Introduction

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In the name of Allah, the One towards Whom the pure word and righteous actions ascend. Salutations and peace be upon the best of His creation, Muhammad salla Llahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, his Household, his Companions, and those who follow them with righteousness.

 

Wake up, O Shia of the world!

Sinuhe (Sanuhi) was a doctor of the Pharaoh Amphasis who lived in the tenth century BC. He had penned down his memories from the life of this Pharaoh and also of the Egyptian people who would assist in the tyranny of this Pharaoh.

Historians have discussed these memories amongst what the years left behind from the hieroglyphs.

The memories which this doctor wrote in a very unique and amazing way have been translated into the various languages of the world and have been published many times. Now it is in front of us and all readers can read it in their language and derive wonderful lessons from it.

Sinuhe (Sanuhi) writes in his notes:

 

I was walking in one of the streets of Egypt, when suddenly I came upon a noble, renowned, rich, and well-known man, Akhenaten, thrown on the ground, stained with his blood. His opposite hands and feet had been cut off, his nose severed, and there was no spot on his body that was free from a spear pierce or a whip lashing. He was in the throes of death. I carried him to the hospital and I tried my level best to save him from death. After more than two months, he regained consciousness from his stupor, and narrated to me his sad story, saying:

“The Pharaoh commanded me to step down from every span of land I owned and to gift him all my wives and slaves and all the gold and silver I own. I accepted his request on condition that he spares my house that I live in and a portion of the gold and silver I own, so that I may use it for my needs. The Pharaoh found this condition too burdensome and took possession of everything I owned. He then commanded that these horrible things be done to me and that I be thrown bare on the street, so that I may be a lesson for those who oppose the commands of this (self-claimed) god (the Pharaoh).”

Days passed while the poor Akhenaten endured poverty and deprivation and all his hopes in this world were pinned on revenge from the oppressive Pharaoh, even though it be at the hands of someone else.

Thereafter, the Pharaoh died and I attended the ceremonies of death in my capacity as the great doctor. The fortune tellers were delivering their farewell speeches, highly praising the great man who had departed.

I remember exactly the words that they were repeating. They were saying:

“O people of Egypt! The earth, the sky, and whatever is between them are missing the big heart that used to love Egypt and all those who inhabited it, from humans, animals, and plants to inanimate objects. He was a father to the orphans, a support for the poor, a brother to the people, and a glory for Egypt. He was the most just and most loving of the gods and the most loving to the people of Egypt. Amphasis has gone to join the other great gods and has left the people of Egypt in the dark.”

 

Sinuhe adds:

 

I was listening to the speeches of the fortune tellers and their deceptive way of speaking, and I was mourning over that faction of Egypt and its poor people who were burdened under the whips of both the Pharaoh and the fortune tellers. Meanwhile, a gathering of people, each of whom had personally received pain and punishment from the oppression and lashing of the Pharaoh, had broken into tears. I heard a man crying like how a mother who had lost her child would cry. His crying was the loudest from everyone and he was murmuring something that I could not understand.

So, I searched for a while until suddenly (I found that) the one crying was the same helpless, handicapped Akhenaten who was tied to the back of a donkey. I rushed to him to calm him down a little, as I thought that he was crying out of happiness and delight at the death of an oppressor who oppressed him until the point of death.

However, Akhenaten shattered my hopes when he caught sight of me and began screaming loudly:

“O Sinuhe, I did not know that Amphasis was so just, mighty, and good to his people to this extent, until I heard what these fortune tellers said regarding him. O Sinuhe, I am crying because all these years, instead of love and honour, I carried malice in my heart for this great god. Certainly, I was in manifest error.”

 

Sinuhe says:

 

While Akhenaten was repeating these words with firm conviction, I looked at his severed limbs and his disfigured appearance and I was amazed at what I was hearing. It was as if he could read my mind and he began shouting at me forcefully:

“Amphasis was rightful in what he done to me because I had not listened to the command of the god; and this is the recompense of every person who disobeys the god who created him and loves him. What could be a greater fortune for a person than to receive the punishment he deserves from the hand of the god, and not from the hand of anyone else!”

 

Who was this Amphasis?

He was a Pharaoh from amongst the Pharaohs of Egypt. He ruled Egypt with fire and iron throughout the ten years [of his rule]. He had initiated a brutal war with its neighbour, Nubia.

In this war, he killed one fifth of the Egyptian population, destroyed the crops, cut the trees, and kept the youth of Egypt alive, disgracing them with defeat in the war in which he invaded Nubia. He burnt the capital city one night, just as Nero did seven centuries later by burning Rome the capital of the Roman Empire.

The era of Amphasis was the worst era Egypt had witnessed in the history of the Pharaohs who ruled them, which began from the first family right until the fifth family of which Amphasis was the first.

Amphasis died and left behind complete destruction and a fragmented people, and despite all of this, the assembled crowd cried over him after being affected with the lamenting of the fortune tellers and their speeches, and amongst that crowd was the poor Akhenaten.

 

History repeats itself

On Monday, the seventh of June 1989, history repeated itself. The world witnessed on television what the doctor Sinuhe had seen three thousand years ago. The world saw six million Akhenatens full of grief and sobs, bidding farewell to the al Wali al Faqih, the Jurist in Tehran, nothing less than what Akhenaten and the others had done.

However, the difference between what Sinuhe had seen three thousand years ago and what the world saw on 07 June 1989 are as follows;

1. It had occurred in different places and in different eras.
2. There were more participants in the funeral procession.
3. The deceased was an Ayatollah and not a great god.
4. The ones delivering the (mourning) speeches were Ayatollahs and not fortune tellers.
5. The tribute and praises were specifically to the Ayatollah and not to the god himself. However, the meaning, the contents itself, and the grieved crowd were afflicted with the most terrible of calamities just as the people of Egypt were afflicted before, with the instruction of the Ayatollahs and not by the instruction of the god himself.

Besides these differences, there is much resemblance between today and yesterday, tonight and last night.

Certainly, it is a great calamity that in this era of enlightenment and civilisation, there is intellectual retrogression amongst us, the Shia Imamiyyah. We have stooped to this level of decline and deterioration. This is what compelled me to write this petition. And yes, I will not leave even one Shia on the face of this earth without making him hear what I would like to say in the ensuing pages.

We have just learnt who Amphasis was and now we must learn who the “Jurist” who had passed on was.

The Jurist who passed on ruled the Shia in Iran for ten complete years, with fire and iron. He killed 150 000 of those who opposed his mission. Three million Shia fled (Iran) and they are displaced around the world. He deprived fifty million Shia Imamiyyah the right of self-determination, intellectual freedom, and social policy. He made the Shia in Iran destitute to a point that has never been experienced before.

He initiated a war, which lasted for eight years, against the Shia and non-Shia of Iraq, in which he murdered close to a million people. He died while there were a thousand Shia in captivity who he denied freedom or release. He left behind a terrible bequest, the bad articulation and disgusting words of which is unmatched in the history of bequests. He commanded opposition and dissention between the Muslims. This Jurist died and the masses bid farewell to him with grief and sobs. (While many of those who participated in his funeral procession and were wailing and remorseful over his departure had been afflicted by the misfortune and evil treatment from the side of this very Jurist, just as Akhenaten had received at the hand of Amphasis who died.)

In the ensuing pages, we will clear things up and explain the causes that led to this intellectual retrogression, which resulted in our enslavement at the hands of the Jurists and Mujtahids who ruled with tyranny over us for 1200 years. Many of us have neither comprehended nor realised what disasters and afflictions had opened up at the hands of these ruling jurists. Rather, we consider this a divine gift just as Akhenaten had done before.

For this discussion to conclude with the result I intend, it is necessary for me to present my observations in a structured form and numbered, lest one gets mixed with the other, and so that, eventually, we arrive at the conclusion I wish to present in this appeal.

 

Observation One

For a few years now, I have been calling the Shia to wake up, in the light of reformation, to which I invited in my books al Shia wa al Tashih ^[1] (Shia and Reformation) and ‘Aqidat al Shia al Imamiyyah fi Usul al Din wa Furu’ihi fi ‘Asr al A’immah wa Ba’dahum (The Belief of the Shia Imamiyyah in the Principles and Subsidiary Matters of Din in the Era of the Imams and after them) to which I gave another name: al Sarkhah al Kubra (The Great Plea).

In these two books, I have established that reformation is the only way to save the Shia from a condition similar to that of Akhenaten, in which they are living.

In short, this is to revert to the pure, pristine, shining, glittering din that is similar to the Fiqh of Imam al Sadiq in the light of Qur’an and Sunnah. The only purpose of this reformation is to set the Shia free from the intellectual, personal, political, economic, and collective hardships they are living in. These objectives cannot be achieved without discarding the distortions, innovations, hollowness, and crookedness which have crept into our pure and pristine beliefs at the hands of some leaders of the Religion and the Jurists throughout history.

We, the Shia Imamiyyah, suffered unprecedented hardships, worries and grief throughout the centuries at the hands of this group, supposedly considered the pure and chosen ones.

If the condition of the Shia in Iran improves, then the condition of the Shia in other parts of the world will likewise improve soon thereafter. The tragedies of the Shia are all linked to one another and all of them stem from intellectual submission to the group we call Jurists and Mujtahids.

I think that our tragedy as Shia Imamiyyah is not a tragedy of leadership, politics, and of the people in charge. Rather, the tragedy stems from ourselves because of our submission to and acceptance of the innovations that had crept into our belief system. The Jurists took advantage of this to establish their rulership and leadership, and we obeyed and followed everything they said.

From here, I want to be clear on the mission that we are undertaking and to establish that our problem as Shia Imamiyyah stems from the majority, and not the minority.

We know and see those who call to political and national liberation receive a great welcome and a quick compliance from the side of the oppressed groups, who desire deliverance, and these oppressed political groups then join the movement’s leaders or unite under their flag, with the intention of liberation. However, the greatest difficulty is to turn the mindset of the leaders who have taken a stand against delusions, idle thoughts, and fairy tales; and fight against the authorities whose buttresses were built with those idle thoughts, innovations, and misguidance. These leaders obstinately turn more of their attention to countering colonialist philosophies and exploitation than actually countering their own authorities.

To summarise, every time you call a group to fight and free themselves from the rule of political colonisation, all of them walk behind you and sing your tune so that they may gain freedom and re-claim political independence, which these tyrants had robbed them of. However, when you call the people to free themselves from mental colonisation and despotism, which is worse than political despotism, majority of the people oppose you and stand against you; and they will say that the liberator, who intends to free them from the shackles they bound upon themselves and not by Allah decreeing upon them, has no opinion concerning it.

Therefore, my address is to the Shia Imamiyyah and to that faction that had bid farewell to the Jurist with tears and wailing, while each one of them has on his forehead or heart a wound and scar from him.

 

Observation Two

I have known from before, and it is incumbent on me to make it clear, that the easy way for a government to rule fifty million Shia with fire and iron for the duration of ten years, is to take several millions out onto the streets whenever the need arises. So, once all the necessities of the people are in the sole hands of the government, whether food, drink, clothing, life, and death, then it is not difficult for a government like this to send multitudes to the arena commanding it to call and shout as mentioned previously.

We have witnessed in the past half a century, a very huge funeral procession; we saw eight million Egyptians bidding farewell to the deceased leader, Abdel Nasser, with cries and tears. We also witnessed greater enthusiasm and worse tears from several million of the same people while bidding farewell to the great singer, Umm Kulthum. However, the question I am posing is, that those who had bid farewell to Abdel Nasser, did so out of honour for him, and those that bid farewell to Umm Kulthum, did so out of love for her, but what was the reasoning behind these people bidding farewell to this Imam, Governor, Jurist that passed on?

The truth of the matter is as we said; the government ruling over the Shia in Iran had the ability to take out millions onto the streets. Nonetheless, everything we have witnessed was not entirely from the verdict of the Authority, rather there were millions from amongst the people who sincerely believed in the guardianship of this Jurist and believed in whatever came from him, whether good or bad.

This is what incited me to plea to the Shia with this petition and say to them: Wake up! O Shia!

 

Observation Three

Since I am pleading with the Shia to wake up, I deem it necessary for me to elucidate on a few things that need to be clarified; so, the Shia of the world may recognise the harms they endured at the hands of their Jurists throughout history. Here I must ask you in the Socratic way. I pose a few questions so that the answers to them are the very same clear answers that point to the object I am promoting.

The questions whose answers expose the reality are:

• Why have we, the Shia Imamiyyah, bounded ourselves to follow the Jurists in every aspect of our lives?
• Why have the Jurists placed enslavement and servitude over us?
• Why have some Shia attached themselves to the Religious Authority yet not shown concern for the suffering of the Shia of Iran?
• Why is the Shia Religious Authority of Iran harsher on the Shia of other nationalities?
• Why are the major colonial powers assisting the Shia Religious Authority?
• Why do some countries in the region which suffer from the terrorism of the Ruling Religious Authority over the Shia in Iran not stand with the Reformation Movement?
• Why is the Shia Opposition unable to overthrow the Shia Religious Authority?
• Is there any Solution to Deliver the Shia from their Distress besides the Reformation Movement?

This is how I will begin, posing the questions and their answers.

 

NEXT⇒ Why have we, the Shia Imamiyyah, bounded ourselves to follow the Jurists in every aspect of our lives?

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[1] An English translation of this book can be downloaded from https://archive.org/details/shiahacriticalrevision/mode/2up