Middle East Focus: My Fatwa on all Fatwas: Extremist Fatwas and an Evil Majority on my Gulf……..

Arabia Deserta

My Fatwa on all Fatwas: Extremist Fatwas and an Evil Majority on my Gulf……..

Walking on water

“A hard-line Saudi clergy (they call him ‘aalim: scholar) has criticized the “soft” way the Bahraini king has used with the Shi’a protesters, whom he called “evil”. He insisted that the king of Bahrain become tougher in dealing with these “rafidha” or heretics (i.e. Shi'as). Shaikh Yousef al-Ahmad is also the same Saudi shaikh who banned women in Saudi Arabia from working as cashiers. He was responding to a Kuwaiti shaikh Tareq al-Suweidan who had sided with the demands of most Bahrainis for political reform. Shaikh al-Ahmad said the Bahraini unrest shows that the Shi’a majority in Bahrain have become a source of evil and not good…….” al-Quds al-Arabi (London)

Too many fatwas these days, hard to tell which ones to follow. This happens because so many people in the Gulf states nowadays enroll in Shari’a colleges and graduate easily (not necessarily by cheating, not always) and become shaikhs or imams entitled to issue fatwas. These Shari’a colleges spawn thousands of these shaggy ones each year. I solved this problem many years ago, when I was about nine or ten years old: I stopped listening to any and all fatwas- haven’t heeded one since. Sometimes I tend to go in the opposite direction, and wait for the thunder to strike. This will be my fatwa this week: don’t listen to any fatwa, you can do your own (make this fatwa of mine the last one you heed).

Back to this schmuck. Interesting this logic of some of these Wahhabi shaikhs: ”Bahraini unrest shows that the Shi’a majority in Bahrain have become a source of evil and not good….”. A ‘majority’ of a nation becomes a source of evil. A majority, by definition, defines what is good or evil for their society (okay, maybe there are one or two exceptions in history). What about a majority of Saudis? Are they evil because they are silent, for now, about the regime they accept? Will they be evil soon because they will probably rise and demand their political rights?
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com