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The Hibbert Assembly
Suggestions for a secondary school asssembly
We think of prisoners as people who have done something very wrong. Every day you can read in a newspaper, or see on the television news, reports of people being sent to prison for serious crimes.
But sometimes entirely innocent people are held as prisoners. This is usually for what we can class as political reasons. People are kidnapped and held as hostages because their captors think they can use them in their negotations for what they want. Not very long ago Brian Keenan, John McCarthy and Terry Waite were held imprisoned
Sometimes these political prisoners are treated very cruelly by their captors. They can be chained up in darkened rooms, given very little food, and deprived of anything to occupy their time - even books (though some of you may not regard that as punishment!).
Sometimes, too, political prisoners are tortured.
Today is a special day which marks the death in captivity of a political prisoner almost 300 years ago. He was Guru Arjan, a Sikh teacher and, like many other political prisoners, a good man, indeed a holy man. Guru Arjan was the fifth of the Sikh gurus, or spiritual teachers. He founded a great Sikh temple in Amritsar and he collected with writings of earlier gurus to create the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. Guru Arjan believed in many of the things we believe in today, like equality, and freedom of speech and worship. But the Moghul, the ruler of the state where Guru Arjan lived, thought that the Guru's ideas were a threat to his country, which had a strict caste system where people were divided into social classes.
So Guru Arjan was imprisoned and tortured. He was compelled to sit on a metal platform above a great fire. Then he was thrown into boiling water. He showed great courage in bearing the terrible pain calmly, turning his thoughts to God instead of to his suffering.
And so Guru Arjan became the first Sikh martyr, dying for his beliefs. And Sikhs commemorate his death today.
(Teachers may then choose to read the Sikh prayer on how to bear the unbearable, found amongst our hymns and other worship material)

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