It is well known that men and women are strictly forbidden from mixing together - in public, with separate entrances for them in shopping malls - and in private, with only relatives allowed in cars, or in houses. The conservatives in the Kingdom, in their glorious wisdom, warn that such 'free-mixing' is the very essence of capitulated Evil, the absolute sign that the end of the world has come and we are in the final days. Not something, therefore, that they are ever going to be prepared to accept. And why should they? When an unrelated man and woman are together, so the story goes, the third person present is the Devil.
What about the quandary of men, such as drivers, who have to drive women around and be in their presence? This is highly problematic. The Gulf News of Saudi Arabia reported that:
Exactly three years ago, on May 22, 2007, an Egyptian scholar was disciplined by Al Azhar University, one of Islam's most prestigious institutions, after he issued a fatwa calling upon women to breastfeed their male colleagues. Dr. Izzat Attiyah said that his fatwa offered a way around mixing of the sexes in the work place since breast-feeding established a maternal relation even if the beneficiary was not the woman's biological son or daughter.
Attiyah was then removed from his position because he sounded like an idiot. That has not stopped a Saudi scholar and advisor at the Royal Court revisiting this topic and suggesting a more moderate solution, that
women could give their milk to men to establish a degree of maternal relations and get around a strict religious ban on mixing between unrelated men and women. [Because] a man who often entered a house and came in contact with the womenfolk there should be made symbolically related to the women by drinking milk from one of the women. Under the fatwa, the act would preclude any sexual relations between the man and the donor woman and her relatives.
Even the Saudis think this is ridiculous and have removed it from their news sources. Fragments of the story do exist on the web, of course. But the story shows something more important. The question of the extent to which the faithful are able to navigate away from literalism in their religion.
Adult breastfeeding goes all the way back to the time of the Prophet and is referred to in the hadiths of Sahih Muslim and the Sunan of Abu Dawud and Ibn Maja. To reject it is tantamount to rejecting the force and power of Shari'a law. All that is new with this scholar's revised position is that the milk be poured into a cup and not drunk out of a nipple. That is the essence of moderation here. What hope then for change or modernisation, when even in matters as foolish as this, literal adherence stays constant?
No comments:
Post a Comment