Bilal

[NaSra]

Asalamalaikum Anya


About Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz AKA malcolm X, All I can say is May Allah make his home Jennaht'ul firdaus, ameen.

It was only long after the Prophets death that it reared it's ugly head again amongst the Arabs.

Sad but true, I have seen it with my own eyes, Arabs who claim to be muslims yet they are so full of racism. The darker your skin colour is the uglier you are to them or they also believe that you are lower than them. I have also heard that in Most Arab countries they still practise atleast a some type of slavery, which is shocking to me.


I'll Continue Brother


<b>Bilal waits for his death</b>


They left me alone to myself, to stir all night in myself. My master was, as I’ve said, precise in his punishments. A whip in the morning is the best firewood to keep a slave on boil all night- in his description. But I had more to ponder than the whip. I had the sun; Umaya had condemned me to the sun; in Mecca the sun was the cart of execution.


An expectation of death can light many lanterns in a man and, to my grace and favour, that night God granted me light to see by. I saw again my father and mother working in the steam of the dye vats and the tanners’ yard- my father’s strength so exploited and worn down, that what should have been his full manhood was his old age- my mother coughing, always coughing, until life itself was coughed away. Yet that night, I saw again their tenderness and sadness when they looked at me.


They were Ethiopians from across the Red Sea. I never knew how they came into slavery. They never told me. They endured by forgetting, although my mother said once that though I was born to slavery, I was conceived in freedom. So I always knew that in the most mysterious part of my life, its conception, I had not been a slave.


Yet all men receive their life and station without their knowledge; no man may choose his door; no man may say ‘I enter here.’ Such is the human lot.


That night, again, in the ear of long ago I heard my father and mother whispering whether they should kill me and save me the slavery my birth had bestowed upon me. I felt again the tears on my face, not for myself, but for the pain of their love. As with Isaac, I would have submitted to my fathers will and, as with Isaac, it was not to be.


I saw the day when I came of age to be marketed, to become a slave in my own stature. Then sold and resold among the camels and their sheep of one inheritance or another, one shift of ownership to another. Bah!


I laugh at it now- from sticks to kicks to whips.


But that night in Umaya’s slave quarters, tied up from the knees to the neck? I had little laughter in me.


Then, again, in streaks of pain, I began to relive the beauty of the world. The beauty that was passing from me. What was it? A dog barking in the distance; the moonlight on the floor; a man snoring across the courtyard in the depth of his peace. I hardly remember now. How can I?


Thirty years have gone. The mind is too limited to possess itself. Yet I do remember, in that dark night, seeing a blinding daylight a red ladybird upon a stalk. Even today when I see a ladybird I am happy all day.


Ladybirds, ladybirds- what do men think about as death collects their wits?


Then there were the accidents of the evening before. What brought me to this precipice? Ammar? What had I to do with Ammar or Ammar to do with me? He would not have blamed me had I struck him. He even put the whip back into my hand. Yet I, Bilal, a man of nothing, discovered that nothing in my slavery could make me obey.


You might think I made this decision. You would be wrong. For how can a slave decide? He who has no opinion cannot have a decision. Why then had the whip- or was it a stick- fallen out of my hands? A slave is a fear even to himself and I was neither brave enough nor fool enough to revolt. The answer lay elsewhere. Where? In Muhammad?


I had seen Muhammad many times but I had never spoken to him. When the great Fair was over, when the caravans had disappeared into their own dust, Mecca shrank. The streets emptied into familiar faces, thought they passed me, a slave, without much notice and no familiarity. But Muhammad was different. He never passed any man without a look of friendship. Now he was the one witnessing the One God.


I had been lying there for some hours with the ropes cutting me and my situation pounding within me. I had some hope, I suppose, that whimpering and crawling and licking foot in the morning I might be given the benefit of the inch of life and death. I must have had hope. Hope is the last friend of a man and leaves him only with his last breath.


Morning was coming. A new air pushed through the old air of yesterday. I filled my lungs with it. My mind began to wander back to the One God. You must know that in those days I was illiterate, my thought had no alphabet, and when I say I wandered, I mean I was a nomad who possessed no wells. But I had my thirst; my thirst was all and my thirst compelled me towards I knew not what.


O God, it is not man who chooses you, but You who choose man. No man may believe except by your will.


That dawn, by the will of God, I made my surrender to God. My Islam.


Suddenly, so great a sweetness flowed through me that I was content even in the ropes. My soul sang. I knew that my only comfort would be to be near the One God. I knew it in a truth deeper than in the mind, in the fathoms of man, in his heart. I began to pray, and my soul rested. I began to praise God, and my mind was at peace. I began to look at his Mercy, and my fear departed from me.


Then the sun rose up by God’s hand.


When they came for me I thanked them. How could they have known? The proper course would have been to pray to their pity. They thought me mad. How could they have known that I had rested in the God who created me- and what they did or did not do to me would be done or not be done by the will of God? Their hands lifted me up.


How could they have known that God had already lifted me up beyond fear of their hands?