Muslim leader urges shift from black theology

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Bay Area occupants had a rare chance Lord'S Day to hear a adult male who may be the single most influential Moslem in America. But the bounds of his range were also on display.

When Imam W. Deen Muhammad stepped to the dais at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, there were perhaps 300 people in the audience, almost all of them African American.

Though most of his hourlong talking was not about race, the issue that made him a radical in American religion, he didn't diffident away from it. He urged audience members to believe of themselves not in racial classes but in human terms.

Mohammed spoke of how the Rev. St Martin Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a twenty-four hours when his children would not be judged by the colour of their skin, but the content of their character. But after King's death, Muhammad said achromatic leadership chose another direction.

"Now how come up after he died, our leadership talked nil but 'black' to us," he said. Muhammad said the usage of the adjective "black" to depict the community's accomplishments debauched them - and insulted others.

Noting that African American leadership in United States Congress mention to themselves as the Congressional Black Caucus, Muhammad questioned how people would respond if there was a "white caucus." Muhammad urged those gathered to believe about the catholicity of all people - and that defining faith for any 1 race is dangerous.

"Black divinity weakens our ability to derive from scripture, counsel from scripture, to do ourselves a better spiritual community," he said.

The words are dramatic considering the way that Muhammad have taken.

Mohammed is the boy of Elijah Muhammad, who for more than than 30 old age led the State of Islam, the achromatic breakaway faith that deemed all achromatic people to be "devils" and achromatic people to be "gods." W. Deen Elijah Muhammad was chosen by his father to transport on his legacy.

But after Elijah Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, the boy chose a different path. He gradually dissolved the State of Islam, leading trusters toward the Sunnite subdivision of Islam. All people were equal, regardless of race. Women were the same as men, except for physical strength.

While his father's State of Islamism explicitly referred to the U.S. flag as a symbol of "slavery, suffering and death," Muhammad started New World Patriotism Day in 1979, according to Imam Faheem Shuaibe, who takes Masjidul Waritheen, an Oakland mosque.

The attempt was intended to demo that the ideals put forth in the U.S. Fundamental Law and the Declaration of Independence are the same ideals called for in the Quran.

"We should be most American," Muhammad once said, according to Shuaibe. For a Moslem to reject those documents, Muhammad reportedly said, "You reject our top opportunity."

Mohammed makes not reject what his father did entirely, calling it a necessary measure in the development in the mind of African Americans. For a people who had been debauched into a position of lower status for centuries, believing that they were Gods helped degree the playing field, he maintains.

In his talking Sunday, Mohammed, who now takes a Chicago-based non-profit-making the Mosque Cares, said his father had "prepared" the community.

As a consequence of the immense spiritual migration away from the State of Islam, many people believe African Americans are the single biggest ethnical grouping of American Muslims today. (Louis Farrakhan would raise the State of Islam, though it would be far diminished in size.)

Sunday's talking was noteworthy for the singular absence of Muslims of immigrant descent. Though American Muslims often state that Islamism have no racial bounds, most Bay Area masjids analogue the demographic forms of Christians - unintegrated by ethnicity or race. The Moslem Community Association in Santa Clara is the most noteworthy exception.

Hatem Bazian, a UC Bishop Berkeley lecturer, appeared to be the exclusive outstanding figure in the immigrant Moslem community who showed up. Bazian gave a address before Mohammed's talking about the promise that could be had if the two communities worked together.

But the absence of immigrants left some acrimonious at the belittling of the American Moslem most darling to Muslims of African American descent.

"We are once again disappointed by our blood brothers World Health Organization are immigrant Muslims," said Imam Abu Qadir Al-Amin, who takes the San Francisco Moslem Community Center. "Don't name on me in the future."

E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at .