Saudi Cleric's Fatwa: Women Can Mingle With Men If They Share Their Breast Milk

Half of Saudi Arabia is trying slowly, but desperately, to grow up and join the rest of the modern world, while the other half wants to remain firmly stuck in the dark ages. Most of the clerics, with the exception of a few, belong to the latter half. Shaikh Abdul Mohsin Al Abaican is one of those clerics. He happens to be a consultant to the Saudi King's court, and he just issued one of those laughable fatwas that Saudi Arabia and other religiously conservative countries are so good at producing. It has to do with the Kingdom's mandate that men and women who are unrelated are not allowed to mingle. So this 'scholar' has devised a plan to circumvent that religious law by declaring

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... that women could give their milk to men to establish a degree of maternal relations and get around a strict religious ban on mixing between unrelated men and women.

[snip]

a man who often entered a house and came in contact with the womenfolk there should be made symbolically related to the women by drinking milk from one of the women.

Of course, there should be no actual physical contact with the woman.

Under the fatwa, the act would preclude any sexual relations between the man and the donor woman and her relatives.

However, Al Abaican said that the donor woman should not breastfeed the man directly.

"The man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman," Al Abaican said. "He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam's rules about mixing," he said, quoted by Kuwaiti and Saudi media on Saturday.

So, how is this supposed to work- the woman uses a breast pump and then shares her milk with him? And what about women who aren't lactating? The whole idea is just bizarre, creepy. Wouldn't it just be simpler, and a lot more palatable to just change those non-mingling laws? I guess some prefer the whole sharing a breast with an adult male which I find obscene.

And he's not the first to issue that kind of religious decree. I remember back in 2007 an Egyptian cleric came out with a similar type of fatwa:

Exactly three years ago, on May 22, 2007, an Egyptian scholar was disciplined by Al Azhar University, one of Islam's most prestigious institutions, after he issued a fatwa calling upon women to breastfeed their male colleagues.

Dr Izzat Attiyah said that his fatwa offered a way around mixing of the sexes in the work place since breast-feeding established a maternal relation even if the beneficiary was not the woman's biological son or daughter.

Attiyah's fatwa was not received well by other scholars, some claiming it defamed Islam, so he wound up retracting it. The same thing will probably happen in this case as well, as it has already caused an uproar.

Al Abaican's fatwa was immediately rejected by bloggers as "a decision that is totally unrelated to reality at a time when people are thinking about bold and new space discoveries."

Many wrote that there was no reason for the fatwa to be issued and that scholars should focus instead on "much more significant issues."

I'm not really sure some of these clerics actually think these things out before they open their mouths, or are too ignorant to realize what they are saying is shear stupidity. A symbolic sharing of the milk means nothing in the real world, they are still not related. Just change the darn laws and be done with it. Telling a woman to breastfeed a man so she can 'mingle' is just disgusting.