IMAM IBRAHIM EL-AMIN: As-Salaam Alaikum Brother Imam. In some of your previous commentary, you referred to America as a “moral construct.” Could you elaborate on this and what it means for us as Muslim-African-Americans?
IMAM EARL ABDULMALIK MOHAMMED: As-Salaam Alaikum Imam Ibrahim El-Amin. Here is another concern and question that requires more than a few words in response. These are matters that affect our Muslim-life planning in America. It is necessary for us to understand the nature of the society in which we live, or want to plan and live, an Islamic life for ourselves. Even if it is a declared Islamic society, the societies in this present world may want something from us that the demand of our Islamic life and moral reasoning will not approve.
Our late, special leaders always encouraged us to understand that we must have something as a life-idea or philosophy that is bigger than America, that would keep us disciplined, sober, and productive in good times, and protected and focused in troubled times. Islamic moral consistency is simultaneously universal, international, and supra-national. It is not dependent on the moral fluctuations that can change and disturb, and sometimes even destroy Peoples. Islamic morality depends on that which is eternal and lasting. It is that moral quality which forms, births, and attaches universal man to his aim, and that leads to the establishment of Peoples and nations and their commitments to one another in serving the requirements of a just society. It is not only expressed as justice as in statutes of law, or what may be referred to as Shareeah. As we know this term has created much alarm in the world even in spite of the West's often-blurred moral vision.
Why has the mention of Shareeah alarmed democratic Peoples in the West? It is because what is being referred to as 'Islamic law' does not conform with true Islamic decency and Islamic morality. Whether the West can see its own moral dilemmas or not, the natural sense for right is the birthmark of all humanity. As it is presented by the many claiming it, Shareeah in too many presentations, does not reflect the broad honor and respect that Islam pays to human life, human dignity, and human freedom and the requirement of justice.
In most cases what the Western governments are pointing to that is objectionable, is even more objectionable to sensitive and informed Muslims recalling the moral and just teachings of Muhammed the Prophet that is the true Islamic law. There is a universal decency, a universal morality, that honors human life and human aim, as G'd Designed and Purposed that life and aim, that undergirds the Divine Law.
If what is referred to as Divine Law loses that connection to its foundation, then for the G'd-fearing that law is empty and goes the way of trash. It is trash, and it has no more Islamic character than the immorality we have witnessed in the behavior and thinking of so-called religious extremists claiming they are obeying Shareeah. Their declarations and pronouncements reach the ears, hearts and minds of Prophet Muhammed's true followers as nothing but moral confusion and immoral commandments void of the well-known Islamic sense for right and justice.
Obedient Muslims cannot tolerate moral inconsistency for themselves because there is no such inconsistency in Islamic teaching. Islam is the religion of perfect moral reasoning, perfect moral purity, perfected and completed moral responsibility. Its declarations are of the highest truth and its requirements for human conduct necessitate obedience to that truth on the most fundamental level as well as in the highest understandings.
We will have to address this concern in a major public address at a later time in more depth. For now, in answering your question we will speak to some of the issues that are implied in understanding America as a moral theatre of sorts. A theatre, or construct, where the many moral and immoral actors in their varied performances express their notion of and perspectives on American freedom. As I mentioned in a recent discussion, I am repeating Imam W. Deen Mohammed's teaching that American freedom is indeed morally-peculiar.
Not long after our late Imam became leader of what was then the 'Nation of Islam' he was invited to meet the then new President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. This was maybe 1978 or 1979 and was after the 'Nation of Islam' name had been changed to the 'World Community of Islam in the West'. President Carter invited leaders representing America's religious establishment to meet with him and members of his Cabinet at the White House.
Someone with bad intentions will ask "How do you know that Mr. Earl Abdulmalik? You were not there." These types have rationale for not referring to me as Imam. They want to remove 'Mohammed' from my name to disconnect me from Imam Mohammed. When my parents and I chose the name 'Mohammed', it was the first name our family chose. It was before 'Abdulmalik' was chosen. My parents and I chose these names together. When Imam W. Deen Mohammed changed the spelling of his name from Muhammad to Mohammed, I changed mine for the same reasons following him.
Also, for the record, my first born son who just made 33 years is named for him, Warith Deen Mohammed. Imam Mohammed told me once that there were many newborn 'Elijahs' but very few 'Warith Deens'. I mention all of this because it is significant in the context of this answer. I answer this type of diseased mind and their questions to expose their false reasoning in three ways:
1. I know because Imam Mohammed told me about his many meetings with world leaders and he took time with me to see that I understood what he was sharing with me and why, so that I would comprehend his vision for Islamic life in America.
2. When Imam W. Deen Mohammed shared this with me I was then, and am still, his serious and devoted student. I devoted myself then and now to understanding everything he did as our leader, and what his actions meant for our life as Muslims in this world and in America.
3. I most certainly was present with him then and now. As Allah says in the Holy Qur'an that our souls as humanity is one soul, so then our souls as a special People in America with Islamic life and tradition are one. Wherever he was, I was, and so are all of us who sincerely and truthfully identify in the life he taught and demonstrated.
I say to the People with bad intentions that the fact that you have lost this awareness and sensitivity in your soul does not in any way define or characterize what is in my soul, or the souls of the growing numbers of Muslims who are seeing me more clearly as leader of his People.
During the meetings with President Carter and his Cabinet, the Imam told me that he also met and listened to Zbigniew Brezinski, who was at that time the National Security Advisor to the President. During that meeting he told me that Secretary Brezinski made the comment that "America is an experiment with freedom." Also, we know that the honored American President Abraham Lincoln spoke of the Civil War as America's moral test as to whether a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure."
These are just two examples of many, many public references to America as a construct enabled for study of the nature of freedom in the moral conscience of man. Where do we find the incentive for creating such a construct? The answer to understand this is in the primary sources of those who constructed it. The Bible teaching on the garden, and man being seduced into eating from the forbidden tree and accepting the serpent's logic.
The West, and in particular America, ate and continues to eat from the forbidden tree. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is the Bible. This is not the Holy Qur'an teaching. The West is not following the Holy Qur'an teaching. I want to be clear about what I am saying. America's introduction to the Holy Qur'an teaching, especially when it comes to this particular matter, comes from Imam W. Deen Mohammed and his tradition. If America is to understand and ultimately embrace what is the proper moral disposition intended for man by his Lord-Creator, that knowledge and discipline is to come from us who follow and obey the sightline of Imam W. Deen Mohammed.
America accepts the reasoning of the serpent in the Bible story. Not necessarily every American institution at all times, but in the general picture of America's moral disposition. In its legal, political, social, economic, and moral systems of reasoning it accepts the notion that evil can be used. In other words, to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil means to explore the possibilities of the uses of evil in manipulating and directing the good. The reasoning goes "I can do this bad thing now in the interest of a good outcome." This is the moral construct of America. This is the moral theatre of America that employs so many actors. This is the experiment with freedom in America. This is also the doorway and invitation to moral destruction in the life of a People that only G'd's Mercy and Guidance can save a People and a nation from.
Here is the moral contradiction that is evident in the construct of consuming the serpent's reasoning: How can it be explained that a nation dedicated above all the nations to the idea that a Supreme Authority and Creator endowed His Creation with the inherent entitlement to a sacred life, a sacred freedom, and a sacred aim, made equally accessible to all mankind regardless of race, and then legally construct and then justify centuries of race-based slavery and race-based oppression and injustice to the point where the Supreme Court of that nation decides that "The Negro has no rights that a white man need respect?"
This side of the American conscience is troubled, no doubt, but it also enjoys and entertains itself with the competitions between the good and the bad.
How is it possible that a nation so clearly and demonstrably committed to the moral notion of strong communities and families, respect for parents and children, can at the same time legally justify separating infant and adolescent children from their parents in the name of an immigration policy toward Central America? Or, is it immigration purity they are after? I do not see any similar justification or activity when it comes to European immigrants.
This is the moral confusion. This is the moral drama of America. An America that will defend the notion of free thinking and free and open intellectual discourse, and freedom of faith to guarantee an informed public and electorate so as to prevent the possibility of a rise in tyranny, injustice, and oppression, but that same nation staggers to support the moral will that is necessary to check hate speech which has threatened and delivered violence against religious and racial innocence historically and presently.
As Muslim African-Americans, our obligation is the same as all conscious Americans. To be aware of the conflict and understand in what way our respective religion and moral commitments prepare us to address it. We have to identify where the Islamic moral logic leads us and follow it and apply it. Allah says in the Holy Qur'an, "...and what is competing with truth, but error." We must promote and follow the morally consistent message and clarity. If you cannot see it yourself then get behind someone who can see.
Those with bad intentions will say "Well, Mr. Earl Abdulmalik, are you speaking of yourself? How can we follow you? You are in prison." Yes, it is true. Joseph's brothers did plan a confinement for Joseph's use of their father's tradition. They had it all worked out for Joseph. They stained his shirt with false blood and brought it to their father to disqualify him, and they bet on their own morally-conflicted thinking that the matter was concluded.
But, the famine came and they were exposed. Their father had advised them to seek the many doors of opportunity. They refused his counsel and came to Egypt as beggars with no answers or help for society. They had their father's tradition but they had no vision and no clarity to answer the compelling need. It was the man in prison that could read the moral predicament and the circumstances and apply their father's tradition to address their survival in the society's confusing moral construct.
It was the man in prison that they thought so little of that could see the answers for the society and them. It was not their plan. They were too intoxicated in their own schemes of self-importance to make a plan. It was the plan of G'd over them using the man in prison with his father's vision that freed them from their moral selfishness and stupidity, and established them in the land.
Praise be to Allah. He Guides us to the Right Way and Saves us from the implications of our own weak faith, moral conflicts, and confused moral vision in the context of America's morally-peculiar construct.