07/30/2008
IWDM Study Library
Cosmological Argument
Chicago Heights IL

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
W.D. Mohammed: It's mainly designed to take a people, African Americans, especially those who have not experienced education, haven't grown up in academia, and that's the great majority. To take a people that was cut off from their traditional life, that means their culture, their knowledge, their history, everything, and make slaves of them for the slave masters, and cut them off from any reference, independed of the slave master. All their references for understanding, what I am, why I'm here on earth, and what is my purpose. They have no way of finding it except by looking at the slave master, and going on what he exposed them to, or what he gives them.
Such a group that's so thoroughly dominated have their minds colonized, their spirits colonized, everything is colonized, and the power that colonized them is actually dominating them without interfering directly in their lives, with their own hands. People like that need to be motivated or maneuvered into a position where they are forced to think on their own. I see the main benefit from the teachings of the Nation of Islam, or my father's teachings, Elijah Muhammad, may he have peace in paradise and be forgiven for all his sins and have peace in paradise, is free thinkers. Designed to make us free thinkers, and that's what you just told me. [crosstalk]
Lynn El-Amin: That's what I experienced.[crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: That's what it did. [laughs]
Lynn El-Amin: That's what I experienced when I went out there.[crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: It makes you a freethinker.
Lynn El-Amin: Right.
Clyde El-Amin: The interesting thing is, I came into contact with those teachings when I was in college, and college was never the same from that point forward. I was a problem for everybody.
[laughter]
Lynn El-Amin: Exactly.
Clyde El-Amin: I had to apply my paradigm to them and I found myself saying, "I know there's more to this," even if something seemed unreasonable in its literal form, I started telling myself, "I know there's more to this." I started looking for a way for him to be right because the impact that it had had on my life said to me that there's something potent here. What also was very potent, was my need for it. My need to become an independent thinker. And then once you taste that, you can't go back.
W.D. Mohammed: No.[crosstalk]
Clyde El-Amin: You can't go back. It wasn't just me. The impact that it had on so many African American students at University of Michigan was amazing. That the teachings, and even more so the vision, because that paper would have the cartoons in the middle about build your own engineering and all this build the hospitals. It was amazing. It was so attractive to them that they demanded that that paper be regular reading in the African American studies course at the University of Michigan.
The last two semesters I was there, it was brought there every week for students who signed up for that course, so you didn't just have African Americans reading it. It was interesting to see white and Jewish and others reading that paper, but the African American students enrolled in this course to a great extent than others. What it caused to happen for us as- and I think as you're talking about the aim, because sometimes the aim was achieved without one consciously being aware of the actual teaching.
W.D. Mohammed: Exactly.
Lynn El-Amin: Even the idea that Islam was within his teachings, but there were so many other things that were there, so we weren't getting orthodox Islam totally. We were getting a lot of other things. The black nationalist concept, the community spirit, the economic component, the reverse psychology with the deity. We had Christ, we had Fard Muhammad. All of this was there, but Islam was at the base, and we were taught to respect the Quran, read the Quran, we were taught to pray. That's not by accident.
This is going back to the concept of intelligent design. Allah had his hand-- I feel strongly. I feel that Allah had his hand even in the Nation of Islam and the way things came about, and the way that this culture that had been stripped of everything, as you just mentioned, and was taught to rely on those who were the slave owners, we're taught to rely on them for everything because we had been stripped of everything. Allah still brought us Islam to bring us out of that, to get us to the point where we can follow Islam totally, but Islam was still there. That shows Allah's place even then during that time.
W.D. Mohammed: I remember recalling words from Scripture had reached to me, both Bible and Quran, I believe. I recall a saying, and I think that it is in this form, it is found in the Bible, but also in the Quran in other descriptions, in another description, where it says, "If you use my name," G-d speaking, "If you use my name, you obligate me. If you use my name, you obligate me." If you use his name to do wrong or to harm human being, you obligate G-d to straighten it out.
Clyde El-Amin: To straighten it out.
W.D. Mohammed: If you can't straighten it out, if you won't straighten out, G-d is going to straighten it out. And the slaves, they said, "G-d is a just G-d." They knew that in their soul. They knew that if this is G-d, he's a just G-d, so why is this situation like this? I believe truly that my father getting his plan for establishing the Nation of Islam from Mr. Fard, or Prof. Fard, that he saw as G-d incarnate, or Jesus Christ returning. It can't be approved by the Quran and its teachings, except that G-d permits certain things to happen and be developed to check a worst, something that's worse. Something that is much worse. I see that in the Nation of Islam as G-d's intervention.
If G-d intervenes, then his presence is there. Not only is his presence there, his protection is [crosstalk]. So he protected my father, he protected me, and he's still protecting the followers of my father who was still in that time and in that idea, like Minister Farrakhan and his following and others, a few others not as big as he is, but not as big as Farrakhan. But there are a few others who chose to stay in that mind also, and G-d is their protector. The cause of their protection, because the world created the problem that make us go in these different extreme directions.
Clyde El-Amin: That's right.
W.D. Mohammed: I think that's a good note to stop on, to conclude on. I do want to say that the language or the expression "save the world" is getting to be more and more popular. This is a quarterly magazine, Wilson's Quarterly Magazine, and on the cover it says "Saving the World". We all have a responsibility, we all contribute to messing it up, we all have responsibilities to do something to make it better. I conclude on that, and we hope that this can be transcribed, and come out as a publication soon. 

Bismillah ar rahman ar rahim, that is with G-d's name, the merciful benefactor, the merciful redeemer.
We are recording now the second part and the last part of a discussion on scriptural reasoning dialogue for the Abrahamic faith-based communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, mainly. Father Abraham's way is highlighted for this discussion. Destiny is in finding how to establish one's self-support. The soul needs to find its support, and this support once found gives every individual that experienced it spiritual self-support. The process is initiated or set into motion by human life's universal soul. That is to say that though we have individual souls, we are all having one common soul, and that is the soul of all people, the soul of all human beings, the human soul, the universal human soul. The soul's life force is always reaching out, or reaching for whoLynness that is understanding. Understanding that makes our life acceptable and comfortable in a situation with other people and other nations.
After finding common existence and common spirit, a cosmological finding, as I see it and as I believe it, is revealed in Scripture, the Scripture we called Abrahamic Scripture. We can reason our way or our path to self-identity and purpose. Islam first address purpose, the purpose for human life. And The purpose for human life in Islam is to serve the creator whose common name and proper name for Muslims is Allah. The human soul engages a process for locating its security, and discovers its existence is placed firstly in cosmology, the study of the universe. The soul's life force is now liberated after finding its first place, it is liberated to establish self-support and secure its viable self-interest.
Self-interest can be selfishness, but if it takes this route from the universe or from the cosmos and seek its destiny from the cosmos to its place where it's going to reside and have its life, it will not be selfish. Connecting cosmologically and environment framework is now reached for identifying our souls' inclusiveness. From common cosmological home, from this common cosmological home, a direction is found mapping frameworks that will support one's human existence, beginning in cosmic whoLynness, thereafter in planetary or global whoLynness, further inward to frameworks for the national and social interest and security.
Our souls seek the security that is natural for it. Some of us are secured in situations that will not rest our souls because those situations are not natural. Destinies are natural homes for our souls. Destiny is home. Returning from cosmology, the human soul arrives at its address in its natural and its national boundary to view itself as a member in its cosmological, global, national and social family. Self-support is support of family. Families supporting themselves and contributing to the support of others have found home for the soul, and can realized then a true sense of security. We thank Allah, that is G-d, who made all that is in existence, and made it for us to mate our intelligence with that universe, or with that creation, so that our life will develop intelligently, and we will have a condition that is a must for us now in this time of global reality and global inclusion.
With that I introduce, again, our participants for this discussion. We have now with us for the second part of this discussion, one of person that we know very well as an exceptional student of principal Clyde El-Amin, Lynn El-Amin. [laughs] That's by coincidence.
[laughter]
W.D. Mohammed: If you would, could you begin for us?
Lynn El-Amin: Thank you. First of all, in response to the introduction brother imam that you've given for this particular segment, I wanted to start off by saying as a science teacher, the way that you are introducing the concept of the cosmos and the universality of our environment, et cetera, falls right in line with where science has began to move. You're steps ahead of what the science curriculum is actually looking at, and we're moving more and more into that direction. In the past, science was basically a response to the needs of the environment. The environment, the people, the community said that we needed more of this and more of that, and science basically responded by providing solutions, medical solutions, technological solutions, et cetera.
But the way we're moving now in our curriculum, we're looking more at science as being something that works hand in hand with the system, with the society, with the environment, with the people. Science itself is starting to look at itself, the field is looking at itself more as one of discovering, of looking at the environment, looking at Allah's creation, looking at what's been presented to us by way of our Scripture. We're now looking to see the signs that are out there and what can we deduce from this, instead of science saying, "Exactly, this is what happens, we're doing more studying now."
A lot of what we're doing is we're saying, "You know what? We can't just take everything on face value, we have to start to examine. But We are recognizing that we don't have all the answers as scientists." We're examining things based on the science that are out there in creation. This topic is one that would not only help the religious community, but it will also help the science community in general.
W.D. Mohammed: Yes. It's recent in our history that the media, printed media and the visual media has informed the public that we are living in a time now when science and religion are coming together. That actually religion itself is rooted in the material universe. [laughs] It's not superstition, it's reality.
Lynn El-Amin: Yes. Based on some evidence, based on some understanding of how that evidence is to be interpreted.
W.D. Mohammed: Yes.
Lynn El-Amin: If we use the Scripture, if we use Allah's word to interpret, then we get a better understanding of the discoveries that we're coming across, instead of bumping our heads and just try to figure out what's actually going on.
W.D. Mohammed: Yes, that's the position of the religious servants and teachers. [laughs]
Lynn El-Amin: Right, and that's the position for scientists who are starting to recognize [crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: Yes, I believe so.
Lynn El-Amin: We don't have all the answers and the way we've been approaching it, we have truly, as scientists, bumping and bumping our heads over the years.
W.D. Mohammed: Yes, the true saints in the religion, they say, "G-d, you know, we know not." [laughs]
Clyde El-Amin: That's really, really interesting what Sister Lynn was saying. The science of everything is being influenced by this. This is certainly perhaps giving the field more credit than it's due, but I think it's trying to earn this credit now. The science of human nature, or they call it sometimes the science of psychology, is also being positively affected by this trend, if you will, that you're describing how science and religion coming together. As you know, and earlier in these conversations, we talked about how that field developed originally from a premise that human beings basically were just creatures of appetite.
The Freudian notion that if you study the human being from that premise, you'll understand the human being. We came really a couple of decades ago to realize the shortcomings and the failings of that because it told us so little about human potential. You opened it up talking about destiny and how Scripture addresses human destiny. We could never ever achieved that human destiny if we approached human beings or understanding human beings from the premise that they are limited and controlled by their appetite, and that for all their lives that remains a controlling factor in their development.
That has an impact on education and how we approach education and what we even believe is possible in terms of accomplishment or achievement in our students, whether we're talking about elementary school students or whether we're talking about adult students in a university. If we approach them from the premise that it's already destiny that so many of them, only certain ones of them will ever achieve, because it's a constant state that they only have so much ability, as opposed to believing that, really, it is the interaction of their human nature with their environment that is the best explanation of what they have achieved so far.
If you change that interaction and change that approach and approach it from a different belief system, that in fact what you conclude is they have not had the right approach given to them for them to actually realize their potential, or to even realize how- where they are, how they fit in the grand scheme of Allah's purpose for being here.
W.D. Mohammed: You can't find yourself until you find your place in Allah's-[crosstalk]
Clyde El-Amin: That's right. Right. You certainly can't help others by themselves [crosstalk] realize their potential if you come from that framework.
W.D. Mohammed: Yes. Lynn mentioned something before we began here. She mentioned an expression that I'm aware of. I wish that we could at least elaborate on it a bit, and that's intelligent design.
Lynn El-Amin: Yes. For years, the concept of evolution has pretty much guided the science arena as far as the origin of man, and we've looked at the concept of evolution as the process where things accidentally happened. There was an accidental explosion, that caused the earth to be here, supposedly. There's supposed to be an accidental merging of energy together to give us the atoms, and then the atoms accidentally bumped into each other, made molecules, and whatnot. What the concept of intelligent design is saying is that these are not accidents. These were activities that were planned, that were planned by a higher power than man has the ability to even encompass in its totality.
When you look at that, that definitely says that there definitely is the presence of G-d, Allah in the design of how creation came about. But the people who are promoting this particular concept, they're not only saying that our creation was designed by a higher power. They're saying that we can't stop at just looking at the concrete concepts that are in front of us. We have to start to think and reason. We can't just take what's there and absorb it and say this is it. We have to start looking at motive. We have to start looking at intentions on why things are there. As a Muslim, I'm taught, I don't make any moves without being aware of my intentions. Am I doing this to serve Allah? Am I doing this to do whatever?
In science, we're saying that there's a purpose behind every single path, that none of it is accidental. I'm receiving a lot of opposition as I introduce this concept to my colleagues because they're saying there's no evidence of that. Again, the majority of the science arena is based on theory. It's theoretical. We have some concepts that are out there that suggest that this is the case, overwhelming evidence that this appears to be the case, but how many laws do you find in science? Very, very few. Newton's laws, that's one. There's some chemical laws, that's another, but other than that, majority of those--[crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: I'd like to interject here that when you examine how the prophets, the thinkers in religion came to their conclusions, it was based upon faith. When you examine how the scientists came to their conclusions is based upon theory. You're missing it. Theory is a process that goes to science, and faith is a process that goes to understanding Scripture. That takes to the understanding of that.
Lynn El-Amin: Right. Exactly. In reality, we're actually starting to think more now that maybe our theories need to be reevaluated. The theory of evolution is one that people are starting to investigate and--[crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: If I may, I'd like to read something here from-- I'll just read it, it explain itself. This is from a Rabbi that I met recently in a dialogue with Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He's writing me, and he says, "I have been eager to ask you if you might recommend two or three more members of your community to join in a three-day session with Mr. Shaheed-", that's Ronald Shaheed of Milwaukee, the Imam. His request is that these Imams participate at the University of Virginia with him and about 30 others or more who are students and religious representatives, et cetera. They are all connected by faith to discuss scriptural reasoning. He is Peter Ochs, Professor of Modern Judaic Studies, University of Virginia. Religious Studies.
When I met him in dialogue, he was impressed with my reference that I made to the Quran, how the Quran wants us to see G-d's material work of the creation. I was taken to him to read this at this time because I had planned on making it at the end [laughs] because I'm seeing as you explained it more for me, I understand it better. The expression intelligent design, for me, in connection with the Quran, where it says G-d has formed everything to broadcast knowledge and mercy. The exact words in Quranic Arabic is (Arabic), which is knowledge but it's also science. The same word means science too, and mercy.
When I made this reference in the dialogue, this Rabbi stood up, and he says, "There's no need for us to say anymore. I don't know how to come behind Imam Mohammed." After the discussion, he told me, he said, "You speak Arabic. You read?" I said, "No, I don't speak it fluently." I said, "But I read the Quran in Arabic. I understand it in Arabic." He said, "You must," he said, "because I read the Quran I've never been able to get that."
[laughter]
W.D. Mohammed: It is right there plain Arabic, but the way you think is the way you got it. [laughs]
Lem: Right. In education, we use the concept paradigm to reflect the neurological network of experiences, concepts that you've learned over time that guide the way you process information that you've received. If I'm approaching any situation, considering that I've studied Islam, studied the Scripture, studied under your leadership, a person can't help but to see more of what's in that particular circumstance or situation. A person who has not had that kind of background and that kind of experience will only see what their experience or their background will allow them to see. We use the expression in our culture, using rose-tinted glasses, and how the rose-tinted glasses tend to distort what you see. When we look at our arena, of the science arena, specifically, I'm thinking about it as a science educator, I have to look at education and science merged together. I can't help but to think about the history of how education actually started in this country. How education itself was a sidebar of a religious move. The Protestants moved to America seeking the ability to freely practice what they thought was the appropriate way of religion, and they were fleeing a situation where they were being persecuted for trying to practice what they were trying to do.
So when they set up their educational program here in America, which was the precursor for our public education system that we have here. They said their schools are based on that same premise, that they were trying to implement a particular way of doing things. For them, it was about follow this particular method. Don't think about it, don't just do exactly what you're told to do. And then the educational arena for years we've talked to students, do what I say. Don't ask, don't question. This whole concept of reasoning rather than scriptural reasoning or educational reasoning is newer to our profession as educators and as scientists, because for years we've just told the children just do what I say, just follow what you were told to do.
Here's a scientific method, there's one way of doing things. We're now saying, no, there isn't one way. Every particular process doesn't have to have a hypothesis. You don't have to do an experiment. Your data does not have to look this way. It could look this way, it can look that way. So we're starting to see that I don't have to use those rose-tinted glasses anymore when I'm interpreting things, when I'm analyzing things. We're starting to realize that I need to step out of my box and start to study more of what's going on in others. You mentioned the concept of us coming together globally, and this whole concept of the dialogue between the Abrahamic religions.
The more we learn about each other, the more we learn about the concept of the oneness of Allah, and the oneness of his creation that's here, and how we all answer to him. We can start to see things without those glasses on. See things without these Lynnses being tinted.
Clyde El-Amin: Certainly. I'm taking a little bit of a risk here, but I think this scriptural reasoning is obviously something that has to be brought to more of the religious communities also because the religious communities have been impacted by what Lynn just finished speaking to. In many religious communities, there is a certain caution about bringing reasoning to the religious activities. [crosstalk] Because there's a fear that the reasoning takes you away from the security of being right. That the religious rituals, the religious teachings, the catechisms, et cetera, there's certain security about being right to those things bring you.
We've thought that there was a wall between the religious communities- some of the religious communities. Obviously, I'm not speaking of all of them. And the school where we thought intelligence was taking place. But really, they both were constrained by a similar paradigm. She's absolutely right. There's a paradigm shift going on now, and we're looking at other ways of knowing. But the need to bring reasoning to the religious community is as dire as the need to bring it more to the educational community.
W.D. Mohammed: There is a Dr. Ibrahim Isadin He was interviewed by the Focolare Publication. The living city, I think, it's called. He was asked to explain or give his opinion on how come these religions have been against each other, and they're belonging to the same tradition, really, if we go back to Abraham, and he said politics took over. He said governments in conflict and politics took over. He said if it wasn't for that happening, we wouldn't have to call attention to the need now for these great religions to come together. During the first recording of this discussion, you mentioned George Washington Carver.
Clyde El-Amin: Yes.
W.D. Mohammed: From what you have shown me of his own perception, the feel for his studies, this education wouldn't have had so many difficulties if they had stayed with George Washington Carver. [laughs]
Lynn El-Amin: But the wonderful thing about him, about George Washington Carver is that he wasn't indoctrinated by the current educational system and the history of how it's changed over time. He explored. He didn't just use what he received in his classroom. He explored. He traveled outside of that arena and he started to pay closer attention to the land, to the plants, to Allah's creation, the environment and the living organisms that are there. The more we do that, the more Allah teaches us what we need through the environment [unintelligible 00:35:51]
W.D. Mohammed: That's exactly how Adam was formed in the earth. He had nothing to interfere with the world that G-d made him. [laughs]
Clyde El-Amin: And I think George Washington Carver began his formal education already inspired by his study of nature. He may not have known that the word botany exists. And Lynn can correct me if I'm wrong, I guess if you had to classify him, you might think of him as a botanist, and he was so universal agriculturalist, et cetera. He may not have known that that word existed, though he was studying the subject matter of that field and studying it in nature. He was already in some ways liberated from the constraints that formal education might have placed on him when he entered formal education. What he did, he came to formal education ready to take the advantages of it and build on his foundation.
W.D. Mohammed: Could you share with us the beautiful reading--[crosstalk]?
Clyde El-Amin: Yes. This is from a book written by a gentleman who knew Carver, GLynnn Clark. It's the life story of George Washington Carver. The book is called The Man Who Talks With The Flowers. It's a good description of him. In this chapter, he starts to chapter out to explain the secret of Dr. Carver's power of talking with the flowers. He was asked about this power when he was alone with Dr. Carver. He asked him about this power, and he said, "Dr. Carver reached out his long sensitive fingers, and tenderly touch the flower on the table." He said, "When I touch that flower, I am not merely touching that flower. I am touching infinity. That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth. It will continue to exist for thousands. Yes, millions of years to come."
That's [crosstalk] the cosmological connection. He was liberated before, and he tried to do this with his students. He tried to teach from this paradigm. Maybe it was a blessing that Tuskegee was kind of isolated then because he probably would've gotten a lot of heat, as they say, for teaching from that paradigm and some of the more well-known institutions of his day, and certainly of our day because--[crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: Too bad Darwin couldn't have been motivated as Dr. Carver was. [laughs]
Lynn El-Amin: But even when you look at the way Darwin did, what he did, Darwin left the confines of his laboratory. He left the confines of the city that he lived in, and he traveled the earth. He took a boat, literally a boat ride, and went to various continents gathering data, looking at Allah's creation, and gathering data from Allah's creation. His problem was the paradigm he operated with was one coming from a household of an atheist, of a person who did not believe in G-d. There's a question mark whether or not he himself was an atheist, but the paradigm that he was using to examine the things that he saw in nature was not that of a person of faith, was not a person of the Abrahamic religion.
His method of saying that, yes, this was an accident that we got this, and the survival of the fittest and blah, blah, blah. It wasn't looking at it from a religious standpoint, from the standpoint that there's a higher power, that this intelligent pattern that we see here was designed by a higher power. He just say it's accidental. [crosstalk]
W.D. Mohammed: His situation brings to my mind an expression in the Quran that's very important, especially for believers who want to understand the Quran. The expression in Arabic is [Arabic language] that means they follow the logic to its conclusion. They don't conclude for the logic. [laughs] We accept evolution. We know everything- that is real undergoes evolution. Even the knowledge of Islam (unclear) undergoes evolution. As we learn more, we are taken into new dimensions of vision, of perception and vision, but that's not concluded. When Darwin tells us about evolution and he says our existence goes back to the primates, monkeys, and apes, he makes a big problem for my soul, and many other souls who have even rejected him in education.
Clyde El-Amin: He doesn't realize the limits of his paradigm. He doesn't even realize that it is a paradigm. People take their limited experiences and draw universal conclusions from them. It was the same with Freud. No one ever talks about the fact that Freud developed all of his theories from studying his patients, almost all of whom were severely mentally ill. You come to conclusions about the healthy people from studying the people who are severely mentally ill. Other scientists who came behind him tried to break away from that. I mentioned Carl Jung last time. There was another gentleman named Maslow who talked about the hierarchy of needs of human beings, and the highest one is really what he calls the transcendent need. A need for us to transcend limitations.
This gentleman Seligman, who I was talking about earlier, he studied optimism and pessimism in human beings and how if you come from an optimistic perspective that you will come to certain conclusions about yourself, about what possibilities are from you. If you come from the optimistic perspective, you will take what tend to be called negative experiences and you will give those negative experiences a positive role in your life. In Quran and other scripture, we talk about trials from our Lord, and that they are to benefit us. We don't talk about them as defeating us, [chuckles] but if you come from a pessimistic perspective, you will come to the conclusion that it says something about you. If you come to the conclusion that it says something about you and permanent limitations that you've been given, it's easy for you to come to the wrong conclusion about your creator being just and fair.
W.D. Mohammed: Exactly. The creation as seen in Revelation, Revelation does not blame G-d's creation. It blames our misunderstandings of G-d's creation, our misperceptions. Everything in G-d's creation there's beauty. You can find ugliness too, but beauty is so predominant. Even cold winters. I dread cold now more than ever. I hate it, but still, I see the beauty of snow. Snow is beautiful. It covers the earth and it cushions. The ground is hard, it's been frozen hard. It cushions it, and it decorates the trees and everything. It's beautiful. Beautiful. Because we are so cut off from mental contact with G-d's creation, and this advanced world is closing in on us, man's world, where our time is always used for something outside of the soul, not in the soul, we come to the conclusion that, "Aww. Everything is bad, the world is bad."
Satchmo Armstrong, he sings a beautiful song and it's about the world being beautiful. Beautiful. In G-d's creation, there's a predominance of beauty, and the rational conclusion that we should come to, that if G-d has put a predominance of beauty and usefulness and comfort in His creation, then that's His choice. That's His choice for us. Mother Nature is not bad, she's good.
[laughter]
Lynn El-Amin: When you look at Mother Nature, as we use that terminology, the storms, the tsunamis, the tidal waves, et cetera, the cold weather, each one of those wonderful phenomena, because if you look at it as wonderful phenomena then you can see the beauty of it, represents bringing balance to the earth, to Allah's creation. That freezing cold temperature during the wintertime keeps microorganisms from growing out of control, and we have just enough to do exactly what's needed to keep the community [crosstalk].
W.D. Mohammed: Beautiful.
Lynn El-Amin: Keep the community in what we call in science homeostasis, and the balance between the positive and the negative helps to keep that homeostasis. Homeostasis is the environment where living organisms reach their optimal ability to survive, so you do your best. If I look at the pros and the cons and I bring both of them together, the good and the bad, I see that I need a little bit of distance that Clyde mentioned, the struggles and chalLynnges that Allah tells us we have to go through in the Quran, we're going to be tested. That test is not a negative thing. That test is to strengthen me, just like the blessings. If I see my blessings correctly, that's also a way to strengthen because I say the G-d that gave me these blessings is the one that I'm actually giving credit to. I'm not saying that I earned these blessings myself. The blessings came from my G-d. The positive and the negative help to keep that balance, and that balance helps us to live in the best possible way that we can live under Allah's guidance and teachings. It's all about how we perceive our role, how we perceive our responsibilities within this culture. Are we Allah's servants to follow His will or are we the ultimate?
In science, people tend to think, "Because I have control over this." We're doing genetic engineering now. You can determine the gender of what you want your baby to be. You can decide if you want your baby to have blonde hair or brown hair. If we allow genetic engineering to move further than where it is right now, all those decisions could be made by human beings instead of being made by Allah. Are we looking at ourselves as being creator or creation? As long as we see our place in G-d's creation, we won't make the mistakes of becoming arrogant like Hitler and going off on a tangent like he did.
W.D. Mohammed: Yes, he did. The expression is in the Quran, "[Arabic language]. Surely with difficulty, accepting to face difficulty you will come to find ease. You will find ease. Meeting the difficulty, you will find ease." Another expression in the Quran, "G-d advances human life by stages. Stage after stage." These stages get on me, they can be very difficult. You can face very difficult stages, but one difficulty prepares you to defeat another difficulty. Then it goes on and on and on.
Clyde El-Amin: It's amazing that people find that concept hard to understand, but at the same time, people go to the gym and purposely lift 300 pounds and really feel good about the achievement of lifting the 300 pounds, because it brings some-- Maybe self-aggrandizement is the motive or maybe there are other motives, but to be able to understand that so easily but not to be able to understand Allah's message to us through scripture.
W.D. Mohammed: You enjoy it.
Clyde El-Amin: Right, because you enjoy it.
W.D. Mohammed: I'm physical myself. I can't do what I used to. I'm physical myself, and I know I enjoy meeting the difficulty.
Clyde El-Amin: You enjoy working out, meeting the difficulty.
W.D. Mohammed: Straining against the difficulty.
Lynn El-Amin: It's like the harder you work, the more you feel that you've accomplished whatever the task is.
W.D. Mohammed: Exactly.
Lynn El-Amin: Like you just mentioned, because you accept that you have to go through these challenges as part of you moving forward, and moving forward [crosstalk].
Clyde El-Amin: The task becomes easier. As you accept those difficulties and move through them, you move through them with greater ease. We were talking about beauty in the creation earlier. I was just amazed this morning. There was a news report about scientists capturing alligators and extracting blood from the alligator because they believe that the blood from the alligator holds great promise for treating certain illnesses. There was another species, and I don't remember the name of it, but it was very, very, very unattractive.
[laughter]
They were extracting--
W.D. Mohammed: It must have been a human.
[laughter]
Clyde El-Amin: I'm sure there are some humans who have these characteristics. They were getting some secretions from this animal. It lives on the bottom of the ocean. If you went scuba diving or whatever you do to go down beneath the surface of the ocean, you wouldn't look for this animal. You'll look for starfish and other beautiful things.
W.D. Mohammed: It wouldn't be urchin?
Clyde El-Amin: It's something like that, because they now know that this secretion actually will control, and maybe even will control the growth of tumors, and they believe it actually holds the potential to actually destroy them. You look at these creatures and you will say they're ugly, you will say alligators are dangerous. If you're coming from the place that you believe that there's a good purpose for everything, and the scripture tells us that Allah put this whole creation here, even the universe, to serve us, and you know that everything has a purpose, if you stay out of the alligator's way he won't do you any harm. That there is a purpose there. Other than just shoes and handbags, that alligator has a purpose, and they finding this more and more with animals. They've been doing it for decades now with plants, going to the Amazon and other places to find these natural cures.
W.D. Mohammed: Recently I had read a science article, and it was showing the hyenas and how unattractive they look. What it says is that they have one of the most impressive family orders.
Clyde El-Amin: Family orders, yes. Something as simple as the ant.
Lynn El-Amin: As small as the ant.
[crosstalk]
Lynn El-Amin: It's in the community spirit as well as the ability to build communities. The bee and its ability to go out and extract from the environment and bring it back to the hive and make that beautiful nectar that we call honey that's been found to have so many wonderful properties as far as helping human beings. We look at science and we look at all of the different things that are out there, but the concept that we're moving towards now in the field of science is scientific inquiry. We're questioning more. We're not just making statements about whatever. We're questioning. We're investigating. The concept of scientific inquiry says you're not just looking for, like I mentioned at the beginning, just the face value or just the surface. You now want to understand more. You want to see how things fit together. This concept of reasoning, you're looking at the clues, the cues around you, and you're trying to come up with something that could help better explain why things are happening the way they are, not just what's happening but why.
W.D. Mohammed: Why, yes.
Lynn El-Amin: In Islam, we're not taught to go through rituals as far as our religion. Actually, it's shunned upon in Islam to do something just ritualistically. When I fast Ramadan we all know we have to make our intentions first. It's your intention that's the most important part of starting that fast, is to make the intention.
W.D. Mohammed: Spiritual benefits firstly but also the social benefits.
Lynn El-Amin: Of making that part, exactly. When I make my prayers I have to make my intentions. When you make your Hajj, you're making your attentions. We look at the reason. We're not just saying, "I intend to," but I'm doing this to please Allah. I'm doing this to improve my social, my spiritual mind, my own inner self, but the whole purpose is Allah has guided me, has said to me that these are the things that I need to do. Now in science we're not saying, "Here's photosynthesis," but why. Why is it like this, and how does this impact upon the society? How does this impact more upon Allah's creation? We're paying more and more attention to nature.
W.D. Mohammed: It's the best time for man on this planet earth. I'm convinced of that. The prophets, especially Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, the major prophets that we identify mostly with for understanding our religion, they pointed, always, us forward and they didn't say that in their life you're going to realize everything. No. They said in the future you'll realize even much more than you realize in their individual lifetimes. They pointed us to the future always to get more. To get more knowledge, to get more of life, to get more of what we need to manage society without abusing society.
Clyde El-Amin: I was really fascinated when you made the point about our understanding of religion also evolving as everything else evolves because we're at a point where if you realize that in a positive way, not in a negative way, you're so proud to be religious. [chuckles] When I started college-- I don't want to say I didn't have much of a religious foundation, I had the best religious foundation that my parents' understanding was able to give me, but it couldn't withstand the professors, which is strong enough.
[laughter]
W.D. Mohammed: I know.
Clyde El-Amin: I never left faith in Allah. At that point I said faith in G-d and my mother was so happy about that. She said, "As long as you're searching you'll never become an atheist."
[laughter]
W.D. Mohammed: I've heard that expression.
Clyde El-Amin: Now students can come to the academic enterprise with their religion if they understand scriptural reasoning, or if they're pursuing scriptural reasoning, and they're not afraid to bring reasoning into that part of their life. That they understand that their intellect is in fact a gift from Allah that also evolves and is intended to evolve. To me, it's just such a major era. To be in that era where we're actually able to talk about our understanding of religion or religion evolving because 20, 30 years ago that could get you into trouble. [chuckles].
W.D. Mohammed: There was a slave, I think his name was Ibn Said.
Clyde El-Amin: Ibn Said.
W.D. Mohammed: I'm pretty sure of his name, Ibn Said. He was in prison and he starts studying the Bible and the Quran. Is there similarities for the Bible and the Quran? He didn't live to see his work really develop much, but I see a lot of similarities for Bible and Quran, and reading that about him has given me a desire really to complete his work of comparing Bible and Quran. In the Bible, it says, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." He didn't say in his mind. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." He said, "People will be wondering where is Christ Jesus?" He said, "They will look in the sacred chambers they won't find him there. They'll look to the mountain they won't find him up there," he said, "but he'll be in the heart of the earth." Then the Quran comes and says, "G-d has formed everything to broadcast knowledge or science and mercy. The heart is where we find mercy, and He revealed it upon Muhammad's heart." The two books are saying the same thing. [laughs]
Clyde El-Amin: They're saying the same thing. One clarifies those things about which maybe doubt has come. Of course, since I was raised in Christianity actually until I was in college, my mother was there until I was about 15 because I had told her, I said, "I got a problem. I really have a problem." She said, "You don't have to come to this church anymore, but just stay faithful." I had a real problem with what they were presenting, but I never saw a conflict in Quran and the Bible. The Quran made me come to a different conclusion about what my understanding had been of what I had read in the Bible. I said, "I always had a problem with my understanding of that though," because the understanding I got left me a little confused.
W.D. Mohammed: That was purposely done by the leaders in religion, especially Christianity, who feared that if the religion was clearly understood by pagan rulers the people would suffer too much. They would kill them all out . If G-d didn't stop them, they would kill everybody. They feared death and persecution so much coming from pagan authority that they designed scripture to attract pagan authority. Now everything has to be studied again for us to come to a better perception and understanding of what our scriptures really want us to have.
Lynn El-Amin: My background's a little different than Brother Clyde's. I did not grow up in a home of parents who practiced the Christian faith. I grew up in a home of parents who practiced Islam under the leadership of your father, Elijah Muhammad. May Allah's peace and mercy be upon him. My way of looking at my college experience was a little bit different. I questioned everything. I didn't believe anything they said. They had to prove to me that the knowledge that they was bringing represented something that I needed to take as a serious concept. As far as them saying that this is what happened and this is what happened when I took my psychology courses,
I'm like, "Wait a minute. This man had this type of a background or that type of a background, so how could he be the one that we relish as far as interpreting the way human beings think, reason, et cetera?" When they introduced these concepts of science for biology or chemistry, I wanted to know why. Why is this particular law, this particular process? Why this equation? Et cetera.
My paradigm was a little different, similar to what we were saying about George Washington Carver. When I got out into the workforce and I started teaching, others were like, "That's not the way we were taught to teach." Who's to say that there is one way to approach this and who's to say that all I have to do is tell the child to open the book and read? Why can't I help the child understand why this is the case and why this is important, and their role in society? Coming up the way I did and the way I was taught, I had the responsibility of contributing back. Not just taking, not just using it for my own benefit, but contributing back for the good of all.
We look at the concept that's in the Quran about the Khalifa. I saw my role as a Khalifa. I saw the role of every student that I taught as that of a Khalifa, so I made them aware of what their role was in the society. Alhamdulillah. Just recently I was informed that I had received some funds for a grant proposal that I had put together. I didn't write the proposal alone, I wrote the proposal with the help of some children. The children and I sat down, we looked at the problem that was in that particular environment, and we said, "Let's come up with a solution." The implementation, inshallah, of this particular grant will be with the help of the children. If we start to give our students and the people that are working with us more autonomy to be able to be a part of this solution, that's what I see as the field of science is moving more towards.
As I learn more about Islam and learn more about the religion, and I'm studying now some of the teachings of Christianity and Judaism. As I learn more about it, it's not to restrict us. One of the statements that you used at the beginning of this session was the liberation of the human being. This knowledge would free us to be able to do more instead of restricting us to say, "This is the only way that you have to think," and figure things out. That's reasoning to me. That's what reasoning is about.
W.D. Mohammed: I have to acknowledge that the Bible turned me off because when I would hear it and tempt to read it, there were things that gave me-- It didn't show intelligence to me. I thought that this was not intelligent the way it was stated. The same thing from my father's teachings. Some things in his teachings I’d say, "This is not respecting human intelligence." Since then, over the years I've come to really appreciate the Bible so much [laughs] and the same for my father's teachings. I've come to appreciate his teachings so much. If we look for aim and purpose, what is it aiming for? What is the purpose? What is it aiming for? I can make a conclusion right here regarding the teachings of my father, the Nation of Islam’s teachings 
[01:04:15] [END OF AUDIO]

