Migrating to the Wilayah of God

Wilayah, Part 6

European historians call the second, third and fourth Islamic centuries a golden age. This session asks who it actually served.

Hijrah — migration for God's sake — is presented as the natural consequence of everything argued so far about wilayah: living under a rival authority creates an obligation to escape it. Can someone live as a genuinely faithful Muslim while at the disposal of an authority God has not sanctioned?

The answer is tested against history. Under Umayyad and Abbasid rule, the Islamic world translated, built and discovered at a pace later admired by European historians. But the session argues this achievement, without a just ruler at its centre, still failed the people it was built on — the same class divisions, the same hunger beside the same wealth, that mark any age. Against it, the session sets those who stayed loyal instead: Mu'alla ibn Khunays, hanged in the marketplace for his closeness to Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, peace be upon him; and Yahya ibn Zayd, eighteen when he was killed in the mountains of Khurasan.

If the golden age served the wrong authority, what would migration to the right one actually look like?

What the evening covers

The river and the net. Two images for being carried along by an authority you never consented to, and why the illusion of choice is not choice.
The golden age, reconsidered. Why scientific and literary triumph under an unjust ruler is judged here as a loss dressed as a legacy.
The price of loyalty. The companions of the Imams named here, tortured or executed for refusing to abandon them.
Migration corrected. Why hijrah is read as resistance where you stand, not flight — treating it as an excuse to run is called a grave error.