Mid Jumada al-Awwal — corresponding to Sunday, October 25, 2026
“Let there be among you a community inviting to good, enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong — and it is they who are the successful.” (Surah Ali ‘Imran, 3:104)
Every civilization eventually asks: who is responsible when things go wrong? The Qur’an’s answer is this verse. Not the ruler alone, not the scholar alone — a community, standing guard over good itself. Amr bil-ma’ruf wa nahy anil-munkar — enjoining right and forbidding wrong — is the immune system of the ummah; the traditions of the Ahlul Bayt call it the pillar by which all the other obligations are established, the prayer and the fast included. When it functions, correction flows through the body politic like blood. When it dies, the surface may stay pious while the substance rots: prayers in the mosques, injustice on the thrones.
The Verse That Explains Karbala
If you want to know what this verse looks like when it is the only thing left, look at Karbala. When Imam Husayn (peace be upon him) left Madina refusing allegiance to Yazid, he wrote his reason into his testament to his brother Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya — and it is a commentary on 3:104:
“I have not risen out of exuberance, or arrogance, or corruption, or oppression. I have risen only to seek reform in the ummah of my grandfather. I wish to enjoin what is good and forbid what is evil, and to follow the way of my grandfather and my father, Ali ibn Abi Talib.”
Note what the Imam did not say. Not conquest, not the throne — reform. The state had made evil official and good dangerous; in such a time, the verse’s duty could no longer be performed with the tongue alone. So the Imam performed it with everything: his family, his companions, his own blood. Ashura is amr bil-ma’ruf at its maximum price — proof that the duty does not lapse when it becomes expensive; that is precisely when it matters.
The Ethics of the Duty
The school of the Ahlul Bayt hedged this obligation with wisdom, and the details matter. It begins with the heart’s refusal of wrong, rises to the word, and only then to the hand — each stage governed by knowledge and by the likelihood of benefit. Its master practitioners were never harsh: the commentators recount how Imam Hasan and Imam Husayn, as boys, corrected an old man’s faulty ablution not by rebuke but by performing wudhu before him and asking him to judge between theirs — and the man, weeping, corrected himself. Enjoining good is a rescue, not a humiliation; its aim is the brother saved, not the ego satisfied.
And it begins at home, with the self: “Do you enjoin righteousness upon people and forget yourselves, while you recite the Book?” (2:44).
“And It Is They Who Are the Successful”
The verse ends by naming this community al-muflihun — the successful, the ones who break through. By every worldly metric, the seventy-two of Karbala failed and the thirty thousand succeeded. Fourteen centuries have reversed the ledger beyond appeal. Success, in the Qur’an’s dictionary, belongs to those who kept good alive — at a word’s cost when a word sufficed, at life’s cost when it did not.
Tonight, take the smallest share of the inheritance: one gentle truth spoken where silence was easier, one wrong named in your own conduct first. That is the community the verse commands into being — and Husayn is forever its Imam.
References (al-islam.org):
