Imam Khomeini’s scholarly works and progressive political ideals continue to attract million of faithful and oppressed people across the globe.
From his speeches and writings, we find that Imam Khomeini, in his youth, besides being a jurisprudent of repute, piety and disciplined way of life made him shun the company of the shallow-minded and he devoted his time and energies in deep reflection of the socio-political realities.
At the age of 27 the bright young scholar, Imam Khomeini, wrote the book Misbah al-Hidayah in Arabic on the topic of ethics.
At 29 he wrote a commentary on the famous pre-dawn or Sahar Supplication of the fasting month of Ramadhan and soon established himself as a budding scholar with a series of books and treatises to his name.
He consequently reached the level of ijtihad and started holding his own classes, which were attended by hundreds of students, at a time when the foreign puppet, Reza Khan Pahlavi, was consolidating his power in Tehran as the new monarch after ending the Qajarid dynasty.
In fact, so disciplined was his life and so punctual was he, that according to his friends and family, time could be told without the need of a clock by his movements and actions. In 1943, he wrote his famous work Kashf al-Asrar, after the removal from power of Reza Khan, thereby revealing the first signs of his political acumen.
He clearly saw that the Pahlavi dictator’s mortgaging of national prestige and natural resources to foreigners, his repression of the Iranian people and their traditional values, his forced unveiling of women in the name of progress and civilization, were part of an elaborate plot conceived by world imperialism to eliminate Islam as a social and political force. He wrote:
“All the orders issued by the bandit Reza Khan have no value. The laws passed by his parliament must be scrapped. All the idiotic words that have proceeded from the brain of that illiterate soldier are rotten and it is only the law of God that will remain…”
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Principles of Imam Khomeini's dynamic political ideals