There is a time for carrying out specific duties: duties should be carried out at the right time. And the best time to carry out a duty is the present time, which is a time of virtue. Well, some people do not carry out their duties at all. They say, “Let's forget about it.” Some individuals carry out their duties, but they do it with delay. And some individuals carry them out when the right moment has passed.
An example are the Tawwabeen. The Tawwabeen did not enter the arena when they should have – which was on Ashura. They entered the arena when it was too late. Another example is the uprising of the people of Madina under the leadership of Abdullah ibn Hanzalah. They stood up against Yazid, staged an uprising, and threw the ruler of Madina out, but it was too late. They should have thought of this when they heard that Hussain ibn Ali (pbuh) had left Madina, but they did not do so. They were late, they thought of it a year after that event. And the result was the same as history has recorded. They were murdered, annihilated, and terminated without being able to take action: task should be carried out at the right time. Well, if we want to do a certain task on time, we should have knowledge of the task itself. We should know what task to carry out, so that we do it on time.
During the time of the Constitutional movement, too, there was a number of great ulama--I do not mention their names, but all of you know them, because they are well-known--who did not see the plot that was hatching. This plot was hatched by westernized individuals and those so-called individuals who were under the influence of the west and who were subdued by western thoughts. These ulama did not pay attention to the statements that these westernized individuals made, in the national Majlis of those times or in their newspapers, in which there was a war against Islam. They did not pay attention to this. On the contrary, they tolerated and surrendered to them.
The result was that someone like the late Sheikh Fazlollah Noori, who knew about and understood their intentions, was hanged in front of their eyes, but these ulama did not show any sympathy. After that, even those people, who did not show any sympathy, were attacked and harassed by them, and they received a slap across their faces. Some of them lost their lives, and some of them lost their dignity and reputation. This was the mistake made during those days. We should not make the same mistake.
Many nations have failed to understand the enormity of certain situations. As a result, events accumulated and passed them by. They remained unaware and were downtrodden by these events. If the ulama who stood up to Reza Khan's tyranny had been supported by the people, if all our people had understood what was happening in the country and resisted, our nation would be 50 years ahead of its current situation now. If the people had supported the ulama at that time, they would not have suffered 50 years of loss during the reign of the evil and dependant Pahlavi regime.
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