My Favorite Fatwas

By Laina Farhat-Holzman, Ph.D.

Because there is no central religious authority in Islam, religious edicts (fatwas) can be declared by almost anybody with a loud speaker.

In the Christian world, the Roman Catholic Church had the Papacy with pronouncements (Papal Encyclicals) that were mandatory for believers. These were issued infrequently and generally created much public clamor. But with the breakdown of Catholic monopoly in 16th century Europe, Protestantism emerged and almost immediately fragmented—as it continues to do to this day. With religious competition, binding religious prohibitions are impossible to enforce. However, the Catholic list of condemned motion pictures (the Index of Forbidden Books and Films) did affect box office returns as late as the 1940s in the United States.

The most recent Protestant religious pronouncements came from the late Jerry Falwell, who got it into his head that one of the Teletubby characters in a TV program for infants was of unknown gender and carried a purse—obviously to Falwell a homosexual baby. His condemnation was laughed out of town.

But our Muslim neighbors around the world have resurrected the religious fatwa with very entertaining results. Knowing the underground humor of Iranians and other Muslims, I suspect many of these fatwas are grist for jokes. Some fatwas, however, have induced the dull-witted to passionate acts of violence.

Ridiculous Fatwas

• Iran’s Kayhan newspaper (July 26, 2007) criticized officials for allowing a sale of the new Harry Potter book, claiming the series is a Zionist project in order to disrupt the minds of young people. A fatwa is sure to follow.

• Dean of Islamic Law at al-Azhar University in Cairo ruled in January 2006 that for married couples, “being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage.” Liberal Egyptians howled with derision.

• Saudi Arabia’s Higher Committee for Scientific Research and Islamic Law denounced the Japanese cartoon character Pokemon and has banned the video games and cards since 2001. They claim that Pokemon encourages gambling and is apparently a front for Israel. Religious authorities in the United Arab Emirates joined in, condemning the games for promoting evolution, which they call a Jewish-Darwinist theory. The unenlightened Catholic Church in Mexico also got into the act, calling Pokemon video games “demonic.” I suspect that the Japanese have not seen a reduction in sales, however.

• Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, has solved the problem of unmarried men and women working together (forbidden by Islamists). “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote, so if she were to breast-feed her male colleagues five times, the two could safely be alone together.” His university suspended the scholar and he recanted his silly ruling. Cairo is still laughing.

Seriously Detrimental Fatwas • Local mullahs in rural Pakistan have forbidden mothers from getting polio shots for their children; they claim the shots are a plot from the West to sterilize Muslim children. A contrary fatwa from Pakistan’s largest Islamist umbrella group has not been enough to deter the locals. Nigeria had the same experience with local mullahs, resulting in this otherwise eradicable disease spreading to 12 new countries in just 18 months.

• Iranian fatwas do have a way of being more chilling than those in Egypt. The most notorious, of course, was that of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose review of Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece, The Satanic Verses, resulted in a death sentence and a $3 million price on his head. Thousands of irate Muslims around the world protested the book as an insult to Islam. A Japanese translator was murdered, an embassy set fire, but Rushdie still has his head and has been knighted by the enlightened British Queen.

• Some years ago, Iranian clerics deliberated over a legal issue that resulted in a fatwa. The question was: to whom does the amputated hand of a thief belong—the thief or the state? They issued a fatwa that it should belong to the state because the thief could run to a hospital after the amputation to have it reattached.

• There were fatwas banning Danish goods when a Danish newspaper published cartoons deemed “insulting to Islam.”

The irate Muslims could not think of how to punish the Pope for a university lecture that they also found “insulting,” but they did find a nun who nursed in a foundling hospital to murder and several churches to burn. Fatwas are great for a rumble.

Most of these fatwas were printed by the FP (Foreign Policy) website, which was entertaining indeed. As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.