Trying to find some funny Fatwa's:
- Rashad Hassan Khalil, former dean of Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Cairo, ruled in January 2006 that for married couples, “being completely naked during [the act] annuls the marriage.”
These two got a lot of attention, the second was rescinded I believe.
- Polio Vaccine: Pakistan’s largest Islamist umbrella group, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), issued a fatwa in January 2007 endorsing the provincial government’s efforts to immunize children from polio in the country’s Northwest Frontier Province. But even though health workers carried copies of the ruling with them as they trudged across the province, The Guardian reported in February 2007 that the parents of some 24,000 children had refused to allow the workers to administer polio drops. It turns out that influential antistate clerics had been issuing their own fatwas denouncing the campaign as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims.
- Breast-feeding: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.
- In Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, a prolific issuer of fatwas, declared that any Iraqi who did not vote for the United Shi’i Coalition list would be legally separated from his wife, and would also go to hell.
- In Bangladesh, the following was announced during Ramadan from a mosque microphone in the Haripur region: “No woman will be able to go to the market for shopping, and if any shopkeeper is found to sell goods to any woman, he will be fined 500 taka.” The fatwa resulted in losses for angry merchants.
- The Algerian militant Hassan Kattab, founder of the Group for Call and Combat, requested a fatwa from Saudi dignitaries that would enable him to sit down at negotiations with Algerian government authorities, whom he had previously declared impious.
- The Darul-Uloom Deoband, a 150-year-old Muslim seminary in India, ruled that a woman allegedly raped by her father-in-law would have to divorce her husband.
- In response to the question, “If a chicken defecates in my well, has [the water] become impure? How do I purify my well?” the Darul-Uloom Deoband — the same seminary that ruled on the alleged-rape case in India — answered: “Throw out 110 buckets of water from your well. Then it will be purified and the water can be used for wazu [washing before prayer].” (Commenting on a recent spate of ridiculous fatwas this fall, Indian journalist Saba Naqvi Bhaumik said, “Ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.”
- “Soccer is Forbidden Except When Played as Training for Jihad.” This fatwa, translated into English this year and attributed to the Saudi Sheikh Abdallah Al-Najdi, was complemented by numerous directives, including: “One should not use the terminology established by the non-believers and the polytheists, like ‘foul,’ ‘penalty kick’... Whoever pronounces these terms should be punished, reprimanded, kicked out of the game, and should even be told in public: ‘You have come to resemble the non-believers and the polytheists, and this had been forbidden.’”
That case had made headlines in every english newspaper in India.
