ABSTRACT
Neither a speech nor, strictly speaking, a declaration, this is an extract from Kashf al-Asrar, a book published by Imam Khomeini in 1943, soon after the forced abdication of Riza Shah. The book was written at the behest of Ayatullah Burujirdi in systematic refutation of an anti-religious tract that had appeared a few years earlier. Given its wide-ranging contents and those of the book it was designed to refute, as well as the currency of anti-religious literature in the period of Riza Shah, Kashf al-Asrar is largely political in nature and, in fact, constitutes his first public political statement. The extract given here is a fitting introduction to this section of our anthology because of the warning note on which it ends. Source: Kashf al-Asrar (n.p., 1943), pp. 221-224.
