The List: The World’s Stupidest Fatwas

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Salman Rushdie

Who: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran

What: A fatwa is simply a religious ruling in Islammost often, it seems, fatwas are about sexual mattersbut Westerners usually associate the term with the notorious 1989 death sentence against British author Salman Rushdie. At the time, Khomeini was seeking to distract his followers from the pointless slaughter of the recently ended Iran-Iraq war, during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed and wounded. Rushdie had just authored The Satanic Verses, an edgy novel about the origins of the Koran, and thus proved the perfect foil for Khomeinis designs. Thousands of irate Muslims around the world protested the book as an insult to Islam. For a decade, Rushdie lived in hiding, fearing assassination for his apostasy. More recently, when Queen Elizabeth II knighted the author for his literary achievements, al Qaeda called for retaliation against Britain. And Khomeinis successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, reversed his earlier position and said that the original 1989 fatwa remains in force.

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Unclothed sex

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 Khalils 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 others genitals. And they should probably have sex under a blanket, he added for good measure.

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Pokmon

Who: Saudi Arabias Higher Committee for Scientific Research and Islamic Law

What: Denouncing the lovable Japanese cartoon characters as having possessed the minds of Saudi youngsters, Saudi Arabias highest religious authority banned Pokmon video games and cards in the spring of 2001. Not only do Saudi scholars believe that Pokmon encourages gambling, which is forbidden in Islam, but it is apparently a front for Israel as well. The fatwas authors claimed that Pokmon games include, the Star of David, which everyone knows is connected to international Zionism and is Israels national emblem. Religious authorities in the United Arab Emirates joined in, condemning the games for promoting evolution, a Jewish-Darwinist theory that conflicts with the truth about humans and with Islamic principles, but didnt ban them outright. Even the Catholic Church in Mexico got into the act, calling Pokmon video games demonic.

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Polio vaccine

Who: Local mullahs in rural Pakistan

What: Pakistans largest Islamist umbrella group, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), issued a fatwa in January 2007 endorsing the provincial governments efforts to immunize children from polio in the countrys Northwest Frontier Province. But even though health workers carried copies of the ruling with them as they trudged across the province, 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.

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Breast-feeding

Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairos al-Azhar University

What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone togethera stricture that can pose problems in todays 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 reasoningwhich was quickly and widely derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on Arabic-language talk showson stories from the Prophet Mohammeds time in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya headed the department dealing with the Prophets sayings, al-Azhar Universitys higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a bad interpretation of a particular case.

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