Individual Counts

Till this day we had heard numerous Fatwa’s and what not and some of them were actually funny but with this fatwa every limit to hilariousness has been beaten.
Reports say that a Saudi cleric belonging to the Saudi Royal court has issued/suggested a fatwa advocating women to breast feed their male colleagues to establish maternal relationship between them. That way they can work freely in a multi-gender environment without violating Islamic laws as they would have maternal relations with their colleagues.
No, you didn’t read it wrong. That’s what it said. The roots of this go back to 2007 when a cleric from the prestigious Al-Azhar University said something on the same lines. Ezzat Attiya said 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 this in an opinion issued in May 2007.
Now in 2010, the Saudi cleric has repeated the idea or more like personified the stupidity in his own words. The Muslim world has gone fatwa-mad or rather; it has gone mad through fatwa’s. From Egypt to Pakistan, learned and not-so-learned sheikhs and imams are issuing fatwa’s on everything, from who can be justifiably killed to whose breasts you are allowed to suck. Fatwa’s are being announced on satellite channel phone-ins, on dedicated websites and by special committees set up by radical and terrorist organizations. Nothing, it seems, is out of bounds or too absurd to be the subject of a fatwa. Fatwa’s have become an essential weapon of ideological war. The fatwa issued in December by a cleric in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province provides a good example. Posted on walls in the town of Darra Adam Khel, it described all human rights organizations, including the Red Cross, as agents of “the Jews and the west”. It urged Muslims to target such groups as a duty, by murdering members, destroying their homes, burning their vehicles and seizing their assets. It was one of countless fatwa’s to emerge from NWFP targeting human rights organizations and activists, particularly women. The powerful obtain fatwa’s to harass the less privileged. Sunnis use fatwa’s to persecute Shia’s, minority sects and Christians; chauvinists use them to oppress women. In most cases, the bogus nature of these fatwa’s is all too evident. Why worry about Islamophobia and those who paint Islam in all the colors of darkness? Some Muslims do a good enough job of making a mockery of Islam themselves, thank you!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Mullahs of all shapes and sizes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.