I have a few Islamic clerics, mullahs, on my list of Facebook friends. They are fun to be connected to. Physically, their distinguishing features are a black or white turban immaculately wrapped around their head and a long beard they call mahasen, nice qualities. Sometimes during a conversation, they will move their turbans up or down to draw attention to themselves, or to signify their control of the situation, or simply to scratch their consecrated heads. Their signature mental predisposition is always to rationalize and offer a proof for their often illogical viewpoints. Arguing with mullahs online or offline is like driving a car on a one way street; you can go only one way, theirs. You can’t, obviously, win an argument about their irrational religious claims if you want to make sense. Enslaved to defunct ideas, these men sift through medieval texts to find justification for their argument. And as soon as they pull a hadith from out of their long sleeves, everyone has to shut up and accept the underlying idea no matter how absurd it might be. A hadith is nothing more than an Arabic sentence, supposedly an utterance made by the prophet Muhammad or one of his earlier successors that has been passed on from one generation to the next. A hadith to Mullahs is like a hammer to carpenters. They use it to beat down anything that looks like a nail.
Although some of them are authentic, many hadiths have been fabricated for various reasons over many centuries since the advent of Islam. Often they are used to manipulate naïve believers to get them to behave the way the mullahs want them to. They are appealing, especially to ordinary Iranian adherents, simply because they are in written in Arabic, the language of God and heaven. Ordinary adherents don’t understand the meaning of the hadiths but they are supposed to be mesmerized by the soothing chanted rhythm of them especially when intoned by articulate mullahs. Even if the underlying idea defies commonsense, once it is sanctioned by a hadith, believers must accept it and not dare to challenge its authenticity and eternal appositeness. Some Mullahs are so obsessed with Arabic, the language of Islam, that they have made themselves even more Arab than the Arabs, no offense intended. In the following clip, read the words of this blackhead turbanless Mullah who claims that Arabic is the official language of heaven and Ajami is the only language spoken in hell, even by the Arabs who are condemned there!
Like the gold diggers of the past, Mullahs painstakingly sift through medieval Islamic texts in order to muster validation for their often appalling ideology or to find excuses for their transgressions. In their search for justifications, they frequently make reference to the deeds and the theological preaching of prominent Islamic scholars. It is really hard to fathom why they dig so deeply into the medieval Islamic texts, often cynically, in search of ambiguities and loopholes that lend support to things that are incompatible with the core moral values that constitute the essence of human decency in the 21st century. Watch this clip in which this well-known Mullah claiming that Qammeh Zani
— the Shia Muslim practice of striking the head with a sword to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hosseion—is a highly recommended ritual for all Muslims and is a necessary requirement to graduate from Islamic school!
Some of these mullahs fancy themselves as similar to the bearded middle-aged man featured in the Dos Equis beer TV commercials and dubbed the most interesting man in the world.
In your mind’s eye, imagine the most interesting man in the world with a turban on. The mullahs present themselves to their adherents in a similar fashion. They are extra-ordinary. They are all-knowing. Pearls of wisdom drop from their lips. And because of their sanctity, they will be surrounded by beautiful virgins. They don’t get thirsty; however, they are so exceptional that when they do, they drink only from the well of Zamam, which, according to Islamic belief, is a miraculously generated source of water from God. Nothing else is good enough for them and no one is as righteous as they are.
To mullah friends on Facebook I say, come down from the lofty pedestals you put yourselves on before you end up like Humpty Dumpty who had a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.
