There are laws against monopoly in states, in regional and international blocs, and based on human nature itself. No one monopolizes cultural or scientific creativity, and no country monopolizes the extraction of oil from the ground or modern technology for example. We, however, seem to have monopolized retardation, and I have examples: - In Yemen, there is a campaign led by Sheikh Abdul Majeed al-Zindani, against the government's attempts to ban marriages of children by issuing a law that imposes a minimum marriage age for girls (last year, a law was issued imposing 17 as the minimum age for marriage; however, it was repealed and returned to the Constitutional Committee under pressure from the clergy). Sheikh al-Zindani is an influential and prominent figure. He asked his supporters and students to collect one million signatures to pressure the government and prevent it from imposing a minimum marriage age for girls. I am not stubborn, nor am I easily provoked, and my decade-long colleagues will all witness that I never raised my voice in an argument or shouted; however, I admit that this particular subject provokes me. It is not marriage when it involves an eight year old girl, but rather rape and assault that might lead to her death, as we have seen in many recorded cases in Yemen and elsewhere. In this time and age, both the person who forces his child to marry and the person who marries her are criminals. With all due respect to Sheikh al-Zindani and all other Sheikhs, the marriage age should be determined by doctors, psychologists, sociologists and family experts alone. - In Iran, Hujjat al-Islam [authority on Islam] Kazem Seddiqi said that the cause behind earthquakes that strike the country every now and then, is women's immodest clothing, such as miniskirts and others, and their seduction and corruption of young men. I do not know where to begin. If it were about immodest clothing, France would have been destroyed, and possibly Lebanon too. Also, the Iranian women's clothing is among the most discrete in the world, thanks to the Islamic revolution. However, the rate of earthquakes striking the country has remained the same since before the days of the Shah, as Iran lies on a major fault line, and if the clergy itself, not the women, wore the chador, things would not be different. I want to ask Hujjat al-islam, who is seducing whom? If there are a thousand men and a thousand women, the thousand men will make advances towards the thousand women, and perhaps only one woman among the thousand will make advances towards men. Moreover, the so called Hujjat al-islam seems to be in agreement with the evangelist preacher Pat Robenson, who once said that the Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans, is divine punishment, because Americans practice abortion. He also said later that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by the fact that the Haitian people had a pact with the devil in the eighteenth century to get rid of the French colonial rule. Religious retardation knows no limits it seems, from Yemen to Iran and the United States. If Kazem Sediqi is Hujjat al-islam, then I am the mufti. - Egypt is the ‘mother of the world', and in our Arab world, Egypt leads where others follow, and so if it succeeds we succeed, and if it fails, we all fail. In Egypt, a group of lawyers sent a letter to the Attorney General's Deputy inciting action against the head of the General Authority for Cultural Palaces and his aides, against the backdrop of their publishing of ‘A Thousand and One Nights' in two volumes, as one of the masterpieces of Arab literature and heritage. This particular edition is apparently faithful to the ancient original textm which is more than a thousand years old, and which includes vulgar sexual content. I agree with the lawyers that these parts should be deleted except in limited academic editions, and not in the editions meant for the general public. ‘A Thousand and One Nights' is one of the best books of World Heritage, and not just Arab or Persian heritages. I read it when I was in university, and I have not seen any vulgar content in its previous versions. And perhaps the best and most informative studies I read on the book were the ones published in Egyptian cultural magazines. As the reader can see, I agree with the Egyptian lawyers on the most important point. However, I noticed that their letter to the Attorney General, which I have with me in seven pages or so, included the vulgarities verbatim with the page numbers where they are present in the book, while other parts were repeated twice. In other words, the General Authority for Cultural Palaces published the text once, but the lawyers published it three times as though they enjoy repeating it. These lawyers call themselves ‘Lawyers without Restraints', and it seems that what they mean is that there are no restraints against them but there are restraints against publishing heritage books. I would have forgave them had they asked in their letter that the book ‘A Thousand and One Nights' be reprinted after deleting the vulgar parts. However, they opted instead to demand that the book be banned and that the publishing body be punished, as though they want to promote it, since everything forbidden becomes more desirable. Is there an office where I can submit my resignation from this nation? Please guide me to it if there is one. [email protected]
