IRAN RISES

The Return of the Ummayads

Now that I am writing these words, I am afflicted with great hatred.

The number of martyrs in the demonstration against the coup of “the Vicegerency of the Lie”¹ has reached fifteen and the number of imprisoned reformist leaders and journalists has reached thirty two and the number of arrested protestors has passed five hundred, hundreds of wounded are also laid up in the hospital. I do not have access to precise records of their wounds or how severe their condition is.

His Excellency,² in his Friday Prayers,³ declared, “If the political elitists want to crush the law underfoot, they themselves will be, willy-nilly, responsible for the bloodshed, brutality, and chaos… For if they do not stop, the responsibility for their chaos will be upon them.”

No one had the courage to ask him first of all who is violating the law, when he congratulated the president with 24 million votes the very day [the elections] were concluded and the complaints had not yet been attended to.⁴

Yet the matter of the disappearance of at least ten million disappeared ballots had not been clarified and the Guardian Council itself stands accused of interfering in favor of the current president and they do not bring the complainer’s complaint before the accused, let alone the prevention of marches and meetings, which are against Article Twenty Eight of the Constitution.

His Excellency’s reasoning is as follows: If the complainer is killed by the accused, it is the complainer’s own fault, since he has complained about oppression. 

This reasoning is so well known!

وعندما استشهد عماربن یاسر فقام عمرو بن العاص فزعاً يرجع حتى دخل على معاوية ، فقال له معاوية: ما شأنك؟ قال: قتل عمار ! فقال معاوية: قد قتل عمار فماذا ؟ قال عمرو: سمعت رسول الله يقول: تقتله الفئة الباغية !
فسارع الى القول: نحن لم نقتله إنما قتله عليٌّ لأنه جاء به وألقاه بين سيوفنا
مسند أحمدبن حنبل:4 /199

When Ammar [ibn] Yassir achieved martyrdom at the hands of the Ummayids during the Battle of the Siffin, Amr [ibn] al-As became anxious, since this would have been in accordance with the Prophet’s prediction when he said, “Ammar would be killed by a group of oppressors and transgressors. So how could he  satisfy the people? Mu`awiya⁵ replied, “We did not kill Ammar; his killer was Ali ibn Abi Talib,⁶ wo had brought him to the field of battle and set him within range of our swords! So he is the oppressor and transgressor as it is written in the Prophet of God’s Word.

The history of Islam has repeated itself in the most tragic fashion.

Moreover, the very person who killed Uthman ibn Affan⁷ took up the banner of avenging his blood and someone would write in history of a Sultan who, in the name of God, would drag [God's] servants through the mud and blood and weep hypocritical tears on the Prophet’s pulpit for the very people he himself killed.⁸

Farewell to my youth, when we would learn this song when the revolution was still young and would sing on its anniversary: “Let these days be more bitter than poison; The times will come when it is sweet as sugar.”

It seems that these days are not ending.

Alas, let me bring them, they will break.

Footnotes
1 Parodying the doctrine of Islamic government adumbrated by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Velayat-e Faqih, the Vicegerency of the Islamic Jurist.

2 Here, the author is using the title of royalty for Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, the Supreme Leader of Iran.

3 Friday Prayers are an institution which has been used to mobilize the faithful in the Islamic Republic, although they are technically to be held in abeyance until after the return of the Hidden Imam.

4 An allusion to the fact that the Supreme Leader declared the elections valid immediately despite the fact that the Iranian Constitution stipulates that three days must pass during which objections to the way the elections were held must be addressed.

5 Appointed to the governorship of Syria by the Caliph Uthman, he led a coup against his successor, Ali ibn Abu Talib and ultimately led to the destruction of his caliphate and the founding of the Ummayad Caliphate with himself as caliph.

6 Considered by Sunnis to have been the last of the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs and by Shiites as the first Imam who had been kept from the caliphate by the machinations of his rivals.

7 The third caliph. For a clear exposition of the Shiite view of his caliphate, see this post.

8 The Ummayids demagogically called on Ali to turn over Uthman’s killers, knowing full well that he was neither a military nor political position to do so and, the argument goes, knowing that they themselves had a hand in his death themselves. To this day, “Waving Uthman’s bloody shirt” is an expression used by Shia Muslims. Think Marc Anthony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.