“Just a charade”

Thank you for publishing a most illuminating article "Just a charade” by Faribourz Nariman (Parsiana, January 7, 2007). It is brilliant in its simplicity. The article states: "A civil engineer does not meddle in a surgeon’s work nor does a surgeon get in the way of a civil engineer. Similarly, only scholar-priests and scholars have jurisdiction over religious and socioreligious matters.” The author of the article would debar any letter or article on any religious or socioreligious issues in the Press. The article further enjoins the faithful that "it is the duty to do the bidding of the orthodox scholar priests without a whimper...”

The onerous burden of thinking or taking a decision (on any religious or socioreligious matter) is lifted from our weak shoulders and placed on our orthodox scholars and scholar-priests. The world has suddenly become an easier place to live in.

This is a beautiful idea and the doctrine of "Leave it to the experts” deserves to be taken to other fields and not restricted to religion.

Law should be the exclusive preserve of lawyers and judges. The Press and the civil society ought not to have meddled with the law when the accused in the Best Bakery case, the Jessica Lal case and the Priyadarshini Matoo case were acquitted. The intervention by ‘sundries’ caused such an unnecessary waste of judicial and legal time!

Nuclear bombs should be the sole preserve of nuclear scientists or military men. Mere literate persons who have difficulty in understanding the difference between fission and fusion, let alone the equations behind them, ought not to meddle in matters in which they do not have any expertise.

Leave medicine to the doctors. So what if an unscrupulous surgeon removes a kidney when a poor person goes for an appendectomy.

Civil engineers are of course supreme in matters of civil engineering. What should a dilettante do if a new building or a new bridge comes crashing down as they sometimes do? Leave it to the civil engineers — the rest of the society is not expert enough to criticize.

We may also not oppose corruption — after all who understands corruption better than the corrupt? Let us leave corruption to the real experts and not stupidly oppose it or write against it.

If we don’t think, the world will certainly be an easier place to live in. One question however still bothers me. After I, along with other Parsi Zoroastrians, have stopped thinking and left it (i.e. thinking) in the safe hands of the orthodox scholars and scholar-priests, how will I recognize an orthodox scholar or scholar-priest? How will I know that a person who claims to be an orthodox scholar is not really a ‘pseudo orthodox’ or a ‘heterodox’ in disguise or a ‘counter-traditionalist’ or an ‘illiterate indifferentist’ or a street smart ‘sundry’ or even a misguided messiah? Leaving it to the experts also has its costs.

Just one last word of caution. I do hope the orthodox scholar-priests do not take the advice of whacking the heretics too literally. We would not like a situation where the whackers get whacked.

E. P. BHARUCHA