'An Islam Without Jihad': Ramazani on the Faith the Umayyads Left Behind
Addressing physicians on the Arbaeen procession, the AhlulBayt World Assembly chief traces a line from the distortion of early Islam to what he calls the collapse of Western invincibility
The Secretary-General of the AhlulBayt (AS) World Assembly has said the Arbaeen pilgrimage and the figure of Imam Husayn (AS) belong not only to Muslims but to the whole of humanity, in remarks tracing the distortion of early Islam through to the present confrontation with Western power.
Ayatollah Reza Ramazani was addressing a gathering of physicians and medical staff at the AhlulBayt (AS) University procession in Iraq, attended by prominent doctors from Iran and Iraq alongside scholars and thinkers from Palestine and Pakistan.
‘They used Islam as a tool for power’
He opened with a question: how, only fifty years after the Prophet’s passing, could the head of his grandson be raised on a spear? The answer, he argued, lay in historical deviation.
“The Umayyads and Abbasids used Islam not for guidance but as a tool for power and achieving their own desires,” he said, “and none of them were concerned about religion.”
What prevailed in that era, he said, was an inverted Islam:
“They left behind an Islam without jihad, without happiness, without perfection, and without enjoining good and forbidding evil, which with Yazid’s rise to power, was effectively doomed.”
He drew a parallel with the present. Two reductive approaches to religion compete today, he argued — one treating it as “the opium of the masses,” the other, Western in origin, confining Islam to prayer and private experience. Against both, he said, the Islamic Revolution returned religion to the fabric of life and to the arena of governance.
‘A civilisational issue’
Turning to Palestine, Ramazani said the strength of Islam today is expressed through the Palestinian cause and the resistance in Gaza. “The Palestinian issue is no longer merely a security or political matter,” he said, “but a civilisational, moral, and human dignity-related issue.”
Were the Prophet (S) or Imam Mahdi (AJ) present today, he added, Palestine would be their first and foremost concern.
He argued that the appearance of Western and Israeli invincibility has been broken: “Ashura thought caused the Zionist ‘Iron Dome’ to be struck,” he said, and US warships whose presence once caused trembling had been forced to withdraw after encountering resistance in the Persian Gulf. These, he said, were decisive defeats for armies that had believed themselves unbeatable.
Toward a unified Ummah
Just as the blood of Imam Husayn (AS) kept Islam alive, Ramazani said, the martyrdom of Iranian and Iraqi youth side by side has awakened dormant consciences around the world. Citing the teachings of the martyred Leader, he said the world divides into dominators and dominated, and that the Islamic system accepts neither role — the meaning, he argued, of the slogan “Away with humiliation.”
He closed by urging movement toward a unified Islamic Ummah, describing the subservience of some Muslim governments to the arrogant powers as the gravest affliction facing the Islamic world. Referring to the Leader’s letters to European and American youth, he said that appeal had strengthened the resolve of Western young people against the system of domination — and predicted that, with unity preserved, the collapse of the colonial system would come in the not-too-distant future.
He ended by thanking the physicians, in both classical and traditional medicine, for their service to the pilgrims.
Reference: ABNA24