notifications_active Weekly Meshkat-e Noor Session: Thursdays at 20:30 at Haj Reza Mosque
Dear teacher, may we wish for the death of God’s oppressive servants—Muslim or non-Muslim—whose victims among the Muslims are not safe from their harm? Or are they also God’s servants, sent by God Himself to carry out a mission on earth, and will God take them from this world when He so wills?
This response considers whether one may pray for the death of God’s oppressive servants. It explains that, for those who hold no hope of being guided and whose continued existence brings nothing but sin and corruption, praying for their death may itself be a special act of mercy. Supplication 27 of al-Ṣaḥīfa al-Sajjādiyya offers a beautiful model for prayers concerning oppressors.
Those for whom there is no hope of guidance, and whose continued existence yields nothing but the production of wickedness and corruption, are shown a special kindness when death is sought for them, for the longer they live, the heavier grows the file of their vileness and the more intense their punishment becomes.
The twenty-seventh supplication of al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya is a beautiful model for ordering and structuring our supplications concerning the oppressors.
A portion of the supplication:
... O God, through this supplication shatter their adversary and cut short the claw of the enemy from their bodies, and cast division between the enemies and their weapons, and break the bond of their hearts, and bring about a great distance between them and their provisions and sustenance, and leave them wandering and bewildered on the road, and cause them to lose their way. O God, block the path of aid to their enemies and diminish their number, and fill their hearts with terror, and cut short their hands from aggression, and bridle their tongues from speech, and cause their defeat to become a cause of dispersal and a lesson for those who follow after them, and when You cast them down in abasement, let no army-raising coveter thereafter desire to contend with us.
O God, make their women barren of childbearing and dry up the loins of their men and cut off the offspring of their cattle and beasts. Command not their sky to drop a single drop upon them, and command not their earth to grow a single plant....
O God, cause this supplication to encompass all Your enemies in the regions of the lands: the Indians and the Romans and the Turks and the Khazars and the Abyssinians and the people of Nubia and Zanzibar and the Saqaliba and the Daylamites and the other polytheist nations whose names and descriptions no one knows, but whom You Yourself have numbered by Your knowledge and over whom You watch by Your power.
O God, occupy the polytheists with one another so that they desist from aggression against the lands of the Muslims, and diminish their number so that they do not diminish the number of the Muslims.
Cast division among them so that they cannot unite against the Muslims.
O Lord, remove tranquillity from their hearts and strength from their bodies, and sweep every thought of guile and treachery from their hearts. In the hour of battle with our men, make their hands and feet weak and cast fear into their hearts so that they are powerless to fight and grapple with the warriors of Islam. Send against them an army of Your angels together with Your wrath and punishment, as You sent at the Battle of Badr, that You may sever the vein of their life and blot out their rank and glory and scatter their gathering.
O God, taint their waters with plague and mix their food with diseases, and swallow up their cities in the earth, and rain stones of affliction one after another upon their land, and afflict it with years of famine, and place their provisions and sustenance in the most rainless and driest and most distant of lands, and block the refuges of the earth against them, and afflict them with unending hunger and painful illness.
O Lord, every warrior among the followers of Your religion who rises to fight them, and every struggler among the followers of Your Sunnah who wages jihad against them so that Your religion may be more exalted and Your party more powerful and Your share more abundant—then make easy for him whatever he wills and prepare the means of his affair and take upon Yourself to grant him victory. O Lord, grant him agreeable helpers and make his back firm and bestow upon him abundant provision and let him enjoy cheerfulness and gladness, and quench in his heart the fire of his longing for family and homeland, and shelter him from the grief of his loneliness, and erase from his mind the remembrance of wife and children.