Connectivity creates boom market in outlier fatwas in Saudi Arabia
Too many opinionated, helping hands in the Kingdom, according to this WAPO story.
The details:
Abdullah has tried to curtail some of the powers of conservatives, including the religious scholars, and taken cautious steps to improve the situations of women and of Shiite Muslims, a religious minority in Saudi Arabia.
In June, however, the Saudi public was startled by a fatwa advocating that women breast-feed unrelated men to establish "maternal relations" and thus get around the Islamic prohibition on the mixing of the sexes. A few months earlier, another scholar had urged the killing of anyone who facilitated the mixing of men and women in workplaces and universities.
Those are extreme examples of a torrent of rulings on all aspects of life by Saudi scholars making the most of their recently acquired access to much wider audiences.
"Fatwas have become a huge problem, especially after satellite TV and the Internet," said Hamza al-Mozaini, a liberal newspaper columnist. "It has become something like a business for religious scholars, and they race to outdo each other."
As with any sudden onset of connectivity, the crazies quickly predominate--largely discrediting themselves in their aggregate nonsense. But the fear market is likewise there early on, so the King is right to move on this.
Reader Comments (1)
Will we soon be reading of Saudi discomfort over the "24-hour fatwa cycle"?