DAR AL ISLAM - EGYPT: IF A MAN SUCKLES AT A WOMAN'S BREAST, YOU CAN REMAIN IN THE SAME ROOM WITH HER WITHOUT A CHAPERONE

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up people...My gawd, Saturday Night Live could have a field day with this one, if they would not all be dhimmi cowards...

Lecturer suspended after breastfeeding fatwa

CAIRO: Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University has suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Atiya pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.

Atiya is the head of the department which deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.

Atiya's unusual opinion was widely publicised by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.

Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar on Monday quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.

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Islamic theology center to discipline cleric who allows adult breast-feeding

CAIRO, Egypt: 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.

His fatwa raised a widespread outcry in Egypt, with religious authorities rejecting the edit and several newspapers deriding Attiya for issuing it. Several lawmakers called for Attiya to be punished.

The president of the Al Azhar University, Ahmed al-Tayeb, ordered Attiya on Monday to stand before a disciplinary tribunal and denounced the fatwa as defamatory to Islam.

Attiya had initially stood by his fatwa, but on Sunday he backtracked an apologized for the controversy. He said his fatwa was "only an opinion based on one incident."

Attiya based his fatwa on "hadith," or teaching of Muhammad. In the hadith, Muhammad reportedly told a woman to nurse a teenage boy who was not her own but whom she had raised in order to establish a family bond. But many Islamic scholars deny the hadith, saying it is not verified and should not be used.

Egyptian Religious Affairs Minister Mahmoud Zaqzouq said Monday that fatwas "should be compatible with logic and human nature."

Strict Islamic interpretations forbid an unmarried man and woman to be alone together. But with women in the workplace, the situation is generally accepted in Egypt and much of the Muslim world.



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1) Lecturer suspended after breastfeeding fatwa

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