The Shia will look within the Hadith collection of the Ahlus Sunnah in order to prove their viewpoint. However, the Shia will oftentimes need to make use of academic deceit when they quote such Hadith. One such example can be found when they procure Hadith about Muawiyyah.
It is recorded in the Hadith of the Ahlus Sunnah that the Prophet said of Muawiyyah, “May Allah not fill his belly.” The Shia will then claim that the Hadith thereby condemns Muawiyyah. What these Shia fail to say is that there is an Arabic saying “may Allah not fill your belly” which means “may your sustenance be without end” (i.e. its end never come). In the Semitic cultures, this is a commonly used colloquialism: when someone is about to die, people say that so-and-so has reached his fill of food.
Oftentimes, Shia youth will go to various discussion forums and use simple “copy and pastes” in order to “prove” their point; they will duplicate this Hadith. These Shia propagandists do not have a grasp of the Arabic language and are thus liable to make such mistakes whereby they take things drastically out of context. The analogy of this is a man telling his son to “break a leg” before a soccer match. If we were to literally translate “break a leg” into Chinese, it would lose its intended meaning; a Chinese reader would think that this father actually wants his son to physically get hurt! If this same Chinese reader asked the Chinese police to arrest this man for child abuse, they would probably do so. But if this Chinese reader went to English-speaking police, they would probably laugh at him for misinterpreting English colloquialism. In the same manner do we laugh at the Shia who use the afore-mentioned Hadith to prove anything.
The truth is that the Shia scholars who first posted this Hadith about Muawiyyah were engaging in deceit in order to fool the masses and “prove” their point. In reality, the Hadith is in praise of Muawiyyah and not a condemnation of him. Unfortunately, this Hadith is now circulating the internet without proper context. We see that this is a recurring theme in the debate with the Shia.
Article Paraphrased By: Ibn al-Hashimi, www.ahlelbayt.com
