MI Paper: Major Writings by Kalim Siddiqui
The State of the Muslim World Today
By Kalim Siddiqui
One of the advantages of being a student and an academic is that we can take a somewhat longer and harder look at the realities as we find them. We academics and students neither have an immediate vested interest to protect, nor so we have to be continuously glancing over our shoulders. And, therefore, the university, the Islamic society and being students is a state of free existence. One of the grim realities in the Fourteenth Centenary Year of the hijrah is that we, if we were physically placed anywhere in the Muslim world, could not discuss our problems openly and frankly without being reported by somebody to someone who would then put us in prison or worse.
Your chairman has referred to the fact that I once worked for The Guardian, formerly The Manchester Guardian. C.P. SCOTT founded this newspaper in this city but is now edited by a bunch of people who cannot even use decent language. They get away with such abuse because you and I are not active enough. The Muslim students of this university should have occupied the offices of The Guardian and stayed there until they got an apology. I wish this had happened here in Manchester and in London because too many people who seem to think that they can do just what they like are taking too many liberties against us. However, since The Guardian has been mentioned, let me just say that a few days ago this newspaper published a special supplement marking the ‘1400 years of Islam'. Expressing its ill-informed editorial opinion the newspaper said that Islam was now experiencing the same kind of ‘revivalism' that was experienced by Christianity at about the same stage in the Christian era. The implication being that when Islam ‘grows up' in the same way as Christianity has ‘grow up', when Islam too, is two thousand years old, Islam will also be as docile as Christianity.
This gives us an insight into the minds of these people, how they look at us and at Islam. It also reflects their view of the history of man, the development of man, their view of his past, their view of his present, and their view of his future. Backing up this editorial opinion were articles written by, or on behalf of, the Shaikh of Abu Dhabi, Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, and the banks and insurance companies of the Ummah, mixed with some intellectuals of the Muslim world. These intellectuals are always declaring that Islam is a compete system, without telling us what this systems is, and without pointing out exactly how we get rid of the people who are the very blot on our history today. These intellectuals find their way into the media posing as champions of Islam. These are the very people who are the greatest obstacle to the establishment of Islam in its complete and total forms as an operational civilization, solving the problems of mankind, and leading mankind in the way of God.
However, the conditions in which the year 1400 of the Hijri has arrived are, by and large, not of our making. In the last 200 years Muslims have not been in the driving seat of history. We have not made history, we have been victims of history. I need hardly remind you that not long ago we were the chief architects of history. We were the people who brought mankind out of the dark ages. We were the first people who civilized the world. Having lost control over the direction of human history, we were taken over by the alien, hostile, brash, uncouth civilization of the west. So much so that all the social, political, and economic systems we have today have been created during the years of our decline; the years of the dominance of the western powers over the Muslim countries. What is it that the west has done? The west has achieved the fragmentation of mankind into small pieces of land known as nation-States. Not very long ago, at the Treaty of Versailles (1919), or even at San Francisco after the Second World War (1945), only a handful of States was represented. It was a world of empires, a world of colonial domination. The world of empires meant that vast territories of the world were controlled by a very small number of States, mainly European, including Russia, which later became the Soviet Union.
This western system turned the course of history not only away from the direction it was taking before; it turned it right round in the opposite direction, in the direction of total jahiliyyah, such as had existed before Islam. The reason for it is simple. The European religious experience was a Judeo-Christian experience. Here, the Reformation and the Renaissance influence political behavior. The Reformation and the Renaissance were really two stages in European history, which were directly and distinctly concerned with the religious experience of Europe. They were directly concerned with containing and destroying the influence of religion. The European peoples were allowed to retain Christianity or whatever religion they wanted in their personal life. The Guardian says that Islam is the most politicized religion. We have to understand that so long as the Muslim people have the will to establish Islam in its political incarnation, everybody outside Islam is our enemy. This is what the Guardian means by saying that when we reach our 2000 years we too will have gone through the Reformation and the Renaissance and we too will be reduced to having a Pope, the cardinals and all those irrelevant churches. In order to turn Muslim history in this direction, the colonial powers created among us a group of people who are western-oriented and western-educated. This is the ruling elite to which the west handed power at the end of the colonial period. This elite is charged with the task of carrying out the good work of secularizing Muslim society. Before leaving, the west also made sure that our societies, particularly our economies, were totally integrated with their economies. In this way they have ensured that their industrial revolution and their high standards of living could be sustained and supported by the raw material, the cheap labor, and the surplus value transferred from us to them. They established a conspiracy of the rich in the poor countries with the rich in the rich countries and then said they were going. They had done their work. They had put the Muslim societies on the same course of history that had been followed by the erstwhile Christian societies. They left us to experience our own Reformation and Renaissance, to ‘reform' Islam, to ‘modernize' Islam, to bring it ‘up to date'. And our political leaders have tried to do just that. Political leaders and regimes have patronized and produced their own ulama, giving fatwas in their favor. They have their own front organizations trying to project the most reactionary regimes as friends of Islam. They are trying to legitimize their power in terms of Islam. These post-colonial regimes realize that their authority must be legitimate in terms of Islam before it has any chance of survival in Muslim societies. Thus in most Muslim countries, a great fraud is being perpetuated on the people in the name of Islam.
In addition to the political and economical integration that I have referred to, the western colonial powers also introduced the intellectual invasion of our societies through the educational systems that they set up. The universities that they set up in our counties are poor replicas of western universities. These universities have introduced into our societies what they all value-free science. This whole notion of value-free science is a deception, which is played upon us. Many of us are victims of this notion of value-free science. Having done this, they expected us to behave in the way the masters had taught us, as the good example set by the western model of development of political, economic, intellectual, scientific, and every other type of behavior. And most governments are succeeding in doing just that.
But the Islamic revolution in Iran has upset all the calculations of the west and of the nationalist governments about the direction in which history was proceeding. The Islamic Revolution has stood everything up on its head. Their assumptions made about Muslim political behavior have been disproved. They were also wrong in their assumptions about our economic and military behavior. For once we have an Islamic movement totally and completely in control of the destiny of one small part of the Ummah known as Iran. While the Ummah as a whole was going through this nightmare of historical experience during the last hundred years, a number of Islamic movements have been working to fight against the evils that I have described earlier. These movements and the men who sacrificed their lives, wealth, money, indeed everything for these movements, are some of the most dedicated men that ever lived. Allah, the Compassionate and Merciful, will no doubt reward them for all that they have done to keep the candle of Islam burning through the dark ages of Islam.
Nevertheless, we must admit that these Islamic movements, by and large, did not achieve the major objectives that they set out to achieve. Their achievements have been very considerable and we must not belittle them. There is a great deal that we must learn from them. But there are also great many lessons we must learn from their experience. And one of the lessons to which I want to refer in particular is that no Islamic revolution is possible in any country anywhere in the world following the democratic method. In fact, in my submission to you, there is no such thing as a democratic method of Change. Democracy is an instrument of the status quo. Democracy does not tolerate change beyond a narrow band of variation within an existing system.
Democracy has a history of development in post-industrial Europe. During this period the tensions created by the industrial revolution in European societies had to be adjusted and mitigated. The landed aristocracy had to be defended and allowed time to transform it into an industrial aristocracy. The feudal political system was defended against any major social change. Democracy was invented to serve this purpose. Our political masters in Muslim countries to protect the feudal system there have used the same democratic process. Because there is a requirement to follow the method of shura in Islam, Muslim thinkers have fallen into the trap of thinking that this western democracy, this European democracy, was somehow the model of shura, a method of consultation that Allah enjoined upon us. They completely failed to understand the social, economic, and political conditions that gave rise to this particular political system which we now know by the name of democracy. The true nature of democracy completely deceived the Muslim thinkers who recommended that we, or the Islamic movement itself should follow a democratic process. The moment you accept the democratic process you accept the legitimacy of the existing system as one which can be worked according to some of the rules of that very system: you lose your independence and become a prisoner of the existing system. Once that happens, all the doors are closed against the Islamic movement. This we have seen happening in the Sudan and in Pakistan. In Iran, on the other hand, the Islamic movement has achieved an enormous success, a success that could not have been even dreamt of only a few short months ago. The success achieved by the Islamic movement in Iran was due to a very simple expedient -the total and relentless opposition of the system prevailing in Iran. No compromise was made. The finger of accusation was pointed by the Islamic movement at the Shah and his system and this finger remained pointed regardless of what forces were thrown against it. The whole system was challenged and all its corruption was exposed. The masses of Iran erupted, revolution like one man, because despite all the so-called modernization of Iran, the people of Iran are Muslims, their political culture is Islamic, their values are Islamic. By teaching somebody English you do not change his political culture. By putting him in trousers you do not change his political culture. This has been proved in Iran. It has also been proved that no matter how westernized the student body of Iran - of Tehran, of the universities of Iran, once the leadership offered the alternative and the credibility that is essential for a leadership, the people of Iran, the modern sector, the westernized sector, left the existing regime. And they joined the Islamic movement of Iran. This is one of the greatest events in the whole history of Islam. People who have been divided into these two groups, the traditional sector and the modern sector, came together. Their coming together was never predicted by the political science of the west. This is what has caused the greatest bewilderment among the western political scientists: they cannot understand how these people, who has been ‘civilized' by their education, could follow this ‘bearded mullah'. The fact of the matter is that these are not two people. Simply because they wear different clothes, simply because they have been put through toe different traditions of education, of knowledge, they have not become two different people. The coming together of the traditional sector and the modern sector produced an unbeatable combination in terms of political, social and economic force in any society. My hope is that the model that Iran today represents is a model, which will be repeated all over the Muslim world within the next few years.
The regimes that surround Iran will be falling like ninepins in a very short time, insha'Allah. But pushing a regime over is only half the story. The other half of the story is of picking up the pieces and rebuilding. In the last two hundred years we have lived through a hurricane of history blowing through our countries. Everything good has been destroyed except the will and the spirit of our people. We now have an enormously important job to do in rebuilding our societies as they go through the revolutionary process one after another. This is where I want to draw your attention to the present situation in Iran. It is imperative for the revolutionary government and leadership in Iran that they should challenge and defeat all the remnants of the old system within Iran and their agents outside Iran. Let no one feel weak-kneed about it being un-Islamic to hold hostages and so on. Please remember that this Revolution is an Islamic Revolution. Once you accept that, your support for this revolution cannot be conditional. You have to leave it to the leadership of that Revolution to decide what action is necessary to protect and pro a gap in our knowledge. Has the Muslim civilization remained in its dominant role in history, we would have produced a body of knowledge in the fields of the social sciences, in economics, in political science and so on. After all, Ibn Khaldun and others have done very useful pioneering work. The west has created a body of knowledge, known as economics, in order to justify, rationalize and make profound the economic behavior of the west. The capitalist system did not follow a theory. Any yet the west has produced a discipline known as economics. Many of us take degrees in economics. Similarly, in political science, they have produced an intellectual tradition virtually overnight. Did you know that a hundred years ago there was no such thing as political science? And there was no such thing as a department of political science in any university in Europe or America? There was not a single professor of political science! And yet within the last fifty or sixty years these have developed and spread everywhere because the western experience had produced a political model which had to be justified by an intellectual tradition. Therefore, the political system produced the intellectuals, the institutions, and gave them the money to produce a theory to justify the system. It is as simple as that. And the same goes for every other branch of knowledge that you can care to think of. And yet the Muslims and our westernized elites have tried to use this subjective ‘knowledge' of the west to try to solve our problems. Not surprisingly, not a single Muslim government has succeeded in solving any social, economic or political problem. Every problem they have tried to solve, they have made more intractable. These problems have also escaped definition and understanding because the model they were trying to apply is a model developed in an alien civilization, in an alien culture, among an alien people. This failure is something for which we have paid a very heavy price. But if they have succeeded anywhere we would not be able to point our finger at them to say that this does not apply. They tried it in Turkey, they tried it in Iran, and they tried it in Pakistan. They are trying it in Saudi Arabia, they are trying it in Egypt, and they are trying it everywhere. But the thing just does not work because it does not belong to us, our people do not know it, it represents an alien value system; it is just not us.
In the years that lie immediately ahead of us we have to make sure that the one Islamic movement that has succeeded, does in fact succeed not only in the short-term but also in the long-term. We also have to reorient our individual life as well as the social, political entities from which we come, in order to achieve the new goals that must be set for our societies in the next hundred years. It is not necessary to set a goal and achieve it. You set a goal, go part of the way towards it, then other people will go ahead and achieve it. This is how the race of history is run. Each generation must pass on its work to the following generation, but please do not accept the work of the generation just gone or going. You have to create a new situation and from then on make a sharp turn. I know that watersheds and sharp turns in history are largely imaginary; they exist in the imagination of the historians and in history books. History goes more or all straight on. Nonetheless, we have to make that effort which is essential in the next hundred years to make sure that when the next turn of the Hirja century comes we, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are placed in a much better position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And this is the challenge that faces us and the generations to come. I think the condition in which we have found ourselves in the year 1400 has been made bearable only by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Otherwise there was darkness everywhere.
_________________________________
----------------------------------------
1. Kalim Siddiqui, The state of the Muslim world today, London: the Open Press, 1980. This is the text of a lecture given at the University of Manchester Islamic Society on December 8, 1979
2 This refers to the Guardian editorial of November 26, 1979, which used abusive and obscene language for Ayatollah Khomeini
Your chairman has referred to the fact that I once worked for The Guardian, formerly The Manchester Guardian. C.P. SCOTT founded this newspaper in this city but is now edited by a bunch of people who cannot even use decent language. They get away with such abuse because you and I are not active enough. The Muslim students of this university should have occupied the offices of The Guardian and stayed there until they got an apology. I wish this had happened here in Manchester and in London because too many people who seem to think that they can do just what they like are taking too many liberties against us. However, since The Guardian has been mentioned, let me just say that a few days ago this newspaper published a special supplement marking the ‘1400 years of Islam'. Expressing its ill-informed editorial opinion the newspaper said that Islam was now experiencing the same kind of ‘revivalism' that was experienced by Christianity at about the same stage in the Christian era. The implication being that when Islam ‘grows up' in the same way as Christianity has ‘grow up', when Islam too, is two thousand years old, Islam will also be as docile as Christianity.
This gives us an insight into the minds of these people, how they look at us and at Islam. It also reflects their view of the history of man, the development of man, their view of his past, their view of his present, and their view of his future. Backing up this editorial opinion were articles written by, or on behalf of, the Shaikh of Abu Dhabi, Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, and the banks and insurance companies of the Ummah, mixed with some intellectuals of the Muslim world. These intellectuals are always declaring that Islam is a compete system, without telling us what this systems is, and without pointing out exactly how we get rid of the people who are the very blot on our history today. These intellectuals find their way into the media posing as champions of Islam. These are the very people who are the greatest obstacle to the establishment of Islam in its complete and total forms as an operational civilization, solving the problems of mankind, and leading mankind in the way of God.
However, the conditions in which the year 1400 of the Hijri has arrived are, by and large, not of our making. In the last 200 years Muslims have not been in the driving seat of history. We have not made history, we have been victims of history. I need hardly remind you that not long ago we were the chief architects of history. We were the people who brought mankind out of the dark ages. We were the first people who civilized the world. Having lost control over the direction of human history, we were taken over by the alien, hostile, brash, uncouth civilization of the west. So much so that all the social, political, and economic systems we have today have been created during the years of our decline; the years of the dominance of the western powers over the Muslim countries. What is it that the west has done? The west has achieved the fragmentation of mankind into small pieces of land known as nation-States. Not very long ago, at the Treaty of Versailles (1919), or even at San Francisco after the Second World War (1945), only a handful of States was represented. It was a world of empires, a world of colonial domination. The world of empires meant that vast territories of the world were controlled by a very small number of States, mainly European, including Russia, which later became the Soviet Union.
This western system turned the course of history not only away from the direction it was taking before; it turned it right round in the opposite direction, in the direction of total jahiliyyah, such as had existed before Islam. The reason for it is simple. The European religious experience was a Judeo-Christian experience. Here, the Reformation and the Renaissance influence political behavior. The Reformation and the Renaissance were really two stages in European history, which were directly and distinctly concerned with the religious experience of Europe. They were directly concerned with containing and destroying the influence of religion. The European peoples were allowed to retain Christianity or whatever religion they wanted in their personal life. The Guardian says that Islam is the most politicized religion. We have to understand that so long as the Muslim people have the will to establish Islam in its political incarnation, everybody outside Islam is our enemy. This is what the Guardian means by saying that when we reach our 2000 years we too will have gone through the Reformation and the Renaissance and we too will be reduced to having a Pope, the cardinals and all those irrelevant churches. In order to turn Muslim history in this direction, the colonial powers created among us a group of people who are western-oriented and western-educated. This is the ruling elite to which the west handed power at the end of the colonial period. This elite is charged with the task of carrying out the good work of secularizing Muslim society. Before leaving, the west also made sure that our societies, particularly our economies, were totally integrated with their economies. In this way they have ensured that their industrial revolution and their high standards of living could be sustained and supported by the raw material, the cheap labor, and the surplus value transferred from us to them. They established a conspiracy of the rich in the poor countries with the rich in the rich countries and then said they were going. They had done their work. They had put the Muslim societies on the same course of history that had been followed by the erstwhile Christian societies. They left us to experience our own Reformation and Renaissance, to ‘reform' Islam, to ‘modernize' Islam, to bring it ‘up to date'. And our political leaders have tried to do just that. Political leaders and regimes have patronized and produced their own ulama, giving fatwas in their favor. They have their own front organizations trying to project the most reactionary regimes as friends of Islam. They are trying to legitimize their power in terms of Islam. These post-colonial regimes realize that their authority must be legitimate in terms of Islam before it has any chance of survival in Muslim societies. Thus in most Muslim countries, a great fraud is being perpetuated on the people in the name of Islam.
In addition to the political and economical integration that I have referred to, the western colonial powers also introduced the intellectual invasion of our societies through the educational systems that they set up. The universities that they set up in our counties are poor replicas of western universities. These universities have introduced into our societies what they all value-free science. This whole notion of value-free science is a deception, which is played upon us. Many of us are victims of this notion of value-free science. Having done this, they expected us to behave in the way the masters had taught us, as the good example set by the western model of development of political, economic, intellectual, scientific, and every other type of behavior. And most governments are succeeding in doing just that.
But the Islamic revolution in Iran has upset all the calculations of the west and of the nationalist governments about the direction in which history was proceeding. The Islamic Revolution has stood everything up on its head. Their assumptions made about Muslim political behavior have been disproved. They were also wrong in their assumptions about our economic and military behavior. For once we have an Islamic movement totally and completely in control of the destiny of one small part of the Ummah known as Iran. While the Ummah as a whole was going through this nightmare of historical experience during the last hundred years, a number of Islamic movements have been working to fight against the evils that I have described earlier. These movements and the men who sacrificed their lives, wealth, money, indeed everything for these movements, are some of the most dedicated men that ever lived. Allah, the Compassionate and Merciful, will no doubt reward them for all that they have done to keep the candle of Islam burning through the dark ages of Islam.
Nevertheless, we must admit that these Islamic movements, by and large, did not achieve the major objectives that they set out to achieve. Their achievements have been very considerable and we must not belittle them. There is a great deal that we must learn from them. But there are also great many lessons we must learn from their experience. And one of the lessons to which I want to refer in particular is that no Islamic revolution is possible in any country anywhere in the world following the democratic method. In fact, in my submission to you, there is no such thing as a democratic method of Change. Democracy is an instrument of the status quo. Democracy does not tolerate change beyond a narrow band of variation within an existing system.
Democracy has a history of development in post-industrial Europe. During this period the tensions created by the industrial revolution in European societies had to be adjusted and mitigated. The landed aristocracy had to be defended and allowed time to transform it into an industrial aristocracy. The feudal political system was defended against any major social change. Democracy was invented to serve this purpose. Our political masters in Muslim countries to protect the feudal system there have used the same democratic process. Because there is a requirement to follow the method of shura in Islam, Muslim thinkers have fallen into the trap of thinking that this western democracy, this European democracy, was somehow the model of shura, a method of consultation that Allah enjoined upon us. They completely failed to understand the social, economic, and political conditions that gave rise to this particular political system which we now know by the name of democracy. The true nature of democracy completely deceived the Muslim thinkers who recommended that we, or the Islamic movement itself should follow a democratic process. The moment you accept the democratic process you accept the legitimacy of the existing system as one which can be worked according to some of the rules of that very system: you lose your independence and become a prisoner of the existing system. Once that happens, all the doors are closed against the Islamic movement. This we have seen happening in the Sudan and in Pakistan. In Iran, on the other hand, the Islamic movement has achieved an enormous success, a success that could not have been even dreamt of only a few short months ago. The success achieved by the Islamic movement in Iran was due to a very simple expedient -the total and relentless opposition of the system prevailing in Iran. No compromise was made. The finger of accusation was pointed by the Islamic movement at the Shah and his system and this finger remained pointed regardless of what forces were thrown against it. The whole system was challenged and all its corruption was exposed. The masses of Iran erupted, revolution like one man, because despite all the so-called modernization of Iran, the people of Iran are Muslims, their political culture is Islamic, their values are Islamic. By teaching somebody English you do not change his political culture. By putting him in trousers you do not change his political culture. This has been proved in Iran. It has also been proved that no matter how westernized the student body of Iran - of Tehran, of the universities of Iran, once the leadership offered the alternative and the credibility that is essential for a leadership, the people of Iran, the modern sector, the westernized sector, left the existing regime. And they joined the Islamic movement of Iran. This is one of the greatest events in the whole history of Islam. People who have been divided into these two groups, the traditional sector and the modern sector, came together. Their coming together was never predicted by the political science of the west. This is what has caused the greatest bewilderment among the western political scientists: they cannot understand how these people, who has been ‘civilized' by their education, could follow this ‘bearded mullah'. The fact of the matter is that these are not two people. Simply because they wear different clothes, simply because they have been put through toe different traditions of education, of knowledge, they have not become two different people. The coming together of the traditional sector and the modern sector produced an unbeatable combination in terms of political, social and economic force in any society. My hope is that the model that Iran today represents is a model, which will be repeated all over the Muslim world within the next few years.
The regimes that surround Iran will be falling like ninepins in a very short time, insha'Allah. But pushing a regime over is only half the story. The other half of the story is of picking up the pieces and rebuilding. In the last two hundred years we have lived through a hurricane of history blowing through our countries. Everything good has been destroyed except the will and the spirit of our people. We now have an enormously important job to do in rebuilding our societies as they go through the revolutionary process one after another. This is where I want to draw your attention to the present situation in Iran. It is imperative for the revolutionary government and leadership in Iran that they should challenge and defeat all the remnants of the old system within Iran and their agents outside Iran. Let no one feel weak-kneed about it being un-Islamic to hold hostages and so on. Please remember that this Revolution is an Islamic Revolution. Once you accept that, your support for this revolution cannot be conditional. You have to leave it to the leadership of that Revolution to decide what action is necessary to protect and pro a gap in our knowledge. Has the Muslim civilization remained in its dominant role in history, we would have produced a body of knowledge in the fields of the social sciences, in economics, in political science and so on. After all, Ibn Khaldun and others have done very useful pioneering work. The west has created a body of knowledge, known as economics, in order to justify, rationalize and make profound the economic behavior of the west. The capitalist system did not follow a theory. Any yet the west has produced a discipline known as economics. Many of us take degrees in economics. Similarly, in political science, they have produced an intellectual tradition virtually overnight. Did you know that a hundred years ago there was no such thing as political science? And there was no such thing as a department of political science in any university in Europe or America? There was not a single professor of political science! And yet within the last fifty or sixty years these have developed and spread everywhere because the western experience had produced a political model which had to be justified by an intellectual tradition. Therefore, the political system produced the intellectuals, the institutions, and gave them the money to produce a theory to justify the system. It is as simple as that. And the same goes for every other branch of knowledge that you can care to think of. And yet the Muslims and our westernized elites have tried to use this subjective ‘knowledge' of the west to try to solve our problems. Not surprisingly, not a single Muslim government has succeeded in solving any social, economic or political problem. Every problem they have tried to solve, they have made more intractable. These problems have also escaped definition and understanding because the model they were trying to apply is a model developed in an alien civilization, in an alien culture, among an alien people. This failure is something for which we have paid a very heavy price. But if they have succeeded anywhere we would not be able to point our finger at them to say that this does not apply. They tried it in Turkey, they tried it in Iran, and they tried it in Pakistan. They are trying it in Saudi Arabia, they are trying it in Egypt, and they are trying it everywhere. But the thing just does not work because it does not belong to us, our people do not know it, it represents an alien value system; it is just not us.
In the years that lie immediately ahead of us we have to make sure that the one Islamic movement that has succeeded, does in fact succeed not only in the short-term but also in the long-term. We also have to reorient our individual life as well as the social, political entities from which we come, in order to achieve the new goals that must be set for our societies in the next hundred years. It is not necessary to set a goal and achieve it. You set a goal, go part of the way towards it, then other people will go ahead and achieve it. This is how the race of history is run. Each generation must pass on its work to the following generation, but please do not accept the work of the generation just gone or going. You have to create a new situation and from then on make a sharp turn. I know that watersheds and sharp turns in history are largely imaginary; they exist in the imagination of the historians and in history books. History goes more or all straight on. Nonetheless, we have to make that effort which is essential in the next hundred years to make sure that when the next turn of the Hirja century comes we, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are placed in a much better position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And this is the challenge that faces us and the generations to come. I think the condition in which we have found ourselves in the year 1400 has been made bearable only by the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Otherwise there was darkness everywhere.
_________________________________
----------------------------------------
1. Kalim Siddiqui, The state of the Muslim world today, London: the Open Press, 1980. This is the text of a lecture given at the University of Manchester Islamic Society on December 8, 1979
2 This refers to the Guardian editorial of November 26, 1979, which used abusive and obscene language for Ayatollah Khomeini