12/26/2000
IWDM Study Library 
Eid Al-Fitra Harvey Islamic Center - Harvey IL

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
This is the National Public Broadcast of W. Deen Mohammed, Muslim American Society leader. The following Khutbah was delivered December the 26th, the year 2000 at the Harvey Islamic Center in Harvey, Illinois. Commemorating the end of the month of Ramadan. The month of the fast, your lecturer is Imam W. Deen Mohammed.
Bismillah hir rahman nir raheem. Ashhadu anla ilaha illallah hu wahdahu la sharikalahu wa ashhadu anna Muhammadan abduhu wa rasulu. Salla allahu alaihi wa sallam wa ala alihi wasahbihi ajmaeen ammaba. Ya ayuhal muslimeen, ya ayuhal mu'minuun. Ya aiyuhal muslimun ya aiyuhal mu'minuun. Salaamu alaikum. As salaamu alaikum! Peace be unto you, wa Eid Mubarak! And a blessed Eid. For this occasion, we glorify G-d much with strong feelings, with strong spirit, with attention to our obligation to worship him alone and attention to our obligation, to follow in our life form and style after the form and lifestyle of the seal of the prophets, the last of the Prophets, Muhammad, salla alahu alaihi wa sallam and his uswa and his Sunnah. His uswa, his excellent human nature. He fulfills what Allah, G-d requires of human being for the development of our human nature and also his Sunnah, how he lived, how he practiced life or religion and religion. The religion is life. Religion is the life. When you come into religion, your life should change from the life of the world to the life of religion.
So, we follow his Sunnah, how he practiced the religion, how practiced living. We have to make a conscious effort. And we want to be the best we can. Islam encourages us to always go for the best and to always take the best. Allah says, select the best, Allah says, in the Qur'an, highly glorified is He. Subhana wa ta'ala. Says in the Qur'an, and select the best thereof. And G-d says to us that he does not desire, burden or hardship for us, but He desires that we be purified. And in order to be purified, we have to accept the burden and the hardship. The month of Ramadan, the blessed month, 30 sometimes 29 days of abstaining from food, water, all drinks, all foods. during the daylight hours, from the first sign of dawn, that's the straight white line in a black sky.
A straight level, I've seen it myself several times, a straight black line in the east, in a black sky. And that straight line of white lights on the black background is called in the Qur'an, the thread. white thread of the dawn and the black thread of the night. We fast from that time up until sunset. At the sunset you know, we break out fast, and we break out fast as G-d ordered. We don't fast this month, Ramadan is past now, we don't fast Ramadan for any other purpose than for G-d. And G-d says fasting is for me. He makes it very clear to us. Fasting is for me. It's not for physical fitness, is not to look pretty. Fasting is for G-d. You get many benefits, more than loss of weight and good looks. You get something much better than that. You get Allah's friendship more. He'll be more your friend because you made your sacrifices.
You've done what He asks of you, so you'll be more of a friend of His when you complete the Ramadan. The friendship will be getting strong and stronger. Every day you compete the fast. And at the end of Ramadan, this friendship with G-d is much stronger. And also, his angels will respond to you automatically. Angels respond automatically, but only to good. They'll respond to you. You'll get more help from G-d's angels because of you doing what G-d asks of you. Enduring the pain of hunger, enduring the pain of thirst, enduring the pain of abstaining from sex with your wife, enduring all of this and suffering all of that, that's the hardship. But Allah says, He does not want the hardship for you, He wants that you be purified. So that tells us that if we obey Allah, we will have a more pure life.
When we say pure, we mean, vulgarity goes out. You get away from vulgarity. You get away from filthy language. The habit of talking filthy language. You get away from filthy behavior or unbecoming behavior for intelligent and decent people. You get away from that as you purify yourself more. So, this is Ramadan. So, we celebrate the completion of the fast. This is a great victory for us who were able to complete the fast and you who are not able to take it or complete it, if you love Allah and you love His word, the Qur'an, and you love His servant and messenger, the seal of the Prophets, mentioned in the Old and New Testament. You love that. If you love this religion, if you are true and sincere, that's what I mean to say, if you are true and sincere and you wanted to fast, you get blessings too. Don't think you will not get blessings; you get plenty blessings.
Allah does not deny you blessings when you can't do things. If you are very sincere and, in your heart, you truly want to do it, Allah gives you blessings, sometimes just as If you completed the whole thing. And if you complete the whole month, Allah gives you blessings. Allah will give you blessings. Our G-d is a loving G-d, a merciful G-d. Our G-d is a G-d that doesn't want hardship for us. So, the old, the senior citizens who are suffering problem, health problems, Allah knows and it will not please Allah, for you to fast. And little children, not physically matured yet. Allah does not want suffering for those children. So, I never asked my young children, my little children under 12 to fast.
In fact, some of them, I would discourage fasting, even though they want to fast. I say, well, you are developing and you have to go to school and you need your energy and your brain and your growth is taking a lot of energy from your brain just to grow. You are losing a lot of energy from your brain. So, I say, I don't think you should fast. And sometime they insist they fast a day, and I congratulate them. I love that. Some smaller children have health problems. You should discourage that. Allah is ar Rahman and Muhammad the Prophet told us, Allah is the merciful, and we are obligated to be also merciful. Allah is the loving, and we are also obligated to be loving. Allah is kind and gentle. We are also obligated to be kind and gentle.
So, we are to take on the attributes of G-d and we'll have a beautiful life with our families and with our friends and with all mankind. If we just follow the simple instructions in this religion, you don't need to know the deep stuff that you think I'll be teaching. I teach only deep stuff, so you will see light stuff. All right? The light stuff is the good stuff, the main stuff you have to use all the time. All right? So, you don't have to know deep stuff or be busy in the deep thinking to get the great benefits you get the great benefits from following the simple, practical, common teaching of this religion. That's how you get the great benefit. We know Allah rewards, those who seek knowledge and those who get knowledge, G-d says they have surely received a great blessing.
And we know that, but remember, if you have all the heavy knowledge, but you don't have a life of a Muslim, you have nothing but hell fire coming. Allah wants us to be the best human being possible. That's why He give us Muhammad. Muhammad is the best human being possible. He gave us Muhammad as a model because he wants all of us to be the best human being possible. And He says, Muhammad is for us. That means we are to try to be like him, in human excellence, we are supposed to try to be like him. Allah says of Muhammad, He says expand for him, his breast, his chest. That means he made his chest, his heart big so that he can take in the whole of mankind into his heart. Muhammad.
Ah "we have expanded for you, your breast", that's the translation, breast. It means the rib cage, this here. where the heart is. Open up, so you could take more into your heart, more room there to take more into your heart. He expanded for him his breast until he could take the whole world of people into his chest, with his heart, so they could be right next to his heart. Isn't that beautiful? So, if he was like that, and G-d made him like that, because he was such a perfect human being, then that tells us we have to also have room in our heart for everybody. Only the rejectors of G-d. Those who reject G-d, we reject them. But if they don't reject G-d, then we should have a place in our heart for all of them, no matter where they are on this earth, what country, what language they speak it doesn't matter. We have a place in our heart for them. And especially for the Muslim brother, the Muslim believers, we must love each other. We must practice that love. Muhammad the Prophet, sallallah alaihi wa sallam he said, "thatakul jinna hata tu'minuun, wa la tu'minuun hata tu haaabuu. You will not enter paradise until you have faith, and you will not have the faith until you practice loving one another.
So, this religion that calls us to faith, and we know it calls us the faith and the Qur'an and the people said, we have heard a caller in the land calling to faith. that Muhammad the Prophet, the messenger of G-d, servant and messenger of G-d. "We have heard a call in the land calling to faith, and we have responded saying, we believe". So, we know it is a call to faith, Al-Islam is a call to faith. But Muhammad, the Prophet said, you won't have that faith. He's calling people to faith, but they won't have it until they become decent human beings. Loving human beings. You will not enter the paradise until you have the garden, until you have faith and you will not have the faith until you practice loving one another. I'm a person of faith. G-d has blessed me to embrace the Qur'an, the whole of it.
And I believe in the whole of it. And Allah has blessed me to embrace Muhammad, the perfect man, the perfect human and I have accepted him, all of him. Everything about him, all of his words, everything. I've accepted him completely, as my leader, as my Imam, as my prophet, as the servant and messenger of G-d and the seal of the prophets, the last of the prophets. I've accepted that. And I've accepted that because I was conditioned by the Nation of Islam. By my father and by my mother, I was conditioned to love G-d, to depend on G-d, with my whole being and to practice loving my fellow man. I love the brotherhood. I love the sisterhood. I love the community of Muslims with all my heart. I love them. And that means all of them. I may hate you for what you did to me that was bad, but I love you because G-d wants me to love you. And because you are my human brother out of your righteous nature. So, I love you still. I want you to come back to your righteous nature. I won't stop loving you, even though I fight you and may kill you too. But I killed the person that I wanted to be a good Muslim. I didn't want him to be bad. I wanted him to be a good Muslim and I was loving him when I was killing him.
I had to kill him. I wouldn't kill him unless I had to. Yes, it sounds funny to you, but this is true. This is true of me. And it's true of many of us. In fact, there are many right here, right now, the same as I am. Praise be to Allah. Yes, so we are going to conclude the Khutbah very shortly, but let us remember that this religion wants us to be ... Muhammad the Prophet says, "kataballahu al insana ala khuli shay". G-d prescribed excellence and goodness for everything, for everything. And scientists who study the evolution of matter, they will tell you that matter began very simple and crude. Like biology, like the biological life. And it increases and grows and also improves in its value and in its beauty, in its excellence, in everything. It improves, it becomes refined, more refined and more refined. We ourselves, we are told that we came from earth and we came from water, right? And we are told in the scripture that we were made from a clot of blood. But we went from that to fetus lump, something trying to get a form, like human and bones in it. And finally, completion, I'm not going over all the steps, but completion of it, of the flesh, a human being that looks nice. Human being does not look like dust or earth or clay...
Or water, human being got a picture, a nice picture. So, see Allah evolved that matter, that dead matter. That inanimate stuff, and evolved it into a living beautiful picture. A human being, a beautiful girl, a beautiful baby girl, a beautiful baby boy. He did that, right? So, he did that for everything. Everything is evolving into a more beautiful picture. The earth that is dead, the land, G-d tells us that look at these things and think about these things. He brings water to it and it gets sunshine and it gets air, wind, oxygen. And out of it comes life, seeds burst open and let up life. Life comes up out of it and the trees and the plants, the grass, and the animals and us. We are more attractive than what we came out of. So that tells you Allah wants beauty and excellence, for His creatures.
So, we don't want the worst, we want the best that Allah wants for us. So, we should always be striving for the best. And that's what Al-Islam is all about. Being the best that you can be in your own creation and nature, as a human being. That's what I mean by that, in your own creation of nature. I mean, as a human being, you want to be the best you can be in your human form and nature. Don't lose your human form and don't lose your human nature. Like some go stray and they think they should become spirits. Spirits. Become too pious, I should say too extreme in their pious devotions, not too pious, but too extreme in their pious devotions. And they go astray. They leave the logic, they leave the good reasoning, the good rational knowledge.
They leave it, and they go astray and they lose their human nature and their human form. And they become like spirits or angels or something. And G-d says, if the earth had been populated with angels, He would've sent us an angel as a messenger, but he sent us a human being as a messenger. So that tells us that we want to have angelic qualities, divine qualities, G-d's attributes and angelic qualities. It says, sameana wa ataana. Thats an angelic response. We hear and we obey. That means we don't let our thinking come into the picture. We know G-d said, do this. G-d says fast Ramadan. "samea'na wa ata'ana". We here and we obey. We don't start debating that and saying, maybe I'll benefit more. If I don't fast. Maybe if I just go to the health spa and do these things and practice my own diet and my own exercise program for myself. And do my meditation, do my Buddha or something, meditation maybe that'll be better for me.
We don't even have an impulse to think that way because we have an angelic quality, also with the human nature. G-d created us also with an angelic quality along with the of human nature. So as the angels obey Him instantly without questioning. So, they go straight to the job. They don't deviate in any degree, when they know the job, they just go straight to the job, with no attention to nothing but doing the job. "samea'na wa ata'ana". So, we are happy to celebrate our fast victory in this month, along with all the Muslims of the world, the Royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the nations of Africa, Sudan and Morocco and Egypt and all of them. And all the nations of the Middle East and the far east to Pakistan and Afghanistan and Indonesia and India, where it is not a Muslim nation, but a very big population, bigger than most nations on the earth.
We celebrate with all our brothers and brothers of the Philippines and sisters of the Philippines and all the islands, and certainly of this new world over here in South America and here in North America, in the United States, we celebrate this victory all together and we pray to G-d for the ummah. Oh, Allah strengthen the ummah and strengthen all the believers. Oh, Allah heal our sick, give our sick relief from their sickness and give us relief from our troubles of our mind and troubles of our soul. Save us for your pleasures, our Lord, please. Ameen.
Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. La ilaha illallah. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, wa lillahi humd. Subhanahu bukritan wa asieelah. Highly glorified as he in the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. We worship none, but Him. La na'abudu ilah yahu muk'liseena lahudeen wa lau khaliha kafirun. We worship up none but Him and we give Him our obedience completely reserving nothing, or holding back nothing. And for Him is the religion and we do that even though the rejectors of faith hate us for doing that. And don't think we are no different than the Christians in that respect. The Christians were told as they have it reported to them in their Bible, their New Testament, that you'll be hated for my namesake. Which means if you be like me, you're going to be hated. And if we be like Allah want us to be, the unrighteous, the unG-dly, the rejections of faith will hate us. And they will pretend that they love you, but they'll be hating you. Yes, they'll be hating you very intensely, very deeply. They'll be hating you. But they will be pretending like they' like you because they don't want to be seen in that ugly picture.
So be aware of that, don't think because you're good, your life is safe. The better you become, the more unsafe you are. If you depend upon the people of the world. But the safer you are, if you're depending upon your G-d, your Lord, the G-d that made you and everything. Praise be to Allah. So, we pray to G-d, Rabbana ateena fid dunyah haasanatan wa fil akhira ti hasanatan wa qeena a'dhabanar. (2 x's) Rabbana latul zigh qulubana baaqa hadaytina wa hablana lilladunka rahmatan inna ka'antal wahab. (2 x's) Ameen Yes, we are not finished bro. Rabbana ateena fid dunyah haasanatan wa fil akhira ti hasanatan wa qeena a'dhabanar. Allahuma sali ala Muhammadan wa aly ala Muhammada, kama salaita al Ibrahima wa ala aly Ibrahim, wabarik ala Muhammadan wa ala aly Muhammad, kama barakta ala Ibrahima, wa ala aly Ibrahima, fil ailameena, innaka hameedun majeed. Subhana rabbika rabbil izzati ama yassefuun was salaamu ala mur'sileena, wal hamdulillahi rabbil ail ameen, ameen. Dear believers, this is a wonderful day as the month that we have fast, the wonderful and blessed month. And this is a wonderful religion, Al-Islam. And we are blessed to be Muslims in the following of Muhammad the Prophet, salla allahu alaihi wa sallam, the servant and messenger of G-d. In this ummah of Al-Islam, the community of Al-Islam.
So, enjoy the day and the day to come and the day after that and all the days until we have this blessed month again. Join us at the 45th Arena for dinner and in socializing and enjoyment. And also remember to visit the sick, call them on the phone at least wish them happy Eid, a blessed Eid and happy Eid. And love one another, because that's an order not only in Christianity, that's an order or commandment also in Al-Islam. Peace be unto you, As salaamu alaikum. It'll only take a minute. We have an announcement and, and the workers at the EggMate food processing plant would be very much displeased with me, if I didn't make this announcement. We have received some decorations, so they have the place beautiful for you and all of you who care and can do it, we'd like for you to go by the EggMate meat processing plant.
And we want you to go by the EggMate meat processing plant between now or well, I don't know one of the mics it's out. I'll try to raise my voice high. What I was saying is that the workers at EggMate meat processing plant, they will be awfully displeased with me, if I don't give you this announcement. They will be open from about now until about two o'clock. But the sooner, the better, and they are open for those who care to and can come by the meat processing plant and see the halal deli that we have. And just see what the facility looks like, if you haven't seen it. And you have seen it, you'll still invited. We have been... someone donated some nice decorations. They have a decorated there for you and they are working today.
A sister who's a Christian works for us and she couldn't come in yesterday, we told her the Eid would be perhaps Tuesday. So, she couldn't come in yesterday, she's coming in today. She's there today. So, there'll be some other workers there. And anyone who like to go by and visit. You won't see it like we want you to see it because during this in the Ramadan and Eid we sold a lot of products. So, we are ordering products to fill up the cases again. But I'm sure you'll see a beautiful place that you'll love. We are doing this to make our life better. Not my life only and not the business people's life only, but to make all of our life better. So, we have more opportunities, more money to finance our needs, et cetera.
We are not going after $1,000; we're not going after one million dollars; we are going after millions of dollars. So inshallah, this effort will eventually put you in business who want to go in retail business. I guarantee you; we can put some of you in retail business overnight. Right now, we can put you in business overnight, but you have to qualify now, no monkey business, all right? But we can put you in business overnight. And right now, we can do that. And in the future inshallah, we will be a very big business. Allah is blessing us tremendously. Allah is blessing us. We didn't expect all these blessings. He's giving us the people we need to get the job done and He's opening the way for us to do it. What more can you ask? I can't ask more than that.
Our G-d is loving and kind and merciful to us. And He is now pleased with us in our form, in our shapes that we are in now in the position we have taken as Muslim. Allah is pleased with us now and we have fulfilled our obligation as believers to come into the correct Islam and be the right-minded Muslims. So, Allah loves us, He's pleased with us and loves us. And he going to help your Imam in miraculous ways to get what we want, and to get what Allah wants for us. Thank you. So, we invited you. You don't have to come. You got family, you got loved ones, you got children, you got a lot of things on your mind. You might have to go back to where I don't know what you're doing today, but you are invited. The address is on 167th Street. It's on 167th Street, not far from here. The address is 2979, 2-9-7-9 167th Street. Thank you.
Be sure to join us next time for the National Public Broadcast of W. Deen Mohamed. Muslim American Society Leader. For more on the Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohamed call 1708-798-6653, or write Post Office Box 121, Hazel Crest, Illinois, 60429 for. W.D.M. Publications call 1708-862-7733, or write Post Office Box1944, Calumet City, Illinois, 60409. For Muslim Journal see local distributor. And thanks for listening.



