By: Ustadh Gharibi Murad(*)
So that we may study the life of Imam al-Husayn (a) well, and observe how the breadth of his intellect, the composure of his thought, the forbearance of his movement, the radiance of his Islam and the dignity of his patience were? And how he carried the responsibility of Islam and the Muslims in his mind and his heart, and his family (a)?
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If we truly and really love Imam al-Husayn (a) and commemorate the day of his martyrdom in Karbala every year, we ought on this day to release the Islamic grief that produces Islamic joy and makes of affliction a school of uprightness, because Karbala is a university of Islamic wisdom, a garden of the flowers of Islamic culture and the repository of Islamic spiritual and gnostic riches. For this reason, the commemoration of Imam al-Husayn (a) must be a new launch for scholars, thinkers, intellectuals and men of letters, for building and developing research methodologies concerning the subject of Islamic reform, so that Muslims may comprehend reform in thought, culture, politics, economics and society, and in understanding the universe, through the chapters of the course on martyrdom in the university of the Karbala of al-Husayn (a). In the light of that, we find that the martyred Imam al-Husayn (a) has nothing in thought, in politics, in social life, in culture and in movement as a whole except the authentic Islamic line. Al-Husayn (a) was an Imam in every meaning the word carries and in all that the word can encompass in its cultural, political and social dimensions, and his practical method embodied the method of the Messenger of Allah (s). And in one of his (a) sayings, he said: ( O people, the Messenger of Allah (s) said—he said: “Whoever among you sees a tyrannical ruler, deeming lawful the sanctities of Allah, breaking the covenant of Allah, opposing the Sunna of the Messenger of Allah, acting among His servants with sin and aggression, and does not act to change things against him, by word or by deed, it is a right upon Allah to make him enter his place of entry.” Behold, these people have adhered to obedience to Satan and abandoned obedience to the All-beneficent, made corruption manifest, suspended the legal punishments, appropriated the spoils for themselves, made lawful what Allah has forbidden and forbidden what Allah has made lawful, and I am the most entitled of anyone who would bring about change...). This saying of Imam al-Husayn (a) came in the form of a call built upon the Most Noble Messenger (s), as it conveys the reality of the essential relationship between the person of the Most Noble Prophet (s) and Imam al-Husayn (a) on the one hand, and the character of the educational analysis of political concepts such as leadership and responsibility in the school of the Ahl al-Bayt (a) on the other, through widening the circle of discussion and of investigation into the predicaments that obstruct the movement of Islamic society. The first thing we notice at the outset of this Prophetic-Husayni discourse is that we must gaze at the heroic deeds and the roles in addition to our gazing at the heroes, in order to discover and investigate the particularity of the line that this heroic person represents; for the Messenger of Allah (s) has defined for us the features of the bad leadership that imposes itself upon Islamic reality, attracts people to its deviant line and veils the authentic Islamic line from them. Then Imam al-Husayn (a), after conveying the Prophetic hadith, speaks in a manner that lends the matter something of detail, analysis, simplification and activation—or something of the realistic dynamism of the Mission that the Imamate undertakes after the era of Prophethood has come to an end. For Imam al-Husayn (a) set out to describe reality by projecting the Prophetic Islamic theory onto it in order to lay it bare; so after the talk had been about the leader, it became talk about the deviation that has fashioned a system and apparatuses that serve its interests and protect its aims of arrogance (istikbār)... Through that we understand that the leading person whose conduct is bad in the movement of leadership for governance, if he meets a society that does not care about its reality, whether it is Islamic or otherwise, then this reality will inevitably be a non-Islamic reality, because its conditions—which the Most Noble Messenger (s) defined—have been fulfilled... Frankly: after this cultural-political prelude—or the Prophetic-Husayni theory of the concept of leadership in a realistic form—came the Islamic responsibility for producing change, as Imam al-Husayn (a) presented himself as the coming symbol of change: not to change the person, but to change the direction of leadership and to rectify its deviation at the level of the person, as the apex of the pyramid of deviation, on the one hand, and of society, as a structure of deviation, on the other. This truth we discern and draw inspiration from in several Qurʾanic narrative scenes, which firmly establishes for the perceptive Muslim, and for the one who hears about the Imamate and the wilāyah, that the Imamic movement of the Mission is infallible and pure, constantly connected with the Qurʾanic insights and knowing their essence in all the details of its life, because the Imam, in his entirety, expresses true Islam ... And Allah is behind the intent.
(*) An Islamic writer and researcher
