Surge in Fatwas Bewilders Muslims
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
CAIRO, Egypt — 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 sparking 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 and Morocco — 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,” Abdel Moti Bayoumi, who heads the Islamic Research Compilation Center in Cairo, said. “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 the prophet Mohammed. 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 one in May saying women who meet alone with men ought to breastfeed 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 Khomeini put a death sentence on author Salman Rushdie for supposed blasphemy in his novel “The Satanic Verses.”
