his duty to his job in the community. A man, not a fish. Yes, isn't that what Christ Jesus said, “Come and I will teach you how to become fishermen of men, not fish, men.” Praise be to Allah.
So, I'm going now go back to what I said earlier that business is very important. There are two urgent needs in the black community or in the African-American community. The first one is a need to stop acting with no conscience. Be conscious of your duty to G-d, to Allah. And be conscious of the life of decency that supported us coming out of slavery, and following leaders like Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist movement. Finally, Dr King who said that he hoped for a day or he believed that there's coming a day when a man will not be judged by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
Now, how come after he died our leaders just talk nothing but black to us. Everything black, black caucus, suppose the white man will say white caucus, how would they like that? If the representatives for us in Washington would have to hear white people saying white caucus? All the magazines, black. Did the Honorable Elijah Muhammad excite you all so much that you went out on your own and didn't even go out to him and find out what he was talking about? You just going out obsessed with your color, black. I know that's not the real situation. You know what the real situation is? They responding to the white man's mistreatment of them.
They responding mostly to the white man's claim against them that black people can't produce anything but babies. So, everything they do, they got to tell the white man. "Okay, here's another one, black. That's another achievement for us, black. Here's another achievement for us, black. Now we got our own organization as servants of the people in Washington DC. It's a black caucus. See white man, you say we can't produce nothing but babies, black caucus." And the white man is so smart. He just let him go on like that. He doesn't question it. He let him go on and on.
I think he's smart enough to look into what they're doing and come up with my conclusion that I just shared with you. But he knows what it does for us. It weakens us. Black theology weakens our ability to gain from scripture guidance and wisdom that we need to make ourselves a better religious community. Black theology, they weren't the first to say that. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, one of the major speeches he gave was the theology of time. Believe me some of them got a hold to it and later they come out with black theology.
And what the honorable Elijah Muhammad was talking about in that speech was the developmental trend or the developmental path that the soul takes. That the soul has to work its way out of bondage to the body to the mortal flesh.
And that's the first veil and womb of darkness. Then it comes into the mind, and the mind has to work itself out of bondage to darkness, ignorance, misguidance et cetera. Lastly, we have to have it come into our spirit where we don't have to think. It becomes just natural and automatic for us to serve G-d and be obedient to him and take our life in the right direction.
Once it comes into the spirit, then the devil can't get you because he gets you mostly through your spirit. He excites you in your spirit, and when he gets your spirit under his control, then your spirit is too strong for you to handle.
Your flesh can't handle it, your mind can't handle it, only thing can handle it is if you would come back to the spirit of G-d. The spirit of G-d come into you; you can handle satan. I said business, focusing on business again. You know when Allah made the first human being, He made him from the earth? You people of religion, you know that. He made him from the earth. What does that tell us? That human beings like all other life are a product of the natural environment, product of the earth. And Allah says, “and He made the Earth enough to satisfy all of your aspirations.” That's Allah.
So, when He created the first man, our father, or created the first humans from the earth. It is to tell us that our needs are in the earth or in the matter that He took you from or created you from. Even your moral needs, don't you know man in primitive life is not conscious of his high moral nature that he has over all animals. Primitive life imitates animals and take the behavior of animals because they feel that this make them stronger. I'm going from that trend of thought to make it shorter. Allah said, “And He made the garden an inheritance, the garden of paradise."
Is this garden in somewhere near Iraq or somewhere? Is it the Eden, physical place? No. What is this garden? Allah revealed to Muhammad through him to us, “that the width of the garden that He has for His servants is as the width of the heavens and the earth.” What is this garden for? Is this a garden that we plow with a heavy piece of wood like they did in primitive time for industry or plow now the big tractors that they have? Is this the kind of ploughing? Is this the kind of garden? No, we plough the garden with our intellectual curiosities. We search G-d's creation. He says He made the whole world to yield its benefits to the human family, to the human community, the whole world, says to Adam, meaning all human people, all the human family. He made this creation to yield its benefits. If you know what He's speaking of, G-d was speaking of whatever's in the sky. With astronomers, they study what is in the sky, the stars, their pattern of movement, et cetera and many other things. They study about the heavenly bodies and they grew the science of astronomy. And the farmer studies the land and he study how the land benefits the crops and how it supports different kinds of crops.
He studies and he becomes a scientist of agriculture and we progress that way. This garden, G-d says, “He made it as an inheritance.” That mean you don't have to have it and you don't have to have the sense to get it. G-d created you and you're going to interact with people, human beings who have needs and you're going to seek to answer those needs and you're going to find the answers in the earth and in His matter that He created in the creation. You're going to find those answers there. You're going to plough His creation with your intellect and you're going to bring much produce and much development to the human family.
This is how we should see these things, in order for us to make progress in these days and time. We used to have guardians over us, they were guardians from human beings, decent people, who made themselves guardians, to protect the ignorant people and to help press or to press for better conditions for the masses of suffering people. We don't have guardians like that anymore. Satan has taken over the management of our appetites for pleasure. We don't have guardians like that anymore. Very few, their little efforts are so small.
Look, the Pope just came here and left.
I know he's still here maybe in New York, maybe he's still here, but he just came and he gave a major address, the Papal mass. I thank Allah that I was at home, where the TV was and I was doing some paperwork and I was able to hear him. When I heard him, I changed my opinion of him. Before I listened to him carefully, I saw him with horns. His ears looked like they had points, looked like they were pointed and his grin looked like a grin of satan, a demon. That was my opinion, but when I listened to the mass, I say, “No, he has that face on to scare people, but he's really a very dutiful servant of the word of G-d."
When I heard the mass he gave, he has an obligation to all people, but his mass was really directed to the following of the Catholic church. And the things that he brought out was so beautiful. And what impressed me most of all, is that he told them, that your life should be a life of Catholicism. That's my way of putting it, just to make it short. Your life should be a life of Catholicism. You should be living the life of a Catholic, not the life of the world. He pressed that upon them very hard. “You should go to your Catholic doctrine, to your Catholic teachings for guidance. You should live the life of a Catholic.”
Now same applies to us and to other people. If you belong to a scripture, to a religion, you should be trying to live the life that's in that scripture, so that satan won't give you to the life of sin and death, blindness and ignorance. One more point and I'm going to sit in that chair back there and see what else is on the menu. I've been so pressured by so many obligations I have. You don't know half of the places my appointments because all of them are not in the journal. They are not put in the Muslim Journal. I'm a busy, busy person and some things I have to neglect, I can't do everything. I just can't do them all. What I do, I try to do those that are most important.
I'm not a man that's working for money. If I was working for money, I'd give it up and I'd go back to welding or do something else, maybe become a writer, just publish my writings. I'm working to have the Ummah of Muhammad, the Ummah of Al-Islam, established in America. And I'm cooperating with any leaders of Al-Islam in America that want to accept me as their friend and brother, I’ll work with them. I don't have to be their leader. We all are needed to work together. Those who want leadership, they want most likely something selfish or a dominance, want to be over other people. No, that's not in me, thank Allah, and it's not in many of you. And I know that. We are a special group of people.


