My father is a cleric. About forty years ago, a few streets above where our house was, there was a boy named Ali living with his family. He was about three years older than me. Their house was in the middle of an orchard, and most of the surrounding area was farmland.
I had often seen, in the mornings after sunrise, a very polite boy standing next to our house door and repeatedly calling out loudly, “Honorable Sir, Honorable Sir,” and I would come out of the house at his voice. I don’t remember him ever knocking on our door or ringing the bell. Back then, house doors were mostly kept open during the day, so that when children or women from the neighborhood visited each other, there wouldn’t be a need to knock.
Ali, a polite boy of about ten years old, always stood straight, neatly dressed. He always held a bouquet, which I believe he had carefully picked and tied together with a thread, with both hands. I noticed the sweetest moment for him was when he could offer the bouquet to my father with his own hands, and my father thanked him.
If not all, I can say that the vast majority of the youth and adolescents in the neighborhood respected the local cleric. The nature and form of that respect were worlds apart from today’s. They, in their view, saw clerics as akin to prophets and imams, and there weren’t as many clerics around back then as there are now.
Some of those young and adolescent boys, including the very polite Ali, were martyred in the war. Ali was 16 years old at the time of his martyrdom.
That was about the youth of yesterday, and as for today:
In some social media groups I am a member of, where most of the members are young people, I do not dare mention anything about God, Prophet, the Imams, especially the 12th Imam. One of their favorite pastimes is mocking religious beliefs.
From the perspective of these young people, if these are the representatives of God and the Prophet, and the proxies of the 12th Imam, who beat, tear apart, kill, imprison, and disgrace with utmost cruelty, then if their imaginary Imam were to emerge from occultation, he would likely put even ISIS to shame.
I try not to engage in debates defending my beliefs with them due to two reasons: Firstly, I am not a religious expert to argue with them about beliefs, and secondly, even if I were a religious scholar, I wouldn’t do so, because these people do not need my logical reasoning. Their problems are freedom, security, employment, economy, and marriage, none of which are currently available for them.
Scholars and religious authorities have mostly remained silent, not defending the dignity of their Imam, and have allowed any vice to occur under the pretext of representing the 12th Imam. I do not know if their silence is out of fear, monetary motives, or ignorance of the truths. I find the third option unlikely.
Mohammad Mahdavifar
13th of Azar 1394 [December 4, 2015]