THE PERIOD OF AWAITING: ACTIVE OR PASSIVE RESISTANCE?

THE PERIOD OF AWAITING: ACTIVE OR PASSIVE RESISTANCE?
Religious leaders in the Muslim community are divided on the appropriate response to the period of moral depravity and decadence that has accompanied the modern period of human advancements in various fields. There are some in the community who have accepted God’s decree in the meaning of abandonment of any endeavor on the part of humanity to interfere with God’s overall preordained plan for the End of Time. “Engagement” with time and intellect is, then, out of place. People should simply submit to the catastrophic future in the hope that God will deliver them at the right time before the final judgment takes place at the End of Time. This is the belief in historical determinism – a view that history has been foreordained and nothing that humans will do can change the situation. In other words, when human beings find a situation unbearable, instead of actively responding to change it they should simply ascribe it to the will of God and bear the unpleasant conditions patiently. In fact, the passivity advocated by this kind of thinking is not very different from the prescription of “separatism” and “isolationism” in the context of open society discussed above.
The second group’s active response to the future of humanity is captured by the above-cited tradition reported on the authority of the Imam ‘Ali> b. al-H{usayn. This tradition rules out such a passive response to the situation in which we all find ourselves. The most important message conveyed by the Imam is that human intellectual development and human capacity to embark upon progression until it reaches the highest level of comprehension and insight is through God’s own endowment. Why would God confer a thing on humanity if it were to remain in abeyance until the appearance of the deliverer? The divine mystery that explains the probable reason for even choosing the state of invisible existence for the future deliverer of humanity is that during the period of severe trial of one’s faith in the realm of the unseen (al-ghayb) all followers of the Imam should remain alert to their responsibility to do all that is within their power to usher the bright future. To put it differently, Muslim community cannot afford to remain indifferent to the challenging world in which they live – the world in which materialism is in severe competition with spirituality and moral awareness. The forces of materialism are not to be defeated; they are simply to be tamed and brought under the supervision of moral and spiritual values taught by the revelation of God through His emissaries.
In this sense, the period of invisible existence of the messianic Imam is the period of political messianism in the sense of preparation for justice to prevail over the forces of injustices; for truth to defeat the forces of falsehood so that the earth can be filled with justice and equity as it is filled with injustice and tyranny. Political messianism should precede the religious messianism when Islam will return to its pristine purity the way it was when the Prophet taught it. This is the active response to which Imam ‘Ali> b. al-H{usayn is calling his own followers and the followers of the school of Ahl al-Bayt until the End of Time.