Imagine that one day someone passed a law that said, “As of last week, there can be no more laws passed!”
This act itself would have to be considered an act of law if it was followed, and in so doing, it would contradict its own ruling, since it came after the cut off time for the passage of law. This is the sort of deficiency of commonsense that has gone relatively unchallenged in the Ummah until the modern age…
Perhaps it is not so much that it has gone unchallenged as it is something that would – in former times – provoke a death sentence from the dissidents who stepped up and challenged the illogical system.
Within the Shi`a Muslim (or more accurately, Mutaslim) world there is a similar, yet slightly different, problem; this problem is the Usuli system of Marja`iyyah. In the Marja` system, a person attends a Hawza institution until they have learned to parrot their scholastic predecessors to such a point that these predecessors confer an ijazah – a diploma of sorts – upon them that says now they are able to pass fataawat on subjects as mujtaahidun.
The trouble is that in order to get this ijazah, they must tow the “party” lines. They are not going to get very far if they are challenging the status quo, or engaging their teachers, or the so-called `ulema’ about truly critical issues. They thus have two options: assimilate or get kicked out of the Hawza academy.
This zero-sum game may be conceptually challenged by proponents of this fairly newfangled ‘Usuli marja` system. Nevertheless, the reader is challenged to cite a single example of a dissident Hawza student who ever went on to be granted such a diploma.
By dissident, it should be noted that I do not mean “radical,” I mean challenging issues on everything from the infallibility of Muhammad’s progeny of the Ahl al-Bayt, to the permissibility of child molestation or “thighing” (mufakhathat), of nursing infants that a man has “married.”
The Pro-Pedophilia Fatwah the Mullacracy Doesn’t Want You To Know About
Most of the Muslim world has never heard of such a fatwah. In fact, there is not one, but several version of this disgusting fatwah. Lest anyone think this is just an “Iranian” problem, two versions are presented below: one from the self-described Ayatollah Khomeini, and the other by the Iraqi “moderate” Ayatollah Sistani.
When I first published these fatwatayn, over two decades ago, the Iranian Government quickly made sure to try to scrub this from the Internet… unfortunately, for them they didn’t scrub hard enough. As it turns out, this filth will not come out no matter how hard you try to scrub. The Internet means “forever.” Here is the pedophilia fatwah that they don’t want you to know about – preserved by WayBack Machine.
The same fatwah could formerly be found here as well, but has since been removed because of the Taliyah al-Mahdi. As well, today, the related offshoot – the Jam`at al-Fitrah anti-Hamas mujahidin in Gaza – have been working together for years, in the effort to shine a light upon the darkness of this fatwah.
In truth, the Islamicate Ummah is largely unaware of such disgusting rulings. If you asked most Muslims about them, almost no one would have heard of them, and even fewer still would believe that they were penned by their religious leaders – who demand emulation or taqlid.
Here’s the cached page they tried to keep you from seeing, preserved by Wayback Machine here:
The following is the translation of the first fatwah, the second is pretty much the same:
“It is not permissible to have sexual intercourse with one’s wife that hasn’t reached nine years of age, be it permanent or temporary marriage. But there is no problem with all other pleasures such as lustful touch, embracing, and rubbing again the thighs, even with a suckling infant. If he does have sexual intercourse before nine years of age and does not penetrate, there is no penalty, but he has committed a sin. If he does penetrate causing the vagina and urethra openings to be one, she will become forever haraam for him. Although this is as a precautionary measure. And it is more probable that her status as his wife is not removed. And the rulings of inheritance, and the prohibition of a fifth wife or marriage to her sister applies. He is also responsible for her maintenance as long as she is alive, even if he divorces her and even if she marries someone else after his divorcing her as a precautionary measure. And he is liable for blood money for the penetration and the amount is equivalent to that of an individual. If she is a free-woman, the amount is half that of a man, plus the dowry that she became entitled to through the `aqd and penetration. If he penetrates his wife after the age of nine (causing the same damage as quoted above) , she does not become haraam to him and there is no evidence that blood money is liable, but as a precautionary measure, he should maintain her as long as she is alive, although it is more probable that this is not obligatory.”
The nearly-identical wording of both fatwatayn – from both scholars’ rulings – leaves us with two rather bleak possibilities.
The first is that both agree on the permissibility or hillah of raping children as young as two-years-old. In fact, they agree so closely, that their wording in writing a fatwah permitting such abuses naturally ended up being worded almost identically, perhaps due to emanating from the rulings of a grand teacher which both have in common.
The second possibility evidences that many rulings are not individually-handled with the critical thinking of Reason or Al-`Aql, as they claim and are religiously required to be. Instead merely “copied and pasted” – so to speak – from one scholar to the next.
It is difficult to determine which of these possibilities puts the muqalidun emulators of these “experts” or fuqahah in a worse position. Remember that the so-called Islamic Republic of Iran purports to have claims to rule because they are religious fuqahah. That is, the Wilyah or Guardianship of the government is of the Faqih. This is what their concept of Wilyat al-Faqih or Vilyat-i Faqih literally means.
But Muhammad himself is reported to have warned us against the very scholars representing Islam in this age.
“There will come a time for my people when there will remain nothing of the Qur’an except its outward from and nothing of Islam except its name and they will call themselves by this name even though they are the people furthest from it. Their mosques will be full of people but they will be empty of right guidance. The religious leaders, the fuqaha of that day will be the most evil religious leaders under the heavens; sedition and dissension will go out from them and to them will it return.” (Ibn Babuya, Thaqab al-Amal, quoted in Allamah Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar Vol. 13. p. 152)
If the fuqaha are not in fact morally-legitimate, then what claim do they have to lead, teach, rule, enact laws, collect taxes, fund terror groups build nuclear bombs, threaten to go to war with other nations – all on behalf of a people who they demand not dare engage in critical thinking?
Whatever answer religious Iranian Muslims come to conclude, the logical take away here is that the person of reason must always remain critical of any and all fatawat as well as the process by which they are set to pen.
The existence of such rulings in the collections of scholars does not necessarily indicate that these are truly their positions – just that they have no engaged in new, independent critical thinking with respect to copied rulings. If they are thus “phoning it in” and plagiarizing work of pedophiles-past within the `ulema, then this too means that they are scholars-in-name-only, or Scholars For Dollars.
Again, all of this is tragic evidence of just how little critical thinking is encouraged in the Islamicate world. This should be a warning to all critical thinkers who are approached by the Da`wah Industry, with manipulative missionary brainwashing tracts that always seem to leave out inconvenient little details like those presented here.
It is little wonder then why the Judeo-Sufi rabbi, a grandson of the Rambam () `Ovadyah Maimuni (1228-1265), of the Maimonidean Dynasty “As for he who accepts taqlid, it is as if he were never born. ‘An untimely birth is better than he'” (Qohelet/ Ecclesiastes 6:3).
Nevertheless, we are told from a Cairo Genizah document that the public assessment of Rabbi `Ovadyah Maimuni was that “all is revealed to him” whenever he withdraws to meditate upon a subject or question.
“Rabbi `Ovadyah, the eminent Sage to whom mysteries are revealed, in whom ‘light, understanding and wisdom like the wisdom of the angles are to be found’ (Daniel 5:11), ‘no secret mystifies him, he lies down and all is revealed to him'” (6:6).
The Judeo-Sufi answer, like all Jewish answers, is that there are no short-cuts to get around using reason to critically deduce. You have to employ the faculties of reason. Indeed, it has been this insistence upon critical thinking which has irritated the nations to no end with us over the centuries. While they were content to emulate their religious leaders and check critical thought at the door, we were always there with a logical response whenever they demanded we uncritically adopt their beliefs and practices as our own.
Ultimately, this was the greatest crime of the Jewish people in the eyes of the nations: refusing to just accept the authority of someone because they claimed to have been a religious leader, or even had a nice piece of paper that said they were. Regardless of titles, if they could not reason, they were not more an “expert” than a black belt who has never sparred. When he gets in the ring with an experienced fighter with no formal rank at all, he will be in for a rude awakening… in a hospital bed.
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