11/04/2007
IWDM Study Library
RICH PEOPLE, POOR PEOPLE
(Part 1)

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed


0:18:55 IWDM: Greetings to our radio listening audience, we are always thankful to you for being interested in what we're all about. And we are also thankful always to God, we say Allah in our religion. Allah, the name is Allah, for the presence here, because you could be somewhere else and I could be somewhere else. And some of us could be held back because of problems with health, but we're here. And I hope the live broadcast is reaching persons who are confined because of health. I hope it's reaching them as well, because when we engage matters of importance for the community life, we engage matters of importance for all of us. And when we do that, we also give off, with words and with spirit, a healing influence that soothes our souls, and make for a better people in our minds and actions. And also make for better people in terms of health. You'd be surprised how much good comes from just good. [laughter] In our holy book, our God says, "What is the reward of good, except good?"

0:20:53 IWDM: Yes, praise be to God. And let me say Alhamdulillah, praise be to Allah. I'm going to slowly get into this, be patient. Sometimes I'm more humorous than I want to be, I hope you don't find my words are too humorous. They're serious. But I told someone, in the public place, we were sitting in there, and as soon as I finished one little humorous statement, I came back with another one. And I was coming with them so fast, I became aware that they were wondering, "Who is this guy? What is this guy all about?" So I just stopped it by saying, "I'm the good humor man."

[laughter]

0:22:00 IWDM: Yeah. This world is so serious, if you don't have a little humor, we might find you on the funny farm somewhere. I'll be really going from one concern to another. And one concern is to accept that we are not all the same in our mind, in our aspirations, what we choose as a life for our self. We're not all the same. Not to mention that we're not all the same in religion. We're not all the same. But what we want to work on together is finding where we are the same, and identifying where we are the same. And if we have problems in that area, we want to solve those problems, because where we are to be together, we don't want problems. And I think that's easy for us, but if we don't work on it together, it'll never be solved. And working on it separately makes it very difficult. We don't have to be physically working together, but if our mind and spirit be the same for that particular area where we should be united, or we should be together, then we will be together, though physically separated, or separated by our interests.

0:24:01 IWDM: As long as we have serious interests and being together where we should be together, we're going to be alright. We're coming alive on this first Sunday, November 4th 2007. I feel a bit poetic today. At birth, the name given Grandpa was William Poole. Willy, he named his son Elijah, E-L-I-J-A-H, Elijah, at birth. Elijah, that's his name at birth. How does that grab you? Yeah. Elijah left the church for the street, dove love. How does that grab you? Yes. On this time change day in Homewood, warm and sunny, WD preaching, preaching for bread money. Yes.

[laughter]

0:25:54 IWDM: A son of Willy, the preacher, and his son Elijah, WD. That son is completely sober on this media wire. Wallace D preaching with his spirit, it's not in keeping with his spirit. Five whole loaves of bread to be smoked through the nose. Yes. Whoo. How does that grab you? Love is the most powerful force in living flesh. Ordinarily a small bird flies away when a man comes near. That same little bird becomes a deadly foe for the protection of his babies in the bird's nest. I know because a bird once thought I was coming to disturb that nest with her babies in it, and she came at me, looking wild and vicious. Her size was exaggerated by her emotions that was moving her to just come blindly, at what she would normally would run from. Love is a potent seed. An apple seed has in its power, reproduction. The reproduction of a big apple tree. Out of a little apple seed, comes a tree, roots, trunk, branches, stems, leaves, flowers and bushes of the apples. The same picture is true of lumber producing trees, man's wooden structures, frame houses, etcetera, are the production that came out of a little seed. No wonder the seed plant life is pictured as love.

0:28:55 IWDM: Human population numbers for this earth have reached the six billion mark. The human seed cannot be seen by humans, unless a magnifying glass is used, a microscope. From what is much smaller in size than a speck of dust, grows out to be a 900 pounder. No one wants a mammoth figure for themselves, however, the human life spec has that much growth in it and more. Because I've heard of some people weighing 1,200 pounds. Life is feeling, F-E-E-L-I-N-G. Life is feeling, and that's where life begins. The baby comes here from his mother, just delivered, and it has feelings. And when its feelings are touched, it wakes up to our world. It opens its eyes and they become aware or alert in our world.

0:30:18 IWDM: Life is also intelligence. Feeling, and also force. Life is force. The force was not the baby's doing on its own. The God that created life created the life to force the baby out of the confinements of his mother's flesh into our world. Feeling, force, and intelligence. All three work together, and all three will make us or break us. Feeling, force, intelligence. Where are we going with this? We're going to the place where we are divided, but where we should be at the same time united. United. Common decency and common sense. History is not a report of one person's life. For any subject, the historian looks for circumstances, as they relate to the person or to the person's life. The person that's being presented in the history.

0:32:03 IWDM: As powerful as it is, love fails the lover when love is not benefiting from common decency and common sense. Common decency and common sense make possible human conditions for a sustained community life. The common good. We couldn't support the common good if we didn't have persons living decency on living common decency and living common sense. The dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, college dictionary, gives in its definition for decency this meaning, "The necessities for an acceptable standard of living." The necessities for an acceptable standard of living. Since Dr. King's "Freedom now," and Elijah's "Do for self," black America's life has been an open door to scavengers and exploiters. They have virtually become extinct. The grassroots, standard bearers. When I was a boy, I used to hear that expression from the preacher. I mean the preacher and the nation of Islam. The standard-bearer. They were aware that a congregation, like a neighborhood, like a community, must have standard bearers to survive and keep the good life. Survive and keep the good life. The good life is the life that offers us a good future. The good life is progressive, not stagnated or stagnant. We have lost those old, seasoned preachers, and that's a big loss. Big loss, big loss.

0:34:38 IWDM: Showing when divided people are to be united is the purpose for my address right here, this first part of it. America's most serious separation is the separation of the rich and the poor. The rich and the poor. Wherever there is a natural need for people to be together, the Satan comes in there and he wants to disrupt it, confuse it, turn you against one another. Because the only way he can achieve what he's out after, what he's out to get, is to keep the important God-given relationships from being healthy and growing. He doesn't want those relationships to be healthy, because if they're healthy, they're going to grow and he knows that. So he want to keep them sick, corrupted, so they won't develop properly as Allah, as God wants them to develop, and progress.

0:36:06 IWDM: The rich and the poor, we've been deceived, we've been turned against each other. When you were doing without, and you know the society is not that fair by you, and that was a condition we suffered for the whole time of plantation slavery, and for the time after plantation slavery, up until just recent in our history in America. So we can understand why there is not a unity in that divide. Certainly we're divided, we're separated, we know wealth separates the wealthy from the poor, we know that. They can live in better conditions, they can move, they have more freedom of movement to move out of a bad situation into a better one. They have so much more freedom than poor people. We know there's a big difference, certainly there's a big difference. But if you belong to religion and you have not been overcome by Satan's inducements, inducements. That he can come into your mind, into your heart, into your soul as influence, and induce in you attitudes that's really against your own better interest. Yes.

0:38:20 IWDM: We want justice, we want fairness, and we want even more from rich people, we want charity from rich people. It is, charity in our religion is not something that you haven't qualified for. The rich did not become rich in a situation or in circumstances where there was only the rich. The rich became rich because there were circumstances that they could benefit from and those circumstances were the conditions are the circumstances for the poor. So they came in and saw opportunities to grow wealth in the circumstances of the poor. Therefore charity is not something that we don't qualify for. Then we live in a society governed by laws. And we have to pay taxes like everybody else, we're taxed like everybody else. There is a public domain it's paid for by taxes. Those taxes are collected from the citizens, and we are among those citizens taxed.

0:40:13 IWDM: So we help to keep the roads fit for us to drive on, smooth, it won't break the axles of the car, potholes and whatever won't give us flat tires and break the axles of the car. But who benefits the most? It's the people with the most money, because if they have to stop and fix a flat, that hour, their time is much more valuable than ours in terms of dollars. So they lose big dollars to fix a flat, bigger dollars to have the car put in the shop for the axle to be repaired or replaced. So they lose much more than we lose, but we are also keeping the roads good so they won't have busted tires, potholes and busted tires and has broken down axles. So what religion wants for society is justice, fairness and I repeat, giving charity to the poor from the hand of the wealthy is something the poor is due, we're due that. And the burden shouldn't be placed unreasonably on government, because everytime you place the burden on government, the government has to spend more money, employee more people, get better or extra facilities. And when the government has to spend more money, the citizens have to pay more money. And that impacts the poor more so than the rich. So we have to understand this. We have to understand these things. See, I'm the good humor man, but I'm also the public education teacher.

0:42:36 S?: That's right.

0:42:38 IWDM: And you can't get the public education that you need to solve your problems as poor people from the elementary school, the high school, and the colleges. No, we have to have standard bearers who register the problem and how serious it is, and devote themselves to informing the public. And informing them in a way that will result in them being better educated as citizens or members of the society. The standard bearers. Yes. As I'm talking, I'm calling some really great standard bearers that I was acquainted with as a young man, a young boy and a young man. The devil has set us up, Satan, the invisible evil has set us up. That evil wants us to think that rich people are our enemies, want us to think that rich people have gotten over the easy way. But most of the very rich people who have been successful generation after generation, meaning that they have a family line that shows successful business. The one in the beginning, or in the first generation, perhaps was among us as a poor person, but used their intelligence and used their connections to build wealth. And then became so wealthy that when we hear about them and what they have achieved, we don't think that they could have started in poverty.

0:44:51 IWDM: And by the way, we got a booklet, a little booklet, says the poor were the first. And what that little booklet is saying, is that before man's world was established, the world was a natural world. And the natural world provided people with food, clothing and shelter. Not only food, clothing and shelter, we have to add transportation. Because before man's world, the transportation was the fast horse, the stubborn donkey, and some others that man learned he could ride. Yeah. Alright, oh, I like this. Well, well, well. Now I love to cook, but I'm in another kitchen now, buddy. Ooh, and do I like this cooking. Oh yeah, I love this cooking.

0:46:05 IWDM: Now, the Satan, I said, has tricked us into seeing rich people as our enemies. President Clinton has put out a book recently, and in that book he named several persons of great wealth and their great charity. I visited the Clinton's library in Little Rock, and it's been published in our Muslim Journal. I was invited and didn't even know it, I came to participate in the groundbreaking for a new Masjid complex in Little Rock. And I'd heard of the new Imam in that area, who not completely new, but relatively new. And I wanted to go and let him know that I was aware of his great leadership, and I supported it. When I got there there, there were more non-Muslims on the site than Muslims, recognizing the contributions that they were making to the community. And it turned out to be a wonderful experience for me. I got to the Clinton Library, and to my surprise, I was scheduled to speak.

[laughter]

0:47:41 IWDM: And they had scheduled me for some time before I arrived there, you see how the Lord works? 

0:47:50 S?: Yeah.

0:47:51 IWDM: I didn't know I was supposed to speak and I was only there for a night and the next day I was gone. I didn't know I was supposed to be there. Those people had me there, were expecting me and everything, I didn't even know it, but God put me there. God put me there so I could answer what they expected of me. And we had a great time, great time. Yes.

0:48:19 IWDM: Getting back to how our relationship, rich to poor, poor to rich, is taken advantage of by the Satan. He wants the rich to spend all the money that they got, the way he wants the rich to spend that money. And he wants the poor to not get the benefit from experiencing a friendship with rich people, because if the poor experience a friendship with rich people, by virtue of them just having an interest and an association with rich people, they're going to benefit from the better experiences, and from the better knowledge and skills that the rich have. And this relationship with the rich is going to help rise the level of the poor in the economic scale. Satan doesn't want that, Satan wants ignorant people, poor people, to be consumers and not producers.

0:49:36 IWDM: Praise be to Allah. Every time I hit a big one, man, I got to get a break, get a couple of breaths. So be patient.

[laughter]

0:49:45 IWDM: See, my heart races at big ones. Yes. This friendship that is natural. You know in the South, some of the closest friends was a poor dirt farmer and a very rich, rich man or woman. Some of the best friendships. But when we came up North, we came up to a different kind of situation all together. You came up to a situation that didn't care about folk life, didn't care about people being warm toward one another, as much as they cared about people supporting the establishments. It was a little different, and in some instances, greatly different in the South. I know because I'm not a young fella, I'm an old rooster now, and I'd heard it a lot from my elders, especially my parents, my grandfather, father and grandmother, mother, close relatives, and also their friends who are not relatives. I've heard them say things about life in the South, and I learned a lot. I think we've learned more about life in the South from our families than we learned from textbooks, haven't we? I know I have. Yes.

0:51:31 IWDM: So this is an attempt to bring us back to a normal, natural way of relating to one another, and also relating as poor people to rich people. And this encouragement for us will grow more and will increasingly become a friendly divide, a friendly relationship for the poor and the rich, as much as is possible. And the only thing that can hurt this a lot is the exception to the rule regarding persons of wealth and poor people. We know there are exceptions to the rule, they have rich people that hate to see you, hate to see that you exist. They don't want to even see you. Why? Because you bother their conscience. You prick their conscience. They know they came into wealth on the back of the poor, they know that. So you bother their conscience. So they hate just that you're present. And a lot of us will mistake that hate for racism. It's not racism, it's a guilty conscience in the rich, in the better off people. And when they see you, you remind them of their neglect, of their moral neglect, of their citizen neglect, of their thieving, of their theft. Yes, they got rich off of you and your circumstances.

0:53:19 IWDM: Brother Rafah, he touched upon wealth, how much money comes in, all these billions that come into us, into our hands. Ronald Reagan, I guess I make duas with him for two reasons, he was a good cowboy in the movies...

[laughter]

0:53:47 IWDM: He and his wife, they were good stars, good movie stars. So that's one reason, I think I just tend to make a dua for them occasionally. But I think another reason is that he gave us big help, and we thought it was just negativism coming from a white man. He said, "Your day has come and gone." He heard some of our preachers said... Now, this is when he was campaigning. He heard some of our preachers saying that, "This is our day." He said, "Your day has come and gone." And he didn't give us more understanding on it, but I know what he wanted to say, "Yeah, President Johnson was your day." [chuckle] "When President Johnson was the president, that was your day, it's gone." [laughter] And we know that it wasn't only President Johnson, but he stood out. There were other Democrats, and some Republicans too, that was really helping us get free, get free and get where we could feel that we are citizens of this country.

0:55:00 IWDM: You know, a lot of us couldn't even feel that we were a citizen of this country. When there was the ugly South, the plantation life. And the ugly 100 years of lynching us, and terrorizing us so that we would never have enough courage to stand up to a white man, not to a white man that was serious about putting us down. That Ku Klux Klan, the Ku Klux Klan, their psychology was, "If we burn them, and hang them, and beat them and ride them down, they will eventually fear us so much we won't have to worry about them, we can sleep and not worry about them rising up and making trouble for us." A hundred years of that. So all of that ugliness made some of us feel there really is no hope with these people. And that's why the Black Nationalists formed from that movement, and believed there was any hope in the future for us with white folks.

0:56:06 IWDM: And that's why Mr. W. Fard, Mr. Wally Fard Muhammad came and found my father, and made a leader out of him, because he knew. In fact, he said it. He said, thinking of himself, "I come as a son of man in the clouds. Let me hide my real image from you. And I've come to get the lost sheep, I've come to get the lost members of the Nation of Islam." And a lot of us don't know now that the great majority that was brought to these shores and made slaves, they were brought from Islamic nations or Islamic places, not from Christianity, but from Islamic lands, we came. So if we want to speak of a heritage, we must speak of Islamic heritage first, and then say, "Well, all of us have our own opinions, and we have the right now to look back at our past, and take what we had, or identify with that past life, or not." And that is our right, I wouldn't have even hit that a Christian doesn't have the right to state Christian, because now we have lived church life so long, we also have a Christian heritage. But the Islamic heritage was before the Christian heritage, so the Islamic heritage is more the right of the black man in America than a Christian heritage. Why? Because the Islamic heritage was taken from us by force! 

[background conversation]

0:57:58 IWDM: Allahu Akbar. God is the greatest, yes. So this is what I am trying to do, is build upon a friendship that is not, in this time that we're living in, completely forgotten or lost. A friendship and the relationship of poor and rich, the poor and the rich. And it didn't have to happen for us in the South. Many of us have worked in the North as domestic workers, and we have found that the people who hired us, took an interest in us, and wanted to see us have a better life. And many of them imparted to us information that we would never be privileged to, because that information is in the circle of the rich. And they were sharing that information with us. I worked in a home, once, with my friend, Leroy. He got the job, painting job, and I was washing windows and doing other things for this apartment owner. And this white man, when I got ready to leave, he brought out a lot of suits. He say, "These look like these fit you," He said, "they look like your size." He said, "Can you use them?" Man, oh man! I was put out of the Nation of Islam, and the prodigal son's mouth was parched.

[laughter]

0:59:26 IWDM: Oh, I lit up. I said to myself, "I don't care if they don't fit, I'm going to take them. I sure know how to get some benefit."

[laughter]

0:59:38 IWDM: So I say, "Yessir!" I said, "Yessir! I sure can use them." You hear that? "Yessir" not "yes, sir." Yessir. I want him to know where I came from. "Yessir, yessir." I said it more than once so it'd register on him, touch his heart. I said, "Yessir, yessir. I can use them."

[laughter]

1:00:00 IWDM: But the gift didn't come from him, but he gets the credit for it with God. The gift came from the hand of God, came from Allah. Because when I got home, every one of them fit me like I was measured and then they were made and given to me. I mean, perfect fit. Nice suits. So all of us have memories of a relationship, or a certain situation or circumstances that brought us in contact with the wealthy whites who were not bad people, but very good people. Yes, sir. So, we shouldn't forget that, and that's what I've been trying to do, and my time is up now. That's what I've been trying to do, build it on what we already have, what we already know to be good for us, Whatever we have had, have experienced. You know, I rejected my father's idea of God. I rejected all of his theology completely, I had to for my heart to be at ease or at peace with the holy book that we claim, the Quran. So to be at peace with our own holy book that my father claim and all of us claim that are Muslim, I had to reject his theology completely, and study it. I love my father, so I'm not going to just throw him away and not study him to see what is right? What is wrong? What is good that I can keep? Because, I don't want to throw him away completely. What child that have benefited so much from...
