A Play concerning Knowledge and the Scholars

Question

In our neighbourhood some Muslims staged a play; Muslim men and women, old and young, attended as spectators. First it was shown that a boy sat on a chair under the name of the Big Nawab (nawab: a title of a Muslim ruling prince or nobleman); shortly a boy came in got up as a scholar, wearing a beard of goat’s tail. On the arrival of the scholar-like boy the Big Nawab vacated the chair and seated the “mawlana” saying, “I am sending the Little Nawab to study.

Answer

For a scholar to be lacking in practice is certainly a great offence and deserving of censure; but on that account the insulting and belittling of all scholars in general is by no means tolerated in the religion of Islam, and to adopt for it such a form as a play and the like, through which religious knowledge and the scholars are demeaned and insulted, is so dangerous that…

Source: Fatawa Mahmudiyya

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