The stupidest fatwas of all time
Foreign Policy has the five stupidest fatwas of all time - or at least since we’ve all been keeping track. Actually, since Islam has no central religious figure to guide the religion, like the Pope, all sorts of very strange religious edicts get thrown out from time to time. Here’s the big five:
1. Salman Rushdie must die for apostasy. That’s the gift that just keeps on giving. First, it was the Ayatollah Khomeini for the Satanic Verses. More recently, there were calls for his death when the British crown knighted him. On top of that, his really hot wife just left him. That guy can’t catch a break.
2. Unclothed marital sex is forbidden.
Who: Rashad Hassan Khalil, former dean of Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt
What: When Khalil ruled in January 2006 that for married couples, “being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage,” liberal Egyptians howled with derision. Other scholars rejected Khalil’s logic on the grounds that everything but “sodomy” is halal in a marriage. Absorbing the criticism but seeking to appease religious conservatives, Abdullah Megawar, the fatwa committee chairman at al-Azhar, reached for an awkward compromise. Sure, he said, a husband and wife could see one other naked, but should not look at each other’s genitals. And they should probably have sex under a blanket, he added for good measure.
3. Pokemon is evil.
Denouncing the lovable Japanese cartoon characters as having “possessed the minds” of Saudi youngsters, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority banned Pokémon video games and cards in the spring of 2001. Not only do Saudi scholars believe that Pokémon encourages gambling, which is forbidden in Islam, but it is apparently a front for Israel as well. The fatwa’s authors claimed that Pokémon games include, “the Star of David, which everyone knows is connected to international Zionism and is Israel’s national emblem.”
4. The polio vaccine is a plot to sterilize Muslim children. This goes back to some of previous assertions that many in the Muslim world are trying to keep all of their people in the 7th Century.
The Guardian reported in February 2007 that the parents of some 24,000 children had refused to allow the workers to administer polio drops. It turns out that influential antistate clerics had been issuing their own fatwas denouncing the campaign as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims. Although Pakistan only saw 39 cases of polio last year and most children have now been immunized, a similar religiously motivated firestorm against polio drops in Nigeria in 2003 allowed the eradicable disease to spread to 12 new countries in just 18 months.
5. Men and women may work together only if the women breast-feed the men.
Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University
What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. He based his reasoning—which was quickly and widely derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on Arabic-language talk shows—on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya headed the department dealing with the Prophet’s sayings, al-Azhar University’s higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”
(Via Hot Air)
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