The Greatest Jihad:Combat with the Self
Warnings to the Seminaries (1)
It is possible that by spreading poison and evil propaganda impure hands have portrayed ethical and reformatory program as without importance, and have presented going to the mimbar (pulpit) for
giving advice and making sermons as contrary to a scholarly station, and they inhibit the work of the great scholarly personalities who have the station of reforming and refining the seminaries by calling them mimbari (mere sermonizers). Today, in some seminaries, going to mimbar and giving sermons may even be considered disgraceful! They forget that the Commander of the Faithful, peace be with him, was mimbari (a sermonizer), and from the mimbar he would admonish people, make them aware of things, raise their consciousnesses, and guide them. Other Imams, peace be with them, were also this way. Perhaps secret agents have injected this evil in order to exterminate spirituality and ethics in the seminaries, and as a result our seminaries have become corrupt and dissolute. God forbid that forming gangs, selishness, hypocrisy, and disagreements should penetrate the seminaries. The people of the seminaries ight with each other, they close ranks against one another, and they insult and belie one another. They become discredited in the Islamic community, so that the foreigners and enemies of Islam are able to get hold of the seminaries and destroy them. The ill-intentioned know that the country supports the seminaries, and as long as the country supports them it is not possible to beat them or tear them apart.
But on the day when the people of the seminaries and the student of the seminaries come to lack ethical principles and Islamic manners, and ight each other, and form opposing gangs, and are not refined and purified, dirty their hands with unsuitable deeds, then naturally the nation of Islam will get a bad impression of the seminaries and the clergy, and support for them will be lost, and consequently the way for the use of force and enemy influence will be opened. If you see that governments are afraid of a cleric and of a marja' (authority in Shi'ite jurisprudence and source of imitation), and take account of them, it is because of this, that they benefit from the support of the people, and in truth, they are afraid of the people. They consider it probable that if they show contempt and audacity and violate a cleric, that the people will rebel and rise up against them. However if the clerics oppose one another and defame one another and do not behave with Islamic
manners and morals, they will fall from their position in the
community, and the people will abandon them.
The people expect
you to be ruhdii [spiritual, a cleric], well-mannered with the manners of Islam, and to be of the party of Allah. Restrain yourselves from the splendor and glitter of life and artiiciality, and do not refuse any kind of self-sacriice in the way of the advancement of Islamic ideals and service to the nation of Islam. Step forward on the way of God the Almighty to please Him, and except for the unique Creator pay attention to no one.
Source:” The Greatest Jihad” by imam khomeini
