The oldest profession in the world?

Paphnuce was monk in Christian Egypt, at the time of Saint Anthony. One day, while praying with his fellow monks in the desert, he remembers that in his youth he was in love with a certain belle de jour called Thais, whose beauty had him in a trance until the day he saw the light and shunned the world for a life or prayer and hardship in the desert. Paphnuce decides that as an ultimate service to God, he shall go to Alexandria and seek Thais, and lead her from her life of sin to a life of virtue and righteousness, thus saving a lost soul from eternal damnation.

Paphnuce walks the desert and endures hardship and misfortune until he reaches her house. Then, one look at her is enough for all the religious piety and zealous accumulated through his countless years away from the temptation of mankind, to give way to raging desire and lust. At the end of the story, Thais ends up dying while taking her vows in a monastery, as pure as the day she was born, while Paphnuce ends up with eternal damnation.

Morality lessons are often as thick and heavy on the soul as the complete works of Charles Dickens are on a disinterested middle school student, and, if anything, Anatole France meant for his tale to be one of the pointlessness of the moral discourse, of how rigid moralizers, even in the context best suited to their otherwise fairly unimportant skills, end up ultimately falling into the same temptations that normal humans know, not the least of them being ego, greed, and lust. Being rather unprepared to face such temptations, they end up going to the extreme depths of depravity and degradation.

Today’s moralizers are far more annoying than Paphnuce ever was, being as persistent as a fruit fly that joins your dinner party uninvited. Add a doctorate to their name and they are as irritating as a fruit fly that comes to your dinner party uninvited, then demands respect from the attendees on the grounds that it knows more about the best ways for recycling than you do (fruit flies are notoriously fussy about not mixing up recyclables with non-recyclables as plastic upsets their digestive system).

One of those purveyors of superfluous yet excruciatingly long-winded monologues on the best ways to living our lives in the most uncomfortable and most affected manner possible – and who unfortunately happens to have a doctorate – is Dr. Youssef al Qaradawi. In the days of yore, and by that I mean a few months back, this person  was rather content to tell us how best to lead our lives on his weekly program on a certain information-dispensing-medium-with-some-40-million-viewers. I once tried to watch, but then decided that I don’t need someone delving into the deepest corners of theology to tell me how far away from my neighbor’s dog I should tread (living in Paris, such information is rather superfluous and the lesson is usually learned the hard way within a week). Finally, and for sanity reasons, my conclusion was that all of the 40 million viewers had been blessed with enough desire for intellectual stimulation that they would all go on doing something more important while he is dispensing his advice, like arranging their spices in alphabetical order. You can imagine my disappointment when someone I know told me that she is an avid follower since she actually feels light coming from his eyes when he speaks. It was there and then that I decided that when it comes to certain candles, cursing the darkness is the only reasonable recourse for sensible human beings.

I was always willing to consider Dr. Qaradawi to be a social science experiment that forty million viewers untake seriously on a weekly basis. After all, if people believe what someone tells them, they tend not to put that belief into practice, for fear of earning society’s approval – at which point they wouldn’t be able to look themselves in the mirror the next day. However, in the past couple of months, he started addressing people as political masses rather than as social beings. In this, and much like the popes of medieval times who used to lead the troops into battle (oh they did), he was trying to use any religious authority he possesses for temporal political gains. Donning a façade of the utmost piety he could muster, he pulled a Pope Urban II trick by telling people that it was their religious duty to revolt against this or that ruler.

I guess many people tolerated that, for the very basic principle that if you point at a random Arab ruler and claim he is corrupt and oppressive, the chance of you missing the mark are just about as high as the chance of a three legged turtle who had just had a large meal beating a well focused rabbit in a race. However, he suddenly decided that while the first three revolutions that he had endorsed were pure and unadulterated, the one happening in Bahrain was a sectarian battle cry of one sect against another, and that people of one sect were actually engaging in systematic violence against another sect. Many people were shocked by the unabashed condemnation of what was not much different from what he had fully upheld a few days before. A few days later, though, and another protest movement in Syria received his ringing endorsement, as did that of Yemen. At the base of it, the demands of all protesters had been the same, the oppression - to varying degrees of brutality, but let’s not discuss shades of evil here - of the same spirit, and, as a matter of fact, the Bahraini movement was pretty much the most peaceful of all the movements and even had me, a rather perennial cynic, voicing a tacit approval.

At any rate, as violence goes, he didn’t seem to have many qualms about its moral repercussions when he offered heavenly absolution to whoever assassinates Ghaddafi. Beyond that, by offering celestial pardons for worldly sins, which was a practice commonplace for Popes in the middle ages, he neatly tied in with Ghaddafi’s ‘New Crusades’ theme (Now this is turning into one sick fancy dress party!)

There are two possible explanations beyond which I can see none for Qaradawi words that are, honestly, as pointless and as dangerous as a broken pencil that is carrying the poison of a Golden Dart Frog.  The first is that he actually believed in all Arab revolutions and he did not wish to put them into a sectarian context. However, after finding out that passion fruit does not grow in Qatar and is quite expensive to import, he decided not to risk losing his supply by going against the wishes of the Qatari ruling family, which tells him when to endorse, when to denounce, and when to lose the faculty of speech altogether. Now that is a fairly sensible reason for dissimulation, I mean, would we want to come between a man and his supply of exotic fruit? (He might be getting more than a bucket of passion fruit a week from the royal family, but the principle is the same.)

The other reason is probably less sensible and would be the simple fact that he does believe in the superiority of his own sect and religion over those of other people.  The belief in religious supremacy was a hallmark of medieval Popes  and societies, but far from it that I should accuse him of such contemptuous behavior, so I shall assume that it is all about passion fruit, for now.

Common sense dictates that when people present their very own lives – be it wise or unwise (and it is not up to an outsider to judge) - as offerings at the doorstop of an Annunciation, and some demagogue vilifies their movement without evidence, it becomes – to borrow his own terms – our duty to criticize, censure, and even disparage his remarks, while his religious authority has to be questioned, and, if needed, openly mocked.  Should we do that, we hit two stones with one bird: Above all, it is an exercise in social freedom : that we should not fear words, and should not fear criticizing what warrants criticism, irrespective of the authority we face. Of more immediate concern is that by discrediting that religious demagogue and rigid moralizer, we shall manage to avoid the ugly scenario of civil and religious strife that his words, if heeded, might lead to.

For now, I can only hope that people see beyond Qaradawi’s words and that he does not dull the edge of belief they have in their own sense of morality and in each other. As for me, I only look forward to the day that a Lady of the night, as an ultimate service to God, decides to walk through the desert until she reaches Qaradawi’s place of dwelling, and guides him from a life of sin towards a life of virtue and righteousness; for what he is practicing by preaching hate – for money or for baser instincts of religious supremacy –  qualifies as being the oldest profession in the world.

By Comte Almaviva