 Chapter
8
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Surat al-Kahf
You may have read the Surat al-Kahf. It mentions the story of the youths who professed faith in their Lord: God had increased them in guidance at a time when they were confronted with a dominant idolatrous regime which, without pity and hesitation, ripped the buds of tawhid and stifled any effort to rise above polytheism. They were under great stress; despair had overwhelmed them and they had lost hope. Unable to find any solution, it appeared to them that falsehood would continue to rule and oppress for ever and to prevail over the truth, forcing into submission everyone whose heart leaned towards truth.
Sleepers of The Cave
They sought refuge in a cave seeking from God relief from their predicament. Do you know what God did? He caused them to fall asleep for 309 years in the cave. Then he raised them from sleep and sent them forth on the stage of life after the regime that had overwhelmed them with its power and oppression had disintegrated and collapsed to become an inert and harmless part of history.
All this was done so that those youths might
witness the fall of untruth whose prevalence, power, and
persistence seemed overwhelming to them, land that they might see
its end with their own eyes and witness the triviality and
insignificance of falsehood. If this clear vision, with all its
spiritual force and sublimity, was realized by the Sleepers of
the Cave through this unique incident which extended their
life-span by 300 years, a similar thing applies to the Awaited
Leader in the course of his long life-span, which enabled him to
witness the giant of a civilization when it was still a dwarf, the
ancient tree when it was still a seed, and the epochs when they
were taking their first breaths of life.
In addition, this experience of accompanying
successive civilizations and direct contact with their movement
and development, have a great role in intellectually preparing and
deepening the leadership skills for the promised day, as they
expose the reserved individual to the various efforts made by
others along with their points of weakness and strength and all
kinds of error and correct judgment, giving him the utmost ability
to evaluate social phenomena with a complete awareness of their
causes and historical conditions.
Further, the change that the Awaited Leader is destined to bring about is based upon a specific message, the message of Islam. It is but natural that it should require a leader who in nearer to the sources of pristine Islam, with a personality built in an entirely independent manner separately from the cultural influences he is destined to combat on the promised day. This is opposed to the case of a person who is born and brought up in that culture and whose thoughts and sensibilities take shape within its environs, because such a person is usually not free from the influences and tendencies of this culture even if he is leading a change against it. Therefore, for ensuring that the reserved leader is not influenced by the civilization for whose change he has been prepared, it is necessary that his personality be entirely built in an earlier civilisation stage closest in its general spirit and origin to the civilization which he seeks to realize on the promised day under his leadership.
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