BookRix

It is now more than forty years since these sermons were delivered, but throughout all these years, this great valuable work “The General pattern of Islamic thought In the Quran” remained unpublished! When the young Hojjat-al-Islam sayyed Ali Khamenei began these series of sermons at the half-built Imam Hassan Mojtaba Mosque in Mash-had for 28 sessions in the month of Ramadan 1394 (1975), the city of Mash-had acquired a different atmosphere: The sessions were held following noon-prayers in the heat of summertime when people usually went to their houses to rest for a couple of hours; yet, in a locality in this city many people , young and old, were on the way to attend Khamenei’s unique lectures; if you could look at the audience, you would notice that many people belonging to different social strata: Theology students, high school pupils, university students, shop- keepers, local residents, both men and women, especially young ones, all attended these sessions; medical students had managed to hire two buses to transfer them from the vicinity of the university to this mosque. In Khamenei’s lectures, everything is different from traditional, spiritual sermons: everyone is given one or two photocopied pages containing a summary of topics to be discussed in the session, the lecturer delivers his speech while standing g on a fasting day and after the end of the lecture, a fine-sounding Quran reciter chants the relevant Quranic verses discussed already. Khamenei’s sessions really resembles an educational class-room rather than a traditional preaching