Imam Khamenei

The elites of the Islamic world challenge the claims of the West to knowledge and civilization

Today, the ground for bringing about this fundamental transformation is available, more than ever, to the Islamic Ummah, to sympathetic intellectuals and to those who have well intentions for the Ummah. Today, Islamic Awakening – in other words, the attention of Muslim intellectuals and youth to their ideological and spiritual assets – is an undeniable truth. Today, liberalism and communism, which were considered 50, 100 years ago as the most prominent achievements of western civilization – have completely lost their glamor and their fatal flaws have become visible. The system built on the basis of the latter has collapsed and the system founded on the basis of the former is struggling with deep crises and is on the verge of downfall.

Today, not only the cultural paradigm of the west – which stepped into the arena, from the beginning, with scandal and ignominy – but also its political and economic paradigm, its money-based democracy and its discriminatory capitalism, have shown their inefficiency and corruption.

Today, there are many intellectuals in the world of Islam who challenge all ideological and civilizational claims of the west with total honor, glory and dignity and who explicitly display Islamic alternatives. Today, even those western thinkers who would introduce liberalism, in the past, as the end of history have no option other than taking back their claims and acknowledging their sense of bewilderedness in theory and in practice. A perfunctory look at the streets of the US, at the behavior of US politicians towards their people, at the deep valley of class inequalities in that country, at the embarrassment and stupidity of those who have been chosen to run that country, at the dreadful racism there, at the cruelty of an officer who tortures an innocent individual to death on the street and does so in cold blood and in front of others, reveals the depth of the moral and social crisis in the western civilization and also the deviation and falsehood of its political and economic philosophy. The behavior of the US towards weak nations is an extension of the behavior of the police officer who puts his knees on the neck of a defenseless person of color, pressing so long until he dies. The other western governments are also the manifestation of this disastrous situation, each within the scope of their power and resources. [Jul 29, 2020]