PREVAILING AGAINST THE MANIPULATION OF THE SPIRIT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

by Imam Earl Abdulmalik Mohammed

The enemy of man seeks the use and influence of high human offices in order to corrupt the moral life and dictate the direction of man’s rational movements. He wants to make fools of human lives which have been created for intelligent feelings and intelligent decision making, and for a beautiful existence of dignity in a diversity of cultural community existence.

The enemy seeks the throne of G’d in man’s life. And what is that? It is the manipulation of man’s spirit to obey nature-based instincts for decency planned and placed within him by his Lord and Creator. It is to redirect man’s inherent urge to obey. The enemy seeks an Order of Chaos. He seeks confusion and discord. He invites man to disrespect his natural honor, to not recognize that honor in his fellow man, and to generally distrust all worldly institutions built up by man as expressions of his best nature.

When the enemy manifests in the high office, he is a narcissist, inviting to the worship of his image, and recklessly feeding and rewarding all expressions of selfish self-interest. His command by way of high offices ridicules the responsible discourse of well-meaning souls who seek to identify and walk upon the pathways of human progress. His leadership is characterized by the favoring and enabling of revolt and rebellion against every decency.

The enemy of man is an extremist in his nature, a bully against innocence. He is a terrorist against the honor of human life. And he, with no doubt, found a way into the highest office of this nation and has thus corrupted the perception of the American idea and manipulated the spirit of brotherly-love in the American people.

Those citizens of this country who voted to retain this President in that high office are no band of bullies or extremists or terrorists. They are, by and large, victims of a sophisticated scheme constructed by use of their own innocence to destroy the pure American idea as an influence and force for good in the world.

We Muslims who follow in the tradition of the late Imam W. Deen Mohammed, son and successor to his father—the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, are no apologists for Democracy. We are Muslims, and our Islam—our religion informs us in a way higher than any other influence can or should.

However, this is not to say we do not love our Democracy. Anyone knowing us knows the way in which we came to love it. It was a hard fought road, a steep climb. Our life was not formed in this country as other Americans. In fact we were known as our late leader was known, to have been those living in America and not identifying as Americans. We are, and we are proud to say, that we came to understand the Democracy over time and due to struggle within it.

We openly challenged its promises, exposing its lies and shortcomings in unprecedented fashion. Our community produced minds and hearts of sincere and true opposition to American hypocrisy toward the African-American people, and all people similarly victimized and marginalized. Our community produced, alongside and in the same moments of a Civil Rights Movement and Freedom Struggle led by Dr. Martin Luther King, a different mind for the black man and woman, a different life, a different human pride. Our community produced the tongue of Malcolm X and the heart of Muhammad Ali.

We came to express ourselves in the public of America by first loathing the white man in his hypocrisy toward us and by rejecting the white world in its crimes against us, all in the name of a Just G’d, and within a non-Christian notion of our relationship with that G’d. Only because of G’d’s Mercy, and the maturing in our perception of human life in its essential design and purpose as presented in the Holy Book of Muslims, the Noble and Generous Qur’an, did we find the true American idea in the sanctity of its Sacred Determinations.

In America’s founding documents our late leader identified for us a connection between our Islamic Determinations as servants of G’d and creatures of inherent dignity, with the sacred destiny for human life identified in the Declaration of Independence and preamble to the United States Constitution. By the processes within our building of Muslim life and identity we became Americans, but our late leader was not and would not identify as America’s Imam -as some incorrectly identify him now after he has passed away. As his successor I am correcting that perception of him.

He was Imam in the society of Muslim-Americans, meaning that he came to a perception of America in its truth because of love for G’d and what He created human beings to be at first and in their completion. He was not formed to love America in its initial brutal treatment of us as its slaves and in its hypocrisy as its subjects. It may be said perhaps that we are even truer Americans than those claiming that identity for much longer because of this maturity in our understanding.

It is precisely this reality that manifests now in us and qualifies us in a way that perhaps few others are qualified, to point out how the American people themselves have been manipulated to threaten the beauty and the existence of their own sacred American idea.

Our G’d, the G’d of all mankind, says in the Holy Qur’an in the Arabic language of its revelation:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لِمَ تَقُولُونَ مَا لَا تَفْعَلُونَ

This is translated into English: “O you who have faith, why do you say that which you do not do?”

We call on our national leaders to be the public examples and set aside partisan concerns in the interest of our Nation’s integrity as the democratic model for all nations and its hope for humanity. Reject the tactics of the enemy of man. Push away from his influence and rhetoric. Repent the sin of arrogance.

Men are no gods, except illegitimately. We say to our most sensitive American leaders: Stop feeding from the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Promote the good and push away from the evil. This is our counsel to our beloved nation, its leaders, and our fellow Americans.

— Imam Earl Abdulmalik Mohammed