Positive Liberty

Mark Olson alerted me to the fatwa du jour, the one about adult breastfeeding:

A religious ruling by an Islamic scholar permitting women to breastfeed adults with whom they work has led to his suspension this month from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the world’s leading Sunni university.

Izzat Atiyaa had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, offering his bold suggestion as a way around the prohibition in Islamic religious law against a woman working in private premises with a man who was not her close relative. Breastfeeding, he argued, would create a familial relationship under Islamic law.

Dr Atiyaa explained to the Egyptian newspaper al-Watani al-Yawm that: “A man and a woman who are alone together are not (necessarily) having sex but this possibility exists and breastfeeding provides a solution to this problem (by) transforming the bestial relationship between two people into a religious relationship based on (religious) duties.”

In Islamic tradition, breastfeeding at infancy establishes a degree of familial relationship between nurse and child even if there is no biological relationship.

Dr Atiyaa argued in his fatwa that if an adult male was nursed by a female co-worker it would likewise establish a familial bond that would permit them to work side by side without raising suspicion of illicit sex.

I know that scholars of the Enlightenment tend to see everything as though it were happening in the eighteenth century. But is this fatwa not a piece of audacious, Voltairean satire? I won’t even go into the reasons why no one could possibly take this seriously. I trust I don’t have to. But if it’s a joke, what kind of joke is it? Hint: It’s not just about flashing your boobs in an otherwise straitlaced society, although that, certainly, is funny enough in itself.

It seems to me that the real targets of the joke are the prudish legalists who have kept women out of the workforce, even when everyone concerned — men, women, employees, employers, colleagues — would much rather have them working. The satirist’s weapons are also those of the prudes — Atiyaa plays the Allah card, so to speak, and calls into question the faith of anyone who disagrees with him. It’s a turn that would no doubt have made Voltaire grin:

“The fact that the hadith regarding the breastfeeding of an adult is inconceivable to the mind does not make it invalid,” Dr Atiyaa said, in defending his ruling. “Rejecting it is tantamount to questioning the Prophet’s tradition.”

Disagree with me and you have deviated from true Islam. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand. Indeed, your own failure to understand may just be the point, as it has been all along.

Compare this with Voltaire. After an exhaustive essay ridiculing the folly of all miracles, the gadfly of a different Enlightenment wrote as follows:

A great number of writers, whose misfortune it was to be philosophers rather than Christians, have been bold enough to deny the miracles of our Lord; but after the four priests already noticed, there is no necessity to enumerate other instances. Let us lament over these four unfortunate men, led astray by their own deceitful reason, and precipitated by the gloom of their feelings into an abyss so dreadful and so fatal.

Mock sincerity again unravels a repressive religious tradition. The faithful of his own era complained loudly and often about Voltaire, and he spent much of his life in exile. Yet the Christians of our day are better off for his work and for the work of all those like him.

The same, I hope, is now happening in Islam: Note that al-Azhar is the same university that expelled Abdulkareem Nabil Soliman — for writing, in a freethinking vein, about religion and politics on his blog. Writing as Kareem Amer, he denounced Islamic militants as bloodthirsty hypocrites; he proclaimed that all people have individual rights; he spoke out against repression. And he is now in prison. This last is thanks to the efforts of the university, which not only expelled him, but also reported him to the police.

Al-Azhar is the second-oldest university in the world and is usually described as the leading institution of Sunni Muslim learning. Today its best-known representatives are a satirist who ridicules fundamentalism and a student agitator who has done all he can to denounce the radicals, including serving time in prison.

Voltaire would be proud: In his own day, the Sorbonne never did so well.

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