Weird Fatwa Update
Charles Johnson
Tue May 22, 2007 at 12:58 pm PDT • Views: 375
Professor Ezzat Attia of Al Azhar University got in trouble for his incredibly strange fatwa about adult breastfeeding, and now he’s retracted it.
CAIRO — A professor at Egypt’s Islamic Al Azhar university Monday retracted a controversial religious edict which states that a woman can only be left alone with a strange man if she breastfeeds him.
Ezzat Attia, president of the university’s Hadith department which studies traditions based on the Prophet Mohammed’s words and deeds, withdrew his fatwa and apologized for any inconvenience he caused, in a statement distributed by Al Azhar, Sunni Islam’s main seat of learning.
Attia’s edict, which sparked an uproar in the media, stated that a woman can only be alone with a man to whom she is not related - such as an office colleague - if she nurses him “directly from her breast” at least five times.
In his retraction, Attia said the fatwa had been a result of his personal analysis of Islamic texts and was in fact “a bad interpretation of a particular case” during the time of Prophet Mohammed. According to Mabruk Attia, a professor of theology at Al Azhar, the Prophet had advised a woman to nurse her adult adopted son, to become his wet nurse, following an Islamic ban on adoption. The woman gave the man her milk from a bowl, and not directly from her breast, Mabruk Attia said.
Frank says: