Jihad al-Akbar, The Greatest Jihad Combat with the Self

BOOK ID

Author(s): Imam Khomeini

Translator(s): Dr. Muhammad Legenhausen Azim Sarvdalir

Publisher(s): The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works

Category: Spirituality

Topic Tags: Greatest Jihad Spiritual Struggle Akhlaq

Featured Category: Spirituality

point

The internal struggle. Recommendations for religious students and seminaries. Importance of purifying the soul. Knowledge and faith. Includes advice on how to benefit from the blessed month of Ramadhan and the fasting and devotion therein.

Foreword

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

Human being is the most wonderful and complex creation of God, a creature who, aside from natural and animal instincts and physical reactions, has spiritual disposition and personality, which has made him excel over other living creatures; a being who thinks, chooses, and through rational planning and physical endeavor, he tries to remove the obstacles along the pursuit for a better living.

Along with this venture, he makes his life’s history and increases the learning which he has inherited from his predecessors and he paves the way for the future generation to have a more rapid development, more extended dominance over the nature, and further ingenuity in unraveling the unknown and mysteries of creation.

Yet, it is lamentable to note that amidst man’s endeavors to attain his desires and yearnings, and the hullabaloo of man’s encounter with the nature, an ever more precious truth has been consigned in the limbo of oblivion. That truth is the spirit and essence of man’s personality. In other words, it is the “man’s primordial self”, self-refinement

p: 1