Adult 'Breastfeeding'(!) Sanctioned for Muslim Men

As Dr. Sanity remarks, you just can't make this stuff up. MEMRI reports:

The head of the Hadith Department in Al-AzharUniversity [in Egypt], Dr. Izzat Atiyya, recently issued a controversial fatwa dealing with breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa stated that a woman who is required to work in private with a man not of her immediate family - a situation that is forbidden by Islamic law - can resolve the problem by breastfeeding the man, which, according to shari'a, turns him into a member of her immediate family.

To be fair, there is intense and ongoing controversy within Islam as to the propriety of this fatwa. Nonetheless, it comes from a reasonably senior, well-respected muslim scholar and managed to get published in a mainstream journal. As I noted last August, the fact that bizarre religious legalisms like these even spring up for serious debate:

...point up... the sharp difference between religious traditions that hold up balanced monogamy as the single true ideal (even if secular institutions provide plenty of 'outs') and a religion that seems to go out of its way to accomodate male-fantasy lifestyles... [as well as] ...the idea that passions potentially damaging to the social fabric are best managed by feeding them...

Perhaps this is a (positive?) sign that universities in the muslim world are diverse enough that they're having to deal with as many fringe nut-jobs as we are here in the West. Maybe. After all, super-radical feminist Mary Daly (who famously, refused to acknowledge male comments at her lectures or admit them into her classes) spent much of her career in "theology" at Boston College.

UPDATE: For anyone puzzled by the above fatwa, check out this epic, professionally-informed, commenter-fed, thoroughly referenced post by Dr. Sanity on the misogyny deeply-rooted within Islam.