Iraq: A Fatwa on your carp!

It does sound pretty gross. River's abundance of corpses ruin Iraqis appetite for fish.

Dead bodies frequently pulled from the River Tigris have dulled the Iraqi capital's appetite for masqouf, its popular dish of grilled carp, after it was reported that clerics had warned that the fish dined on rotting corpses."

They spread rumors about the fish, that they eat the bodies of drowned people, but this is just a rumor," said fisherman Hussein Ahmed, 62, after setting his nets within sight of the heavily fortified Green Zone compound on the banks of the Tigris.

Scores of corpses turn up every week in Baghdad, victims of unrelenting violence between majority Shiites and minority Sunni Arabs.Many are dumped in the Tigris, which flows through the heart of the city and was once lined with restaurants specializing in the masqouf people loved to eat on Friday nights.

Most riverfront eateries closed after they became magnets for insurgents' bomb attacks.

A fatwa, or religious edict, forbidding Iraqis to eat fish from the Tigris was reported by Iraqi media recently, but tracing its original source has been tricky. Prominent Shiite clerics in the holy southern city of Najaf yesterday denied any knowledge of the edict. Officials from the government office representing imams who run Iraq's Sunni mosques were not available for comment.

The Mullahs speak about the female condition

Iranian Mullah Hot-to-trot Hassani: If his wife's a donkey, I guess that makes him an ass.

From Gateway Pundit: What do women and mass transit have in common?

Quite a lot, according to Iranian Mullah Hojatolislam Hassani. In last Friday's sermon about the crackdown on Iranian Fashion Victims, the Islamic hardliner divided women into three groups--

The first group... he said are the women who are badly veiled who are like buses who everyone and anyone can ride.

The second group... are women who are wearing scarves without the Islamic overcoats; they are like taxis who only pick up certain passengers.

And finally, in the third group... there are women like my wife who are like donkeys who let only one person ride them!

Bonus fatwa: Breast feeding among adult co-workers okay.

Ezzat Attiya had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together.

In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers. It means the child could not marry the nursing woman’s biological children.

Attiya - the head of Al-Azhar’s Department of Hadith, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammad - insisted the same would apply with adults. He argued that if a man nursed from a co-worker, it would establish a family bond between them and allow the two to work side-by-side without raising suspicion of an illicit sexual relation.

Sorry, boys. Before you go rushing off to the break room - he has since recanted.

Fatwa on polio vaccine - causes impotence.

From the Hindustan Times:

Thousands of children below five years in Peshawar could not be administered polio drops, after a fatwa issued by anti-state cleric Maulana Fazal Ullah declared that these drops could turn the kids "sexually impotent". Ullah’s message warning the people against the polio drive was aired on illegally-run radio FM channels. The cleric is said to be holding tremendous influence in the area and people accede to his directions.

He said that polio drops rendered the kids "sexually impotent", and also called upon the people to boycott the polio drops because these (polio drops) were a tool used by the Western countries, particularly the US.

Unfortunately, there's no vaccine for ignorance. The BBC reports that over 160,000 children were estimated to have been left unvaccinated and that vaccine teams have been beaten up. Conspiracy theories abound.

Amirullah Khan, a resident of NWFP's Swat district, quoted Maulana Fazlullah of a local FM channel as telling his listeners the vaccination drive was "a conspiracy of the Jews and Christians to stunt the population growth of Muslims". Maulana Fazlullah confirmed this to BBC, saying if the international organisations were keen on improving the health of the Muslims, they should help the hepatitis-C patients in the area. Last year samples of the vaccine were laboratory-tested after a petition in Peshawar High Court alleged they contained oestrogen. The hormone was not found, said Dr Waheed Khan, a health official.