1978-February-10

Bilalian News

Mystery Of Christ And Satan

Imam W. Deen Muhammad


With the Name Allah (in the Name of God), the Gracious, the Compassionate. 

As-Salaam-Alaikum

(Editors note: Reprinted   by popular demand)

Sometimes I like to refer to the Bible in bringing home to you points that I try to make. The Bible speaks of evils growing upon the lives of the people. Evils that grow and grow with time and generations, accumulating and becoming so troublesome that those evils take over the intelligence of the people and the leader's intelligence is of no power to deal with those evils. The Bible says of these hidden things, that there will rise up a god and the people will worship that god. It also says, that it will be a strange god or a god that your forefathers never knew. It will be a god of forces. Now hasn't that become a reality? Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) spoke of the same thing, but in a slightly different language. The Holy Quran speaks of the beast that will be made to speak to us, the 'Dajjal,' meaning the voice of materialism and its forces.

This Western society, more than any other society has taken up the worship of the forces of materialism—the invisible things of materialism. If you ask some people to describe the god of materialism, some of them will say, "money" and some of them will say, "lust and luxuries." But those with better insight will say the influences of materialism. Then is their god visible? No, their god is invisible. The people who told Moses, "Show us God in public. We won't believe in an invisible god." The same people, the same mentality, the same ignorant, crippled, one-side minded individuals have come to worship an invisible plurality of gods, and they are not aware of it.

How can we manage this life to avoid falling under the material influences of creation? God created us in this material world. He shows us our nature, and tells us that He wants us in this material world. The Bible is so symbolic and secret in its language that you get confused sometimes and think that the creation of Adam happened somewhere on a spiritual plane or in a spiritual existence that was devoid of flesh and material. Then after God created him as a soul or something, he was put in flesh.

Allah in the Holy Quran clears up this confusion. He says that from the physical world you are created. In your mothers' flesh wombs you are created, step-by-step, stage-by-stage. Then after He completes the forming of the fetus, or the forming of the human life in the womb, God says that another creation begins. So the real human person comes after the physical creation. The creation of our intellect, the creation of our sentiments and of our emotions, all of these things are created after the flesh body is made. Where is the personality of the fetus? It is waiting to bloom outside its mother. Once it is separated from its mother and its mind opens, ears open, soul opens to what is happening out here, it begins to blossom into a personality. Crazy spiritual ideas resulting from misreading the Bible split the human being and forgot to put the other half back. Thus leaving many to think that we need an unnatural being to lead natural beings. We don't need unnatural beings to lead natural beings, we need natural being to lead natural beings.

Who gave us this understanding? Allah through His Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H.), the Universal Messenger to all, for all times. We as Muslims should take pride in the great wealth of religious knowledge that has been put into our hands or into our charge as reward for the efforts and for the high moral excellence of Prophet Muhammad, (P.B.U.H.) who is representative of all human beings. By his effort, his sincerity and by his righteousness, he earned the reward of this precious knowledge. So if he has earned it, then the human being has earned it. As Christ represents salvation for the individual, Muhammad represents it for the mortal world.

Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) was not an angel! Allah said, "If the Earth had been populated with angels, I would have sent you an angel as a Messenger." But God has sent us a mortal being as a Messenger, and the efforts of a mortal has earned reward from God. That is salvation to all people.

When we study the, old ancient wisdom, we find a word that is called "Eden." This idea of Eden is really a concept of the primitive beginning of the human society. Don't all of us look back on our beginning life as a pleasant life, as "Eden," a garden that was secure and without trouble? Someone took the diaper off and cleaned you, powdered you and put it back on. Someone rocked you to sleep or sung you a song; wasn't that heaven? But Allah (God) doesn't want us to stay in that kind of heaven because it is not big enough for human potential. Allah grows us out of that heaven to bring us into a bigger one. Now how did man fall from the rise into peace? The Holy Quran says that Adam slipped. He made a blunder. It says that there was no resolve on his part to go wrong. He did not sit up one day and plan on how to corrupt his life. 

He fell into corruption by ignorance or by accident. But there is another mentality that doesn't come into corruption by accident. It schemes and plans corruption. This is called the Satan. Satan is not in some kind of immaterial body. He is in a human body. Satan never affects man in a big way except when he appears in human body. Now he can give you small nightmares without appearing in a human body, but whenever he changes the political order, changes the religious order and plagues the nations, he has appeared in a human body. When he gives you big trouble, don't look for him in a dream or in the mysteries of darkness. Look for him in the mysteries of crookedness, lies, deceits, and you will trace that right back to a human body. There won't be a human being in it. Satan will be in it. The human nature and the human mind in that body will have become the Satan nature and the Satan mind.

Yours in service to Allah, 
Emam W.D. Muhammad
