The Breast Feeding Fatwah

Conservative Islamic family values, workplace ethics, and a fatwah only an academic could love.

After reading a story like today’s, I’m often left wondering if conservative religious leaders don’t get headaches from trying to find plausible work-arounds for the difficulties their repressive edicts cause. How can any society function when its moral leadership assumes that adult human beings must be constantly monitored and supervised to prevent their regrettable prehensions toward wild monkey sex at every opportunity?

This specific example is a case in point. I’m just going to give you this story in its entirety because there are some things you have to read for yourself in order to know I’m not just making all this up.

Al-Azhar University, one of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institutions, ordered one of its clerics Monday to face a disciplinary panel after he issued a controversial decree allowing adults to breast-feed.Ezzat Attiya had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together.

In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers. It means the child could not marry the nursing woman’s biological children.

Attiya - the head of Al-Azhar’s Department of Hadith, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammad - insisted the same would apply with adults.

He argued that if a man nursed from a co-worker, it would establish a family bond between them and allow the two to work side-by-side without raising suspicion of an illicit sexual relation.

Courtesy of The Religion News Blog.

Wouldn’t it just be simpler to treat your followers like self-responsible adults, instead?

Or is this just me, being too reasonable for the room again?