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| Islamic scholar promotes adult breastfeeding |
| 2007-05-27 |
| 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. Teachings attributed to prophet Dr Atiyaa headed al-Azhar University's department dealing with hadith - oral tradition, outside the Koran, attributed to the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. He said he had based his ruling on one such tradition according to which, at the Prophet's order, a man named Salem was breastfed by the wife of another disciple. "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." Universal rejection Nevertheless, his ruling evoked almost universal rejection among Muslim scholars and in the popular Egyptian press. Al-Azhar University formed a committee of hadith experts, who dismissed his ruling, and the university administration ordered him to publish a retraction. He complied. |
| Posted by:tipper |