The Significance of Prayer

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9/9/09 3:40 PM

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FinalCall.com News Columns The Significance of Prayer By the Honorable Elijah Muhammad Updated Sep 4, 2009 - 2:44:05 PM “O you who believe, remember Allah, remembering Him frequently and glorifying Him morning and evening. He it is Who sends His blessings on you, and so do His angels, that He may bring you forth out of utter darkness into the light and He is merciful to the believers (Prayer is better than sleep.)” (Holy Qur'an 33:41-43).

This alone is salvation, just to be brought out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of the truth. Who is in more need of the truth than the American so-called Negroes who do not have the knowledge of self nor of anyone else, and who love those who hate them and spitefully use them?

“O Prophet, surely we have sent you as a witness and as a bearer of good news and as a warner and as one inviting to Allah by his permission and as a light-giving torch” (Holy Qur-an 33:45, 46). Come to success; prayer and obedience to Allah will bring you success. The prayer is recited standing erect with face towards the east with hands raised and declaring to the one God, Allah, that he has turned himself to Allah (God), the originator of the heavens and earth. This prayer and positions are especially designed and worded for those lost sheep (the so-called Negroes) who have been lost from the knowledge of their God and people and now declare that they are turned again to their God, Allah, and are upright to Him. Imagine a native Muslim who never was lost from Allah and His people in the Holy Land or Holy City, reciting the above prayer. The prayer has been turned into the wrong direction. He is in the west, looking again due east, confessing his faults for going astray from his God and people and declaring that he has been unjust to himself. He confesses his faults and declares that none can grant him protection from his faults but Allah (God). He further asks that evil morals be turned away from him and that he be guided to the best of morals. He is now leaving the infidels of the west who brought him into darkness and pleading to be guided to better morals. Surely we, the so-called Negroes, lost all of our good morals among the enemies of the West. The type of the so-called Negroes is given in many parables of the Bible. In fact, if the Bible is rightly understood, it is referring to none other than the so-called Negroes and their enemies, the chosen people of God to whom the God gave the firstborn (convert), and even the (Mahdi) Christ offered His life to restore the so-called Negroes again to their own kind.

But the so-called Negroes are blinded with a picture of the Jews' salvation and cannot see their own selves in prophecy. They should shout with joy over the understanding that God has and is causing me to give them of the Book.

It is a prayer for forgiveness that Solomon advised you and me to make to Allah if we be lost from our own under the name of Israel (II Chronicles 6:36-39). Solomon was a Muslim prophet and king. He and his father David, were of the Black nation. He advised us to pray toward our own land and toward the Holy City (Mecca) which He has chosen.

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Print Friendly: The Significance of Prayer

9/9/09 3:40 PM

In the parables of the prodigal son (which is one of the most beautiful) and of the lost sheep it is, or should be, easier for the so-called Negroes to see that they are the ones referred to. It is with the turning toward his home and father's house to pray that the sins of the prodigal son were forgiven, and he was accepted by his father and restored to his rightful place among his brethren. It is the turning again of the lost-found so-called Negro —the tribe of Shabazz—in prayer to Allah, their true God and His true religion, Islam, that they will be seated in heaven overnight (at once). The enemy knows this as well as I. The prayer service is divided into two parts, one to be said in private and the other to be performed in congregation, preferably in a Mosque. While the private part is meant simply for the development of the inner self of man, the public part has other ends as well in view: ends, that, indeed, make the Islamic prayer a mighty force in the unification of the human race.

In the first place, this gathering of all people living in the same vicinity five times daily in the Mosque, is a help to the establishment of healthy social relations. In the daily service these relations are limited to a narrow circle, i.e., to members of the same neighborhood. But the circle becomes wider in the weekly Friday service which gathers together all Muslim members of a particular locality and becomes still wider, in the two great “Eid” gatherings.

Thus, prayer promotes social relations between the different sections of the Muslim community. Far more important than this, however, is the leveling of social differences brought about by means of congregational prayer. Once within the doors of the Mosque, every Muslim feels himself in an atmosphere of equality and love. Before their Maker they all stand shoulder to shoulder, the king along with his poorest subject, the rich arrayed in gorgeous robes, the beggar clad in rags.

Nay, the king or rich man standing in a back row will have to lay his head, prostrating himself before God, at the feet of a slave or a beggar standing in the front. There could be no more leveling influence in the world. Differences of rank, wealth and color vanish within the Mosque and quite a new atmosphere, an atmosphere of brotherhood, equality and love, totally different from the outside world, prevails within the holy precincts.

To be able to breathe, five times daily, in an atmosphere of perfect peace in a world of strife and struggle, of equality where inequality is the order of the day, of love amidst the petty jealousies and enmities of daily life, is indeed a blessing. But it is more than a blessing; for it is the great lesson of life. Man has to work amidst inequalities, amidst strife and struggle amidst scenes of hatred and enmity, and yet he is drawn out of these five times a day and made to realize that equality, fraternity and love are the real sources of human happiness.

The time spent on prayer is not, therefore, wasted even from the point of view of active humanitarianism; on the contrary, the best use of it is made in learning those great lessons which make life worth living.

And these lessons of fraternity, equality and love, when put into practice in daily life, serve as foundations for the unification of the human race and of the lasting civilization of mankind.

In fact, the five daily congregational prayers are meant, among other things, to carry into practice the theoretical lessons of equality and fraternity for which Islam stands; and, however, much Islam may have preached in words the equality of man and the fraternity of the community of Islam, all this would have remained a dead letter, had it not been translated into the everyday life of man through the institution of five daily congregational prayers.

(Text from “Message to the Black Man in America,” 1965.)

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