From the will of the Khalil of our revolution

 Mujahid al-Suraymi — Sana’a

Khalil of our revolution has departed.

That free man has gone; and is there any freedom except you, O Khalil al-ʿUmari? You were the voice of the voiceless.

You were truthful when you spoke, trustworthy when you counseled.

You were an army in the battle of the word alone; you fought the enemies and the spears of the vile stabbed you in the back—not for anything but because you lived for the cause, believed in the revolution, and worked under the banner of its leader—may God preserve him!

O rider who storms upon time, O extension of the campaign for truth in thought and speech, O product of rejecting falsehood, O one who leads the free toward construction and development, O source of awareness and beacon of moral insight; you have always been steadfast like solid mountains, confronting traitors, opposing the narrative of invading aggressors, and confronting corruption and the corrupt.

Your pen is the ascension of every soul that longs to reach the tree of glory—honor, dignity, fame, strength, sovereignty, and independence. Your words are ammunition in the satchel of the leader of the revolution; they are never fired except with consciousness, and they only fell the murderous criminals—killers of souls and ideas, killers of hopes and ambitions—the criminals who wronged the martyrs and the steadfast, squanderers of sacrifices and those deviating from the straight path.

Those vile ones, whenever they see you, they cast before you the utmost armies of arrogance and Zionism, and the retinue of treacherous Bedouin slaves; they bound your hands with their follies, tied your tongue with their childishness, and placed obstacles before you; their ideas are counterfeit and their horizons barren; if they speak, it is delirium what they say; if they act, oh how much they destroy! Their rule is injustice and their faith mere pretense; their emigrants like my brother (ʿAdi) al-Quraishi; their best among them like my brother (Tim); their supporters a Yemeni named Madani; but like (Abu ʿAmir the apostate) one takes what is not his by accounts from liars who inflated his standing by what they claimed for his son (Hanẓala).

They are the vile in whose literature—as you once said—“terms have departed from their original meanings to novel senses that became entwined in the greedy designs of the caverns and then grew from the obsessions of the tyrants. The (traitor) and the (inciter) became the one who does not applaud and beat the drum for their superiors. As for the one who criticizes their errors or complains of their sins, he is labeled an agent and a spy and a mercenary and hired — and so on. When the homeland is reduced to a (village) and the people are confined to a (supervisor), these terms no longer relate to the homeland, the people, or the stance toward the invader and external enemy, but to the stance toward the sacred village and the great supervisor.”

You knew they are not a novelty of the age; rather, they represent a natural continuation of an old current that formed in the name of truth to destroy it from within. A current whose major station was the (Saqifah), through which it annihilated the prophetic message and replaced it with a religion of falsehood and superstition—a religion of domestication, dilution, subjugation, and enslavement; a religion of servitude, oppression and injustice; a religion with no place for common people, a religion of merchants, priests and pharaohs; a religion that uses God, the Qur’an, prophethood and all forms of worship as a means to cement the pillars of classism, regionalism and tribalism; a religion that places every (Mughayrah ibn Shuʿbah) above every (Ammar ibn Yasir) and makes every (Marwan ibn al-Hakam) ruler over every (Abu Dharr). Its beginning is (Abu Sufyan) and its end a thousand (Abu… Abu…).

A religion of eliminating the path of (Ali), and extinguishing the movement of (Husayn). A religion of assassinating every (Malik) and preserving every (Ashʿath ibn Qays). There is nothing new—only that the Saqifah became many saqifahs.

Therefore was your testament:
“We live in a phase that mirrors the period between (Uqbat Tabuk) and (Khamis al-Raziya).

And if the (grandson) does not rise swiftly and hasten to topple the (two heads) before they say, ‘Let him be for he shall be abandoned,’ the atmosphere will clear for them even from (Abu Dharr) and (Ammar) and (al-Miqdad) and (Salman) soon. And it is not hidden from the perceptive that (Saleem) stands ready to pledge allegiance to whoever buys it, and no obstacle will bar the (two heads)—neither (Saʿd) nor (Saqifah).

But it is only days or weeks before they flee the (city) terrified, and the hoofs of the new (Umayyad) horsemen trample everyone, alleys rot with the corpses of innocents, and chaos rules for an age.

O God, I have conveyed—O God bear witness.”**