02/07/1977
IWDM Study Library
The Christ Movement: Part 1

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed


IWDM:	Let me first open by saying [foreign language 00:00:11]. In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful. [foreign language 00:00:22]. I openly witness that there is nothing to be worshiped except Allah. [foreign language 00:00:31]. I openly witness that Muhammad [foreign language 00:00:36] is His slave servant and His messenger.

	Muslim brothers, I give you the greeting of peace, As-Salaam-Alaikum.

	Now you can begin sitting now. I think most of you are here.

	All praise is due to Allah.

	Now we shouldn't be able to hear anything. It should be so quiet in here that you feel like the place is empty except for the filling of life and the spirit of brotherhood. If you feel like the place is so quiet that it's empty of noise, then that's what it should be. We should be able to hear a pin fall if it fell on [inaudible 00:02:01] in a hot surface, or a fly flying around an auditorium. Thank you.

	Let me begin by thanking you for being present here tonight. What you're going to hear tonight is what you hear whenever you hear peace, the true teachings of Islam. It's so valuable to you that you are obligated to say thank you if you are indeed a believer, but I am thanking you, and I think you because your support is my strength and if you don't support me, then I don't have that strength.

	When I see you come out lively and strong as you have reported here tonight it makes me feel very, very proud and very, very special, because there are not many leaders today who have anyone's support. All praise is due to Allah.

	I know that with this kind of support we are not going to fail. We are going to accomplish the job. It's a big job but everything I see is turned that we are going to make it. We have made it this far and we have big successes behind us, in this two years that we have been battling to come out of the first resurrection and establish ourselves in the second, we have accomplished great things. Great things.

	We have done things that I don't believe any organization, religion, or movement has ever been able to do. I don't know of any in history, if you know of you have to tell me, I don't know anywhere in history where there have been as drastic of changes as we have made with the slow ... easy and slow changes, and our success has been a great one.

	Our attendance now is better than it used to be. We didn't lose attendance. We gained in attendance. We didn't lose progress. Our progress increased. If we consider all the goals [inaudible 00:05:36] that we have realized since making the drastic changes that we made, that we began making, pardon me, two years ago approximately, February 26, we will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is God's doing, that this is the doing of the Lord of the heavens and earth, that I have not brought this about by myself, but I have only been used to bring it about and it is God Himself, Allah the almighty, the eternal, the one who lives and is not dead, who acts but needs no rest, neither slumbers nor sleeps, who is not physical and yet is in constant touch with every physical thing though it be smaller than an atom.

	That God has brought me this far and that God is with me and is with you who follow. Fear not. You are the righteous, the best, and the most powerful. That was said a few years ago. Now it is a fact. What I mean by a few years ago, about 40 some years ago. As the Fard Muhammad said, "You are the righteous, the best, and the powerful." He said, "I can sit on top of the world and tell anyone that the most beautiful people or nation is in the wilderness of North America."

	What did he mean in that saying? How are we the most beautiful people he had seen all over the world, being he had seen Muslims who had never touched pork, who had never known whiskey, cigarettes, on occasion adultery, stealing, thieving, robbery, rape, et cetera? He had seen people who had never known these things. There was no appearance of these things in their society. What did he mean that we were the most beautiful?

	He meant that over here he saw a people that had a thirst for God's blessings, and that if God would bless them they would be the best people on the face of the earth, because no other people on the face of the earth showed as much thirst for God's still waters as we did. He had been among the Muslim people of the world and he had seen how anxious they were to hear something about God, about the prophets and especially about that last prophet and the message of the Quran as revealed to him, but he had never seen people as eager to learn about God and truth as you were.

	Conditions had made you like that. You had been separated from ancestors, separated from traditional knowledge of God, and you had been given all of your knowledge of God from the people who captured you or the people in whose hands you fell. Is that right?

	So you wanted to know is there something else beyond this? I know these people are not our ancestors. The American people are the people that we came under or fell under as slaves. Is there something? What's beyond it? This big question was in the mind of all of the descendants of our ancestors, the slaves, that this question, what was before that, what was before Jamestown, Virginia? The big question was in all of our minds. We then have a natural connection with the history of religion, or the truth of religion. Our connection was one of adoption. We were allowed to take on a religion, and the religion didn't come from our true parent. It came from one that adopted us. Is that right? So you always have a suspicion, is this really what was yesterday's? You want to get back in touch with the past.

	When your father came here he wasn't ... America, or European. He was an Arab, or at least looking like an Arab. We wanted to know, well, stranger, can you tell me something about my past that these people didn't tell me? Well, stranger, can you tell me something about God that these people didn't tell me? So he started up more willingness and more a desire and anxiousness, an eagerness, to get knowledge of God, knowledge of truth. We wanted to know the facts. We wanted the truth. We didn't trust the Caucasians who had enslaved us and who had denied us equality and justice. We couldn't trust them, so we want to know, maybe they told us the truth, maybe not. Stranger, can you tell me something? Is God the God they say or not?

	That's what Fard saw in us. It made sense ... for knowledge of the truth. He saw that once we got a little knowledge of God that we could accept His truth. We became more faithful to God, even though we wrongly conceived Him, wrongly imagined Him, wrongly pictured Him in our mind, we became more faithful to this God that we believe now is God than those who had been serving God without any interruption over there in the lands we call Islamic lands, so because of that he said, "I can sit on top of the world and tell anybody that the most beautiful people are in the wilderness of North America. The most beautiful nation is in the wilderness of North American."

	You know Imam Elijah Muhammad ... Even in the allegorical language he did tell us that Master Fard, I don't know how many of you heard it, but I'm sure that if you followed for years you heard him at least say it once openly, but he used to say it to us in private home settings often. He said, "Master Fard wasn't talking so much in the present all the time, he was talking in the future." So when he said you were the most beautiful nation on the face of the earth, he was seeing into the future, saying that these people stay like this, one day when their eyes really open to the whole truth, they are going to be the most beautiful people on the face of the earth and they are going to be the righteous, they are going to be the most powerful.

	So he said, "I can sit on the top of the world and tell anybody that you're the most beautiful," and he said, "You are the righteous." Not that you were the righteous then. You were only the righteous then in spirit. You had a willingness for righteous but you hadn't yet been shown righteousness. You had been shown righteousness in part but your willingness was complete. I'm not talking about every one of you but I'm talking about the majority who accepted the leadership of Master Fard Muhammad and stuck with it and the majority who followed that leadership that passed down to the honorable Master Elijah Muhammad [inaudible 00:15:03].

	The majority of those people had a complete willingness to follow the righteousness of God. If they failed it was because they just didn't know. So you see how slavery, how kidnapping, how cutting us off from our roots, from our traditional knowledge, family knowledge, can't you see how that really worked to put us into position to rise over all people in terms of [inaudible 00:15:35], devotion to truth, worship of God? Don't you see how that worked to rise us to the top?

	Listen, brothers. Almighty God, if He brings us suffering or permits a terrible thing to happen in the lives of the people for which there is no clear justification, then God has allowed this to happen because He has a bigger thing that He wants to give to that people and He is just preparing them to be big enough to receive the bigness of that thing He has to give us.

	By emptying us so barely, taking this knowledge out of us, letting the society kill our knowledge, empty our minds of everything that is [inaudible 00:16:31] or original, forcing us to have to take all the things that are of the never-land, that are not ourselves. We had to take all his language, all his identity, all his misguiding, everything except his attitude. We couldn't take on his attitude because attitudes are something that's prompted by a conscious behavior and you can't have your own attitude if what you've taken on is not your own.

	You couldn't consciously take on his attitude and he couldn't give you his attitude. Why? Because attitudes are something that arrive out of something that's there, and all that was there was him, so in yourself you were a dead man. Do you understand that? It's like taking on the framing work of a man but not the life of that man. We took on the metal framework. We took on the metal framework, the mind of the man, but we didn't take on the intelligence of the man. We took on the knowledge of the man but not the intelligence of the man. So intelligence, conscious intelligence, is needed to affect attitude, attitude changes. So our attitudes were in the hands of the man. All of our attitudes were born by the society. Is that right? We couldn't change our attitudes unless the society changed our attitude, until a new mind came.

	When a new mind came then we were able to change our attitude and take on a new attitude, and those attitudes were not our own. They were attitudes that rose up from a dead man. I'm going to explain what I'm telling you. I want you to understand.

	You had taken on a mind that was not yours. You mean to tell me the mind Master Fard gave up was not ours? Yes, I mean exactly that. It was not yours. It was his. He made it and then gave it to you, and you couldn't establish it. You could only believe in it, independent, but you couldn't connect it with its past. You couldn't show how it descended to you. All you know is that you got it, right? Whenever you had to defend it, you couldn't think with your own mind. You had to just take hope, but you would talk. Is that right? Yes.

	So you were still a dead man, but a dead man who at least believed his mind was his own. Before you knew your mind wasn't your own. You knew your mind was the mind that was given to you by the people who enslaved you, but when Master Fard gave you a mind you were told that that was the mind of your ancestors, so you believed it was your own.

	Well what about you now, [inaudible 00:20:14] Imam, aren't you giving us your mind? No indeed. I'm giving you the mind. In giving you the mind, you get your mind. The mind that I give you is as much yours as it is anybody else's. When you accept that mind you begin to grow as an individual. You're able to handle this by yourself. Am I right or wrong?

	You don't need to keep referring back to any catechism. The original man is an idiotic black man in 60,000 BC, so many million years ago, so many thousand years ago. You don't need any hacks and figures of that nature, and you don't need any recorded message that you have to repeat over and over again. You can speak now from your own mind.

	There's the difference. Once you were given truth the light comes on, and you find that you have control of yourself and that you're able to speak and defend your position by yourself. You don't even have to [inaudible 00:22:16], and if you have listened and learned, the lesson that I've been getting out by the guidance and power of almighty God, you can defend yourself by yourself and you never have to mention my name. You never have to mention Master Fard's name. You never have to mention my father's name. You never have to mention the lessons that I'm giving you. You don't even have to use my words. You can use your own words. You don't have to use a word of the whole Quran. You don't have to use a word of the Bible. You can defend yourself and your position and then I can come behind it and say, "Did you hear what he said? Did you hear what he just told you?" The people say, "Yes." I say the same thing.

	The Quran says the same thing. The Bible says the same thing. Every true teacher or every man that had truth, whether it was allegorical, symbolical, no matter what form it was in, he said the same thing. The sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the water, the land, the air, and everything that is [inaudible 00:23:50] and everything between these too, says the same thing.

	All praise is due to Allah. So now we're out of the grave. The Bible says that hell must give up the dead, that there is one coming who will have power over hell and death. You are looking at that one right now.

	Almighty God has been growing me for a long, long time. Yesterday I was many righteous men, and many well-meaning men, but they were all members of my body. Now all the members are together in me. This man is finally made.

	Who are you saying you are, Imam W. D. Muhammad? I am the Christ.

	About 2,000 years ago that man that lived was a sign of what you see right today.

	Nothing but the plain simple truth. There's no great mysteries once we tell you. It's simple to understand. Brother Muhammad, he is the last and universal prophet. He is the image of the movement of human society, fulfilled and completed in him. What you see here today in this day and time among you is the fulfillment of the movement of the individual's makeup.

	Prophet Muhammad represents society and I represent the individual. The individual has to develop to complete man being in touch with the world of reality and growing naturally as a person without having himself separated from reality by some false wall. You see?

	Didn't Prophet Muhammad do that? Yes, but it's not made a fact until today. What he was doing was bringing together reality and human existence. The reality of creation and the reality of human existence, our human makeup, that's what his job was, so that we can see what is the proper order of human society, and in him proper social order was established for society, not just for yesterday, for all time.

	Did we ever see in his day the fulfillment of the individual coming to full bloom? No. Prophet Muhammad did. Certainly, he did, but it did not become a reality for the people. If everything had become a reality for the people, and if there was no reason or no need for the individual human being to reach completeness and be established before the eye of the world in reality, then Prophet Muhammad wouldn't have said that Jesus and myself will be together in the end of time, and he wouldn't have said that the believers in Christ will not die before seeing him return. He wouldn't have said these things. So he said that it was a divine requirement that Jesus return. So that's why you find many Muslims believing in the return of Christ, return of Jesus, because there's authentic [foreign language 00:29:57] saying that he has to return.

	You'll find some authorities that differ, say, "Well, we don't accept that. It's not right." If you question them, those who have knowledge, they will say, "We said it's not right because we know it is not right the way they are saying it." You see? They're expecting a physical man to come back and that's not going to happen, but the knowledge that human beings as individuals should have in order to really survive without fear and without grouping in the dark is not only the knowledge of revelation but the knowledge of the secrets of revelation concerning the real life of the individual, the makeup of the real man.

	You have again in the holy Quran [foreign language 00:30:58]. The man who is under the powers of his flesh, hunger, pain, sex, appetite, and as such, fear of being killed physically, all of these things that are connected directly with the flesh, the man that is under that, he is [foreign language 00:31:22]. [foreign lanugage 00:31:31] means the man who has come alive gradually and he's now looking at himself in truth and he's going back and forth between ...
