07/09/1997
IWDM Study Library
Understanding Al-Islam at Benedict College Columbia SC

By Imam W. Deen Mohammed
Announcer:
The following lecture titled, Understanding Al Islam was delivered Wednesday, July the ninth, 1997 on the campus of Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina. The lecturer is Imam WD Mohammed Muslim-American spokesman. And now Imam Mohammed.
Imam WD Mohammed:
As Salaam Alaikum. That is Peace be unto you or Peace be upon you. The Muslim greetings always is peace. We are Muslims and Muslim means one who accepted to be at peace with his Lord, Creator as the G-d, first of all. And then with the order that G-d wants for His creation. We accept the order that the Almighty G-d who created it, we accept the order that G-d wants for His creation. And G-d says to us in our holy book, the Qur'an, the revelation to Muhammad the Prophet of Arabia, the land of the Arabs at that time. And till now it's still the land of the Arabs, Arabia. I would say it's the land of the Muslims, but the Arabs are still there and they serve as custodians for the Muslims who make pilgrimage there once a year from all around the world, from everywhere. So, it is really the home of all Muslims, especially the holy precincts there in Mecca and in Medina where our Prophet lived, Peace be upon him, and where he built the first society of Muslims in the city of Medina. Our greetings is peace, and we are people who are called peaceful people. Muslim means one who accept to be at peace. And our religion is the religion of submission to G-d in peace. Peace, peaceful, peace based submission to G-d.

Our souls were created to have peace and every human being wants the soul to be at peace, wants the soul, the human soul to be at peace. And G-d has given us the religion, the religion of peace under Him, Islam. It is called Al Islam. And He has named us Muslims through Abraham, Prophet Abraham, called Ibrahim in Islamic language, Islamic terminology, Prophet Ibrahim first father. Peace is what our life wants. All life wants peace. Peace. When we accept to be angry, accept to be at war, it is because our peace have been denied us. Something is in the way of our peace and we want to defend our right or the right of our souls to be at peace. Some of us are given to habit. So that brings to mind G-d's way of honoring everything. G-d, the Creator gave us all our form. Form of life. Our form of life is human. Human. We all are human. We have one form of life in common with each other. We are different in terms of our nationalities, our languages, our nationalities, our cultures, our physical features. Our racial identities are different. But the Lord Most High, the Creator who gave form to everything, He gave us one form. It's called the human form. The human form. The human form is very special. There is no other form of life that the G-d created that is as free as the human form. G-d gave the greatest amount or measure of freedom to the human creation, human creation, human form. All of the life is limited in their freedom much more than we are. So, we are special creation. Allah has made the human form a special creation and Allah says He is the one who gives you your forms while you are in the bodies of your mothers. And He says, and He is the one who made your forms and made your form most excellent, made your form singular, one, and made your form most excellent. So, the most excellent form that G-d made for us is the form that we have in common, the form that is the same for all of us. That's the human form, the human form. So, we believe as Muslims that human beings are excellent creation. But G-d says of this excellent creation that if you are conscious and care about it and devote your attention to it to make contributions to your own growth and development, then your soul will prosper.

Your life will prosper. You'll be a success and not a failure in the world. But G-d says there's some who neglect their souls. So, G-d says, "And whoever neglects to invest in own self for his own good growth and development, that person will be reduced to the most despicable of all creatures to the lowest of the low." So, G-d has created us with this measure of freedom that no other creature has but the human. And in giving us this measure of freedom, G-d has also given us a great measure of responsibility for ourselves. And if we don't be conscious and accept to be responsible for ourselves, then G-d says we can fall to the lowest and most despicable of all creatures. Again, G-d gave us form, human form and all forms have expression, expression, and the human being has the most developed language of all the creatures. The language of the birds and other creatures that G-d made are not like the human language. The human has the most developed language, the most complex language, the richest language expression. The richest language in utility is the human language.

And human beings speak many different languages, but every language that we speak is a language of the human nature, the human being, the human nature and the human life. Whether we speak Chinese or Russian or English or Yoruba, German, whatever, Arabic, these languages are the languages of the human form, the human form, they're human languages. And some of us can speak many human languages, many human languages. So, G-d gives us form and He gives us expression. He makes the form for expression. And G-d also created us to have sensitivities and to like this and dislike that, to have a spirit for something and to have no spirit for something else. So, G-d has created us as spiritual beings, also spiritual creatures. And in our invisible body, the spiritual body, the abstract body in our invisible body is where we should find that oneness, that human life. We are not necessarily human because we have this picture we call the human anatomy. But when the right spirit is in that flesh, the right abstract body is in that flesh and that abstract body can be identified with human qualities and human interest and human reasoning, then we say that it's a human being.

So, G-d has made us both visible and invisible and it is the invisible body that is the most precious of them all. My invisible body is speaking to you now through my visible body. So, G-d has made the unseen to be expressed through the seen. How wonderful it is. And we underestimate the value of the abstract person. I could see your physical picture. Your mother could have sent me your picture and I could know you by face or by physical appearance, but I will never really know you until I communicate with the invisible body inside the visible body. Then I will start to really know you. Some persons have identical twins, and you don't know who you are looking at sometimes. "I don't know which one of those twins I'm looking at." But if you live in the house with them or if you have been accompanying them around regularly, playing with them or talking to them or going places with them, sharing experiences with them, you come to know the invisible person and you can tell from the expressions of the invisible person through the visible body who that is. You can tell by the smile, you can tell by the look out of the eyes. You can tell by the way they respond to comfortable things and uncomfortable things. "Oh, I know that's so and so." And so, you can even tell when they're walking down the street.

The invisible will even influence the way they walk. The invisible body inside the visible body will influence the way they walk. And you will know that there's a little different walk there. "No, that's not that twin, that's the other one." So, G-d created us and gave us form visible and invisible and made us human. And that is our best identity. Every other identity must compliment that identity. Every other identity must develop upon that identity. We are first human when we come from our mothers in the nursery at the hospital, we are first human. Human form comes and then we become conscious of ourselves as Russians, Chinese, different nationalities. That comes much later and that is built upon the first identity, the human identity. This is true for all things. Everything that we have in existence was given its true form by G-d Almighty, the Lord Creator of everything. And it was designed to have its true and truthful expressions by the same Lord Creator. The world religions today have lost most of their following. Now we know there are about over 1 billion Muslims on earth today. They say one out of every five persons a Muslim.

So, if you count the people, take one out of every five of them and you'll have the number of Muslims. 1 billion, over 1 billion now, over 1 billion. But that 1 billion are not enjoying the Muslim life. 1 billion Muslims on earth today. But that 1 billion I repeat, they're not enjoying the Muslim life. Their parents, parents of the youth are worried about their children because their children are going to the streets and going to the ways of the world. I am speaking of the majority. I speak with Jewish leaders, with rabbis and others and they tell me the same thing. They have the same problem. I don't have to ask the Christians because I live in a Christian society. The majority of the people that I look at every day, I walk out of my door are Christians. I see what their condition is. They're not enjoying the Christian life. So, some of our leaders who have been thinking on the problems of the people, how they have lost the life that G-d wanted for them, they're saying that before this electronic technology, technology, electronics, television, technology, high science, high tech. Before this time the masses of the people were not as occupied and they had more time to listen to parents, to preachers. But now that the world has become so small and life is so busy, especially in the big cities, there are movies to look at, it's television to look at, there are songs to listen to. Record players. The excitement of all of these things created by science and technology. So, it's not easy to get the attention of people anymore, especially when you're talking about something that they don't think they necessarily need. And they have grown to believe that that time is already taken by school, by sports, by entertainment, by television, by Hollywood media, movies, et cetera. Don't have time. So why should I listen to you talk about G-d? Why should I listen to you talk about the spiritual side? And even the bigger problem they're saying is that in ancient times and in times not so far behind us, most of the people were really illiterate by our present standards. Were illiterate, uneducated, illiterate by our present standards. So, it was easy to call them away from the worship of idols, indulging in destructive life, sin, murder, crimes, violence, vulgarity. They say it was easy to tell them to come away from that in the name of G-d so you'll have a better life. So, G-d will love you and you'll have a better life. They said it was easy to do that because most of the people, they couldn't question what you were talking about. The level of learning was almost nonexistent. So, they could easily understand that it's wrong to worship that stone there as G-d. So, in ancient times, G-d says He is G-d and He alone is G-d and that's no G-d. They would listen. But now what we worship is not so easy to pull away from.

The learned among the leaders in religion, now they're saying that what we worship now are pleasures, abstract. It's an abstract. Pleasures, ideologies. Ideologies are something else. Very complex. Pleasures and ideologies and charismatic personalities. So, it's kind of hard to pull you away from those things if those things are in the way of you having the life that Allah G-d, your Creator, our Creator, wants for you. So, it's difficult. So, what they're saying is that the old way of preaching doesn't work anymore. That you just can't frighten people into coming to G-d. You can't scare them into the door of faith. Say come on in here you know, the boogie man's out there, it doesn't work anymore. And those learned people are seeing this as really the plan of G-d, that G-d has created the world for man and woman to use the tools of reasoning, the brain, the intellect, and make for yourself be in charge of your own environment. Both bibles, both books, the Bible and the Qur'an, the Muslim book, both of those books say that G-d made man. And when it says man, it means the human community. It doesn't just mean a single person, it means the human community. And both books make that very clear that when G-d said He created man Adam, G-d was not talking about just one single person. G-d was talking about the human community, male and female. He said He made them in the beginning, He made them Adam and called, named them Adam. Male and female. Created He them. This is the Bible. And the Qur'an gives the same understanding that man, male and female came out of one single form or one single entity and they became male and female. And from them all the people on earth. Actually, Adam is singular and Adam is plural, Adam is singular and Adam is plural. Now the human community, the human community. As we begin to learn more, use our brains more, develop more, and take charge of our environment, we begin to create all over again our environment. So, this is not the original garden that G-d put Adam, the man and woman in. This now has become man world. The environment that G-d put the first man in was the environment designed by G-d. He hadn't touched it, man hadn't touched it. It was designed by G-d. The environment that we live in now after science and technology and all this, industry science and technology, the environment that we live in now is man made environment.

This building the streets, the lights out there, the transportation out there. When we look outside, we see more of man's presence than we see of the original environment. So, we are actually living in our own creations aren't we? We are living in our own creations. Now, if our planning is not the best for us, if it is not in accord with what G-d wanted us to plan for us, then we may be creating an environment that is punishing our true selves, the human self. We may be creating an environment that's punishing instead of helping our true selves, our human selves, the human creation that G-d made. G-d says in the Qur'an that He made everything in the skies and down here on the earth to be used by man. And it means by man for community. By man for the human community. It created everything in the sky and down here. We know man gets help from the sun more than just light and energy to grow things, to heat us. Man make tools and he can get benefit from the sun. Now we can even warm the house by sunlight. Run machines from the energy, with the energy from the sun.

And that's in the sky, isn't it? And other things that we don't know about. Benjamin Franklin, what did he get from the sky? Electricity. Isn't that the fellow that got the electricity? Benjamin Franklin, he sent a kite up in the sky during the storm and he got electricity down from the sky. G-d says that He made what's in the sky and what's on earth to be utilized, to be useful, to be brought into use for the benefit of the human community.

Both books says the same thing, but in different language, in different language, different language. Maybe one is more expressive than others, clearer than another. But the essential things that G-d communicated to his Prophets and His Messengers and Prophets, we find them in both books, the Qur'an and in the Bible. We say the book of the Muslims, but there are the books of the Muslim who, Muslims who were converted to it. There were no Muslims before the Qur'an came, the Qur'an had to have followers. There was no Muslims before the Qur'an came. If there was, they didn't know it and they weren't calling themselves that. They didn't know it and they weren't calling themselves Muslim. And we know they didn't have what Muslims have now as knowledge for Muslim life. They didn't have that. That came with the Qur'an. The book called the Qur'an. So, we say Qur'an is the book of the Muslims. It's the book of the Believers first of all, and it's the book of Muslims because we are the ones who chose it, to follow it. But it's the Book of Humanity. It's the book for all people. For all people. Allah says of Muhammad the Prophet who taught the book when he was on this earth. Allah says of him that he is a mercy to all people, the mercy to all the worlds, Muhammad.

So, Muslims, let us stop thinking of ourselves as so small. We are people with a message for the world. We are people with a faith and an invitation to a faith that is the faith of the human heart and the human nature. We are a people with a message to the human brain. It's a message that G-d, the creator of the human brain, it's a message for the human brain. It's a message directing us to the human community that will satisfy our souls. It's a message directing us to build community life. So, we have a spirit, but the spirit needs directing. The spirit needs a direction. We are form, we are expression. We are essentially spiritual beings. We are spirit and spirit needs direction. And G-d's revealed word, the Qur'an and the teachings of our Prophet. If we use it, apply it correctly, we will have the disciplines for our whole life. We'll have the direction for spirit. The Spirit wants to obey G-d. It was created to obey G-d. If it doesn't obey G-d, it punishes us. It punishes us. Give your spirit away, take it away from G-d and give it to sports and leave G-d. Leave it away from G-d. Your sport life is going to punish you. Give it to entertainment and don't give it to G-d. The life of entertainment is going to punish you.

Give it to politics. Even give it to education, academics and leave G-d, forget G-d, and your spirit is going to punish you. Your spirit, the human spirit, the life drive of the human form wants to obey his Creator. And if the brain makes choices that keep the human spirit from going to G-d and obeying G-d, then the human spirit is going to become a punishment on you. And it will punish you and punish you until you reform, until you turn back and go the right way or until you reach the grave and go to the hell eternally. Until G-d says that's enough. This is the truth. So, life is no small business. Life is a big business. Human life is a big business. There's no big business. There's no business bigger than the business of human life. And to live it, you have to have some business sense or you're going to suffer. Allah showing us how we can keep our good soul and spirit from trouble, from torment and suffering and misery. He invites us and He speaks to us in our language of business. G-d says, "And who will enter into a commercial bargain with G-d, who will make a business deal with G-d?" Yes. That's what G-d says to us in Qur'an. And G-d promises us that if we make a business deal with Him, and the deal is that you give your life in devotion to G-d. You live for G-d's purpose, for G-d's will, that you accept G-d's will for you, G-d's plan for you, G-d's way for you. That's the deal. And if you will give Him yourself in obedience, that's what it means. Give Him yourself. That's the deal. You give Him yourself in obedience to His will and plan, direction, et cetera. Give your life for yourself, your soul to Him. And He will give you everything. Nothing that you desire will be kept away from you. You'll have the whole world to select whatever you like from it. And then you'll also have the afterlife. G-d will give you the afterlife also. And there you will get the fullness of your soul's desire. That's what G-d promises. And the devil also makes the promise. He makes an appeal to you too. And G-d says, "And the devil, the Satan, he frightens you with poverty." Poverty. He frightens you with poverty. He makes you afraid to be poor, to not have money, et cetera. Find most of the people who are afraid to be broke, and you'll find most of the people that are going to jails and doing crimes, et cetera. So, sin, sin and the fear of losing money or wealth, they go together. Now, G-d is not one who wants us to just go to extreme now. "Oh, well I just better give up this money thing. I better not. I better take my mind off of having money." Oh, G-d is not that like that. G-d says, "Seek by the means that He have made available to you." That's whatever you have in your own human ability to utilize, to take benefit, to get the benefit of what's out here outside of your body in the world, the land, everything, business, whatever, utilize what He has given you to get the life hereafter. That mean I should first be trying to be productive so I can please G-d, to have life hereafter, eternal life. But G-d says, but don't. Right behind those words, G-d says, "But don't forget your share in this world." And the learned it in our religion, they say, here is the expression in our Holy Book from G-d that protects us from going to the extreme where we give ourself only to material interests and not spiritual interests or give ourselves all the way to spiritual interests and not material interests. So, G-d created us spiritual beings to have expression through a material body. We want Islamic schools, we need physical structures and we need physical material, books, pencils, pens, paper, typewriters, computers. We need all these material things to express something that's abstract, to deliver something that's abstract. And G-d says, "See how He made the worlds above you." There's one of them not far from us. It's called Jupiter. It's bigger than our earth and we can see it at night at the right time, we can look up in the sky and see Jupiter. And G-d says, "Look at them and see how they appear to be supported with no structures up under them." Invisible support is holding those great massive bodies up in the sky. And you who took science in high school perhaps you know, are aware that this earth, this land we stand on is really swimming through space, floating, circulating, revolving, rotating and revolving in space. And when we look up under it, if we could go out in the space ship and get a look up under the earth, we wouldn't see anything visible holding it up.

And right now I can stand up here for hours like this with no conscious attention to my standing, but if I get sleepy, I will fall to the floor. So actually, the ability to hold yourself in balance without attention, without muscle and attention. Attentive involvement is spiritual. G-d stands, stood us up spiritually. I'm standing up here spiritually. Can you stand a structure up like mine, like this? No, I'm standing up on balls and sockets. Yes, my ankle is a ball and socket. My knee is a ball and socket. My backbone flips. That's the way the song went. So, I took it from the song. And my head look. But with no attention. It stays there balanced with no attention. My whole body's balanced upon the sockets called ankles. They're really balls and sockets with no attention. My knees holding balance, spiritual balance. Think about those things. Now lastly, we want to invite the leadership of Columbia, South Carolina. This is Columbia, South Carolina, isn't it? These are difficult times for the mind. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody hollered out there and said "No fool, we on Jupiter." It wouldn't surprise me at all. So, we would like to invite the leadership of this city to think over how they have been preaching and teaching to their congregations. And to see if they don't need to upgrade their methods and their language.

So that it respects the level of literacy, education and intelligence that we have in our common public today. And we would like to invite them to also meet with leaders of other faiths more. If they're doing it, do it more. To learn from qualified leaders or teachers of the other faiths what is the real essence of the religion that they have chosen? We need to know each other's religion so we will know each other lives. We cannot respect each other and appreciate each other unless we know each other's lives. I know the Christian life, most of us do because we come from Christian background. Most of us in this association came from Christian life to this life, the Muslim life. And some of us who are now students and teachers, professors, scholars, even, in Islam, we have now a deep understanding of Christianity. Our religion has taught us this about Christianity.

And we have a deep appreciation now for Christian life that we didn't have before. We have a much greater respect now for Christian people and their Christian lives than we had before. We want others to get to know us like we have gotten to know you and the people of faith, of the faith communities. That's the language that is being used now in higher circles. People of the faith communities need to get acquainted with each other so we'll know each other's lives so that we can appreciate each other more. And G-d says to us in our Holy Book, "He has not created you and your differences, nations, tribes, nations and tribes, that you should raise your nose to each other or think you're better than each other. But He have created you different so that you would want to come to know each other so that you will get to know each other." This is what G-d says. He says "The best human being, the most valuable person with G-d is the one who is most conscious of his obedience to G-d." That's the only basis or the only criteria for one thinking or believing he's better than another. Whether it's one individual or one nation, one race, it doesn't matter. In G-d's presence, we are all equal and we are only better if we are more conscious of wanting to be obedient to Him.

The world to come and it's really right at our door. The world that's, I should say, the world that is knocking on our door now in the future. The world that is here, almost. That world is asking for us to recognize our essential life form. We are human beings created to have a great measure of freedom for our minds, our intellect. Islam respects and encourages freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of choice, freedom of religion. As long as we do it, being conscious of obedience to G-d. Thank you very much. And we pray that G-d will help our individual lives, our family life, our faith community, and its life for all of us. Our business life, yes, our government, our political life. We should bring it all in obedience to G-d. We should want to know what is indicated in our human creation and in the ability, our human ability to get benefits from what's out here. What is the indication in all of this that may be a message from the Creator of it all and try to obey that. Peace be on you, As Salaam Alaikum. We pray G-d forgive us our errors and sins, grant us mercy and give us guidance. Show us the way always. Ameen. Amen.
Speaker 1:
Takbir!
Audience:
Allahu Akbar!
Speaker 1:
When we say takbir, it means glorify G-d. And we say Allahu Akbar, that means G-d is greater. Now we're going to take some questions. Please, not a statement per se, but questions. And the Imam will, at this particular time answer your question.
Speaker 1:
I'm sorry.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Yes. I said I will try to answer.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Yes,
Audience Member:
He's a profound teacher.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Thank you very much. Thank you.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Yes. Yes. The study of Arabic language tells us that the AL means the, AL means the,T-H-E. And the name for G-d, for any G-d, not the real G-d. For anything we would choose to call G-d is Elah, Elah. E-L-A-H. E-L-A-H. Elah. And it is believed, the linguistics, they believe that El was combined with Elah to make the name Allah. And they think that it means the G-d, the G-d, the one G-d. El, Elah was shortened to say, Allah the G-d, it means the G-d, the true G-d, the only G-d, the G-d. But I have to admit this, that in the Qur'an in the teaching of the Prophet, we have nothing to support that. That just comes from those persons who are experts in the language, the knowledge of language, how the language develops. But there's nothing in our religious teaching to support that. We only told that Allah was a name that was among the Arabs. They didn't use it. And we were told that Prophet Abraham built the Ka'aba, the small house there in the holy precincts of Mecca. He and his son, Ishmael. They built that small house called the Ka'aba. It's called simply home. The home. Al Bait, the home. And it's a symbol for us in prayer.
Imam WD Mohammed:
All of us turn facing that house when we pray five daily prayers. And we make pilgrimage there once a year, we go circle that house seven times. We go around the house seven times during the pilgrimage to the house. And so there is a story, like a report or a story that says the Arabs found the name Allah written on the house. And they knew the name Allah, but they didn't use it for any of their idol G-ds, their false G-ds. And there were 369 idol G-ds, false G-ds in that house. When Prophet Muhammad was given victory against the Pagans, he was given the victory. And he went into that house and he took all the idols out. 369 we are told, was removed from that house and it was made empty. Empty. It's a spiritual house.
Audience Member:
Thank you.
Imam WD Mohammed:
You're welcome.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Yes, yes, yes. I explained the L for you and on Islam it would be the same. It would mean the submission to G-d in peace, the peaceful surrender to G-d, Al Islam. Yes. In our Holy Book, it's never written Islam, always Al Islam. But for English, I guess it was shortened to make it easy in English, it was shortened to say Islam. Yes, you're welcome. Thank you for the question. Well, I'm sure it helped somebody else who was wondering too, had a similar question. Yes, yes.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Wa Alaikum As Salaam. Well that's quite an honor. And I accept in the name of all of us, for all of us. Yes. Well, if you have it with you, the Imam will.
Audience Member:
Takbir.
Imam WD Mohammed:
Allahu Akbar. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is an honor and we accept it and want you to carry our warm greetings to the Mayor for us. Yes. If there are any, yes, there is a sister. We call all females sister. There was a lady with her hand raised. Thank you. Yes, yes. Alright, thank you. I understand the question and I will now try to give some clarity to the picture there. I was born to my mother and father about two years after they had accepted what they believed to be, to have been Islam. They thought it was Islam. And I believe that what was given to my mother and father was really a well thought out plan to attract them and hold them to something that as they become, as they grew to know more about the world and how the world is made up, about the geography of people, the Arabs, the Muslim lands. That they would then begin to reject what they were given. But they would still want to be Muslims. So, they were also given the Qur'an, the Holy Book of the Muslims. So, the plan was to hold them by something else until they could become more literate, more educated, to appreciate the message in the Qur'an and join the International body of Muslims on this earth. That's what I believe, and that's what I've told the followers of the Nation of Islam. But it took me years to see all of this. I knew that what we had was wrong and we were not in accord with what the Qur'an, our Holy Book was saying or offering us. We were not conforming to that. I was aware of that, but I wasn't aware of how this man who taught my father, he was not an American. He was from overseas. I was not aware of how he planned to attract the following to black consciousness, to black power, to self-government or Nation of their own, away from, I would say a life of social rejection in this country. Exclusion. The system didn't include us at that time in the thirties when this man came. Not until the sixties did we really start getting some recognition, some respect as citizens of this country. So, I didn't come to see that until years, many years later. But as I began to see that, I started sharing that with him too. So, Minister Farrakhan, he's very much aware now of how I see the old idea of religion that the Nation of Islam follows under Farrakhan. And how I see now, presently see the teacher of that idea called Fard, his name is called Mr. Fard and my father, Elijah Muhammad. He's very much aware of that now. So, what I'm saying to you is that there's a big difference between what we believe and what they believe in terms of religion. The two religions are poles apart. The religion we follow doesn't resemble at all the religion that the Nation of Islam follows. In fact, they have no developed religion in the Nation of Islam. They don't have a developed religion. They only have some concepts and ideas and a spiritual interest or spiritual force or motivation, but they don't have a developed religion in the Nation of Islam. One more thing I would like to share with you and ask in responding.

Sunday, this past Sunday, Minister Farrakhan hosted a conference of Islamic scholars. I understand that there was about four to 5,000 people attending. And the conference was sponsored by Kadafi of Libya. And Farrakhan was acknowledged by these scholars as a true Muslim leader. Now, these scholars, they represent Islam as we all believe in. Same Islam that all Muslims believe in, 1 billion of us. They recognized Farrakhan as a Muslim Imam, a Muslim leader. In fact, they said he is the leading Imam, the leading Muslim leader in America, Farrakhan. And the report also says that Farrakhan has accepted Islam as that religion is known and believed by the 1 billion Muslims all over the world. So, we got in the news that Farrakhan has changed. He left the Old Nation, the Nation of Islam's old ideology of religion, and he's now in accord with the thinking of Muslims all over the world.

I pray that's true. He has made such statements on about two or three other occasions and before big public gatherings and very distinguished persons. I was at one of those meetings myself, and I went up on the stage and I embraced him and we embraced each other. We thought we were all in one religion, the same religion. But it wasn't no more than about two or three weeks later that we heard he was back playing the same old music on the same old instrument. We hope and pray this time it will stick.



