Speech number twenty

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

When the imperialist agents approach us (the clergy), they say that the young, the educated and the students have been corrupted, that they have lost their religious and nationalist beliefs, that they have gone astray and blindly imitate foreigners. Yet when they come to you (students), they tell you that the maraji' and clergy are superstitious reactionaries who do not understand the realities of the time. They tell you that to listen to them would be to follow a retrogressive path and that supremacy and progress require that you pay no heed to the hopes and ideas of these fanatical elements and that you distance yourselves from them.

It is our duty and yours to deepen our spiritual and ideological relations, despite the efforts and desires of the imperialists and those who seek to create divisions between us, and to create unity of thought and together by using our mutual experiences, information and capabilities, create stability, greatness, prosperity, progress and supremacy for ourselves.......

You educated youth are the men of tomorrow and the leading personalities of the society's future. You should be vigilant and struggle

against the retrogressive, divisive and bemeaning elements in your country. If you pay this matter due attention, you will find that the most important cause of the decline of the Muslims is the unawareness and neglect of the redemptory teachings of the true Islam, that Islam which created the most brilliant, resplendent civilisation at the darkest period of history and took its followers to the heights of greatness, power and nobility. Once these followers shut their eyes to these teachings and accepted a deviated and class-based system which they called Islam, then naturally that greatness and long-held glory was lost and they fell into dark times like the present...

 

1-  Barrasi va Tahlili az Nihzat-i Imam Khomeini. Vol. 2, p. 424.