
PAULA BRONSTEIN/Getty Images News
Salman Rushdie
Who: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran
What: A fatwa is simply a religious ruling in Islam—most often, it seems, fatwas
are about sexual matters—but Westerners usually associate the term with
the notorious 1989 death sentence against British author Salman
Rushdie. At the time, Khomeini was seeking to distract his followers
from the pointless slaughter of the recently ended Iran-Iraq war,
during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed and wounded.
Rushdie had just authored The Satanic Verses, an edgy novel
about the origins of the Koran, and thus proved the perfect foil for
Khomeini’s designs. Thousands of irate Muslims around the world
protested the book as an insult to Islam. For a decade, Rushdie lived
in hiding, fearing assassination for his “apostasy.” More recently,
when Queen Elizabeth II knighted the author for his literary
achievements, al Qaeda called for retaliation against Britain. And
Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, reversed
his earlier position and said that the original 1989 fatwa remains in force.

KHALIL MAZRAAWI/Getty Images News
Unclothed sex
Who: Rashad Hassan Khalil, former dean of Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt
What:
When Khalil ruled in January 2006 that for married couples, “being
completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage,” liberal
Egyptians howled with derision. Other scholars rejected Khalil’s logic
on the grounds that everything but “sodomy” is halal in a marriage.
Absorbing the criticism but seeking to appease religious conservatives,
Abdullah Megawar, the fatwa committee chairman at al-Azhar,
reached for an awkward compromise. Sure, he said, 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.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
Pokémon
Who: Saudi Arabia’s Higher Committee for Scientific Research and Islamic Law
What: Denouncing
the lovable Japanese cartoon characters as having “possessed the minds”
of Saudi youngsters, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority banned
Pokémon video games and cards in the spring of 2001. Not only do Saudi
scholars believe that Pokémon encourages gambling, which is forbidden
in Islam, but it is apparently a front for Israel as well. The fatwa’s
authors claimed that Pokémon games include, “the Star of David, which
everyone knows is connected to international Zionism and is Israel’s
national emblem.” Religious authorities in the United Arab Emirates
joined in, condemning the games for promoting evolution, “a
Jewish-Darwinist theory that conflicts with the truth about humans and
with Islamic principles,” but didn’t ban them outright. Even the
Catholic Church in Mexico got into the act, calling Pokémon video games
“demonic.”

TARIQ MAHMOOD/AFP/Getty Images
Polio vaccine
Who: Local mullahs in rural Pakistan
What: 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.

iStockphoto.com
Breast-feeding
Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University
What: Many
Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone
together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy.
So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were
to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be
alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her
hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion
issued in May 2007. He based his reasoning—which was quickly and widely
derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on
Arabic-language talk shows—on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time
in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya
headed the department dealing with the Prophet’s sayings, al-Azhar
University’s higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the
iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a “bad
interpretation of a particular case.”
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