Statement by the Religious Leader Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim on the Demand for the Release of Prisoners
In the Name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful
The free and noble people of Bahrain call for the release of their honorable sons and the restoration of their unjustly stolen freedom. In doing so, they are merely demanding their rightful share — their own and their sons’ right — to freedom, dignity, and honor, without any favor, humiliation, degradation, or begging, and without relinquishing their legitimate, legal, human, religious, and full citizenship rights.
The issue is not a request for freedom as a charity offered by some benefactor or as a favor from anyone. It is a demand for a freedom that has long been obstructed and usurped — a great divine gift and a high honor for humanity, which no one has the authority to alter except in accordance with a clear ruling from the sacred, just, divine law. Those imprisoned in Bahrain were placed there because of their call for justice, their rejection of oppression, and their commitment to enjoining good and forbidding evil.
No society can be noble, prosperous, dignified, secure, or content if the call for rights disappears and the movement of enjoining good and forbidding evil dies out.
It must also be recalled that the reform movement has always been accompanied by a call for peacefulness throughout its course, despite the official response marked by extreme force and brutality — resulting in the loss of lives, the desecration of sanctities, the confiscation of freedoms, and other grave consequences.
Isa Ahmed Qassim
19 Rabi‘ al-Thani 1447 AH
12 October 2025
