Mockery of Religion or Lament of Knowledge?

«What is the difference between the atonement of one who deliberately breaks their fast by drinking water and one who does so by eating dirt?» 1) «The former must give one mudd of food to a poor person for each day, and the latter must feed sixty poor people for each day.» 2) «The former does not need to make up the fast, and the latter must both make it up and pay atonement.» 3) «The former is free to choose the type of atonement, and the latter must pay the combined atonement.» 4) «The former must fast for two months, and the latter must feed sixty poor people.»

*** What you read above is the last question out of twenty-five under the heading «Islamic Culture and Knowledge» (row number 75), which was posed this very year — on the morning of Thursday, 15 Tir 1396 — in the general university entrance exam for the «Mathematics and Technical Sciences experimental group» [National University Entrance Exam — 1396]. And this phrase, attributed to «Imam Khomeini (RA),» is inscribed in the upper right-hand corner of the first page of booklet number 1 containing those questions: «If the university is reformed, the country will be reformed.» The outward appearance suggests that, in the view of the designers of these questions — who are the managers and planners of the country's educational system and the custodians overseeing the soundness and health of that system — the reformation of the university is contingent upon the student, before entering the sacred precinct of the university, being familiar with a minimum of Islamic culture and knowledge, and these questions are a representation of that minimum. That I said «minimum» is based on the observation that the questions were designed for the «Mathematics and Technical Sciences experimental group» and not, for example, for a group that intends to delve deeply into Islamic sciences and be considered a specialist and authority in these sciences. So let us return to the question whose text we placed at the beginning of the article: The question is based on the assumption that it is the month of Ramadan and a Muslim person, at a normal body temperature of 37 degrees, who is physically in perfect health, decides to deliberately break their fast. This esteemed person has a plate of dirt and a bowl of water before them and wants to break the obligatory fast by consuming one of them, and since, while committing the sin of breaking the fast, they are both bound by the rulings of the Sharia and possess a calculating mind, they want to see which is more economical: to drink the water first and then eat the dirt? Or conversely, to break the fast by eating a handful of dirt and then down the bowl of water? Committing which of the two forms of sin will be easier and more economical for them? A student confronted with such a problem should, by all accounts, doubt the sanity of such a person; someone who knowingly and deliberately wants to eat dirt in order to attain the great honor of breaking the fast! Such a person is certainly insane, and the insane are exempt from religious obligation. The Sharia is for the sane, not for the insane. Yes, that hypothetical person, that wretched sinner, must be called insane; but what should we call those who frame such issues under the name of «Islamic Culture and Knowledge» and make it a condition for teenagers' entry into the university?

When the pen reached this point, O man of wisdom, The blood within my breast began to boil. For a heavenly voice said to my soul's ear, You are more foolish than that one, O contemptible one! You cherished the capital of a lifetime, Come now, bring forth what you have gained from it! You gave your life and received, O sorrowful one, Nothing but a notebook full of fantasies and conjectures. If this is knowledge, then leave it and go; A hundred camels of such knowledge are not worth two barleycorns to me.

These verses are not mine; they are from the learned jurist and authority, the Allamah of the jurists, Mullah Ahmad Naraqi, author of the famous Masnavi «Taqdis.» He complains that the «science of jurisprudence of rulings» has fallen prey to fantasies and has turned into an «obstacle» and a barrier on the path to perfection. Why do they waste the time and lives of seminary students by posing such issues?

If a piece of dung flies from a goat's rump, And blinds the eye of a Hormuzi man thereby, Is that blood-money owed by the goat's owner, Or is the blood-money owed by the master Hormuz? If the Anqa falls from Mount Qaf into a well, How many buckets will you draw from it, if you are aware? If menstrual blood comes from a woman's ear, What is the ruling on that, tell me, O Abu'l-Hasan? If a woman becomes pregnant by a jinn, What is her inheritance from the jinn, O you of a hundred hearts? This is error, error upon error, To spend one's life in this manner.

Let us recall the era of Naraqi, when the dominion of jurisprudence extended over all spheres of people's lives, and the jurist deemed it incumbent upon himself, in the heat and fervor of disputations and the splitting of hairs, to have an answer even for the most irrational and unrealistic hypotheticals. Of this sort is the question of the inheritance of a woman who has lain with a jinn and become pregnant by him, or the ruling on the menstrual blood of a woman that issues not from the natural passage but from the hole of her ear, in the verses quoted from Naraqi, or the multitude of other questions of the same ilk that appear in the famous Alfiyya of Hujjat al-Islam Nayyir Tabrizi—that macaronic masterpiece in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic:

They have differed over the excreta of the jinn, Most of the people of art have deemed it pure. An inclination towards impurity appears From Ibn Yahya and the jurist of the five. And the dancing of the flea in the trousers Is forbidden in my view, without any doubt. And the blaring of the bathhouse horns at dawn Is not considered singing, according to the preferred opinion. And does the braying of the Sultan [al-Dhakirin] cause harm? There are two opinions regarding [whether it falls under] singing in dissimulation. One group said it is to be annexed [to singing], And the truth, in my view, is that it is like the horn.

If the learned Naraqi asks about the ruling on the inheritance of a woman who has married one of the jinn, Hujjat al-Islam Nayyir asks about the purity or impurity of jinn excrement! Dancing is, of course, not permissible for a human, but that flea which has fallen into the trousers of a seminary student may leap up and dance joyfully. The horn of the bathhouse that sounds at dawn (used to sound) is not considered singing and is permitted; but what of the Sultan al-Dhakirin—the famous elegist of the age—who brays? Can his voice be considered of the same type as the sound of the bathhouse horn, and can the ruling for the two be joined together? The entirety of Hujjat al-Islam's Mathnawi "Faswat al-Fasil" is full of this sharp, biting satire, brimming with a mocking, caustic, and fearless tone. Naraqi and Nayyir both lived in the nineteenth century and could not tolerate the wasting of a lifetime on such absurdities; why do the jurists of the computer and electronics age not speak out and allow these kinds of issues to be presented as "Islamic culture and teachings," making the young generation more averse to religion and knowledge than they already are?

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Mockery of Religion or Lament of Knowledge?

Source: Ettela'at - Monday, 17 July 2017

Author: Mohammad Ali Movahed

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