Muslim scholars decry 'fatwa chaos' 
By Daniel Williams
Bloomberg News 
Tuesday, November 6, 2007 
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CAIRO: A century ago, the fatwa department at Cairo's Al-Azhar University
issued fewer than 200 edicts a day. Now it turns out about 1,000.

The university, a center of Islamic learning for more than a millennium,
isn't alone. Around the world, an explosion in the number of fatwas -
pronouncements by religious leaders intended to shape the actions of the
faithful on everything from sex to politics - is driving efforts by
prominent Muslims to rein in the practice. That's proving a nearly
impossible task, given Islam's decentralized nature and the growing number
of outlets for the edicts.

Muslims in Egypt seeking religious guidance may now turn to satellite
television and the Internet for opinions from as far afield as Indonesia -
unless they follow the fatwa issued in 2004 by the Dar ul-Ulum, India's
largest Islamic seminary, that ruled Muslims shouldn't watch TV.

With no pope or patriarch to arbitrate orthodoxy, "it's the nature of
Islamic thought to have many options," says Abdel Moti Bayoumi, who heads
the Islamic Research Compilation Center in Cairo. "But there are too many
unqualified opinions being spread, and this is wrong."

The result is what MENA, Egypt's official news agency, calls "fatwa chaos."

Mainstream Islamic scholars blame TV and the Web for the proliferation of
pronouncements, which are supposed to be based on the Koran and words
attributed to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Confusing opinions are
reaching millions of believers, these critics say.

Dissident preachers fault establishment clerics for issuing what they
consider abstruse and sometimes ridiculous judgments. As evidence, they cite
recent fatwas from the university that ban sculptures, authorize female
circumcision and urge women who meet alone with men to breast-feed them to
create a "maternal" bond that precludes having sex.

Among non-Muslims in the West, fatwas burst into prominence in 1989, when
the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a death sentence on
the author Salman Rushdie for supposed blasphemy in his novel "Satanic
Verses."

Clerics are supposed to have religious and legal training on which to base
their authority. Even trained scholars have issued contradictory fatwas
about whether suicide bombing and attacks on civilians are justified,
creating political and theological controversies.

After the breast-feeding edict gained worldwide notoriety, Ali Gomaa, the
chief scholar at Al-Azhar mosque, suggested that Muslims establish unified
standards for pronouncing fatwas.

On Sept. 28, Al-Azhar University, which is affiliated with the mosque,
announced it was setting up its own TV station to issue proper edicts and
avoid "fatwa chaos," according to MENA. A week later, the Council of Senior
Muslim Clerics in Saudi Arabia said it was creating a Web site to provide
quick access to its rulings.

The mishmash of opinions has created "crises and confusion" at a time when
Muslims are "in utmost need of coherence and unity," Seif Abdul Fattah, a
professor of Islamic political thought at Cairo University, wrote in an Oct.
4 article for Al Ahram newspaper.

The Web site for Dar al-Ifta, Al-Azhar University's fatwa department,
currently includes pronouncements about the propriety of keeping dogs
indoors (no, because "dogs are filth") and using stolen credit cards to
strike back at the United States and Israel for "waging war" on Muslims
(credit-card fraud "does not conform to the teachings of Islam").

Mohammed Salmawy, head of the Egyptians Writers Union, wrote a sardonic
column in the Oct. 20 edition of Cairo's Daily News newspaper criticizing
fatwas that urge women to cover themselves from head to foot and travel in
taxis only in the company of a male relative - practices uncommon in Egypt.

"The competition between our revered sheiks has reached such heights that
not a week goes by, after an issuance of a new and ingenious fatwa in one
country, before another fatwa crops up in another to out-do it," the secular
commentator wrote.

Adding to the tension is a rivalry between establishment clerics and a new
breed of television preachers, says Amr Khaled, a former accountant turned
"tele-imam" who eschews the customary robes of Muslim imams for a coat and
tie. His show, "Paradise in Our House," appears on four Middle East
satellite stations, and Time magazine picked him as one of its 100 most
influential people for 2007.

Khaled, 40, acknowledges that he lacks formal theological training and
models his program on Oprah Winfrey's optimistic style, seasoned with
religious teaching. He says mainstream scholars are out of touch with the
needs of young people, especially women.

"If I can take viewers away from following bad fatwas, I will," he says.
"Unfortunately, there's some injustice said in the name of Islam, and they
come out of even respected institutions."

Even if tele-imams like Khaled don't issue formal edicts, "it is a fine line
between giving advice and fatwas, and people are rightly confused," says the
Islamic Research Compilation Center's Bayoumi.

"The real problem is that religion is being put out front at all times and
injected into everything," says Aly Elsamman, head of Al-Azhar University's
Dialogue and Islamic Relations Committee.

"This makes the need for knowledge more pressing, but the need isn't met."

 



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