Faith-promoting folk tales abound among Latter-day Saints.
Did you know, for example, that Alice Cooper and Steve Martin are Mormons? Have you heard that Albert Einstein once said that “Next to me, James Talmage is the greatest scientist in the world”?
But we have no monopoly on such bogus anecdotes.
And, for what it’s worth, for example, I’ve observed similar things among such subgroups as atheists, gays, and so forth.
In any event, speaking of Einstein . . .
On Monday, as I’ve already mentioned here, I heard a paper by a young scholar who has been doing fieldwork among Shi‘ites living in South London. He told of attending a lecture by a visiting Shi‘ite authority from Lucknow, the capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh and a center of Muslim learning.
The visitor explained that Albert Einstein had learned the principles of relativity from a visit to Iran. (It’s possible, I suppose, that the young Einstein visited Iran. But it seems unlikely, and, though I’m not an authority on Einstein’s biography, I’ve never heard of such a visit.)
The early Shi‘ite imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq (d. ca. AD 765), the visiting Indian authority also told his audience, knew how to build a nuclear bomb, but, aware of the baleful impact that such weapons would have on humanity, chose not to make one.
This was a good choice. The history of the eighth century might have been very different if they’d had nukes.
Fortunately, not everybody in that London audience was completely gullible. A Muslim taxi driver sitting right next to the scholar whose presentation I heard here let fly, to his credit, with an unprintable expression of impatient disbelief.
Good for him.
Posted from Erfurt, Germany
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