— Ali Zandani
Tartuffe by Molière is one of the great works that came to my mind. In this play, Tartuffe the deceiver one pretending to be religious who is taken into a house of a wealthy man named Orgon in order to educate his family members. At the beginning, Tartuffe was able to fool Orgon and his mother Madame Pernelle in being godly and pious. Orgon and his mother end up taking him to live in the Orgon house, and they believe that his presence and piety in the house will be beneficial to the rest of the family. But it soon becomes apparent to us that everyone in the house, with the exception of Orgon and his mother, including the talkative maid Dorine, quickly realizes the truth of Tartuffe. Moliere was really creative in writing this play because of the accurate ironic depiction of a hypocritical man ( Tartuffe) who pretends piety in his outer appearance while practicing all kinds of evil to satisfy his desire and exploit others in order to achieve his personal interests.
This great work carries an important message to its reader and addresses a serious social problem, which is the problem of hypocrisy and deals with those who pretend piety and virtue. This play really relates to me and I believe every one that reads it because as I was reading this play, I had a strange feeling that I have read a similar play before, but I actually didn’t. I personally experience many events with similar hypocritical people like Tartuffe. I have experienced this Deception with religious people who we call “ Religious scholars” but they are actually “money worshipers”. As a Muslim and where I came from, most of our governments are absolute monarchy where reglious scholars take and play a big role in the government. Most of those “religious scholars” deceive me and millions of other people by falsely telling us to do certain things that we shouldn’t be doing and limiting our rights ( freedom of speech and press) in the name of god and religion. Later we know that all they said was just for the favor of our hypocritical leaders and obviously in exchange for money and highness. Reading Tartuffe and me experience these similar events and know people like Tartuffe reminds me that the rope of lies and deception is short.
