The Worlds Dumbest Fatwa’s

Lately I have noticed that American culture has embraced the word “Fatwa”. It of course has a negative connotation no matter what group uses it. We, as American’s, use it in a humorous fashion to note something completely ridiculous and outside the normal scope of logic. So lets take a humorous look at the original use of the word. Your obviously not working anyway..so humor me people!

A Fatwa is explained by Wikipedia as: “a considered opinion in Islam made by a mufti, a scholar capable of issuing judgments on Sharia (Islamic law). Usually a fatwa is issued at the request of an individual or a judge to settle a question where fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) is unclear.” I think that’s pretty deep..so lets just call it a Religious Ruling by a guy who probably wears a funny hat or head-covering ok?

This seems simple enough..reminds me of a religious edict, you know like the Pope is wont to do on occasion and something that asshat Pat Robertson does on a semi-regular basis.

Foreign Policy has an article up what they consider to be the dumbest most fuckwitted Fatwa’s ever handed down in the land of Islam. They list the Fatwa, the moron who issued it and why. Lets visit some of these bonehead pronouncements ok?

1. Salman Rushdie. The idiot that issued this Fatwa was none other than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. As most people know, this one was issued because the mullahs didn’t like his book entitled “The Satanic Verses”, which was about the Koran and its dubious merits. The rest is history. Oh..The Queen has knighted Salman for his literary talent..

1. Unclothed Sex. I kid you not..unclothed sex. Rashad Hassan Khalil, former dean of Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt issued this winner. This dipshit ruled in January 2006 that for married couples, “being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage,” For the love of Pete, every normal Muslim this side of Osama went crazy over this one. The article points out how this was settled as “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. Bet that one went over big in the middle of the 118 degree summers in the Middle East..

1. Pokemon…yes, I said Pokemon. That innocent little set of Japanese cartoon characters had a Fatwa issued against them for ‘possessing the minds’ of young Muslims. Saudi Arabia’s Higher Committee for Scientific Research and Islamic Law issued this sucker. Everything Pokemon was banned from Saudi Arabia in 2001 my dear reader. Something to do with the Star of David..that horrid signature of Zionism. The United Arab Emirates joined in the fun of banning Pokemon..as did…wait for it… The Catholic Church of Mexico.

1. This one is an absolute trip..The Polio Vaccine. Some hayseed mullahs from Pakistan instigated this one. I can’t begin to describe the logic for this one, so lets quote the FP article: “Pakistan’s largest Islamist umbrella group, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), issued a fatwa in January 2007 endorsing the provincial government’s efforts to immunize children from polio in the country’s 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.”

1. We come to the last contestant for dumbest religious decree in the history of Islamic law folks. It’s a real doozie as you might imagine. Its…drumroll please: Breast-feeding. Some jackass lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University had the nads to state that since unmarried Muslim men and women shouldn’t work alone together, the best way to solve this problem was to let the female breastfeed the male she worked with. He based his logic, and I use that word loosely, on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time in which, he maintained, the practice occurred. Everyone went ballistic on this dipshit extraordinare real quick..so he recanted his Fatwa saying his ruling as a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”-No Shit Sherlock..ya think??

So, there you have it my dear reader..a short list of the dumbest most asinine Fatwa’s in modern history. What can we learn from this, you might be wondering at this point? For starters, that the Pope isn’t the most idiotic religious leader on the planet and neither is Pat Robertson….although you might get a rousing argument out of me about the latter. They both have some serious competition from the religious leaders of one of the world’s oldest religions.

Tags: fatwa, Theocrats, Religious wingnuts