Fatwa OnLine - Neil Farquhar

Once, to understand what is behind the proliferation of fatwas, I went to Al-Azhar University, one of the world’s oldest centers of Muslim scholarship and set in the heart of Cairo’s teeming medieval quarter, to speak with Sheikh Khalid el-Guindi, a young religious scholar trying to modernize the whole fatwa process. Fatwas serve as the link between the various schools of Islam and contemporary reality, he told me, and are rooted in explaining sharia, or Islamic law, in a way that teaches people good morals: “A fatwa is the means by which a sheikh works on repairing life through religion and closing the gap between what the religion demands and what actually occurs.”

Sheikh Guindi also happens to be the main religious scholar behind a wildly popular dial-a-sheikh service then called The Islamic Line. Older scholars had criticized him because people had to pay for the service on their phone bills, arguing that fatwas should be free. But Sheikh Guindi brushed them aside as dinosaurs. “As a matter of fact we -- a group of religious scholars -- understand that we have to work with the new technology and to use it to serve religion.”
One afternoon, he let me spend a few hours listening in to the hundreds of calls he got each day. The Islamic Line was designed to help listeners negotiate the dense thicket of religious tradition in minimal time. Ninety percent of the callers were women and 30 percent of all calls were about sex, which Sheikh Guindi believed indicated that many felt more comfortable asking deeply personal questions over the telephone than in person. The irrepressible sheikh himself giggled at some of the calls -- like one man asking how to use a condom or another demanding why, exactly, smoking hashish is forbidden or the woman wanting to know what the reward for her gender was in heaven given that men were promised a bevy of beautiful virgins. (The answer: one man, but such a good one that she would want no other.) The sheikh attributed the high volume of calls about sex to the fact that unemployed young people had plenty of free time on their hands and were more inclined to experiment.

Although his call-in fatwa line was in format modern, his answers hardly represented a departure from tradition. One man called asking if masturbation is a sin; the sheikh counseled prayer and lots of sports before marriage. Another man said he had a gay friend and wanted to know how Islam judged homosexuals. Sheikh Guindi said it was such a big sin that it shook the heavens and that the man’s friend should repent --consulting a doctor if he is sick and getting married if he is single. The sheikh advised the caller to drop his friendship with the man lest he fall under the homosexual spell. Listening, I was struck by just how much the religious establishment still held sway over so many people.