“And [remember, O Muhammad], when those who disbelieved plotted against you to restrain you or kill you or evict you [from Makkah]. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.” Quran 8:30
For much of what historians have referred to as the modern era - that period of time when man reinvented himself away from God to better serve humanity … or so it has been asserted, the Western thought has been built, weaved, and architected around false binaries, anchored in the belief that answers are to be found in secularism, the separation of powers, and towering above all: personal wealth.
One could argue of course that this very western ‘pursuit of happiness’ merely reflects communities’ innate desire to better themselves through financial security, an expression of our human condition. And why not … from the very dawn of time man has in fact worked to provide. To deny we ambition better for ourselves and our loved ones would be to deny that man is flesh as well as spirit.
Where we falter as people is not so much in our worldly ambitions, but our willingness to deny the divine, so that morality, and ethic would not hamper our rise to power.
Communities have failed not in the conceptualisation of their hungering for financial stability but the socio-political complex in which it could manifest. From unfettered capitalism to Marxism and communism nations have hovered in between two binaries, two ideologies emptied of God … both eventually betrayed the very people it was meant to serve.
I believe that none better than Imam Khomeini back in 1989, in his letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, the then- General Secretary of the Soviet Union, highlighted such dissonance. Much can be said indeed of a world where God and the very concept of the divine are but socio-political anachronisms.
And though the ‘modern thought” would have us believe that God sits an enemy of progress, in that, religion rises barriers in between communities and people by calling on individuals to assume their responsibilities before clamoring for their rights, thus reining in freedoms, it remains nevertheless true that secularism has fed into a devolute form of egocentrism which itself has given birth to moral decay and social enslavement.
Referring to Gorbachev’s move to reinvent the Soviet Union away from the pit it had fallen into Ayatollah Khomeini noted::
“Since your assumption of office, there has been the impression that in analyzing world political events, particularly those pertaining to the Soviet Union, you have found yourself in a new era of reassessment, change and confrontation. Your boldness and initiative in dealing with the realities of the world is quite likely to bring about changes that would result in upsetting the equations of power dominating the world. I have therefore found it necessary to bring certain matters to your attention … If, however, you are considering taking a step forward, the first thing that will ensure your success is that you reevaluate your predecessors' policy of obliterating God and religion from society. This policy has, no doubt, the heaviest blow to the Soviet people. Rest assured that this is the only way whereby world problems can be dealt with realistically.”
Here Imam Khomeini eloquently, and one must admit very shrewdly simplified world politics down to one concept: this war ideologues have fought against God, as to claim to a false sense of freedom.
Freedom we may yet learn is not found in the negation of the Divine, since God cannot by definition be denied, but rather in the acknowledgement that we are but His Creation. True purpose remains in worship, not self-contemplation.
If Imam Khomeini was here referring specifically to communism and its pending fall to the pressure of world capitalism, his remark, and one could say warning to what true ailment lied in the shadows remain acutely relevant to our current predicament.
He wrote: “Reality must be faced. The main problem confronting your country is not one of private ownership, freedom and economy; your problem is the absence of true faith in God, the very problem that has dragged or will drag the West to vulgarism and an impasse. Your main problem is the prolonged and futile war you have waged against God, the source of existence and creation.”
And: “Marxism is a materialistic ideology and materialism cannot bring humanity out of the crisis caused by a lack of belief in spirituality- the prime affliction of the human society in the East and the West alike.”
Communism today is no more … As Imam Khomeini rightly remarked, it has been relegated to the pages of History, another failed chapter of man’s attempt to create away from the Word of God, away from the limits defined and designed to offer righteous guidance.
Marxism fell and capitalism has yet to offer the answers we were promised it would in terms of social empowerment and freedom.
Communism was indeed rebuked as a failed concept, only too few have had enough objectivity to recognise the disease which ate at its ideology.
Our collective pursuit of happiness, that race we have been on from time immemorial has indeed little to do with “private ownership” or even economics schools of thought. It has however everything to do with our willingness to drive God away from the public sphere, under the ludicrous belief that by rejecting Him we would attain success.
To fight against God is not to liberate oneself, but to condemn oneself to absolute errance. And though atheism may be in vogue among modern intellectuals since it plays into Society’s pull towards the vulgar and the macabre, that hamster’s wheel is bound to stop spinning … just as communism’s did.
As Imam Khomeini puts it: “Materialists consider sense to be the sole criterion of knowledge and are of the opinion that whatever cannot be known through the senses falls outside the realm of knowledge. They identify existence with matter and consider as nonexistent anything that has no material form. Inevitably, they regard the world of the unseen- God Almighty, Divine Revelation, Prophethood, and the Resurrection- as mere illusion.”
Our world today is plagued by materialism. Communism, capitalism, atheism, secularism are but the mere expressions of such ideological distortion.
One could venture and conclude that in his letter to Gorbachev, the only letter he ever personally penned for a head-of-state, Imam Khomeini foresaw not just the fall of communism, but the pull materialism would have on nations.
His argument, the only argument to be had really, was that of an Imam of Islam inviting a people to embrace the only Freedom which is theirs - that found in the teachings of the Quran and the Guidance of AhlulBayt.
I will conclude with the words of Imam Khomeini: “It is God we all seek although we may not be aware of it. Man strives to attain Absolute Truth, so that he may be annihilated in God. Basically, the desire for eternal life that is inherent in every individual is proof of the existence of an Eternal World to which destruction cannot find its way.”