09/03/2006
IWDM Study Library
LEADERSHIP IN THE NAME OF G-D
PT. 2
By Imam W. Deen Mohammed

00:01 Imam W. Deen Mohammed: And if you don't have knowledge, what can you expect from people if they don't have knowledge? The ignorant in the days before civilization, savages, who did not have the intelligence to better their condition until G-d saved them from their condition, savages. If you, right now, would be told of a savage area existing on this planet today, and you would be told, "Go there and help those people." You wouldn't be too quick to go and help them. You would fear for your life. You'd fear for your life.

01:03 IWDM: Now, I wanna tell you that the KKK, they were savages. And if any of them are still living with that mind, they're savages. They don't have knowledge. They call themselves Christians, but they do not have knowledge of their book. If they did, it would change their way of thinking and behaving. They hold onto scripture without knowledge, but they have scripture by faith only. The world's best known sacred scriptures are more about human societies beginning, mystical beginning. And also about predictions about how life will end. Life meaning community life. How the community life begins from the natural human life that the Creator gave us. It begins from that life. It grows from that life and upon that life, and how it will be concluded, how it will end. Conforming to man's G-d-given life for community and the behavior that man should have. That is what keeps life for the human family or for humanity.

02:51 IWDM: Favoring lifestyles that robs the community of life, robs the community of vital human character and brings about the death of our communities, moral death, spiritual death, cultural death, material death, is something that has taken us from progressing, from following developmental life, to regressing and losing our progress that our great leaders, our heroes, even during the time of slavery and after. From Frederick Douglass and even before Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, John Brown, John Brown, a white man. They thought he was crazy, because he made great sacrifices to tell the world, especially America, that slavery is wicked and it has to be stopped. He was killed. And from Frederick Douglass to Dr. King, we've had all these wonderful leaders. And all of them wanted us to be G-d-fearing. And all of them wanted us to be of good moral character.

04:43 IWDM: So losing your good life, losing your good moral life, is a big crime, especially when you look at the price that was paid to keep moral life in us. It's a big crime. It's a crime against the nature G-d created for you. But it is also a crime against all those wonderful heroes we have, that were trying to lead us, who were deprived of community life by slavery, was trying to lead us to a noble, honorable, rich community life.

05:30 IWDM: Myths are in the way of progress. You don't know how much your life is governed by myths, by myth. Looking into myths and the nature of myths tells us a lot about the freedom that we have, and the freedom that our great leaders hold precious now, still hold precious. Tells us a lot thought about that freedom, the freedom we enjoy in America. Once you're given freedom, to be responsible for it on your own, the freedom that manifests under your control may be poisoned, very detrimental to the freedom that was intended for you. The noble men who formed the ideas for this democracy, they didn't see freedom as the freedom to do anything you please, to even become nasty and indecent, or become criminal. That's not the freedom they worked for, that's not the freedom that they left to us. Freedom to them was the freedom of the thinkers, the freedom of the free thinkers, free thinkers. And their interest was freedom of the mind, freedom for the intelligence, freedom for the best that is in the soul of man. They want it to be like a plan, to let come out of the dead body, the dead mind, the most precious things deposited in there by G-d, the Creator. They want to see that free. They didn't want the freedom that we have now. This freedom is destroying us, destroying our families and destroying our community.

07:55 IWDM: A prophet, a great prophet, was asked by the strong oppressor who was ruling the land that he was in, "So if you leave from me, or if I banish you from the land, what would you have? How would you survive?" And the prophet answered him, the prophet said, "The one who created me, will guide me. The one who created me will guide me." The great thinkers, they studied human creation. And they got great guidance, insight into human creation. And they got great guidance from how human beings are constituted. And they used that guidance, they used that knowledge to improve upon their life, and advance to life, progress to life, according to the will of G-d, or in accordance with the plan of G-d for human life. That's how people have come into great life, great comforts, great benefits. We have to return to scripture and we have to follow the best of our religious leaders, the best of our religious leaders. The politicians of Chicago, they say you reward your friends and punish your enemies. We should reward our good leaders and punish our bad leaders. You punish them by not serving them. You punish them by not following them.

[applause]

09:43 IWDM: It is believed that after man discovered language, language, he began to progress greatly. We shouldn't take language for granted. You shouldn't just speak any kind of way. You were created with a brain, the highest, the richest, most resourceful brain in creation. No animal, no insect, bird, whatever, have been given a brain like yours. The brain, that our prophet said... Prayers and peace be on him, Mohammed." He said, "G-d did not give creation anything more useful than a human brain." So when you love ignorance, you work against your precious brain. So you think of yourself maybe as uneducated, you think of yourself as poor. We all were born uneducated, and we all were born poor. But our human tools and our original human spirit made us turn to the best that we could find outside of ourselves and inside of ourselves. And we worked ourselves out of ignorance, and we worked ourselves out of poverty. Now this... You know we don't believe in Darwin's theory. I studied his theory, and I know he was a thief. He stole information or he was given it by others and he didn't give G-d credit for it. And then he put it in his language that hides G-d. That hides G-d, the creator. He put it in his language so that we would worship him. But we didn't evolve from apes. We evolved from original, precious human life, and we become apes when we leave G-d.

[applause]

12:56 IWDM: We can't forget the freedom road of our pioneers. There are many of them who paid a great price. The nature that G-d gave man won't accept abuse, mistreatment, injustice. We naturally rise up against such. Nat Turner, he knew he would die. John Brown, he knew he would die. Frederick Douglass had a better opportunity. The abolitionists were working at the same time, whites. And we have had whites all along, since then, joining us and supporting us. And risking their lives to help us get attention and justice in this country. Many of us perhaps don't know Elijah Lovejoy, David Walker. But we know Sojourner Truth and the many others, and Dr. Martin Luther King, the last of our great freedom fighters. We know them. But do you know Elijah Muhammad was also a freedom fighter? 

[applause]

14:25 IWDM: We have so many little problems that become very big problems. We call ourselves the colored people, and it was hard to get us to change from saying colored people and to say Black. But the honorable Elijah Muhammad, he kept driving the point home and it caught on. And Christians and all start calling ourselves Black. Yes, proud that we are Black. James Brown, the most dynamic performer I have ever seen, I met him after watching his show. Somebody said, "Do you wanna meet him?" I said, "Yes. I'd like to meet him." So they took me backstage and I met him. As soon as I met him, I just wanted to say, "Thank you, James Brown. Thank you, Mr. James Brown." So I said, "Look. I just wanna say we really appreciate you for making us proud to be Black." 'Cause his song, "Black and Proud, Black and Proud." Here's what he said to me. He looked at me like he was surprised to hear me speak that way. He said, "It was your father who inspired that in me." Yes, Elijah Muhammad.

[applause]

16:02 IWDM: Now, you who have been in the name of Muslims and Islam for 40 and 50 and 60 years, you also have to thank Allah, thank G-d, for the teacher of my father, Mr. Farad.

[applause]

16:33 IWDM: Because he gave us a strategy that would eventually make us give up the dead part of the life he gave us. See, when the seed is put in the ground, when life comes into it, the life comes out of the inside and the dead part on the outside is left to go the way of death, eaten up by the earth. Or it falls down to the earth, I'll try to lift them up like grass, like wheat grass, and the dead part will fall down to the earth, eventually. And only the part that should live stays, S-T-A-Y-S, stays. Now, if you read scripture and I do have some scripture readers here, many. I'm looking at you. I know you. If you read scripture, then you should also understand that it's prophesied that the temple would not stand forever. The temple was built to fall. It was built to fall. But it was built to hold a message, the life, until the life could come up. And then the temple itself, as a material thing, falls to the ground. It must fall. "Destroy this temple, and I will build it up in three days." Huh? 

18:22 IWDM: That's prophet, it's scripture. The scripture of something that was said by then, but is also a prophecy. Don't you know Mr. Farad understood that? He did. He understood that, and he built his temple, not to stand forever, but to be destroyed. "Oh, Wallace, that guy destroyed everything we had." "No, I did not. I destroyed only what Mr. Farad wanted to die in time, to serve you for awhile, hold you for awhile, inspire you for awhile, feed your wife, until you see that a lot of dead stuff is in this. And throw the dead stuff away."

[applause]

19:17 IWDM: Praise be to Allah.

19:19 IWDM: I was watching Channel 7, ABC, and came a commercial, Loyola University commercial, Catholic university, I'm sure most of you know, and they had the words: "Also, treatment of the spirit." Now, they offer so many courses that you have to take if you wanna finish college. But they say they also offer a course for the treatment of the spirit. They ain't big enough to take all these Negroes, all these African-Americans, all these niggers. "Oh, he used the wrong word!" What's wrong with nigger? It means the same thing that "Negro" mean.

20:11 IWDM: The dumb Southern white supremists, white supremists, he learned that a lot of us, we came from Africa, so he found a place that was rich in culture, at one time in history, called N-I-G-E-R. But it's not pronounced "nigger," it's pronounced, "ny-geer," Niger, not "nigger. So he started calling us, incorrectly pronouncing it "niggers." "Nigger" is a better word than "Negro," because "Negro" is just black. It does not take you back to a civilization and a culture, but Niger does. [chuckle] So you see, we have to wake up and straighten out our minds. Now we don't wanna be called "Negroes."

21:08 IWDM: I heard some Spanish people, they was standing on the side, and they saw a lot of us coming. I knew a little Spanish, and they said, "Los negros." "Those Negroes." That's what they said! They said, "Los negros." And they were saying, "Those Blacks." That's what they were saying. So, "negro" in Spanish, means "black." That's what it means, black. Now I know the way you use a word gives it a meaning, also. So the way the dumb white supremest, and I keep calling him "dumb," because that's the only way I can excuse him. He had to be dumb. He had to be uneducated. He had to be uncivilized. Okay, so being so dumb, he called you "nigger," and the way he came, the spirit he came from, made you hate that word.

22:06 IWDM: So I understand how the word got the meaning that you hate. I understand that, but we need to rethink and research, because we're not doing much with our community life. And I believe this ignorance has to be seen, firstly, for us to come into a new mind and take charge.

[applause]

22:37 IWDM: We have to qualify for freedom. To qualify for freedom and economic empowerment, the faithful must defeat this spirit to be nasty, that is in us at home, and in the streets. If it was just in the streets, it wouldn't be so bad. But that nasty spirit we have, is in the home too. Aggressive mind, shameful lifestyle, show-off spirit, spirit to show off. Silly monkey nature, spirit to just have simple, foolish fun. We are being destroyed, people. We have been influenced into having tunnel vision. But we're not a community of Cyclops. The Cyclops have tunnel vision. The Cyclops couldn't do much with their life. In myth, they have one eye right in the center of the forehead, one eye. Not two, one eye.

24:08 IWDM: G-d revealed religion so we will take pride and cherish and value our creation, the human creation. And our holy book says, "See, how he's given you two eyes, not one, two eyes." To see outside and inside. To see outside and inside. To see and question. To see and examine what you see. To see and investigate what you see. To see and dig into what you see. And that's how we become educated. And if we want to follow the professor or the teacher, we have to be guided into that understanding, that you cannot learn by just looking on first sight, but you have to have a second sight. To look into, not just on.

25:30 IWDM: Modern man's ignorance nukes his world, nukes his world. We still see the clothing. You're growing in dress. Clothing getting more popular, getting richer and more attractive. The buildings, getting more attractive, more accommodating. The material just growing and growing. But what's inside? Nothing. Nothing. And that's what the nuke bomb does. The nuke bomb takes away the life of people, but leave the money standing. So the victor won't come to rubbish. The victor will get rid of you, but take over your material establishment. Well, just like the nuke will do that for towns and houses and everything, and banks and big buildings and leave them all standing unharmed, the breath you're breathing from the poisoned culturable air is nuking you. Your physical body is still there, but the person we used to know is dead, gone, vanished, disappeared.

27:11 IWDM: I love these words of Maya Angelou. I saw them on a video of the movie, "Madea's Family Reunion." I saw the movie and got these words. She says, "The sun has come. The myth has gone. We see in the distance our long way home." Beautiful. So rich. When you connect what she is saying with us, African-American community, the African-American community. She said, "The sun has come." G-d opened her mind. G-d gave her knowledge and insight. "The myth has gone." The false pictures, that once was reality in our mind. They're gone.

[pause]

28:28 IWDM: And disappeared, and she was able to then see where our people should be taking ourselves. Where we should be taking our community life. So she concluded with, "A long ways home." A long way home, a long way home. "The sun has come, the myth has gone. We see in the distance, our long way home." Now, it can be a long ways, long ways, but it can be short, too. If we stop following the worst of our leaders and follow the best of our leaders, it can be a short distance.

[applause]

29:29 IWDM: Now, we see all of this great material achievement. But I was walking along the street and I noticed that through the concrete sidewall, a very small crack, there was growing grass. And the grass that was strongest was a tough grass that we don't want for the lawn. We call it crabgrass. And I thought about it. I said, "Well, if grass tried to get out from under concrete, or grow under concrete long enough, it's gonna get tougher and tougher."

30:21 IWDM: Difficulty brings about ease. Facing the difficulty brings about ease. A little grass breaking through the concrete. Then I was taking my walk in the... Well, it's really, it's the Forest Preserve, but it's also the park, Country Club Hills Park. And they have a nice walkway, five miles or more. So I was walking and I noticed the blacktop called "asphalt." There was coming up a little grass, coming up through the asphalt. They call this "the grass roots." Right? Coming up through the asphalt. Vines, if you let them, they'll grow all over a building. Cover the building up. Vines, little flimsy thing. It ain't strong like a tree or even a bush, a strong bush. This flimsy vine will grow all up over that. I saw a movie of New York City. It was really a movie that was trying to get us to turn around from savagery and it showed how...

