Adult Suckling

No, really- that title isn't some bizarre typo. And it doesn't appear to be April 1st.

According to an Arabic article in Al-Arabiyya, the Egyptian Parliament is now discussing a fatwa from an Al-Azhar cleric that aims to circumvent the prohibition on a male and a female who are not married to each other from working together in private. All she has to do, you see, is suckle him. Then he becomes her foster child, and they can be together without a chaperone.

The fatwa from Al-Azhar is, of course, based on the life, times and sayings of Mohammed. And as Robert Spence points out- Al-Azhar is one of the most respected Sunni Muslim institutions in the world. This isn't coming from some fringe, crackpot school that no one has ever heard of. Well, I say that but let me once again re-state the argument- a man and woman cannot be together in private unless they are related and so, in order to avoid this, the woman can suckle the man and thus "foster" him. Once the two are so "related" there's no problem for them to be alone together.

I would have thought that the breast sucking might have been a bit extreme, you know, the kind of thing that religious types would frown upon but apparently no:- man and woman working in a professional and entirely innocent manner together is strictly verboten. Man sucks woman's breasts however and voila! Everything's fine.

I wonder if this story will feature on the MSM's "oddly enough" sections?