If you are looking for Karbala, Yazid, Hussein…

Contemporary civilization, which the late Muhammad Qutb called the Jahiliyyah of the 20th Century and Mehmet Akif called "the monster with one tooth left," has manifested itself, within the ornate shop windows of contemporaneity, modernity and scientificness, with more blood, death, far baser savagery and crimes against humanity than has been seen in the sum of world history.

It was also to be called humanism, that is, a doctrine of humaneness, that civilization. What, one wonders, would have happened had there been no humanism?

As we make our way through the 21st century, we are being accustomed, step by step, to the fact that, in parallel with the further consolidation and settling of that civilization's values, far more savagery and far more hostility to humanity is taking place.

Contemporary Western civilization closed the 20th century with its genocide performance in Rwanda and Bosnia.

It entered the 21st century with its scientific-technological and cinematographic savagery and massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It entered Iraq under the pretext of bringing democracy and fighting international terrorism. In the 10 years it continued its occupation, let alone democracy, it did not leave Iraq even a ground for a sustainable government able to perform its most basic functions. The result is the savage killing of millions of civilians, the deportation of tens of millions of people, systematic and inhuman vile torture inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people, human dignity trampled underfoot, and, beyond all of these, the spread of local or international terror hundreds of times wider than before.

The images from the Abu Ghraib prison are sufficiently clear proof that neither the US nor the Western world has any value to give this world.

A country that carries that potential for savagery, however powerful it may be, is never a great country, and cannot possibly be one in this state.

In fact, in a world in which Aleppo is happening today, this is entirely the real cause of the problem. That the countries that look powerful are never great.

That fierce gangs wholly devoid of human values are normally in a position to govern the world's most powerful countries.

That those who have no human value whatsoever possess these colossal powers that can produce nothing but death and massacres is the world's greatest misfortune.

However many songs we sing with the line "A bandit cannot be ruler of the world," the bandit has become ruler of the world.

The Middle East's having come to its present state stems only from the bandit's dominating the world. Even the bandit has a value he observes at some point, a code, a law. Today the indifference the world's powerful states show in protecting, observing or establishing even a simple human value marks the bottom of exhaustion. The "place where words end," to which we should never have given credit, is unfortunately where we have arrived.

The savagery to which the innocent children, brave youths and free women of Aleppo are subjected already says everything it has to say: "Hasbunallah wa ni'mal wakeel, ni'mal Mawla wa ni'man naseer."

In Aleppo the Assad-Iran-Russia alliance, with the crowds it has gathered, with its high-technology weapons and its aircraft, displays not its power but its performance in humiliating humanity against innocent people.

Yet despite all the machinery of killing, destruction and rape, they cannot subdue the free, noble people of Aleppo.

They kill but cannot make them give up.

They torture but cannot get the words they want.

The children who are barely evacuated leave Aleppo saying

"when I grow up I will come to rescue it."

Iran's Shiite militias, who have made Karbala literature, made the martyrdom of Karbala a myth of birth, and made Hazrat Hussein an object of worship, with every savagery they sign slaughter thousands of Husseins far more cruelly than Yazid, and drown thousands of Moseses far more basely and savagely than Pharaoh.

All that is left is for them to idolize Hazrat Hussein, from whom they have strayed leagues and leagues.

Let those who wonder about Yazid and Karbala look at Aleppo. If the Yazids think they are close to Hussein with the "Ya Hussein" bandages they stick on their foreheads, they are badly deceived. Hussein was never among the oppressors.

Hazrat Hussein was never even among those who stand by as spectators to oppressors who have so left their humanity that not a hair stirs on them as they slaughter children.

Did Hussein not rise up so that innocent children would never again be cruelly killed? Did he not stand up against Yazid to show that one cannot prosper through oppression?

By putting the "Ya Hussein" bandage on the foreheads of that herd of killers you have gathered and armed, driven onto the field and turned into machines of death and rape, whom will you deceive, Hussein, or Allah, who is also the Lord of Hussein?

By God, if you had even the slightest share in Hussein's path, the only place you could find him would be in the hearts of the children massacred under those barrel bombs.

Perhaps you can find him on the tongue of the one who recites Surah al-Balad in place of anesthesia. By contrast, defending Assad, what you will find is nothing but the vengeance of that oppressed child dragging you to curse and to the bottom of hell.

Iran too will of course be asked, the question to be put to that child: "O child, for what sin of yours were you killed?"