In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
The Religious Authority, Grand Ayatullah H.E. Sayyed M. H. Fadlullah delivered the two Friday prayer sermons at the Imamain Al-Hassanain Mosque on Ramadan 1, 1422 AH / November 16, 2001, AD. Several prominent religious scholars, dignitaries, officials, and thousands of believers attended the Jumu’a prayer. (Edited version of the Sermons)
The First Sermon
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
The Month of Repentance and Mercy: A Spiritual Opportunity
Guidance to Mankind
In His Glorious Book Allah says: "The month of Ramadhan [is that] in which was revealed the Qur'an, a guidance for the people and clear proofs of guidance and criterion." (Surat al-Baqarah 2:185).
This blessed month is the month that Allah. the Most Exalted wants us to devote to worship… to come to know Him better and obey Him more, so that we will be closer to Him and become spiritually attached to Him without ignoring our needs in life.
As we devote ourselves to Him, Allah wants us to think about ourselves, so that each of us will understand himself in a precise and thorough manner. Why does Allah want us to do so? It is because what is inside ourselves may well be involuntary… For instance, we might have acquired certain negative or bad attitudes from the environment we live in, or we might have learned certain habits and traditions from our parents or from society at large. We might even discover that we love some people so blindly that we do not question their positions and stands. The problem with this kind of love is demonstrated in Allah’s saying when He talks about the losers: "Those whose effort is lost in worldly life, while they think that they are doing well in work." (Surat al-Kahf 18:104).
Self-Accountability
This kind of social, psychological, and political chaos—and I am saying this to myself as well—in addition to the noise that fills our ears and the distractions we have to attend to in our daily life, makes us alien to ourselves. The Prophetic tradition says: "Judge yourselves before you are judged by others." Therefore, you ought to contemplate and try to understand yourself. This is far more important than wasting time chatting uselessly with others. It is very dangerous to ignore this judgment and self-accountability, for its effect involves both worlds. In this world, you will lose the criteria to distinguish between good and evil, and in the hereafter, when you have to defend your deeds, you will not find anything to say. Therefore, one ought to know the ulterior motives of his deeds to determine if his deeds and morals are Islamic or not.
Our Duties in this Month
Thus, with the advent of this blessed month, we have to review the supplication of Imam Zein Al-Abideen, in which he defines our responsibilities in this month, and I would like to take this opportunity to underscore the importance of the Imam’s supplications (Al-Sahifa Al-Sajjadiyah) for they deal with the issues of the individual, society, and general Islamic concepts.
The Imam says: "And praise belongs to Allah who appointed among those roads (of His beneficence) His month." (This means that this month in particular is the month of Allah, for we know that all months are the months of Allah, but the month of Ramadan is for Allah alone.) And as such it should be devoted to Him, being the month of fasting and Islam, in which the believers ought to read the Quran to become educated and knowledgeable in the issues of Islam. Allah wants us to live the spirit of the call in this month. It is the month of purification, in which we are purified from our psychological and moral dirt. It is the month of being tested, in which we struggle against ourselves to move in the right direction. It is the month of standing in prayer in which the Quran was sent as guidance to the people and as clear signs of guidance and the separator (between good and evil). This verse clarified its excellence over all months. Therefore it is the best month, because of the many sacred things and well-known excellencies which He placed therein, for He made unlawful in it what He declared lawful in others to magnify it. He prohibited foods and drinks in it to honor it, and He appointed for it a clear time which He (Majestic and Mighty is He) allows not to be set forward and accepts not to be placed behind.
Then He made one of its nights surpass the nights of a thousand months and named it the Night of Decree; in it the angels and the Spirit descend by the leave of their Lord upon every command, a peace constant in blessings until the rising of the dawn upon whomsoever He will of His servants…
Knowing the Excellence of this Month
What does the Imam ask his Lord in this month, and thus teach us to ask our Lord the same things too?
"O Allah, bless Muhammad and his household; inspire us with knowledge in its excellence, veneration of its inviolability, and caution against what You have forbidden within it, and help us to fast in it by our restraining our limbs—all our organs should not do any unlawful act from acts of disobedience toward You—and by employing them in that which pleases You, so that we lend not our ears to idle talk (since one of the signs of the believer is he does not listen to such talk) and hurry not with our eyes to diversion. We stretch not our hands toward the forbidden and stride not with our feet toward the prohibited; our bellies hold only what You have made lawful and our tongues speak only what You have exemplified. We undertake nothing but what brings close to Your reward and pursue nothing but what protects from Your punishment! Then rid all of that from the false show of the false showers and the fame-seeking of the fame seekers, lest we associate therein anything with You or seek therein any object of desire but You!
O Allah, bless Muhammad and his Household. In it make us attend to the appointed moments of the five prayers within the bounds You have set, so that nothing will make us ignore them or forget the obligations You have decreed, the duties You have assigned, and the times You have specified; and in the prayers make us alight in the station of the Keepers of their stations, the guardians of their pillars, their performers in their times, as Your servant and Your messenger set down in his Sunna (Your servant and Your messenger set down in his Household) in their bowings, their prostrations, and all their excellent acts, with the most complete and ample ritual purity and the most evident and intense humility!"
Then the Imam attends to the social aspects and says: "Give us success in this month to tighten our bonds of kin with devotion and gifts, attend to our neighbors with bestowal and giving, purify our possessions through paying the alms (for there are those who do not pay the alms except when they want to perform pilgrimage; and all those who do not deliberately pay the Khums are thieves who have stolen the money of the orphan and the needy). Go back to him who has gone far from us, treat justly him who has wronged us, make peace with him who shows enmity toward us (except him who is regarded as an enemy in You and for You—those enemies who fight us because we have embraced Your religion, for he is the enemy whom we will not befriend, the party whom we will not hold dear), and seek nearness to You through blameless works which will purify us from sins and preserve us from renewing faults, so that none of Your angels will bring for You the kinds of obedience and sorts of nearness-seeking unless they be less than what we bring!"
This is the atmosphere Imam Zein Al-Abideen wants us to live as we prepare ourselves to receive this month, expressing the views of his fathers and that of the Prophet (p.). Thus, before we start to think about what food we have to eat when we break our fast, we have to prepare ourselves spiritually and morally. We have to be always with the good, the right, and justice, so as to be with those who obey Allah.
The Second Sermon
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Worshippers of Allah, the Most Exalted… Be pious… and try to fill your time with what draws you nearer to Allah, whether in your private life or public one, for Allah has left nothing without decreeing what to do regarding it. Therefore, we have to adhere to the right path and obey Allah and seek only His satisfaction in all aspects of life, whether at home, at work, or in our general political and social life. We have to remain with the weakened and against the arrogant.
America’s Unequivocal Support for Israel
Israel continues its policy of killing and destruction, a policy of state terror against the Palestinian people, as a result of the freedom it enjoys, since the U.S. prevents any condemnation of Israel or even any pressure on it. Thus, although the Security Council issued a resolution that provides for Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian Authority territories, Israel ignores the resolution and the Security Council failed to comment. On the contrary, pressure was directed against the Palestinians, asking them to stop the so-called Palestinian violence, which, as everybody knows, is a reaction to the brutal violence of the Israeli army that implements Sharon’s orders of killing mercilessly…
America is now carrying out yet another deception scheme in which it talks in the UN in a very vague way about a Palestinian state and about a peace settlement, and warns of a total collapse if this settlement is not reached, while Sharon’s tanks continue to kill the Palestinian people and destroy their towns. In fact, the only thing that America cares about is Israeli security. Because it is the U.S. that prevents any stopping of this massacre. Europe, meanwhile, is confused… it moves one step forward to promote its interests that drive it to take part in the negotiations, but then it retreats backward as a result of America’s insistence on not giving Europe any active or influential role… Moscow, on its part, is searching for the role it lost years ago. But the basic problem is Arab impotence and Islamic weakness in spite of the righteousness of their cause… Everything is in the air, and endless waiting is what characterizes the current stage.
The Intifada
Meanwhile, the Palestinian people continue their struggle to remain the force that counters the Israeli force, to enable the Arab and Muslim cause to continue, and to secure Palestine in the minds and on the ground so that nobody could ever remove it from the map.
The Afghanis Are Concerned about Their Fate
The surprising recent developments in the Afghani war have led to a shift in focus to a new regime. Although all the parties are discussing the issue, the solution remains in the hands of the U.S., which controls the air and the UN, while the Northern Alliance has the ground, while the whole project is still under the influence of regional and international interests.
The Afghani people, who are partly relieved from the daily bombing, are in a real dilemma concerning their unknown future. Several questions are troubling them: What is the new plan? Was the Taliban withdrawal from the cities tactical or a defeat? Is the civil war going to re-erupt, especially as the conflicting parties are of different races and regional and international alliances? Will there be a guerrilla war? What about Pakistan, which is totally destabilized as a result of the American deception…
The UN has involved itself to relieve the U.S. from the embarrassment it suffers, thus turning itself into the de facto U.S. Security Council…
The big question is: why has America prevented the UN from having anything to do with the Palestinian cause, even with issues such as the Israeli crimes and the means to protect the Palestinians from these crimes and towards the settlement as a whole? Moreover, the U.S. did not allow any country to interfere, although the Arab–Israeli struggle represents an exploding situation that might endanger international interests in the region.
If the U.S. took such an attitude towards the Arab–Israeli struggle, why did it allow the UN to interfere in Afghanistan? It is because it is sure that the UN will seek to transfer Afghanistan into a strategic base for the U.S. that will enable the latter to pressure the neighboring countries.
Muslims, Arabs, and the whole world for that matter, ought to know that America does not care about the interests of others; rather, it seeks to promote its own interests... And I believe that the contradiction between the interests of the international powers will explode, especially as the peoples of the region have become concerned about their future. The Arab and Muslim peoples ought to put an end to the state of psychological defeat and carelessness they are living in. They ought to stop being intimidated by American threats… On the other hand, they ought to rule out any killing of innocent civilians, for such actions contradict Islamic values. But they should stand with the Resistance against occupation in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as any other place where there is a struggle for freedom.
Unity in Lebanon
In Lebanon, we ought to consolidate our national unity, for the Americans are playing the card of sectarian differences… Unity alone saves us, and the sheep that leaves the flock might be eaten by the wolves.