Cleric Tells Woman: Get Yer Tits Out...Or, What Happens When You Apply Logical Rules to an Irrational Religion

Islam gets a bad press some times... not that Islam does not occasionally deserve a bad press, that's another story, but Islam can be genuinely slanted when reported on in the Western press. Any person who is informed on Islam exclusively through the Western press would think that a fatwa can only be a death sentence, or perhaps an injunction not to cook with Danish butter. In fact, a jurisprudent at Al Azhar in Cairo, perhaps the longest-running seminary in the world of Islam, has used his position to issue a fatwa allowing men to suck on the nipples of female co-workers--even better, our man (hey, you knew he was a man, right?), Dr Ezzat Attiyah at the Hadeeth Department of Al Azhar, suggested that a session of nipple-suckling was necessary to legitimise a situation where men and women shared the same physical space without being either intimately related or married (for those Arabic boffins, this is to be muhram, or محرم).


(Unfortunately, I have only found an Arabic version of this story, here. As you can imagine though, this is spreading like wildfire, which means it will move into the English-language press soon enough; maybe I will update this post then.) The ludicrous point behind all of this is that the potentially un-Islamic arrangement of men and women working together can be avoided by getting the women to get their tits out.

Obviously, my first thought was: How do I get the secretary to go along with this? Since I started working in January, I haven't been able to get my eyes off the doey-eyed, chocolate-brown, busty, curvy 20-year-old who hardly smiles. She acts like a bitch who knows she can get away with it in an office with bad air-conditioning and packed to the brim with single, mostly inexperienced young men; she just knows that she can walk in, stop me writing an email to the boss explaining why we're a week behind schedule and ask me to scan a piece of paper because, in her several months of working there, she has had the time to chat on MSN and play solitaire, but hasn't really gotten 'round to working the scanner. Well, I'm a sucker for it; I sort of sit back, ask her what file format she wants the images in, hope she tries to make small talk and just sort of stare at her and drool until she snaps her fingers, stomps the floor and leaves without a thank-you. I figure a little bit of breast-based action is not too much to ask, no?

Now, to be fair, this kind of insane male fantasy-fuelled theology does have its foundations in Islam's principles and practice. According to the Koran itself, a bond born of breast-feeding turns strangers into siblings; a man and woman who are breast-fed by the same woman in childhood are treated as brother and sister, making any marriage between them impermissible. A similar arrangement is in place between the breast-feeder and the breast-fed. Of course, the mere fact that Islam has such embarrassingly personal loopholes says something about the preoccupations of the people who founded the religion. The breast-feeding-of-an-adult does itself have an important precedent when the Prophet Mohammed himself ordered it to solve certain issues arising from the Islamic prohibition against adoption (much on that topic can be found all over the internet; I once received death threats for writing about this on a newsgroup, so I'm going to leave it at that). It follows from a simple exercise in analogous thinking (thinking in analogies, or قياس is something of a high art in Islamic theology, for some obvious reasons of self-inflicted intellectual restriction) that men can suck their colleagues' boobs and be allowed to share a closed-door office because they would effectively be like mother and son (although this fatwa does allow a cop-out: the sucker and the sucked can later be married, how I don't know, this is the kind of thing one learns at Al Azhar, I guess).

In some situations all of this can work itself out amicably, I'm sure. The problem arises with the needless infantilisation, in so many ways, of Muslim societies. Not all the women in the Middle East's workplace will be as coquettish and dominating of the men as the lovely Sec (and yes, she will stay anonymous; it's a small country and people shouldn't know that she plays solitaire all day!). If this kind of thing were to become the orthodoxy, families would see their daughters out of the workplace and back under lock and key at home; after all, at this rate, a fatwa prescribing fellatio between teenage girls and their geometry teachers is just a few years down the line. In the meantime, I am left fantasizing about the colour of Sec's areolas. So while I would love for this to realise itself in my own little world, I think it's obvious for all to see why this fatwa at least must go into organised religion's heaving pile of bad ideas, but let this be a warning to all of you: Never apply a logical standard of reasoning to a whimsical set of mystical beliefs from the middle ages. It just complicates relations in the workplace.


Incidentally, there is a literally example of this working out in the fictional world: You all should read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf.


PS: I completely love it when people comment on the blog postings, but could you be a bit more clear about who you are? Specifically, please don't just "anonymous", put a name, that way I can at least guess.