Significance of Culture

Nayyereh Towhidi

About culture, all of us have for sure heard and read many points all of which might somehow deserve detailed discussions, since culture is inseparable from our lives as human beings and more particularly from our lives as Muslims. We all know that a society enjoying a culture of honesty, integrity and piety thrives and advances in all dimensions and phases of human life, while the one in which impious, materialistic, profiteering and hypocritical trends and forces prevail suffers innumerable ills and vices and can in no way be regarded as a safe and secure environment.

Undoubtedly, today more than ever before, human beings need to strive towards promoting a morality-based culture, since with immoral cultures and conducts being spread through the secular, imperialistic mass media the world over, the peace of human societies and safety and happiness of their individual members are being seriously threatened.

To quote the esteemed leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei: “Culture is more significant than economy, since culture is as the air we breathe.” Now, can today’s humanity enjoy physical and spiritual health and happiness while the air they breathe is markedly polluted at the dishonest hands of the agents of colonialists  who present false, distorted pictures of realities constantly, who attack Divine values and trends through evil, misguiding propaganda? Is it not a tragedy for the world of humanity that certain mass media constantly present the most brutal genocides committed  by the Zionists as undeniable rights of the Israeli state and likewise call the Daeshi Takfiri terrorists “Islamic groups”, while all Muslim religious leaders, both Sunni and Shiite have declared that such criminal groups have nothing to do with Islam and that it is the Zionists who have formed all such murderous groups to defame Islam and to create discord among Muslims? Under such critical conditions, it is certainly our duty to try to nullify the ominous plots of the enemies of God by all means possible, including through informing the others of the facts. Of course, by the grace of Allah, The One and Only God both Muslims and non-Muslims in various countries of the world are being awakened to the fact that Zionists are anti-human murderers and that the oppressed Palestinians should be defended and supported. These are evidently related to duties the Divinely-inspired culture presented to human beings through Divine Messengers (AS) and through their rightful heirs and followers. Imam Ali (AS) has commanded his followers to “be always defendants of the oppressed and hostile towards the oppressors.”