I
“CIRCUMCISION OF THE MIND”
Imam Warith Deen Muhammad
November 26,1978
… Refer you to Greek mythology and other mythologies.’ If you are not familiar with… so that a certain Greek mythology…stole the heavenly fire (Prometheus). We still have fire as a symbol of learning in the institutions of education, the college’ and universities. They are familiar with the symbol. I believe that even now they use the magic lamp or lantern with fire coming up as a symbol of higher learning, higher knowledge.
This fire that we are talking about is higher knowledge on the subject of life, human life. Human life has always made man curious and has mystified the ignorant people. Man’s struggle has been for understanding. He has struggled to understand his life. This struggle was made fruitful by the concept of G’d that we have, that is, in Christianity, Judaism and Al—Islam. In Judaism, Christianity and Al—Islam the concept of God as Creator and as the infinite Being who is not creation and is not limited or contained in creation but who has a reach that extends everywhere. He can reach us here, He can reach us in our souls, and He can reach us beyond the Sun, Moon and Stars because His reach as scripture tells us extends beyond everything.
Professor Fard Muhammad said that the world would be finished finally by a great act of a scientist, or a great powerful, wise genius. And this scientist or genius would cause a shortage in the gravity. What is meant by gravity? He didn’t explain. He left us his symbolic teachings and he left us with the burden of finding the answers for ourselves. But he said that the shortage of gravity would produce fire and set the whole atmosphere afire. He didn’t say that the fire would start in material things or object like the homes, factories, clothes or the industries, he said the fire would start in the atmosphere by causing a shortage in gravity.
Is this a good incident? Is this a blessing in Fard Muhammad’s teachings? Is this something that we hope to see? The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us that he said, “Hope to be far away from that fire.” Don’t hope to be near that fire. So here we are talking about a fire that is not good for the human being, and it is created by bringing a shortage in gravity. I understand a shortage in electric current. That is easy to understand. It means touching the wires where they were not intended ±o be touched. If you touch the wires where they weren’t intended to be touched, then you get a shortage. Since Professor Fard was an atua1 fact man as well as a witch doctor, I think we can come up with the right answer by saying the shortage in gravity is the same thing. A shortage in gravity is brought about in the same way. Things touch where they are not supposed to be touched or not intended to be touched. We find the world is gravitating toward the things that were forbidden. Our minds, our souls, our nature are gravitating towards things that were forbidden to us. Christian society, Muslim society, Jewish society, the Communist world, all of the world for the last decade or more has experienced a fragmenting, a straying away from discipline. Even the Communist world is straying away from discipline, giving themselves to things and touching things they were told not to touch. Here in this country, we have been giving our mind, our soul and our whole life to permissiveness, to dissipation of our religious life, our mind; just spending it like it is two cents. We go out and we give our human forces to fun, corruption, just like it is worth two cents.
Today, the homes are broken. The children need their parents. The parents need the children; Husbands and wives need each other. The family has been hurt terribly by this individualism. Everybody is going his way, doing his own thing. Putting down the old disciplines. But we have more talk of love then ever before. Every song almost has love making in it. That is gravity. That is all that it is. There is no light, no insight, just nothing but gravity. Gravitating toward the wrong place in this electromagnetic field that God has set. And if you don’t know what you are doing, you are going to cause a shortage and soon you will have your world on fire. And that is what we have been doing, we have been setting our world afire, burning up the good human life.
I thought that would be a good start, Fard Muhammad was a modern man, a modern witch doctor.
I would like to refer you to ancient Egyptian religion as it is called. Some people might think that their religion was only a mythology, but they did have a religion. Their religion was shrouded in secrecy and symbolism just like ours is today, but they had a religion. I am not off of the subject. I am still on the subject. I am trying to circumcise some people that didn’t get the circumcision yet. When we study the history of the ancient Egyptian people we find that those people excelled in many, many ways. They were not only a great material power in their heyday, which lasted for thousands of years, but they were also very wise in the knowledge of the human mind and the human spiritual nature. In fact, if you do some research, you will find out as we have that they are the ones who gave the modern world psychology. Psychology came from ancient Egypt to the Western world through the Greeks and others. Even today, in their symbolic religion or symbolic wisdom we find most advanced concepts of the human nature, human soul, human intellect and human passion. They were well informed or well learned on the subject of psychology, the nature of the mind-—the nature of the soul and the spirit. Also we find that they practiced circumcision before the Jews did, and the Jews were the ones who passed that practice to the Western world or as we know it, the Christian world.
We are trying to gradually bring before your minds eye a trick that is worked on the people and has been working for thousands of years. And impediment that blocks the intelligent expression ______the free or liberal awakening of the human intellect for I am sure, 80 percent or more among the general public. But in this audience, it might be as high as 95 percent, maybe 99 and 9/10th as I think I heard somebody say once. It is no simple trick. It is a very subtle trick. This trick hides itself with the strategy of publishing itself. This is the nature of the Satan, the Chief of the devils. He escapes notice by putting himself right in your eyes. We don’t suspect things that are open, manifest, plain. We suspect things that are partly hid, partly covered. The things that are boldly put before us we ignore them. You can tell somebody the secret to the atomic bomb. The secret of how to make the atomic bomb. You can tell it as a joke and laugh while you are talking and practically everybody will miss the secret, because that is human nature to pass over things that are not presented seriously or the things that are just boldly and carefree like presented. This is the great trick of Satan, and it is also his downfall because chances are against him, It will work for so long but eventually someone is going to get tired of playing. Someone is going to get fed up with jokes. Someone is going to start taking everything serious. And when you get enough of those people inheriting each other, it won’t take long before they catch up with Satan. So Satan is still making jokes. He is still boldly and shamelessly flirting himself in front of our eyes. But he doesn’t know, but he is caught now.
Let us go now to Genesis and see if Genesis can help bring us closer to what we are trying to show you today. In the very beginning of Genesis, We are told that a serpent speaks to the woman and suggests to the woman to disobey God and follow him. The serpent said that God didn’t mean, ‘you will surely die, but that your eyes would come open.’ And the woman desiring what the serpent was offering her accepted that is his suggestion and also said the suggestion to her mate. And that according to the Genesis is the beginning of the downfall of the human family or the human race.
What do we have in the suggestion? We have the idea of eternal life and we have the idea of passion, appetite, and fleshly appetite. That the human being is weak for the material things, for the things that give pleasure, and satisfaction to the flesh or the physical body form. We have also as I have said, the idea of eternal life because the serpent said, “You will not surely die, your eyes will come open and you will become as g’ds living forever. So the serpent offered the woman, the human being eternal life and with this, offers the opening of the eyes. God had said according to Genesis that in the day that you eat of that, you would die. There is no record in Genesis of Adam’s death or burial. There is no record or word in Genesis of Eve’s death and burial. So it seems that God lied because the woman and the man did the forbidden thing and there is nothing that they died because of that. No, they went on living and living for hundreds of years according to the scriptures. And if you understand the scriptures, Adam never died, Eve never died, Adam is still living and Eve is still living-—if you understand the scripture. But they are living the life that Satan cut out for them. The life that God cut out for them, they lost when they followed the suggestion of the Satan.
”Well Mister, did you call us here to give us a religious sermon? No, I called you here for a circumcision.”
Let us go from the serpent to something else that I think will help and that is word from the Qur’an. Abraham asked Pharaoh a question indirectly. He said, “God comes with the Sun from the East and here you are bringing it from the West,” And the word of God in the Qur’an says, “And the rejecters of faith were baffled.” They were confused. They didn’t understand the saying of Abraham it seems from the reading. But when you know what the verse is talking about then you see that they understood what Abraham was saying, but they were shocked that Abraham had the information. They said, “How did he get this information on us? We thought that we had our religion locked up. Who gave Abraham the secret of our riddle.” Exactly, what was Abraham saying? Let us again go to the Qur’an, The Qur’an tells us that Allah tells us that there were a mighty people, led by a mighty man, and the place of these people where they did their work so says the Qur’an is where the Sun went down into the water. It is a dark place where the Sun went down into the water.
With a few more references from scripture and I think that we are going to bring some light home for those who give some thought to scripture, and the rest of you it is very easy. I could have told you in two seconds.
Muslims are told to (Arabic Ho1y Qur’an 2:238) ”Guard the midday prayer.” Why have I mentioned this? It is because it has something to do with the sun. The midday, the Sun is in the zenith, the arch in the zenith, and our prayers the noon prayers come in that arch that are in the highest zenith. And our second midday prayer, the Asr’ prayer come in the second part close to that arch going toward the West. So it is the two small arches going from zenith, from noon to West. Those are the most precious times for the Muslim. Our Salat Jumu’ah prayer comes in that time.
Let us go to the Bible again. It says Jericho was defeated by three blast of a horn, It only took three blasts to blow down the walls of Jericho, Seven finishes up everything. So the walls of Jericho was broken down by the sound of a horn, and Joshua, the leader of the army so the scripture says caused the Sun to stand still? The Sun as we said earlier is a symbol representing higher knowledge of human life. If Joshua made the Sun stand still that tells us that he was able to keep that knowledge from going down on his people. And Muslims are told to watch the prayers of the midday for the same purpose. Don’t let the Sun of enlightenment go down on your society. Pray to God to keep the Sun of enlightenment high in the world, Keep it at its peak. When you gain intellectual strength and superiority in the earth, pray to God and guard over that with more giving of yourself, with more sacrifice, with more devotion, with greater commitment than that you would give to protect your worldly or earthly treasures. Because the knowledge can bring back the material wealth, but the material wealth cannot bring back the knowledge.
The Sun represents the rising of knowledge. What kind of knowledge does the Sun represent? It is the knowledge of human life, the knowledge of our material human existence. There is another knowledge and that knowledge is the interpretation of religion, the interpretation of scripture--Divine understanding, seeing Divine light. The Moon is a symbol of that knowledge. The Moon is a symbol of the understanding of revealed knowledge. The Sun is a symbol of the common knowledge. Don’t we say that the Sun is the symbol of freedom? That it shines on the poor just as much as it shines on the rich. It shines even on the wicked as well as it shines on the righteous. That is the knowledge that is available to everybody. The knowledge of mathematics, social science, chemistry, all of these subjects that help make a good life for human beings, this is the knowledge of the Sun that should be free for everybody. A Muslim is obligated to keep that knowledge lifted, to keep it at its most excellent development for the good of human life on this earth. But we also have to have guidance to enable us to move and to work and to progress when this common knowledge runs out. And there are some human questions that only Allah can give us light on. All the human effort seems to be lost to give us satisfaction, but faith in God gives us the satisfaction, and if Allah says, “This is the answer.” The faithful says, Yes Lord. We hear and we obey.” That revealed knowledge is like the Moon and it has come to the people in the form of prophecies, visions, etcetera. Lastly it comes as the sunlight itself. Here is that, which use to be Moon light. It becomes so bright that the Moon is not even need anymore. Which means that those questions that our minds couldn’t understand regarding the soul, the spirit and the promised life, the hereafter, all of these things that mystify the human being would one day be answered so clearly that we wouldn’t need faith. It would be so plain as the Book says; “Every eye shall see Him. Every eye shall behold Him.” Shall behold Him, God himself, the actual being of God. No, because the scripture says that no human vision can catch Him. And the scripture says again in the Bible that no man has seen God and lived. And again it says that no man can see God. And again it says that every eye shall see Him. But you have to get a circumcision first; you can’t see him unless you are circumcised.
Again let us go to the Qur’an, It says that Moses saw a fire burning in a bush and he told his people, “Wait here for me. I am going to approach that bush to see that maybe I can bring some burning kindling back or get some understanding there. “ So Moses went to the burning bush and a voice came out of the bush saying, ”You are on holy ground. Take off your shoes.” It is a good scriptural sign. It was a bad social sign for this civilization, but it was a scriptural sign when the Hippies and the Yuppies and the Gypsies started taking off their shoes and walking barefoot in our beautiful cities, That was a very good sign. And Jim Jones and his organization sacrificed, it is a very bad sign. It is a sign that the Jahcubites want to kill the coming of Christ before he is completely seen, so they make their false Christ and kill him as a sacrifice to kill the real Christ in the minds of the people.
So Moses or Musa as he is called in the Arabic language, it says that he spoke to God, face to face, mouth to mouth as a man speaks with his friend, You might say, “Well, Moses saw God then if he spoke to him face to face.” Let me explain what face to face means. Face to face means not back to back or back to face, That is all that it means, It means that he didn’t speak with his back turned to God or his head turned away from God’s calling. He spoke face to face and he wasn’t feeling any hatred for the calling. He was in agreement with the calling. He liked what God wanted him to do. He was friendly.