Al-Mabarrat Charitable Association held an annual iftar at Imam Ali Bin Abi Talib School and Mabarrat in Maaroub, in the presence of social, party, educational and municipal figures, religious scholars and a large crowd of guests from most of the districts of the south.
The celebration opened with a speech by the director of relations and sponsorship at Al-Mabarrat Jaafar Akil, in which he thanked the supporters of Al-Mabarrat's journey. He said: “Al-Mabarrat has contributed and still contributes to achieving social stability through its institutions, which comprise more than five thousand employees. This year it embraces four thousand two hundred orphans, and thousands of orphans have graduated since its launch; it also embraces six hundred and forty people with disabilities, one thousand four hundred people with learning difficulties and two hundred elderly people. Al-Mabarrat provides social and health assistance through health and social centres.”
Allama Sayyed Jaafar Fadlallah delivered a speech in which he said: “God Almighty summed up the human equation in His words: ‘Indeed I am going to create a human being from clay; and when I have proportioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, fall down to him in prostration.' Here the meaning of humanity contained the human, material, clay dimension - in the expression of the verse - and the spiritual dimension, which is a breath of the spirit of God. The spiritual side represents the essence, while as for the clay or material side, its needs represent the adornment, which is part of the essentials of life and by which life is set straight and develops.”
He added: “God willed that the human being should not disown any of his dimensions: he should not be absorbed in spiritualities away from the needs of the body and of matter, nor absorbed in bodily pleasures away from the spirit. This balance is what achieves the deep meaning of the human being's humanity. To strengthen the spiritual side, Islam did not confine itself to acts of worship; rather there are acts of worship in the broader sense, the most important of which is giving, which expels from a person's soul the states of selfishness, agitation and self-interest imposed by the two instincts of love of life and of possession. God willed that the human being should remain in control of the movement of pleasures, appetites and instincts, so that he should not expose himself before the satanic powers. Giving is an educative behaviour that must be constant and must spring from a person's natural disposition, so that a person remains in a state of constantly cleansing his soul and his essence of everything that clings to it and covers it of the film of material life.”
He pointed out that “giving is what reflects this spiritual and human essence in the humanity of the other, when a person interacts with the pains of the deprived, the tormented and the displaced, without denominational, sectarian, ethnic or similar discrimination; and whoever does not interact with all of that points to a problem in the radiance of this spiritual and human essence within him”.
He concluded: “We must insist on the human symbolism of giving when forces press so as to frighten us away from giving and to give us a complex about interacting with the human being's tragedies. This kind of challenge represents an aggression against our humanity from within, and this is what drives us to strengthen the forces of confrontation by insisting on giving even more - not only the giving of money, but the varied giving of every energy a person is able to expend for whoever needs it, proceeding from his sense of responsibility for putting the blessings God bestows on the human being in motion along the line of the needs of the human being and of life.”
