Najaf Quotes

The most complete gift of God is a life based on knowledge.

Iraq is a prime example of the ensuing conflicts and chaos. The more religious among the Shia never accepted that a Sunni-led government should have control over their holy cities such as Najaf and Karbala, where their martyrs Ali and Hussein are said to be buried.

It knelt some six miles east of Kufa, atop a barren, sandy rise—najaf in Arabic—and there his sons buried the man who would ever after be revered by all Muslims, but by two very different titles: the first Imam of Shia Islam, and the last of the four rashidun, the Rightly Guided Caliphs of Sunni Islam.

I am glad that I can tell the truth, for lies are a form of theft; the liar steals from another person's trust. There are liars all over the world who have grown rich on the trust they have stolen.

The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq.

To make a good man, God has to use all of his skill. Some of the goodness of God himself goes into such a man. And when the man is ready to take his place on the earth, God must feel the pride that I feel when I look at the rug I am weaving, at the strands that bind closely together and knot and make a pattern, and at the beauty of the colours. Such a long day's work to make a good man! And yet, one bullet that takes a second to speed through the air and strike a man will kill him in an instant. How can God forgive such a thing? And yet He can, so it is said, for His heart is great and His forgiveness infinite, if the sinner repents. But I am not God and I cannot forgive the man who killed my brother.

Najaf was the oldest and most prestigious hawza (Shia seminary), and Shias came from all over the world, not only to visit the shrine of Imam Ali, but to study.

You get [to the Iraq occupation] and you realize, oh, these people are poor as shit...You got a poor shithead from Philly fighting a poor shithead from fucking, I don’t know, Najaf or somewhere in Iraq. It’s an endless cycle of people who don’t have shit being forced to fight people who don’t have shit.

Muawiyah broke from the traditions of the Rashidun by declaring that not only was he Caliph but that the position would be passed down within his family. In this way, the last egalitarian elements of the government were abolished and a new dynasty - the Umayyads - was established.  The Umayyads would rule for roughly 90 years, and much of their state policy was conditioned by the Fitna, which included requiring all mosques to ritually "Curse" the name of Ali during Friday prayers for 60 years[17].  As a result, the Shia became a persecuted group with hidden followers scattered across the Islamic world, but they were mostly concentrated in Ali's old heartland of Iraq.  The tomb of Ali in the Iraqi city of Najaf would become a center for pilgrimage, and the legend of Ali as a true Islamic ruler who was noble, just and forgiving would be taken up by Sunni and Shia alike.  The weekly Cursing in the end only reinforced the pettiness and weakness of the Umayyads.

From his exile in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, Khomeini mounted a powerful propaganda campaign against the Shah’s government.

It may be tempting to imagine that if the Bush administration had known the power of the Karbala story, American troops would never have been ordered anywhere within a hundred miles of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, but that too is wishful thinking. As with Yazid in the seventh century, so with George Bush in the twenty-first, history is often made by the heedless.

You do not want to live in a country ruled by people who never have any doubts. To have doubts is human. A horse has no doubts, a grasshopper has no doubts, an ant has no doubts. But a human being stops to think sometimes, and when he thinks, he hears a voice asking quietly, 'Are you certain that you are right? You must be certain before you pull that trigger. You must be certain before you put your knife to that man's throat.' Would God have given us the power to question if he wanted us to behave like grasshoppers and ants? I am sure God takes pleasure in all the creatures of the world, but I am also sure that his greatest pleasure is a human being who puts his knife away because he is not sure, because a doubt has come into his mind.

An important event during the government of Haroon was the discovery of the hidden grave of Imam Ali (AS) in Najaf. The Shia Imams knew its hidden location and had kept it as a secret. They had only revealed it to their close companions. This location was hidden from the public for about 130 years until the government of Haroon. During this long period, the holy grave of Imam Ali was protected from the vengeful actions of the Khawarij and the Umayyads, who hated Imam Ali’s justice. For example, during the government of Hajjaj in Kufa, around 3,000 graves were exhumed by his order in an attempt to find and disrespect Imam Ali’s grave. At the time of Haroon, no serious threat was facing the unveiled grave of Imam Ali. The Khawarij ideology had been weakened and their activities were limited to the boundaries of the Islamic

The Basmati must be soaked in clean, cold water for thirty minutes before cooking. The rice is not added to the bowl of water, but instead the water is poured onto the rice. Each ten minutes, the rice is moved gently in the water with a spoon. After thirty minutes, the rice is drained in a chalow saffi, the utensil known as a colander in English. In fresh cold water the rice is boiled in a pot, allowing the level of the water to exceed the depth of the rice, but not too greatly. Once the water boils, the rice remains submerged for five minutes only, and must be stirred briefly twice in the space of those five minutes. The rice is again drained in the chalow saffi, and once drained, it is rinsed and allowed to stand in the chalow saffi for a short time. At this stage, if the Basmati has been treated without abuse, each grain will stand separate. In a dish or bowl suitable for use in an oven, and better that the dish should be pottery, a small amount of oil and butter is heated. The Basmati is poured onto the melted oil and butter and turned with a spoon while salt is added. The quantity of salt should not destroy the taste of the rice.

If doubt has brought you to this page, you probably need a little genealogical cheat-sheet: Kimiâ Sadr, the narrator. Leïli Sadr, Kimiâ’s oldest sister. Mina Sadr, the younger sister. Sara Sadr (née Tadjamol), Kimiâ’s mother. Darius Sadr, Kimiâ’s father. Born in 1925 in Qazvin, he is the fourth son of Mirza-Ali Sadr and Nour. The Sadr uncles (six official ones, plus one more): Uncle Number One, the eldest, prosecuting attorney in Tehran. Uncle Number Two (Saddeq), responsible for managing the family lands in Mazandaran and Qazvin. Keeper of the family history. Uncle Number Three, notary. Uncle Number Five, manager of an electrical appliance shop near the Grand Bazar. Uncle Number Six (Pirouz), professor of literature at the University of Tehran. Owner of one of the largest real estate agencies in the city. Abbas, Uncle Number Seven (in a way). Illegitimate son of Mirza-Ali and a Qazvin prostitute. Nour, paternal grandmother of Kimiâ, whom her six sons call Mother. Born a few minutes after her twin sister, she was the thirtieth child of Montazemolmolk, and the only one to inherit her father’s blue eyes, the same shade of blue as the Caspian Sea. She died in 1971, the day of Kimiâ’s birth. Mirza-Ali, paternal grandfather. Son and grandson of wealthy Qazvin merchants; he was the only one of the eleven children of Rokhnedin Khan and Monavar Banou to have turquoise eyes the color of the sky over Najaf, the city of his birth. He married Nour in 1911 in order to perpetuate a line of Sadrs with blue eyes. Emma Aslanian, maternal grandmother of Kimiâ and mother of Sara. Her parents, Anahide and Artavaz Aslanian, fled Turkey shortly before the Armenian genocide in 1915. The custom of reading coffee grounds was passed down to her from her grandmother Sévana. Montazemolmolk, paternal great-grandfather of Kimiâ and father of Nour. Feudal lord born in Mazandaran. Parvindokht, one of Montazemolmolk’s many daughters; sister of Nour. Kamran Shiravan, son of one of Mirza-Ali’s sisters and Ebrahim Shiravan. Cousin of Darius . . .