Spurious Erudition Watch

Since it is only by chance that I recall the passage adduced, Mr. Bones, it has seemed best to the Muses and myself not to annoy Prof. Cole as follows:

In yesterday’s peanut gallery , Doug@1739 struck me as on to something when he worried about pesky little technical details: Is there a meaningful difference between a fatwa permitting attacks on foreign soldiers and a declaration of Jihad? Is the fatwa likely to be conditional and specific? Now of course "Blogging is therapy, not journalism." And even at the loftier level of journalism, it can get annoying to find foreign news about situation S reported again and again as if each story was the first mention of S ever. To leave the former Iraq out of it, I used to dislike reports about occupied Ulster that insisted on beginning with St. Patrick and the expulsion of the snakes or thereabouts. More than five years after V-IQ Day, 1 May 2003, every human being subject to Rancho Crawford ought to know approximately what the words fatwá and jihád mean. So much the worse for "ought," though, because plainly millions remain unaware that one does not "declare jihád" in the Old Euro style of Napoleon III sending a formal note to Berlin, and that even if one could, the document involved would definitely not be a fatwá. This ignorance is not altogether innocent, because it suits a good many extremist Republicans and a few Lieberman Democrats to encourage the notion that fatwá is a sort of Mafia ‘contract’ and jihád the ordinary Arabic word for ‘terrorism’ -- or possibly "holy terrorism." It is saddening to discover that Wikipedia has succumbed to the Higher Misinformation: A fatwa ... in the Islamic faith is a religious edict or a ruling on Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar. However, contemporary usage in Western countries often connotes an Islamic law pronouncing a death sentence upon someone who is considered an infidel or a blasphemer. Entirely apart from the blatant rightwingnuttiness of the second sentence, ‘edict’ is definitely the wrong word, and ‘ruling’ at least in need of some careful glossing. The article as a whole is not that bad, but whoever wrote it knows about the Shí‘a only by hearsay. So it looks as if somebody really ought to go back and start with the damn snakes. Prof. Cole is reluctant to volunteer: As for the London representative of Sistani, Sayyid Sa`id al-Khalkhali, he said he thought it unlikely that Sistani would issue such fatwas, and insisted that if they actually existed he would know about them. He also disputed AP's report that the fatwas were private and oral and therefore secret. He said that fatwas are public and bear the jurisprudent's seal. Al-Khalkhali is not on the scene, however, and he is just saying what he thinks likely. His point is correct, that what the AP described was a set of private conversations in which an opinion was expressed, not a fatwa, which must be written down and sealed. But what you call the opinion is not the most important thing. It was not, however, the Associated Press that unilaterally made this correct (?) point: So far, al-Sistani's fatwas have been limited to a handful of people. They also were issued verbally and in private — rather than a blanket proclamation to the general Shiite population — according to three prominent Shiite officials in regular contact with al-Sistani as well as two followers who received the edicts in Najaf. All spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. As to questioning the correctness, Sistani’s Sharh ‘Urwat al-Wuthqae Article III (taqlíd), Question 36 quotes Áyatulláh al-Yazdí, The legal responses (fatáwae) of the mujtahid are known / recognized / recognizable by one of the [following four] matters: (1) that one has heard it from him orally; (2) that two upright [witnesses] report it; (3) reports of a single upright (‘ádil) [witness] -- more exactly: reports of a single trusted person whose saying [so] makes calm assurance obligatory are sufficient even if he is not [technically] ‘upright’; (4) conscientious awareness (wijdán) of his [written] manual, when there is no question but that it has been secured against mistake[s]. Sistani evidently disagrees only about (3), saying "There is cause for doubt whether calm assurance can be arrived at on the basis of [a single trusted person not ‘upright’]." [Note 38.]

But God knows best. Happy days.