Albert Einstein, the most famous and important scientific thinker of the 20th Century, and who was born and for his whole life remained Jewish, was actually a Shiite Muslim, an Iranian cleric has claimed.
The cleric, Ayatollah Mahadavi Kani, makes this assertion despite the fact that Einstein once said, “For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews.”
Albert Einstein also once said, “my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.”
In 1952, Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion, one of the founding fathers of the modern Israeli state, offered Albert Einstein the ceremonial position of Israel’s president, calling the theoretical physicist, “the greatest Jew alive.”
Nonetheless, a report in Israeli media says that in a video circulating widely in Iran, Ayatollah Mahadavi Kani says that he has secret documents that prove that Albert Einstein was in reality, all that time, a practicing Shiite Muslim. In fact, Einstein according to the Iranian clergyman, was a devoted follower of an 8th-century Shiite imam — that is, religious leader — Ja’far Al-Sadiq.
Shia Muslims consider Ja’far Al-Sadiq to be the spiritual descendent of the prophet Muhammad.
Shiite Islam resulted from a schism within the Muslim religion that goes back to the death of Muhammad in 632 A.D. At the time, followers of the new religion engaged in a bitter dispute as to who was the prophet’s proper successor as leader of the faith.
Today, Shiites are a minority, comprising only about 20 percent of all Muslims with Sunni Muslims making up the majority 80 percent. But Shia Islam is the dominant brand of religion in Iran.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz , Kani claims in the video that when Albert Einstein first heard about the ascension of Muhammad to heaven , “a process which was faster than the speed of light,” he recognized his own theory of relativity at work.
“When I heard about the narratives of the prophet Mohammed and that of the Ahle-Beit [prophet’s household] I realized they had understood these things long before us,” Kani reportedly quotes Albert Einstein as saying.
The Iranian cleric’s source for these purported quotations from Albert Einstein remains unknown.