Speech [The origin of the opposition of the enemies to the clergy; explaining the peculiarities of the Islamic Revolution]

I have studied the issues, for the sake of which I speak sometimes. If we study the history of these hundred years; these last hundred years, we will come to know as to why these groups, from outside and inside, these plotters abroad and at home, use their pens against the clergy, and speak against them. They write against them in their newspapers. What is the origin of this? Nearly a hundred years ago, there was an old man living in one of the towns of Iraq in Samirra. When he saw that Iran was under the pressure of the foreigners with whom it, had concluded that shameful agreement at that time, he (the old man), who was living in a corner of that place, wrote one short sentence, which no power, whether foreign or local, was able to obstruct. That man was the late Mirza-ye Bozorg «2»- may God have mercy on his soul- who, from Samirra', had ordered the prohibition of tobacco as they (the foreign power) had almost enslaved Iran because of the Tobacco Agreement. He wrote one line prohibiting the use of tobacco. Its effect was such that even that tyrant «3» his associates, and concubines observed that" fatwa" and broke their water pipes. In some places, the tobacco, a costly commodity, was heaped up and burnt. The agreement was, thus, overturned and abrogated. They saw such a thing happen in that a cleric, an old man living in a corner of a small town in Iraq writes a few words, causing a nation to rise and put an end to the agreement between the oppressive King and the British. They saw that the clergy possessed this kind of power. They again witnessed this power when the British had attacked Iraq and virtually colonized it. An old man ordered the people to defend (themselves). And so they rose and saved the Iraqi nation. This was the power shown by an old man, who was the second Mirza-ye Shirazi, the late Aqa Mirza Muhammad Taqi «4», may God be pleased with him. During the Constitutional Movement, they saw a clergyman or a few clergymen in Najaf, and some preachers and clerics in Tehran uproot the very foundation of despotism and the self-centered government of that time and established constitutional rule. Those who were against all this did not give up; they, too, carried on their activities. But all this is too long for me to relate. As for this constitution the late Shaykh Fadlullah, «5» peace be upon him, was adamant that it be a legitimate one, and that the laws be in line with Islam. At the time, when he issued this order- the constitution was also perfected because of his efforts- the foreigners who saw that the clergy wielded such power, arranged for a court to be set up in Iran wherin Shaykh Fazlulla, a crusading mujathid of high status, was tried by a perverted individual in the guise of a clergyman and hanged in the presence of a crowd of people in Toupkhaneh Square (a famous, square in downtown Tehran). «6»

Perhaps you or the people sometimes think that I take the side of the clergymen because I myself am one and that it is a case of group affinity. But I have repeatedly said that I do not approve of everybody who wears a turban or calls himself a clergyman. I have also said very often that a clergyman, who acts contrary to Islamic beliefs and the practices of the clergy and is a conspirator, is worse than a Savaki because a Savaki is a Savaki after all, but this one (an errant cleric) is a Savaki in the guise and dress of a clergyman. It is not that I approve of everybody with a turban on his head. To the contrary, I hate many of them and have no faith in them. I have also often said that wherever there are courts and committees, they themselves must complain against a clergyman who commits an offense and bring him to stand trial. But the issue is not that they are ill- disposed towards a bad clergyman. It is that they are against those clergymen who thwarted the British during the time of Mirza-ye Shirazi, who opposed dictatorship during the Constitutional Movement, who frustrated the British during the time of the late Mirza Muhammad Taqi and also frustrated the superpowers.

The reason why they plot is that they do not want the clergy to be on the scene. They say that the clergymen should go to the mosques and lead the congregational prayers. Very well, but will you (the lackeys of foreigners) allow the clergy to lead the congregational prayers? You go to the mosques where you send some wicked people. You set a man in the front that has no knowledge of Islam. You give the impression of prayers so as to deprive the clergy of the mosques as well. It is not that they will leave the clergy alone if they stop performing their valuable work and restrict their activities to the mosques. As they say, they want to purge the clergy from the mosques. They want to take the mosques away from the Muslims. You saw that in the days of Muhammad Rida, they had kept a retired colonel, a perverted individual from SAVAK, in every mosque in Tehran to keep an eye on things. It could have certainly the case elsewhere also, but I am not very sure. Will they ever stop doing what they had done and which has been carried out by means of those people, or will they not? Should the clergy not have a mosque at least? In those days, they used to say that the clergy should not even wear turbans! It will come to that at the present time as well in case you Muslims remain apathetic.

They have nothing to do with the clergyman. It is Islam that they are after. It is Islam and the basis of Islam that empowers a clergyman in that even a word of his is heeded by the masses. They are against that basic principle. They are the ones whose friend, «7» using an abusive word, held the Qur'an in his hand and said that as long as the Muslims had Qur'an, England would not be able to rule over them. Those people are the followers of those ones. It is regrettable that they go into the schools, and finding simple- hearted children, convey their views to them but couched in a way which makes the poor children think that what they say is true. But they ought to reason out as to what their premise is, and what they are trying to say. In fact, I, too, was very surprised by the way they were speaking. I know Qum; I grew up there. I came to Qum when you- all of you- were not even born. I stayed there and I am still staying there. My health allowing, I will come there again to be among you. I know that you people of Qum will not give up Islam so easily, so quickly. You will never do it on any account.

There is one thing I wish to tell you for later times so that you always keep it in mind even when I am no more. If at any time you see somebody, some group, faction, party or whatever say something against the clergy- it sometimes happens that one may say something against somebody else because of a quarrel between them; this is a different matter- or against an influential figure among them, then you, from now until the time you exist, and the future generations, too, should know that whenever one, speaking against the concept of priesthood, says that the clergy should leave the scene and become isolated, meaning that they should confine themselves to the mosques- although I have said that they will not allow even this; nevertheless they should go to the mosques and get busy with praying- or wants to crush one who is influential among the clergy and is the object of the people's attention, by writing or speaking against him, his intention in doing so does not concern this particular person nor the clergy. He has in mind the fact that this clerical class is against their policies and against the Muslim country being under the domination of others. The Qur'an has enjoined that it should not, and the clergy propagate this Qur'anic injunction. These people are against the institution of the clergy though, their opposition takes the form of saying that they want the prestige of the clergy to be kept, and that by entering politics, the clergy will lose their prestige among the people and, therefore, they want it to be maintained. By such intrigues and ruses, they seek to out the clergy from the scene and hand over your country to East or West. This is the actual truth. Otherwise, nobody is opposed to a few meters of longcloth. «8» Even some clerics are connected to them and are with these very same people. How is it that when Rida Khan appeared on the scene, he focused his attention on the clergy? Why were the ones who used to teach him the object of their attention? Why do the people who want to show sympathy now say that the clergy should leave the scene? Well, you say they should step aside. Supposing they do step aside, will you allow them to remain in the mosques? Or will some people go to the mosques and pray in order to break up the prayers of the clergymen who have gone there to pray, and drive him out of the mosque. They want to deprive you of this stronghold.

The mosque is an Islamic stronghold. It is the altar of war, of struggle. They want to take it away from you. This, in itself, is not the point. It is just the prelude. Otherwise, you may keep on frequenting the mosque and praying.

These people have had a bad experience with the mosque, particularly in these last two or three years. During these last two or three years, the mosque had been a place to rouse the people to campaign against tyranny. Hence they want to rob the people of this stronghold. Well, if they take it (away from the people), will they stop there? As for the university, as not having one is not good in the eyes of the world; they want to set up a university like the one that existed in the days of Aryamehr so that those who come out of it should be in their service, that is, in the service of the West. This is mostly the case. Or, they should be in the service of the East. They want the university, too, to be at their service. Likewise, the government that comes to power and the parliament that holds sessions should all be in their service. When all these official organs are placed at their disposal, whatever the people of this nation- workers, peasants, merchants; everyone- gain, will, also be at their disposal. So, they want to change the basis of everything and do something to make everything on the Western and imperialistic pattern. They want to do all this. It is not that they are against the clergy as such. They are against the clergy because they are against Islam.

They see what a clergyman is doing for Islam. If a few clergymen are bad, let them go to hell. But they do not say that only a few of them are bad. They are talking about all the clergymen. Such is the case. This is not a plot that they have hatched now. They hatched this plot after they had seen over these last one hundred years that such a power existed. And so they had to crush this power in order to open the way for them (to control the country). Well, (they knew) they would not be able to do anything until such a power existed, until the clergyman and the academic were together, until the clergy, the bazaar merchants and the academics were united and all the classes of the people were in accord with the government and all its organs. They could not harm a country in which all the strata of the people were united; the world would not allow them to do so. So what should they have to do? They had to make head-way bit by bit, to come a step forward and entrench themselves just like these people are now doing at the border. They come a step forward, entrench themselves and then move ahead another step, assailing a cleric or two. It was yesterday or the day before that somebody told me that the things you see on the television being collected by the people to send (to the war fronts) are swallowed by these clerics; they do not send them the aid at all. They want to make headway step by step. Suppose it is the clergy now whom they are trying to crush; tomorrow it will be the academics and the day after, it will be the government that they will assail in their demonstrations. Even the government has been attacked. They have acted tactlessly. They want to render powerless one by one, the people who are serving Islam only for some persons to remain who have nothing to do with all these matters and have no say in the country's affairs. They would fall asleep even if the world were being inundated by a flood. They had devised a precise scheme in the past to serve them at the present time. Now they are saying something worse. They are watching what Islam is doing, from outside. They saw that Islam defeated and swept away all the powerful entities. When they see that Islam is like this, they oppose it.

I wish to give you some advice. It is that you and the coming generations should know that whenever a mischievous writer desires to do away with the clergy altogether, to isolate them in some way or other, or target a cleric who wields influence among the people, he is acting in accordance with that plan; the plan which they had, which they have and will have. Everybody ought to be vigilant. We should be careful enough to see that they do not create disunity among us once again and range us against one another, with one group from this side, one group from that side and another one from another side all shouting at one another. We should not let them pit as against one another and reap the benefit.

I am notifying all our people, all the world's nations and the future generations that the actual fact is that Islam stands in opposition to their aims and objectives. They want it either not to exist or, if it is to exist, it should be in the hands of the people who have no knowledge at all about it; the ones who pick out a verse from the Qur'an and a line from Nahj al-Balaghah and have nothing to do with the rest. They want to do away with the Qur'an and the Nahj al- Balaghah with that one verse and that one line. These sentences which some perverted people utter are to be seen on the walls in Iraq. This same heretic Ba`ath Party has written these sentences, and which the perverted ones repeat here, on the walls of Najaf, Karbala and other places all over Iraq. I have seen them myself. These sentences do not mean that they believe in Islam. The Ba`ath Party considers Islam to be against it. The sentences do not mean that they are familiar with Islam. They want to kill Islam with its own sword. Some of these people here who beat their breasts for Islam, want to destroy Islam with the sword of Islam. Otherwise, supposing the issue was something else, like their being opposed to the clergy, for example, or the clergymen being bad, who would have said anything? But this is not the point. The fact is that they are trifling with the Qur'an in that they pick out something from it and say that they have nothing to do with the rest of it. Now I remember. During my young days, I wanted to visit the shrine of Shah `Abdu'l-`Azim. One, a preacher, very influential and capable in his craft but not much bound to Islam, on seeing that I was a cleric, asked me to come and sit by his side. We wanted to go by bus to the shrine of Shah `Abdu'l-`Azim. He spoke and said many things, and I, too, listened to him. As we neared the shrine, he told the driver to make haste; lest the time of the earlynight prayers pass, although it was still early in the night. I told him that it was still too early for the prayer time to lapse. He replied that there was a narration as to what would happen if the early night prayers was delayed. I said that there are other narrations as well.

He then told me:" I have nothing to do with them". This is the point. He said that he accepted a certain saying of the Nahj al-Balaghah but not the others. Likewise; from the Holy Qur'an too, he accepts one thing and not another thing. He takes one sentence from the Book, not knowing that the sentence has its commentator and also the interpretation in the Qur'an itself. The things that have taken place in this age have been mentioned in the narrations. They talk like this to undermine Islam and the clergy. These are the things which these deviated persons say and claim that they want to speak about Islam other than the traditional one. One of the misfortunes is that a person who does not know whether Islam is written with a" p" or" x" (the Arabic alphabetical equivalents of "s"), and is unaware of Islam and Islamic documents, picks up a word, and addressing the youths, begins to shout and clamor in persuading them to do things that are looked upon with disfavor. A jurisprudent who has spent sixty years of his life on jurisprudential matters and documents, on coming across a case and seeing that a decision cannot be reached with certainty, just circumvents it, and that too with much prudence. But people like this person, who has not given a single jurisprudential opinion and cannot do so, think that now that the revolution has for instance, taken place, Islam must also undergo a revolution, and that it should also become like this. These people either do not understand, or many of them who do so want its very foundation to be destroyed and Islamic precepts abolished one by one. Brothers pay attention! I know that you the people of Qum- may God protect you- and all the merchants of Tehran, Yazd and everywhere in Iran are fond of Islam. The people have taken a lot of trouble (for Islam). They have made sacrifices and lost their youths for the sake of Isalm. They have given everything of theirs for it and are still doing so. They send their youths to the borders. They know that the youths face danger there and stand to get killed. But yet they congratulate one another when they are killed. Nobody can mislead such a nation, that is making these sacrifices for Islam, for a long time to come, let alone doing so and making it turn its back on Islam now that not even two years have elapsed. But the devils are plotting for a hundred years hence. They have a lot of patience. They are plotting from now itself. Well, for their plans to be carried out even after fifty or a hundred years, they have begun plotting already. They want to begin now by having the mosques emptied (of the prayer leaders) one by one. They empty a mosque and place somebody there who has no knowledge of Islam, and does not know how many units there are in each (type of) prayer, to lead the prayers. Then, as the mosques get denuded one by one, they turn their attention to another mosque. We, who are living in this age, and the other generations in their own time, ought to be careful as the devils are lurking by. They are out to destroy Islam. They have not experienced anything like the experience of Islam. The Christian clergy are not like the Muslim clergymen. They are active only inside the church. In spite of this, they (the authorities) still undermined the priests who were there in those days. They cracked down upon the small number of them that were there. The priests were told to stay in the church and worship, and to leave politics to the emperor. This was the same thing that was mentioned the day before yesterday in Qum. The British used to say the same thing in the past and now the Americans are saying it and the others as well.

We and the future generations must be careful about protecting Islam, and assembling under its banner. Islam has everything. It offers this world and the hereafter as well, Islam considers every aspect (of life). An Islamic government is not like the other ones that look at one aspect only. An Islamic government is one which guarantees, and will guarantee, prosperity in this world and the next if it is implemented, God willing, and if this nation succeeds in practicing Islam as it really is and in accordance with the Holy Qur'an as revealed to the Noble Messenger, and the traditions of the Imams and Islam.

Nobody, of course, should expect everything to be set right the next day itself after a revolution has taken place; it is being unreasonable. Though the Russian revolution has entered its sixty-fourth year, yet they have not been able to run the country properly. As regards the other revolutions, matters have not been normalized even though ten or twenty years have passed. This revolution was not of the type that a party or a group brings about. It was a revolution for Islam, originating from the nation's bosom. When a revolution is staged for the sake of Islam and springs from the depths of the nation, it has fewer of the consequences of the revolutions in other places. But it is not possible to have no effects at all. In the Islamic revolution, a large number of people were deprived of the opportunity to steal and embezzle which used to be their practice. That is why they are against the revolution. The foreigners, likewise, persist in their opposition to it, because they have lost the opportunity to plunder (the country). They, also, have their agents and their lackeys here. If all of these lackeys gather together, they will form a sizeable group. They, however, are nothing in comparison with this roaring flood of people. A revolution so fruitful and with such few casualties as of Iran's has not been, hitherto, seen. The revolutions that have occurred have had as much as a million people machine-gunned and killed. Newspapers would not be allowed to be published, parties would be dissolved, and their leaders jailed. A news item was brought to me a few days ago. Now I do not remember the details except that one million were killed and a million and a half imprisoned. All the newspapers were stopped from being published, except one or two government newspapers. The borders, too, were closed at the very beginning of the revolution, and those who did all this got busy with their crimes.

If you take a look at all the revolutions that have taken place in the world, you will notice that no revolution has been like Iran's. Relying on the fact that the people were Muslims and that the people themselves staged the revolution, the country's borders remained open for the people, and the newspapers came out for some months. Everyone wrote what he wished. Even some of the people who have deviated (from the path) are writing now. Within these two years of this country's revolution, all the essential institutions of the government, such as the parliament and the office of the five million cast their votes, as was the case in voting for the Islamic Republic, is unprecedented. This shows that there was a consensus of opinion. The others (who did not vote) were sick, etc. or had some other reasons. This was the situation. Where has such a thing happened? Maintain this kind of unity. Safeguard it. I do not know why these (other) people grumble. They have not considered the queues in the Soviet Union. Somebody who had came here told me that his son who is in the Soviet Union had written to him saying that such queues are also to be seen there; in the Soviet Union where sixty-odd years have elapsed since the revolution. He thinks that a revolution entails these things.

You desire to have Islam. You wish to revive it. It needs sacrifices, of course. It is not possible for Islam to be revived without making sacrifices. It was these same sacrifices that the Prophet and the saints of Islam made in its early days. Now it is your turn and ours as well.

May God support all of you. May you be successful and prosperous. Let me stress upon this again that there will be demonstrations tomorrow and the day after. But at the same time, mourning observances (for Imam Husayn) must also be held. However, mourning is observed in a particular place at

times and on the roads at other times, with all the people joining in. May all of you be successful and triumphant, God willing.