The Role of Martyr General Qasem Soleimani in the Construction of the State of Divine Justice

 Gürkan Biçen

According to Islam, a human being is an entity with the ability to be “human,” the manifestation of divine attributes, and an eternal movement towards perfection. Due to this endless movement, human acquires the right to take advantage of existence by gaining a distinguished position in them and dominating others. In this sense, human is not only the center of the earth, but also the center of the entire realm of existence. Human, moreover, has undertaken the responsibility of making every aspect of perfection visible when and where he is. In other words, human is also the officer of making the manifestation of divine attributes concentrated in him visible in himself and spreading it around him. Islam also affirms the power of the individual as well as the society to reflect the divine attributes. Thus, it indicates the possibility of a society that will fulfill the divine will on earth, no matter how small or large this society is. The axis of divine will is “justice.”

In the eyes of Muslim philosophers, mutakallims and jurists, justice is a virtue that consists of courage, chastity and wisdom, develops when a person reaches puberty, keeps him away from excess and understatement, and is based on knowledge. A just person is also merciful, and he does not want for others what he does not want for himself. A just society, on the other hand, offers social opportunities in a way that ensures equality of opportunity among all its members. A just person and society does not behave towards other societies in a way that ignores their divine rights. As Imam Ali stated in his letter to Malik bin Ashter, a just person and society considers people either as brothers in religion or as equals in creation. This necessitates staying away from plundering people's property as booty, harming their chastity and shedding their blood, whether they are Muslims or not. The justice society of Islam is in charge of building the ground that will carry all humanity to divine perfection under the guidance of the just imam. It is possible to define the political equivalent of this structure, which will rise on an individual and social basis, as the “State of Divine Justice.”

The ideal of the state of divine justice is not a new idea. However, it is not possible to say that this is a theory that was spoken in pre-Islamic times. It did not possess the maturity to encompass, transcend and transform the known world and the social models of that time, and the people with the power to realize it. In order to progress theoretically, it was necessary to wait for the multi-divided and strict hierarchical social models of polytheistic religions to be overcome, to consider the universe, including man and society, as the manifestation of the transcendent power of a single god as well as to connect human existence only to this god and to re-imagine the form of relations with social classes. In other words, building a society and administration based on the creed of tawhid became the basic condition of the state of divine justice. Although the core of this ideal was laid in Sadr-i Islam, this idea could not sprout and flourish due to known processes. Nor did it disappear completely, but remained on the agenda of the Muslim community. The vision of an age of justice that was left to future, but that would necessarily take place, continued to exist on the agenda of the Muslim community. In this sense, the understanding of Imam Mahdi in Sunni and Shiite thought forms the cornerstone of the belief that the state of divine justice will prevail on earth.

While the Twelve Imam Shiism offered a comprehensive political theory and management model to the Muslim community, it also transformed the Velayet-Imamet and Mahdaviyya line into an area. The Imam, who is the guardian of Allah on this area, will assume the responsibility of administering the Muslim community in order to lead them to human perfection along with earthly and otherworldly righteousness, and thus, the Muslim community will be an example to the peoples of the earth under his imamate. After the Prophet, Imam Ali and his successors made efforts to fulfill this duty, but only Imam Ali was able to be at the head of the political power. In the life of eleven Imams, in a period of approximately 250 years, the political attitudes that Muslims and a Muslim leader may encounter have been experienced and the principles of the personal, social and political duties of Muslims have been determined from the occultation of the Twelfth Imam Muhammad Mahdi al-Muntazar to his appearance. One of these principles came to the fore by becoming evident over time: to prepare the conditions for the appearance that will take place in order to fill the earth with justice by establishing the state of divine justice and eliminating oppression.

Almost the last five hundred years of human history consists of a picture drawn by Europe and a story it tells. In the last two hundred years of this story, Muslims have almost no active role in history. The Muslim world, which spent three hundred years of a five-hundred-year period resisting Europe in order to preserve what exists, has turned into a completely passive structure in the last two centuries, and has been transformed by European concepts and systems in the form and extent they want. This period of Muslim history includes the struggle between those who want to imitate Europe and transform into a social model that they can accept, and those who resist this but cannot preserve the old model and cannot propose a new one. The history of Egypt, the important country of the Arab world, of the Ottoman Empire, the real organized power of the struggle with the West, and of Iran, the driving power of the Shiite world, present similar examples in this sense. Only one of them managed to draw a paradigmatic barrier by saying "no" to the historical attack led by Europe and America in the last quarter of the twentieth century: Iran.

Imam Khomeini, in his struggle since the 1940s, drew attention to the invasion and influence of the West in the Islamic world, and argued that the Western project does not serve a purpose that works for the benefit of the humanity, including Muslim societies. According to him, the West was attacking all over the world, especially the Muslim world, in order to plunder natural resources, enslave peoples and dictate the socio-cultural, political and economic conditions that would ensure its continuation. In fact, the process that has been operating since the French occupation of Egypt has developed against the Muslim peoples entirely. In Imam Khomeini's thought, there was nothing that the West offered or performed for the benefit of humanity. What is meant by this is neither the denial, nor complete rejection nor denigration of the progress made by the West in the field of technology and scientific study, but rather making it a means of transferring the earth's resources to the West instead of being mobilized for the construction of a just world. From this point of view, everything that can be considered as colonial operation is activities that detach the all human societies from their divine/natural rights, render them passive and enslave them spiritually and physically, which are acts that constitute the opposite of justice, namely oppression. In that case, not only Muslims but also every society should raise their voices against oppression, defend their rights and eliminate the centers of persecution.

Imam Khomeini argued that the main condition for Mahdawiyyah to come to the stage of history, as a conception that includes the human family, was that the Muslim community showed the will to control its own destiny, and he said that the appearance of Imam Muhammad Mahdi al-Muntazar depends on the maturation of the conditions. Of course, Allah would realize the appearance of Imam Mahdi, but his appearance would not take place in a world that was not ready for it, but after the transformation of mind and heart that peoples could accept such a great development. For the realization of these conditions, Muslims had to stand up in every way against the colonialists who are still directly and indirectly occupying their lands, cut their hands off the Islamic countries, awaken other peoples infested by the colonialists and invite them to become the masters of their own destiny. This call resonated in Iran, and in February 1979, the Iranian people succeeded in destroying the American imperialism that had engulfed their country like an octopus. We can understand the meaning of this development that shook the Western world when we consider that at that time, approximately 150 thousand Westerners and thousands of Zionists, of which approximately 50 thousand were American citizens living in Iran, that they have penetrated to the capillaries of Iran, and that the Western embassies in Tehran are the centers of an intelligence and terror network that keeps the whole country under control. The Western world, especially America, not only lost a vassal country that it had gained enormous benefits with this development in Iran, but also faced a new ideological challenge just before the collapse of the Socialist Bloc: the anti-colonial "the State of Divine Justice" process led by Veliyy-i Faqih.

Twelve Imam Shi'ism has the belief that a comprehensive, in-depth and difficult struggle will begin with the appearance and resurrection of Imam Muhammad Mahdi al-Muntazar, at the last moment of humanity, and this struggle will be supported by the appearance of Jesus Christ. With a narrative through symbols, the believers of the Muslim and Christian world will embark on a global struggle with the global powers that corrupt societies, ignore their rights, destroy their countries and transfer the earth's resources to their own countries, and finally, they will emerge victorious from this difficult struggle and start the last period of the humanity, which will pass with justice and prosperity. The scholars and their successors who were involved in the construction process of the Iranian Islamic Revolution are of the opinion that this Revolution, which shook the Western world deeply, is only a beginning and a beacon of the uninterrupted struggle that will last until the appearance of Imam Muhammad Mahdi al-Muntazar. According to them, Imam Mahdi will appear only after the formation of a large community with the awareness, determination and opportunity to fight the colonial powers that surround the world like an octopus, and he will assume the responsibility of the imamate of this community. This reveals the necessity of the steps that will lead to this result. In this process, the Islamic Republic of Iran will be a center of fundamental importance where all these necessities are planned and put into the field of execution. In this sense, the Islamic Republic of Iran represents an ideology with a state rather than a state with an ideology.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has some means of mobilizing the peoples in order to realize the vision of the state of divine justice against the global powers that have strangled the humanity, and uses these tools at different levels according to time and place. One of them is the armed forces. The Islamic Revolution Guards Army, which constitutes a part of the armed forces, is responsible for protecting the Iranian country and the Islamic Revolution inside and outside. However, this is not his only task. Defined as an ideological armed force in the Constitution and organized accordingly, the Army of the Guards of the Islamic Revolution is tasked with removing the colonial forces first from Western Asia and then from wherever possible. This duty arises from the foreign policy principles set out in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As a result of the execution of this duty, the Islamic Revolution Guards Army will end the invasion of global powers on the humanity and will contribute to the preparation of the conditions for the appearance. In this sense, the main mission of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution is to work together with every internal and external element subject to Veliyy-i Faqih to continuously reproduce the Revolution, to present the values of the Revolution to the peoples, and in this process, explicitly or covertly, to remove the military forces of the colonialists from the region as well as to neutralize their political and diplomatic influence. The Islamic Revolution Guards Army has carried out its duties with the hands of an elite staff until today, when it evolved from a simple organization and became an army with enormous opportunities in every field. For those who are not aware of his existence and do not have enough information about himself, General Qassem Soleimani, who came out of the shadows recently, is one of the favorites of this elite staff.

The life story of General Qasem Soleimani, who opened his eyes as the child of an ordinary Iranian family and left the world as one of the leading figures in the direct and indirect struggle with the American imperialism that shook the whole world, is important in terms of reflecting the perspective of the Islamic Revolution on the individual and the society. Soleimani, whose footprints we see everywhere in the struggle against the occupation and terrorism, at a time when the Islamic geography is covered in blood, occupations and terrorism render the states inoperable and people leave their lands, was not only a member of the payroll of one of the armed forces in the constitutional scheme of a state, but also the hand in the field of application of the creed and political mission represented by Veliyy-i Faqih, whom all Muslims accepted as the legitimate ruler of the Islamic Republic of Iran, by defining him with the title of Imam-i Ummah. In other words, General Qasem Soleimani was the military embodiment of the Mahdevi movement, which was advancing towards the appearance under the leadership of Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution. Everything that was mobilized in the process, including the opportunities created by his personality and the countless martyrs in the struggle carried out in an area of several million square kilometers, was spent for the realization of the ideological core of the Revolution, which is for the good of all humanity. Soleimani, who was on the ground to organize and support the resistance in Afghanistan against both the Russian and American occupation, and the same Soleimani, whose name was mentioned in the most difficult scenes of the struggle against the Zionist regime, was as much a military as the commander of this mobilization. Until the international terror campaign against Syria and the developments in the Iraqi field as an extension of it made it obvious, this general, who was one of the performers of the long-term but determined goal of the Revolution, was regarded as a loyal commander of the Karbala front, which was reopened in every age, to Imam Hussein by the anti-imperialist peoples in general and the Iranian people in particular.

General Qasem Soleimani lived to raise the banner of the struggle that would last from the Prophet to the appearance of Imam Muhammad Mahdi al-Muntazar and hand it over to his successor. As a result of this struggle, which was blended with the guidance of the Veliyy-i faqih and his own experience, the American dominance in Iraq was shaken. The takfiri terrorist organization, which dreamed of a state that would be organized and armed by the American and European countries, while the surrounding countries provided logistics facilities, and that it would establish through massacres in Iraq and Syria, lost this power. People who were victims of takfiri terrorism, especially Yazidis, Turkmens and Kurds, were able to breathe. The Syrian Arab Republic has come back from the brink of existential destruction. The Zionist regime has faced a fully equipped Hezbollah in the north and resistance organizations signed by Soleimani in each of the ammunition fired against the Zionist regime in the south, and has lost every war it waged since 2006. General Qasem Soleimani accomplished countless military and humanitarian achievements that he could fit into the last seven years of his life, which we can embody in the examples of Fallujah, Mosul and Aleppo, by looking into the eyes of a whole Western imperialism. But he didn't own any of them. He never ignored the divine will, the Veliyy-i faqih, his friends who were with him, many of whom were martyred in the fronts, his ordinary soldiers, and the oppressed peoples with children, women and men praying for him. He believed that going into the presence of Allah with the consent of the oppressed and innocent people is the biggest relief on the path of perfection. As such, he considered establishing justice in himself, in his army and among the people as the basic condition for the realization of his ultimate goal. All these demonstrate the role played by Soleimani in the process leading to the “State of Divine Justice.” He was tasked with organizing the peoples in an extremely difficult geography and mobilizing them against the colonialists by the order of the Veliyy-i Faqih. Bearing this heavy responsibility, Soleimani spent his life on numerous fronts in a geography stretching from Afghanistan to Yemen until God chose him.

Earth is a place of separation. General Qasem Soleimani left this world by making the tens of millions in Iran and the oppressed peoples on all fronts touched by his hand feel the pain of separation. As he pointed out in one of his speeches, Imam Hussein is valuable, but Islam, for which Imam Hussein sacrificed his life, is more valuable. Martyr General Qasem Soleimani, who fought against the imperialists in the world and sacrificed his life to end their invasion of the peoples, is precious, but the wish of Islam to liberate the peoples, represented by Veliyy-i Faqih, whose beard was washed with tears at his funeral, is more valuable. Martyr General Soleimani took his place in the future with a legacy that directly affects the perfection process of man, which we can summarize as being the assistant of Veliyy-i Faqih, protecting the oppressed peoples and advising to take part in a struggle that will last until the appearance with faith and patience. His presence will make itself felt not only in Iran and in the memory of the Iranian people, but also in every scene where those who seek justice and those who persecute peoples come face to face.