Perhaps you’ve been asked this or similar questions by your parents or friends after a semester of college. The best way I’ve found to answer this question is to present a copy of an A+ paper, about half a paragraph in, when you see the puzzled and perhaps frustrated look on the readers face, all curiosity should be quenched.

But what about our favorite academic in Iraq? You know, Moqtada al-Sadr. What has he for us to read? Professor Hamoudi has obtained some of Moqtada’s work and has translated the Arabic. It seems someone’s been hanging around the European football fields when he should have been studying. Hamoudi provides a link to the original Arabic, and the professor has never put forth a false document in anything of his that I’ve read thus far, however, I’m having trouble believing that this is real. There are only three paragraphs and Hamoudi prefaces the translation with a few remarks, the first is as follows:

There are some who have written in the past the Muqtada is being groomed by Iran to be Sistani’s successor.  I challenge anyone who thinks that to read this and tell me precisely how he is going to convince the seminaries in Najaf that he is, indeed, “the most learned of the Shi’a.”

Fair enough, I’ve been mocking al-Sadr since I first heard those reports. Hence the graphic. But would Professor Hamoudi go as far as I do and put words into Moqtada’s mouth just to make him look dumb? I wouldn’t think so, but this is too much! The reader ought to judge for him or herself:

We can see that the West, and especially Israel, which has the Jews dude, have you ever seen them play soccer?  Do you see them getting involved in games like the others and like the Arabs?  They made us get all involved in a ball and the rest of it, and they’ve left it behind. Have you heard of the Israeli team, upon it etc. and upon it curses, reach some level or win the World Cup.  Or even America dude, except in a few games other than soccer.   They let us get amused by it—singing, ball games, smoking, I don’t know what other stuff like this, satellites that are used for religiously prohibited things,  and so on, they let us get amused by it, and they more than anything else, moved over to matters of knowledge and matters of so forthish.  Why dude are they better than us, or are we better than them?

There’s more on the Islamic Law In Our Times blog, two posts actually:

Stupidity and the Shari’a in Our Times

Stupidity and the Shari’a, Part II: Muqtada al Sadr and Soccer

I recommend both posts if you’re looking for a laugh and an insight or two about how religious doctrine factors in to Sharia law and law-making. It is Hamoudi’s argument that:

in many (not all) cases, the doctrine is really more of a mask, a shell, scholars say the rule is X based on some supposed thing they have taken from a text, but really the decision could have gone either way, other rules could be used to reach an opposite result, and it isn’t legal doctrine that has much to do with it. In many cases, not all, law does count obviously. In many others, it’s irrelevant or secondary at best. Others think it counts more than I do.

And the stupidity of al-Sadr’s writing is offered as an illustration of Hamoudi’s point… dude.