Stages of Resurrection

أَعُوذُ بِٱللَّٰهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيْطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ

I seek refuge in Allah from Shaytan, the accursed

بِسْمِ ٱللَّٰهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

There is a sentence in the Qur'an that should make every Muslim slow down before he opens his mouth about another man's faith.

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِذَا ضَرَبْتُمْ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ فَتَبَيَّنُوا وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَنْ أَلْقَىٰ إِلَيْكُمُ السَّلَامَ لَسْتَ مُؤْمِنًا

Read it again. A man comes to you with the sign of Islam. He offers you peace. And Allah, not a scholar, not a council, Allah Himself, warns you not to rush to tell him he is not a believer.

The Prophet ﷺ sealed the warning.

“Whoever accuses a believer of disbelief, it is as if he has killed him.”

Sahih al-Bukhari 6047

So before I say one word about the Nation of Islam, I plant my feet here. To strip a man of his faith is to pass a sentence. And the final sentence belongs to Allah alone. Not to my pride. Not to my tribe. Not to the man whose road into Islam happened to be smoother than mine.

وَلَا تَلْمِزُوا أَنفُسَكُمْ وَلَا تَنَابَزُوا بِالْأَلْقَابِ

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اجْتَنِبُوا كَثِيرًا مِّنَ الظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعْضَ الظَّنِّ إِثْمٌ

That is the ground I stand on. Now let me tell you what I see.

Allah Does Not Abandon the Oppressed

Allah does not abandon the oppressed. That is not my sentiment. It is His pattern, written across the Book.

وَنُرِيدُ أَن نَّمُنَّ عَلَى الَّذِينَ اسْتُضْعِفُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ وَنَجْعَلَهُمْ أَئِمَّةً وَنَجْعَلَهُمُ الْوَارِثِينَ

Look at who that verse is about. A people crushed under Pharaoh. Stripped of power. Exploited. Humiliated. Controlled in their own bodies. And Allah does not merely comfort them. He raises them. He favors them. He makes them lead. He makes them inherit.

وَأَوْرَثْنَا الْقَوْمَ الَّذِينَ كَانُوا يُسْتَضْعَفُونَ مَشَارِقَ الْأَرْضِ وَمَغَارِبَهَا

This is not sentimental religion. This is a liberation blueprint.

And He does not send that guidance in a form the people cannot reach.

وَلِكُلِّ قَوْمٍ هَادٍ

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا مِن رَّسُولٍ إِلَّا بِلِسَانِ قَوْمِهِ لِيُبَيِّنَ لَهُمْ

Language. Mark that word. It does not only mean Arabic, or English, or Hebrew. It means the cultural tongue. The psychological tongue. The tongue of a people's wound. A guide who cannot reach a people where they actually stand has not reached them at all.

A People Oppressed in the Land

Now bring that pattern home.

We were a people oppressed in the land. Not as a figure of speech. In fact. Brought here in chains. Stripped of name. Stripped of language. Stripped of tribe, of law, of family structure, of the memory of our own God. Then handed the religion of the men who held the whip, and taught to read it through their eyes.

By the time the last century turned, the so-called Negro had been made deaf, dumb, and blind to himself. That is not an insult. That is a diagnosis.

And into that exact condition, a movement rose. The Nation of Islam did not come speaking abstract theology to people who had no leisure for abstraction. It came speaking the language of our actual pain. Slavery. White supremacy. Poverty. Prison. Pork. Liquor. The broken home. The hatred a man had been trained to aim at his own reflection.

هُوَ الَّذِي بَعَثَ فِي الْأُمِّيِّينَ رَسُولًا مِّنْهُمْ يَتْلُو عَلَيْهِمْ آيَاتِهِ وَيُزَكِّيهِمْ وَيُعَلِّمُهُمُ الْكِتَابَ وَالْحِكْمَةَ

There is the function, laid out plain. Recite the signs. Purify the people. Teach the Book. Teach the wisdom. Raise a fallen nation back onto its feet. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad stood in the function of a guide to a destroyed people. Master Fard Muhammad taught him, and he carried that teaching to men the rest of the world had written off.

The Wisdom of Stages

Here is where the wisdom shows itself.

ادْعُ إِلَىٰ سَبِيلِ رَبِّكَ بِالْحِكْمَةِ

Wisdom does not hand a starving man a feast. It hands him what his body can hold, what restores his appetite, what builds him back to the strength where a feast will no longer kill him.

So the Nation came in a form Black people could recognize. It had a minister. It had a temple. It had sacred speech and call and response. It had discipline, dress, moral law, family order, and a prophetic cadence in its voice. It felt close enough to the church we already knew that we could walk through the door. But once we were inside, the fire was different. Knowledge of God. Knowledge of self. Cleanliness. Restraint. Diet. Economics. Modesty. Submission.

Elijah Muhammad did not drape an Arab costume over a wounded people and call that Islam. He gave us Islam in stages our condition could digest. That was not a corruption of the call. That was the wisdom of the call.

Stages of Resurrection

And look what grew out of it.

Over the generations, the community moved. Toward the shahada. Toward salah. Toward Ramadan. Toward the Qur'an in its own words. Toward the masjid and the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

The critics call that a contradiction. I call it stages of resurrection.

The Nation was never the origin of Islam in America. It was the reawakening of an Islamic memory that slavery, Christianity, white supremacy, and cultural amnesia had buried alive. It was the most powerful organized movement in the modern age to make Islam a mass identity, a discipline, and a liberation program for Black people in this country. The door it opened, millions walked through. Many of us are still walking.

When a man tells me, “that was not real Islam,” my answer is simple. It was not the final form of Islamic maturity. It was a necessary form of Islamic reintroduction for a people whose original identity had been destroyed. Allah does not guide men in a vacuum. He guides them according to their condition, their time, their trauma, their capacity, and their need.

Medicine for a Specific Sickness

Then there is the teaching everyone wants to fight about. The white man is the devil.

Let me be honest about it, because honesty is the only thing that has ever set a people free.

A nation had been taught, for centuries, that whiteness was divine. Authoritative. Intelligent. Beautiful. Clean. Civilized. Close to God. And that same nation had been taught that Blackness was cursed, animal, ugly, dirty, criminal, and far from God. That is a spell. And a soft word does not break a hard spell.

The Nation's language was a reversal aimed at a reversal. It took a hammer to a false god, because the false god of whiteness had been driven into the Black mind with a hammer. Understood in its hour, it was medicine for a specific sickness. The only danger is when medicine is mistaken for a permanent diet. Taken literally and forever, it curdles into the very racial arrogance it was sent to cure.

But hear me out, because they conveniently leave this out. Elijah Muhammad himself signaled that the medicine had to mature. At Saviours' Day in 1974, he told the believers it was time to stop calling the white man the devil, because there were Black devils too, and that justice is to be given when it is due.

The moment he said there are Black devils too, he moved the standard off of skin and onto conduct. Devil is not a color. Devil is behavior. God is not a color. God is consciousness, righteousness, mastery, truth, and obedience to the law of Allah. He planted the seed of his own correction before he left.

And the Qur'an is the purifier that finishes the work.

إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ

That is the final standard. Not race. Taqwa. Whiteness as a system acted devilishly, and that must be named without flinching. Black people had to recover the knowledge of self that was stolen, and that must be honored without apology. But the scale a man is finally weighed on is not the color of his skin. It is the truth in his heart and the righteousness in his hands.

Held in Sequence

So I do not hold these two things in tension. I hold them in sequence.

The Qur'an gives the pattern. Allah raises guidance among the oppressed, in the language of their condition, and carries them in stages from where they were ruined to where they are restored. In Pharaoh's Egypt, He raised Musa. Among the unlettered Arabs, He sealed the revelation with Muhammad ﷺ. Among a people stripped of name, language, land, God, and self in America, He let a guide rise to call the dead back to life. That guide did not deliver us to the finish line. It delivered us to the road.

And on that road, when a brother comes to me with peace on his tongue and the shahada in his chest, I will not be the one to tell him he is not a believer. Allah forbade me that. The judgment is His.

فَلَا تُزَكُّوا أَنفُسَكُمْ ۖ هُوَ أَعْلَمُ بِمَنِ اتَّقَىٰ

I know where I came from. I know what carried me. And I know Who I am walking toward.

Mike Rashid King

Allah's Humble Servant