The Fatwa against Women Touching Bananas and Other Stupid Islamic Orders By Asra Q.

Nomani Dec 10, 2011 Did an Islamic cleric ban women from touching bananas and cucumbers? True or fal se, Asra Q. Nomani writes, fatwas have become ridiculous. See her list of the 10 most outrageous ones. There is an interesting headline moving through Muslim community listservs: "Did an Islamic cleric really ban women from touching bananas and cucumbers?" This past week, an email pinged around the world, claiming that a Muslim cleric "residing in Europe" issued a, well, interesting fatwa, or religious ruling, ban ning Muslim women from touching bananas or cucumbers: He said that these fruits a nd vegetables resemble the male penis and hence could arouse women or make them thi nk of sex, " according to a report in a supposed Egyptian website, BikyaMasr. Th e Times of India ran the story: "Islamic cleric bans women from touching bananas ." "If women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small piec es and serve," the cleric supposedly dictated. It s hard to confirm that the fatwa is true, but the fact that we, in the Muslim community, would even think it s possible is a reflection of just how inane the phenomenon of fatwas has become in the Muslim community. The idea of the fatwa became notorious when an Iranian cleric called for the killing of author Salman Rushdie when he published the novel The Satanic Verses, about an erased portion in the Koran supposedly inspired by the Devil. The fatwas used to carry the authority of divine ordination. But the years since have revealed that, indeed, there is nothing to fearor revereabout the fatwa. In fact, nowadays, you can get a fatwa to validate any point you want to make. I ca ll it "fatwa shopping."

Fethi Belaid, AFP / Getty Images

One American-Muslim blogger, Sheila Musaji, concluded the fatwa was "only shoddy reporting," but admitted there have been enough "stupid fatwas" to "make anythi ng easy to believe." Another blogger tried to chase down the truth, writing: "Th ats some pretty good flame-bait, but is it legit?" The BikyaMasr website credited "el-Senousa news," but the blogger wrote, "Good luck finding it," concluding th at "the tale of the vegetable-fearing Mullah is starting to look a little short

on authenticity." Before the story became just another apocryphal tale like the ones that emerge f rom the Onion, the satire magazine that makes up news, the e-trail to the origin al story was clarified. Sunday, after unprecedented attention to the bikyamasr.c om website, an email shot out from a man identifying himself as the site s edito r, Joseph Mayton, apologizing for the mix-up, correcting the original Egyptian m edia outlet that reported the "cucumber sheikh" as www.assawsana.com and linking to the original story in Arabic. In an editorial, Mayton said that "the article should not have run when it did. Arguably, it should not have been run at all." Most importantly, lest we wonder, bikyamasr.com ran an important follow-up stor y, "Cucumber sheikh far from the truth, says Egypt Islamic leader," Sheikh Gab er Taye Youssef, chairman of Egypt s Religious Endowments Ministryno pun intended, of course. The Islamic scholar was quoted saying, "God says in the Holy Quran eat and drink from what we have granted you. " Nowadays, you can get a fatwa to validate any point you want to make. I call it "fatwa shopping." True or not, the possibility of such a fatwa underscores the long Ridiculist of fatwas, to borrow CNN host Anderson Cooper s nightly feature of news stories of the absurd. "That cleric is an idiot," one Muslim wrote. "But what am I going to do now? I eat lots of bananas because I am vegetarian," wrote Farzana Hassan, a progressive Canadian-Muslim leader. In our Muslim community, we ve had enough comic fatwas to create our own Fatwa R idiculist. Some of my nominees: 1. A man can work with a woman to whom he s not a brother, father, uncle, or son , if he drinks her breast milk first. 2. A husband can divorce his wife with a text message, declaring: "I divorce you . I divorce you. I divorce you. 3. Muslim girls can t be tomboys. 4. Mickey Mouse is a corrupting influence and must die. 5. Emoticons are illegal. 6. You can t wear a Manchester United soccer jersey. 7. A husband and wife can t have sex naked. 8. Pokmon is as bad as Mickey Mouse. 9. Ditch the downward dog. Yoga is forbidden. 10. Girls above the age of 13 can t ride bikes. (See fatwa No. 3.) To all of this I have only one thing to say: Please pass the banana split. :P Asra Q. Nomani is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She is co-director of the Pearl Project, an investigation in to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Her activism for wom en s rights at her mosque in West Virginia is the subject of a PBS documentary, The Mosque in Morgantown. She recently published a monograph, Milestones for a S piritual Jihad: Toward an Islam of Grace. Source: The Daily Beast URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamicShariaLaws_1.aspx?ArticleID=61

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COMMENTS 12/17/2011 5:33:06 AM muhammad yunus To all Commentators: Two things must be remembered. 1. A fatwa is simply a legal ly on-binding opinion of any imam or scholar. 2. The antiquated syllabus of the madrasas from where the ulama graduate can grout their reasoning to the medieval ages and distort their thinking pattern leading to their issuance of atrocious fatwas. The educated Muslims must launch a drive to upgrade the madrasa educatio n beginning with their integration with RTE as advocated in an article now poste d awaiting your comments.

12/16/2011 9:17:29 AM Malik This fatwa is not true and consists of wrong information by anti Islamic minds.

12/15/2011 10:15:13 AM Syed Zafar Ahmad There is a very well known hadith that the Mullahs of the later days would be th e worst creature on the earth. I think, that prophecy is now getting literally f ulfilled. How else would one explain the idiotic fatwas coming out with such reg ularity?

12/14/2011 12:46:30 PM Mubaschir Inayet Fatwa? Here is one by Israeli Mayor: The mayor of Nazareth Illit, an Israeli town with an Arab Christian minority, ha s declared a ban on the public display of Christmas trees. "Nazareth Illit is a Jewish city and it will not happen--not this year and not next year, so long as I am a mayor," Mayor Shimon Gapso said. Arab Christians, who make up about 7 per cent of the town s 40,000 residents, were denied their request to put up Christm as trees in their neighborhoods. The Agence France-Presse reports that the commu nity is not happy: His decision angered the town s Arab and Christian minority, who accused him of racism. "The racism of not putting a tree up is nothing compared to the real rac ism that we experience here," said Aziz Dahdal, a 35-year-old Christian resident of Nazareth Illit. "When we asked the mayor to put up a Christmas tree in the Arab neighbourhoods o f Nazareth Illit he said this is a Jewish town, not a mixed town," said Shukri A wawdeh, a Muslim Arab member of the town council. ... "We told him that decorati ng a tree is just to share the happiness and cheer with other people in the town ," said Awawdeh. Nazareth Illit is a suburb of Nazareth, which as the childhood home of Jesus Chr ist is an important center of Christian history and is about one-third Christian today. Journalist Nir Rosen wonders how Fox News, which has a tendency to defen d Israel but also a love of fighting what it calls "the war on Christmas," would

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12/14/2011 12:43:28 PM Mubaschir Inayet This is what happens when you get further and further from the Qur an. Fatwas? Dime a dozen! If you have enough money, you could order a custom made fa twa! How many you want?

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