Al-Bashaer High School in Baalbek honoured its girls who had reached the age of religious obligation at a large ceremony held in the school's ceremonies hall, under the patronage of Allama Sayyed Ali Fadlallah and in the presence of the school's director Hajjeh Itidal Al-Jamal, the director of the Al-Mabarrat Doha educational and care complex Sheikh Fouad Khreis, the supervising director of Al-Mabarrat's schools in the central Bekaa Hajj Ibrahim Al-Saeed, and the families of the girls.
The ceremony began with verses from the Holy Quran, then the Lebanese national anthem, after which the school's Zahraat presented a set of anthems inspired by the occasion. Allama Fadlallah then delivered a speech in which he expressed at the outset his thanks, his pride and his happiness at this gathering brimming with purity, serenity, clarity and love.
His Eminence pointed to the value God entrusted to human beings - the value of religious obligation and of bearing responsibility, which the heavens, the earth and the mountains with all their might were unable to bear, and which our girls have borne with every firmness, confidence, awareness, pride and dignity, for they have taken up wearing the hijab because it is obedience to God and an obligation from Him.
His Eminence spoke of the standing of girls in Islam, which honoured them and gave them their freedom and their self-confidence, holding that no society can be built or advance except when we work on preparing our girls and qualifying them to bear this responsibility - and then we will be able to make a better future capable of facing the challenges and crises buffeting our reality.
His Eminence affirmed the necessity of working to build and develop our girls' capacities and to raise their level, and of their carrying out their mission-driven role in raising aware generations open to their great causes, and their social role in building society and contributing to lifting it towards what is better.
His Eminence continued: We are here at this celebration to affirm that our girls have begun the journey of responsibility in this life. Our role is to make them feel their presence, their dignity and their honour, and to work on qualifying them politically, socially, culturally and educationally - for we cannot see a society that is aware at the religious, social, political and educational level if there is no aware mother who raises her children on these aspects. He held that it is their right to come forward for positions
of responsibility in parliament, in ministerial office and elsewhere, because they possess the competence and the capacity to succeed where others have failed..
His Eminence called on the girls to hold fast to mission-driven, moral and humane values and to work to confront everyone who seeks to destroy these noble values, to invade our minds, our thoughts and our values and to divert us from them - especially in the face of the continuing attack on the hijab and on girls to prevent them from wearing it under many pretexts and sayings.
His Eminence held that the hijab is not merely this piece of cloth but a banner of a girl's humanity and her freedom, and an expression of commitment to a divine duty whose aim is to preserve dignity, chastity, freedom, faith and humanity.
In closing, His Eminence condemned the renewed phenomenon of insults to the Messenger of God (peace be upon him), which has come to recur in more than one country, expressing his fear that it may be part of a plan aimed at undermining Islam and distorting the image of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) - the latest being in India. He called for the necessity of issuing a binding international law criminalizing any insult to all the prophets, and stressed that Muslims should be aware of the aims behind these insults so as not to fall into the trap of those who seek to provoke them and drag them into reactions that harm their image and their presence in the countries where they live…
His Eminence also patronized the festival of excellence and creativity organized by the school in honour of its students who won first places in the competitions in which they took part.
