Wow, a Trump ḥadīth

I kind-of would have preferred to hold back the conclusion til after I finished describing what led me to it, but then I realized that doing so would make my thread title a clickbait-link :eek:...

Anyway, I saw one of those text-images on FaceBook several days ago in which the built-in text went something like this: "Trump thinks some kids could use a spanking. Like/Share if you agree". My first reaction was "for what, acting the way Trump always does?"... followed by being reminded of "André the Giant has a posse" and wondering why we got this particular Mad-Libs outcome instead of anything else equivalent like "Idris Elba eats yams" or "Zhang Ziyi plays a banjo". But then I finally figured out what really seemed so familiar about it, which turned out to be rather different from those comparisons:

1. The subject isn't the famous person whose name is in it; the subject is the other thing being connected to that famous person.
2. The subject is related to cultural values and morality.
3. The format is first a claimed source for the real assertion ("Trump thinks..."), before the assertion itself.
4. Despite the effort to establish (or at least claim) authenticity of its origin, no other sign can be found that the person ever made the assertion himself. (The one about Trump and spanking can only be traced back to a website calling itself "US Herald", which sounds like a newspaper's name, but that site just has the same vague statement as the FaceBook image, nothing else you would normally get with a report from a news source about something that someone had really actually said.)
5. The purpose of the person who came up with it must have been a strange duality of opposites: not just to use the famous person to legitimize the idea, or to use the idea to legitimize the famous person, but both, and to make the inferred overlap between the idea's believers and the person's followers explicit. At first I wondered why someone whose message was about spanking kids wouldn't just talk about spanking kids instead of adding the pointless irrelevant "Trump thinks..." at the beginning, but clearly, that format, starting with a famous person's name and then attributing the real point to that person, must have been an important part of the process to the message's creators.

And that list of details about this case made me realize that I'd seen the very same details in something else before, and think "Wow, this is a ḥadīth; they're seriously, actually making Trump-centered ḥadīths now". (I know, I know, not much revelation in that revelation, with the non-clickbait thread title...)

For anyone who might not already be familiar with ḥadīths...

Ḥadīths are short Islamic sayings that aren't in the Qur'an but are the basis for a lot of Muslim beliefs anyway. They are structured in a particular way, with the first part of each one being a description of the source, which is supposed to ultimately, if indirectly, come from the Prophet; if not "the Prophet said...", then at least something like "the Prophet's rightful successor wrote..." or "the members of this mosque in this town heard the Prophet's nephew preach...". Then the ḥadith moves on to the second part, which is the actual message about the religion and how it should be reflected in your life. However, different Muslim groups have different lists of ḥadīths that they consider legitimate or illegitimate, which means one thing all Muslims agree on about ḥadīths is that at least some ḥadīths must not actually be from the Prophet, in which case they were invented by someone else to promote that other person's own ideas about Islam instead of the Prophet's. So ḥadīths end up matching each of the same details as the Trump spanking thing I listed above, point for point.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2hDnqZp