 Chapter
7
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Victory News Magazine |
The Twelve
Imams ('a)
This question is asked by many people and they do not want a reply based on occult explanations, considering that we believe that the Twelve Imams ('a) form a unique chain of which not a single link can be altered. But those who raise this question demand a social interpretation of this stance based upon tangible realities of the process of change as such and understandable needs of the promised day.
On this basis we will temporarily shift our attention from the, characteristics which we believe these infallible Imams to possess and raise the following question: Taking into account the process of awaited change on the promised day, to the extent it is understandable in the light of human life and experience, is it possible to consider the longevity of the leader reserved for that day as one of the factors greatly conducive to its success and its leadership?
Our reply to this question is in the affirmative for a number of reasons among which are the following:
The process of a great change requires that
the leader who brings it about should possess a unique spirit
which is full of consciousness and pre-eminence and awareness of
the insignificance of the dominant arrogant systems for whose
annihilation he has been prepared and to replace them with a new
civilization and a new world order. And the more the revolutionary
leader is conscious of the pettiness of the civilization which he
combats and the more dearly he perceives that it is only a point
on the long line of human civilization, the higher will be his
morale in confronting it and continuing his campaign against it
until victory.
It
is obvious that the required measure of this awareness would be
proportional to the extent of the change itself and the extent and
hold of the civilization and regime to be annihilated. Therefore,
confrontation with a mightier system and a more deeply-rooted
civilization requires an awareness possessing greater force and
vigour.
Considering that the mission of the promised
day is to bring about a comprehensive change in a world filled
with injustice and oppression by transforming all its cultural
values and diverse systems, it is natural that such a mission
should require someone whose awareness is greater than that of the
world in its entirety, someone who is not an offspring of that
world grown up in the shadow of the civilization which he seeks to
demolish and transform into a civilization based upon justice and
truth. That is because someone who grows up in the shadow of a
deep-rooted civilization and spend his life under the spell of its
authority, values and ideas, dwells under a feeling of awe for it
because it was already there when he was only an infant, a mighty
adult when he still grew up as a child, and when he had opened his
eyes on the world he did not see anything except its myriad faces.
As against this there is someone who has
delved deeply in history and lived in the world before this age of
enlightenment, and has seen great civilizations ruling over the
world one after another and then decline and fall with his own
eyes and not through books of history, seeing also the present
civilization which constitutes the latest chapter in human history
prior to the promised day. He saw it while it was still a small
seed hardly visible. He then saw these seeds establish themselves
in the body of society waiting for an opportunity to sprout and
grow. He has witnessed its growth and march, its ups and downs,
and observed it blossom and grow into a giant and gradually
control the destiny of the entire world.
Surely such a person who has lived through all these stages with complete awareness and insight will mark this giant, which he intends to confront, through the long history he has personally observed, not as something read in books of history. He will neither view it as inevitable fate, nor as Jean Jacques Rousseau viewed France without a monarch, for it is said that he was terrified by the mere idea of France without a king, despite his being, intellectually and philosophically, one of the leading advocates of political change during that era. That was so because he had grown up in the shadow of monarchy and had breathed in its atmosphere throughout his life. But someone who has accompanied history itself carries within him the awe and force of history and profound awareness of the fact that the order and civilization that surrounds him is the offspring of a day from among the days of history that came into being due to certain conducive factors and which will perish when other factors appear, and in near or distant future nothing will remain of it in the same manner as nothing of it lasted in the past; that life-spans of civilizations and regimes, however long they may be, are not more than numbered days in the long course of history.
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