04/09/1978
IWDM Study Library
Coping with the Strange Problems of Today Cleveland OH

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
Our honorable radio audience, we greet you with the greetings of all the Prophets from Abraham to Muhammad. The greetings of peace, Asalaam Alaikum.
The following broadcast is from a special address by Imam Wallace D. Mohammed in Cleveland, Ohio on Sunday, April 9th, 1978.
We live in a great time, a beautiful time. In fact, I believe this is the best time that human beings have seen on earth. And we think of it as such a bad time, but I have read history. I'm not a historian or a professor of history, but I have done some reading. And the Bible carries quite a bit of history and the Holy Qur’an also carries history. And after reading, I'm convinced that this is the most opportune time that people have ever had on this earth. The evils are coming out, but that's a sign that salvation is near.
Scripture tells us that just before the victory of righteousness, of goodness in the earth, that there will be a great show of power and strength coming from the enemies of that righteousness and goodness. So wickedness makes this final show of strength. And many of us are upset thinking that, oh, this is the end of everything. No, this is the beginning of all the good things we've been waiting for so long. It's a great day for us. It's a great day. The evils that people used to be afraid to speak about are now talked about in just daily conversations over a cup of coffee, over the media, the TV screen. Those things that used to frighten us to even think about them are now being discussed openly. So this is a great time. It means that the time of secrecy is over and secrecy has been the greatest enemy on human beings.
Dear beloved people, the Bible as well as the Holy Qur'an, but I refer to the Bible more than the Qur'an simply because the American people are people of the Bible. Whether you've gone to a church or whether you're a church member or not, we are a people of the Bible. Bible life have influenced or have formed our lives. So I use the Bible because I believe that more people are familiar with the Bible, but I hope that as we go, we'll become familiar with also the Qur'an.
The Qur'an is a book that shines light on all things, including the Bible. The Bible is a book that shines light, but also hides light. In the Bible, we read many places where the Prophet is told to seal the book. Say no more. Seal the book. Seal means to close it up. You see? And in other places the Bible says that darkness will cover the earth and the Prophets were told to prophesize. And in another place it says that a famine would come and cover the whole earth. And the Bible says not a famine of food, but a famine of hearing the word of G-d. So the Bible is not only a book that locks up the light of G-d in many places, but it's also a book that prophesied a time coming, prophesied a time coming wherein there will be no light of G-d.
Now, if that time is to come, or if we are people who believe in the Bible, then we should look, examine the things that are happening in our life and see if this is the time, this might be the time. There have never been a day on this earth like this, not in our history. Maybe there's some buried history that we haven't discovered that might carry something like this, but among the histories that have been found and read to us, are given to us, there can be no likeness of what we have in the world today. People have come to give up on practically everything, but the things they used to reject.
People who give up on G-d, give up on family discipline, give up on respect for authority in their lives, give up on government, give up on civilization. There are people who've given up everything except I repeat the things that we used to throw away like self-destruction, alcoholism, dope addiction, vandalism, vulgarity, clowning, shaking the shake all day long and all night long. These are things we used to push back for the things that we are now ignoring, but everything is changing. A psychologist had an article in one magazine, it was a magazine on psychological trends in the society. Harmful, pardon me, psychological trends in the society. I can't recall that magazine right now. This writer, he referred to the kind of mental activity that's going on in the society now, especially in the big cities. He referred to it as high sensation. High sensation. And what does this mean?
If the people are giving themselves the high sensation, what does it mean? It means that the people are regressing. The people are going backwards. The society is not moving forward, it's going backwards. When we study the development of the human being from birth to manhood or to womanhood, we find that sensation is really a very crude baby beginning of human development. The baby comes here depending a lot on sensation.
But as soon as the baby gets here, the baby has already manifest something stronger, something more capable of high evolution than sensation. The baby shows intelligence. The baby shows sentiments and sentiments and intelligence are a bit higher up the scale of evolution than pure sensation. For all the creatures experienced sensation, the dogs, the horse, the rats, the snakes, the bugs, worms, all of them, even the plant life, we believe, experience sensation. The human being, he is a highly evolved creation of Almighty G-d, a creation that G-d say He has made to reach the highest height in creation. Says, "But consequently, some are reduced to the lowest of the low." Why? Because we rebel against natural and divine direction and turn against ourselves. But G-d says in the Qur'an that when the people forget Him, He forget them. Not that He forget them, but He ignore them.
If they forget Him, then He ignore them and leave them alone in their folly. This is what the scripture tell us. So a Merciful G-d, a loving G-d, how can He do that to creatures? How can He let us go to our destruction and not care for us or not correct our ways? G-d says in many different ways with the scripture, G-d tells us that if He had wanted a race of robots, He would have made a race of robots. G-d doesn't want a race of robots. G-d want human beings to make decisions for themselves, to select the things that they want in their lives.
He want human beings to be free, to earn dignity, to earn self-worth. And you can't earn anything if you are a robot. You see? So Almighty G-d knows best how to correct us. Sometimes we see people just bent upon going in a certain way and we know the way they're going in means destruction for them. And we try with all of our might because we love them to pull them away. We call them back from the things that they're doing that's destroying themselves and they hate us for calling them back. We still call them back. We go to them and we risk being hit or killed by them. We go to them and grab them and say, "Come back, don't do that. Come away from that. " Sometimes we get killed, right? Sometimes we get killed trying to save our blindly wandering brothers and sisters who are just blindly going into destruction.
We are killed ourselves sometimes, but G-d knows the best way. This is human. We are supposed to do this. We are supposed to be human beings, not G-d. We are supposed to feel for our brothers and sisters who are suffering and we are supposed to risk our own self, our own comforts, our own lives, if necessary, to save our people who are rushing into destruction. We are supposed to do that. This is human, but we shouldn't ask G-d to be human. G-d is G-d. And He knows best how to bring us around.
I saw two men once standing on the corner and one was a very tall fellow and the other one was kind of short. He was short. And the tall one was also big and the short one was kind of thin. And the short one, I couldn't hear what he was saying, but his emotions, he was a con man. He was a smooth talker. I could tell that he was trying to talk the bottle out of the big man's hand. And it seemed that he would have the big man's attention off the bottle and he would take a chance to see if he could get it. And the big man, right away, he would tighten up on that bottle. He couldn't get his mind off the bottle. Seemed that he would have his mind off the bottle. Just by the time when he goes to take the bottle, the big man would tighten up on that bottle.
I said, "Boy, both of them, the big one and the little one, they can't get that mind off that bottle." But it showed me something. When a man really wants something bad, he will change his own personality, his own image. He would change his own nature just to get the thing that he wants. And that's a real danger for human beings. That's a real danger for the human being. The human being has the power to make himself or to break himself. Each individual has the power to make himself or to break himself. We have the power to form ourselves. In fact, according to the words of G-d, we have the power to create ourselves, but G-d says which in the English means create yourself with the building block, the character blocks given to you by G-d. So G-d is telling us that we have the power to create ourselves, not to create the physical being, the physical body. You know that's created, that's made. It comes naturally. G-d created the skies and everything, but we have the opportunity to create the living being that dwells in this physical body.
The soul certainly is given by G-d, but it's left up to us to let it grow as G-d intended for it to grow or to change that pattern and make a monster out of our human souls. And many of us are doing that. Now, what I would like to get at today and get into some of the personal things that we, personal kinds of things that we experience in our personal life is this, that Almighty G-d revealed to human beings the pattern for individual and community birth, growth, our development. Wicked men on this earth took that knowledge and used it to control human life.
If you know how to make a thing, that same knowledge is the knowledge to destroy that thing. The good Prophets and the righteous, the saints and the righteous servants of G-d, they use the knowledge to build up the human being like G-d wants them to be built up. The enemy called Satan uses the knowledge to master, to control the human life for his selfish ends. Who is this Satan? I'm not talking about something in some dark corner somewhere, not a physically dark corner and not something in the earth, not the physical earth. We are talking about a nature that takes over wicked people and turn them into demons, make them cold natured, so cold natured that they can do anything, distort the human form, retard human development, and go right to their worship with no guilt.
Go and pray to G-d with no guilt, no shame. One of the attributes of Satan is discourager, means the one who punishes the people. Satan makes himself the executor, the punisher. We have misunderstood Satan. Most of us don't know Satan and scripture tells us that we don't know the depths of Satan. We have missed what the Bible have been telling us, and many Muslims have missed what the Holy Qur’an tells us about Satan. Satan is not one who denied the existence of G-d. Satan is one who acknowledged the existence of G-d. The real problem that Satan has is his rejection of the human being. Satan reject human form as a building, a foundation for society. Satan says the human life cannot be trusted in society. The only thing that can hold up society, Satan says, is wisdom, great wisdom. So Satan, his whole life story is a struggle.
Clandestine struggle and an open, bold struggle to gain more and more knowledge so he'll have more and more power over the affairs of people in the world. This is Satan. Well, this Satan makes himself, puts himself in the position, in the position of punisher, executor, punisher. Whenever the people disobey G-d, Satan takes it upon himself to punish the people. The Bible says, I believe it's Job, says that seven eyes went out searching the earth to find someone that was fit before G-d. Says, "And seven eyes went out to find someone fit." The seven eyes that go out searching the earth to find someone fit are those people who have faith in human being, in the human being. Those people who appreciate human nature, who likes the true human form, they like that form. They're proud to say, "Here is a man, a good man. Here is a woman, a good woman.
Here is a child, a good child." But Satan, his nature is to say, "Here is a human being, a sinner." You see? That's the Satan nature. The human being cannot live without my protection. If I don't protect these human beings, they're finished. I have the wisdom. They don't have anything but human goodness and human goodness is not the strong foundation on which to build society. But G-d says human goodness is the strong foundation on which to build society. G-d didn't say wisdom is the strong foundation on which to build society. G-d says human goodness is the strong foundation on which to build society. And we have a sign of this in Christ.
Christ Jesus, the Prophet, he came to regenerate the world and he's called in the Christian language the second Adam. The second Adam. He came to regenerate the world. And he is the what? He is the foundation. He is the foundation of that new world. And what does he represent? He represents human excellence, purity, human goodness, obedience to G-d, human goodness. That's what he represents. He represents the best of what is in the people that G-d has put into them. Is that right? And Jesus said, "You in me and I in you. " Meaning that Christ is in everybody. Is that right? Not Christ the figure, the person, but Christ the symbolic figure.
Christ, the nature. That nature is in all of us. And this is the nature that G-d has designed and established as a very foundation for building community life or for building society. It is the foundation, not wisdom. A human child when he's born from his mother, he's beautiful. Hardly five or 10 minutes after the baby's born and we are getting human responses from that baby. The baby shows that there's love in its nature, sentiments, emotions, love is in that baby. Is that right? Oh yes. And intelligence is in that baby. Learning is not there yet. Learning, as we know, learning is not there yet, but intelligence is there. The baby shows intelligence.
In fact, I look in the eyes of some new fresh born babies and they show more intelligence than some of these 50 year old men. Yes. The light in the baby's face shows more sign of intelligence being there than we see in many of the grown people walking the streets, walking these streets. You look in their faces, you see emptiness, emptiness. The lights are out. But you look in many of the faces of these newborn babies, the light on. You see activity. You see life. You see an interest in thing. The baby shows it's interest in things. He has a curiosity. But there are some people look like nothing is on their mind. Absolutely nothing.
That's right. Yes. G-d wants us to understand our own nature. He wants to understand our own basic nature. And Genesis, that whole book is talking about not the creation of the physical earth, physical water, physical skies, physical stars. Genesis is talking about the evolution of human life, the social evolution, the community evolution of the human being, that he begins in his fundamental nature. That's the beginning of the human development. It has to start in our nature. And G-d didn't make any bad nature. G-d made a good nature. The human being's nature is good. G-d made things on the first day and He said, "It is good." On the second day, it is good. On the third day, it is good. On the fourth day, it is good. Fifth day, good. Sixth day, good.
And then somehow it's repeated. And He said, "No, no good." Originally it was made good. And the human being was included because the Genesis says, "Made them male and female." And He finished it all He said, "It's good." And then here is the artificial man being made and He looked at him and He says, "No good." And we think G-d did it simply because it says that G-d said to the angels, "Now let us make man in our own image and likeness." Well, there was plenty of time between Genesis 1: 1 and that particular act. There was enough time for Satan to come in and guise himself as G-d. You see? And call his force angels. Says, "Now let us make our creature and our own image and likeness." Yes. If you read Genesis, you will find out for yourself that there are two stories of the creation, the generation of life, the creation.
The first story is just told very nicely and smoothly. It doesn't give much problem to the mind. He's trying to follow it. The second story is more mythology than anything else. Says that G-d said to the angels, "Let us make man in our own image likeness and He formed the man of the dust of the earth and to breathe into him of His own breath, then caused him to fall into a deep sleep." And some of us though, I'm telling you, we have believed it in great part. The proof of that is the way you live.
You don't respect yourself. You don't respect your human nature. You don't respect your human quality. You dissipate your good human life. Squander and throw away your good human values, your good human strength. Laugh at human excellence. Tear it down in the spirit of a vandal. Spit on it. Yes. When you shoot each other over quarters, you're a blind drunken vandal. When you go and find weak people moaning in their miseries and give them a shot of death in their vein and hook them, make them a slave to an expensive habit, knowing that they don't have money, knowing that their community doesn't have money, that even their whole community is poor. And you hook them on and give them to an expensive habit, make them thieves and robbers and murderers who are slaves under the influence of heroin or some other narcotics. You are a crazy, blind, drunken vandal.
And the one who buys the death from you, many of them, I'm sure, are people who have really been destroyed by the things that they have been taught in religion. "Oh, I can't be any count. I can't be any worth. After all G-d says human being is born in sin. So hell, what can I do? This is my nature. I'm born in sin. And they go so far as to really establish that. I'm telling you, I've talked to some preachers and they will try to establish that. I try to help them out. I say," Well, look, when you all say that a human being is born in sin, you really mean he's born into the world of sin, don't you? Oh no. Oh no.
 He's born into flesh. Flesh is sin. Good G-d almighty. G-d says in the Holy Qur'an that if the earth had been populated by angels, He would have sent an angel as Prophets to guide us. Said, "But since the earth is populated by human beings, I send you a flesh and blood human being to guide you. " Not an angel. And in another place, Allah tells Prophet Muhammad to tell them, "I'm not an angel." Prophet Muhammad says in the Holy Qur'an, "I'm not an angel." And G-d says again in the Holy Qur'an says, "If an angel, if the book had been made an angel, if the revelation itself had been made an angel, look what a conflict that would have been. A human being and a book that's an angel." The book is a book for human beings too. It's not an angel flying around. The book is a human message. You see? Our marriage that we have, what kind of marriage is it? What is this concept of marriage we have? It's not at all a human concept. It's not a concept of the union of two human beings, male and female.
Before you marry what you get, blood tests, right? You got to get a blood test. Suppose you had been born before they got these methods of blood tests. What would you have done? I wonder how G-d was mating human beings before they got this thing. But now this Christian marriage, you have to have a blood test, right? Yes. And then you go and you say your vows. Never to separate. This is forever. What is forever on this earth? G-d say the sun and the moon won't be mated forever. Yes. In the scripture, He says it. Says the sun and the moon will not be mated it forever. Everything shall die. He says everything is passing away except Me. That's what G-d says. So all these relationships are going to be destroyed and broken up, but I go and say forever.
This is not the marriage of individuals and a society. This is a concept out of religious symbolism. It's a marriage between religious leadership and converts or the congregation. The congregation pledges that it is going to be faithful to the word of G-d for it's whole life. Give his whole life of faith to the Almighty G-d. Be loyal to Almighty G-d. The same language that was designed to form a union between the leadership, religious leadership and the congregation has been placed on us. So we are marrying, going through rituals, misplaced rituals. I do. And she says, "I do until death do us part in sickness and in health, until death do us part." And they get a license, right?
And they go home. And they get home. Now it's time to, what they call it, consummate. It's time to actually make this union a reality, right? And they're ashamed, baby, turn out the lights. Made all of these holy vows to do something you're ashamed of. Baby, turn out the lights or turn your head. Yeah, turn your head. Sinful flesh. I can't let him see this sinful flesh. Yes. What is the flesh that is sinful? The flesh that is sinful is the flesh of lies to bring hypocrisy, lies into a union with G-d's truth. That's a sin. That's a terrible sin.
But flesh with flesh. That's where it came from. That's where it should go back to. The flesh descends from flesh and has to unite again with flesh. It's a natural thing. We shouldn't have to bring all this old confused language into the picture. Mess up the minds of the people. Look what's happening to the marriage life in America now. It's going to pot. Yes. Divorce is just so popular. Mating out of wedlock, just so popular. No respect for the institution of marriage anymore. This is G-d's judgment on something that was false from the very beginning.
The true part of it is your true feeling for each other. When you love each other, when you want to live with each other, when you want to share your lives with each other, when you want to care for each other and look out after the future welfare of each other, that's a marriage, brothers and sisters. Why have we been burdened with all of this ritualism? It is because Satan took over the religious world. And he had a scheme to get the whole world in his hands, not just the religious world. It's told in the Bible if you could understand it, or if you would accept it. Jacob, he wanted Rachel.
He worked so long for Rachel and he couldn't get Rachel. He had to take a second choice. Well, not even a choice at all. He didn't want the other one at all. Leah. Finally, he works again for another seven years. He gets Rachel, I believe, right? Then he gets Rachel. He ends up with both Rachel and Leah. But the one he really wanted first was Rachel. That's what he wanted. Apple of his eye was Rachel. Yeah. But he ended up getting them both. He had to take the other. Yes. This is the world we live in. A world that has been made by great tricksters, great tricksters.
How did Jacob come into his power? According to the Bible, by masterminding tricks, he was a mastermind of great tricks. And how did he start out in his mission? He started out by undoing what Abraham had done. Abraham dug wells. Waters of faith to feed the people, the thirsting spiritual life of the people, or human life of the people. Jacob, when he began, when he went out, first thing he did was put dirt, fill those wells back up with dirt. This is the Bible. You read it for yourself. Abraham dug wells to feed the human life or the spiritual life of the people. Jacob put dirt back and he filled those wells back up, no wells.
Then he went out from his father's house to another community. And by tricks, he got the wealth of that community, by tricks. He used tricks to change the physical looks of the man's cattle so that the man wouldn't even recognize his own cattle. And before he did it, he planned by telling the man all the cattle that are born with stripes are mine, I believe. Is that right? So what he did, he designed a trick to make the cattle come to birth ring striped. And the man ended up being tricked out of his wealth. This is the voice of scripture speaking, saying that scripture has spoken to you in symbolism, allegories, in secrecy. But there's coming a time when it's going to speak to you in plain language.
That's the Bible. The book says that there's coming a time when you will not hear the word of G-d because there will be a famine in the land, the whole earth. That time came. We came to a time in the history of religious growth that we lost any clear understanding of the religious life. We had no more understanding of religious life. In fact, we were less in our understanding than those primitive so- called primitive societies that know nothing about civilized religion, so- called civilized religion. We know there's a G-d, a supreme being, and we try to give our life to it, but look at the foolish notions we have in the religion. Look at the social retarding ideas we have in our lives from religion. So our religion amounted to nothing but darkness, which means what? Darkness is the absence of understanding. Darkness is not the absence of knowledge.
Darkness is the absence of understanding. A man can pick up a book on higher mathematics. He can know how to read, but he reads this book on the higher mathematics and he gets nothing out of it. It's not because there's no knowledge in that book. It's because there's no understanding in the man. Is that right? So knowledge, the absence of understanding is darkness. The presence of light is understanding. And the book promises us that darkness is going to be overcome. And many of us think that this darkness is only the darkness of sin. The darkness of unrighteousness. The darkness of bitterness in the human life and all these things are the darkness of ignorance to G-d. No, it's the darkness of understanding. We have not understood it, but the Bible promised us and the Holy Qur'an promised us that we shall understand it.
You see why we have so many burdens on us now? It's because we are not living sensible human lives. We are going against all the good things that human life have achieved coming up the ladder of evolution. We don't need to have any order. Can't you see people are planning this? They look at the world and they say, look, in 1980, the population is going to be very large. The only way we can keep the comfort that we have in our individual lives that we have now is to do away with this excessive number that we're going to have on our hands. So they just mark off a few million people, and then they design the thing. They put the machinery in the operation to knock you off.
The book says, "My people are destroyed with song and dance." And also it says for a lack of knowledge, as the brother just said behind me, but it says also that people are destroyed with songs. Anything that goes in your mind, influences your mind in some way. If it's not healthy for you, it's going to hurt you. There's no way to live in this world without being selective. If you don't select the things that go into your brain, go into your heart and your mind, you're finished. This is no natural world we live in. The natural world disposes us to human growth, to excellence, to health, to strength, to order.
This world that we have on us now disposes us to destruction. Yes, self-destruction. If G-d had designed you with a mouth on your elbow instead of here, wouldn't your life be made burdensome? You can imagine trying to eat with that elbow. You see? Well, that'd be a pretty hard job, I think. But G-d didn't put the mouths on the elbows, put the mouth here, and the hands bring the food here. There's the order. The body is arranged in an orderly fashion. Is that right? The members are arranged in an orderly pattern, in an orderly fashion.
You don't have the eyes here and the mouth back there. You'd be eating and can't see what you're eating. But the way we live, we are reversing everything. You go in the living room and you're liable to find a toilet in the living room. You go in the toilet, you're liable to find the kitchen. Right. I mean, it's the way we live. Don't have no sense of order. No appreciation for orderly arrangement in our lives. I'm not talking about all of you. A few of us survived that, but the great majority have been destroyed. And who's feeding this disorder into our lives? Media.
The world. The language you're getting on the streets. It's just everywhere. They started out with a big effort. Let it all hang out. Hang loose. Go loose baby. Let it all hang out. And women start dressing like cave figures. Cave men figures. You saw them. The hair just hanging, just do nothing to it. Just hang, just hang. That wasn't enough. They had to start wearing clothes that just hanged. Before they made some, designed some to sell them, the girls were wearing army jackets. Army jackets, just old loose army jackets. No bra, just an army jacket. Everything hanging loose. No bra, that's not loose. It's holding something. Don't hold anything. Let everything go.
So we were conditioned to desert orderliness in our lives. And media was the main tool. The TV, the newspapers, the magazines, radio. G-d, He wants us to live and to live a full life. To live a full life means to realize your human potential. G-d has put into us many tools for great works. G-d want to see us use all those tools and realize our full human potential. And whenever we run into a block in the road or our good efforts are checked by things we can't understand, Almighty G-d inspires someone to get us over those humps and hurdles so we can move on up the ladder of human excellence. Not to get off earth, to accomplish the things that has to be accomplished in the earth. This is G-d's way.
Just a few years ago, I remember if you mentioned G-d, you have people looking at you like you ought to be killed. That's if you tried to be serious. If you just did it lightly, they could tolerate you. But if you got serious, many of them would want to see you dead. Why? Because they had been conditioned to be that way. By the leadership, by the hidden organ that worked destruction in our lives. Respect for mother went down. Respect for daddy was already down, but it dropped beneath the surface. It's buried now. Where's the respect for father?
Women have come to think that a father is nothing but roommate or somebody that she let's stay in the same house with her. Yeah. No respect for father. I remember when I was a child, it was easy to run into women who stood up for the rights, respect of the father. They would tell their children, "You obey your father. You respect your father, that's your father." That's right. Yeah. When I was a child, many women I've seen doing that, teaching respect for the father. And the father, he wouldn't only teach respect for the mother, but he'd collar a little sucker that disrespected their mother. That's right.
Strike fear in him like thunder and lightning. That's right. Check him in a minute, a second. But where's that gone now? Mama doing the bump. Papa's off on a high sensation kick. Novelty wears off of one thing, he picks up another. After awhile he ran out of everything that they got on the market, nothing on the market gives him his high kick. You catch somebody, they'll go down there south street to the spot on the corner. They go down there. After a while they can't be happy down there. They go and leave South Street and they go to North Street to a spot on that corner and they stay down there a while and they can't be happy there. And they just go on from street to street, corner to corner, trying to find happiness. Thing to thing, person to person, trying to find happiness. Sick world.
Sick world. It's an unnatural condition. It's not natural. The human being, in order to grow naturally, he has to accept what he is and value what he is. What am I? I'm a seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting, organism. I see, I feel, I hear, I smell, I taste. Is that right? Yes. Five senses are in my being. But how many of us have a healthy use of those senses?

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