Category Archives: Fatwas

Saudi Women in a City Without Women: Making Arabia Great Again?……….

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Saudi women face a dilemma that nobody in the Kingdom without Magic can solve, not even the new power-to-be, the young Crown Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. A serious problem of physical mobility:

  • A Saudi woman cannot drive a car anywhere in the country, she is not allowed. Illegal, verboten. Fatwas abound against it.
  • A Saudi woman can’t ride the country’s terrible public transport. She would have to ride a public transport bus with strange unrelated men, forbidden. Most of the riders of these public transports tend to be from among the millions of single woman-less laborers from other Third World countries.
  • A Saudi woman can’t ride a bicycle or a motorcycle, not allowed. Not even use a moped or roller skates.
  • She is not allowed to ride a horse or a mule or a donkey (or any unrelated jackass) or a camel either in the city.
  • A Saudi woman can’t walk to her destination, a very healthy exercise. Not really allowed: she can easily be accosted and even arrested by the Religious Police (Wahhabi Vice Squad) for ‘walking the streets’. Besides, it can be otherwise risky in a country full of hungry young woman-less men.
  • A Saudi woman can’t ride a taxi openly, technically. Since women are not allowed to drive, there are no women taxi drivers. She is not supposed to ride alone with an unrelated man, a strange male taxi driver (check this post on Mike Pence and dining alone with unrelated women and the Devil). She could be stopped and questioned if caught joyless riding with a strange man. Some of the cops will even look for the Devil in the back seat, literally.

One senior Wahhabi cleric warned several years ago that allowing women to drive would mean that there will be no ‘virgins’ left in the kingdom. I posted on that at the time here. That is how serious of a divide this issue is. A dilemma that exists in no other Middle East country, with all its economic and demographic implications. Can’t Make the Arabian Peninsula Great Again (MAPGA has a nice ring to it) without resolving it…….
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

A Fatwa on Battered Yemen: Hadi’s Last Look at Sanaa……..

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Yemen‘s weakling former president AbdRabuh Mansour Hadi was elected in a strange election where he had no opponent, arranged by the usual suspects: the absolute princes of the GCC with the accommodating international bureaucracy of the UN looking on. He “won” by an astounding but very typically Arab 99.8% of the vote in 2012: the other .02% of the voters were stoned on election day, or maybe they were the only sober ones. He proceeded to preside over a new/old regime that was as corrupt as any in modern Yemeni history. Lucky for Yemen his reign did not stray far from a couple of cities.
Still under pressure from the resurgent Houthis, he renewed for himself when his term expired in January, something the Arab despots understood and cheered. He was put under house arrest for a few weeks by the Houthis. As soon as the house arrest was eased he escaped, allegedly dressed as a fat woman, and headed for his native region around Aden. A rebellious city General Hadi had bombed and helped conquer for former absolute ruler Ali Abdallah Salih in 1994.
From Aden, he called on the Arab tribal princes, shaikhs and assorted self-styled kings and entitled family field marshals to bomb his country in order to restore him to power. Never mind that he never had much power. Never mind that his foreign allies had neglected Yemen for decades, keeping its people on the verge of starvation as they provided limited aid on political conditions.

From Aden a legend developed about Hadi’s whereabouts last week. He was on a rickety boat to Djibouti. He was on his way to Riyadh. He was living with BinAli and the ghost of Idi Amin in Jeddah. He was holed up somewhere with the slippery Waldo. In the end he did show up smiling and kissing the princes who are bombing his countrymen and countrywomen and country-children. A final shameless act by a stooge.

Whatever happens in this new savage war being waged on Yemen by rich oil princes and their hired Arab mercenaries, however it turns, Generalissimo Hadi has seen the last of Sanaa. He will not be the president of Yemen anymore.
This is my Fatwa, and it is at least as good and valid as any I have seen recently. A Fatwa that is backed by the history of Yemen in the past hundred years, if you bother to read that history carefully………..

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter
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Hooters of Arabia: Cleric Bans Buffet, Can Happy Hours be Far Behind?……….

      


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“A fatwa (religious edict) against “all you can eat” buffets by a Saudi cleric has stirred debate among users of social networking site Twitter. The cleric, Saleh al-Fawzan, recently issued a fatwa through a kingdom-based Quranic TV station prohibiting open buffets, saying that the value and quantity of what is sold should be pre-determined before it is purchased. “Whoever enters the buffet and eats for 10 or 50 riyals without deciding the quantity they will eat is violating Sharia (Islamic) law,” said Fawzan on al-Atheer channel. Using the Twitter hashtag prohibiting-open-buffet” …………”

Shaikh Saleh al-Fawzan is usually an outspoken cleric. It was a matter of time before he came up with a new doozy

No more buffet. The Wahhabi cleric bases his ban fatwa on a technical point. It is purely scientific but in a Wahhabi way, perhaps based on old usury laws. I imagine the Mufti, the chief mufti Shaikh Al Shaikh, is royally pissed, in a Wahhabi sort of way. Doing a V-8: slapping his forehead with the heel of his hand: “Now why didn’t I think of that?” If this stands: no more all you can eat in Riyadh and Burayda and even in Mecca where the more privileged five-star and seven-star pilgrims like to tuck it in between bouts of spiritual piety. No more shoveling it in, even if you are at a 7-star hotel and hence closer to God than others. Which can be a good healthy thing. Of course some rude glutton might complain that ‘it is none of his fucking business‘, but not me. Freedom of Fatwa is guaranteed in the kingdom, even if nothing else is.


On
the other hand, and more ominously, expect more. Expect the unexpected. Next to be fatwa-d into oblivion are the famous happy hours of Riyadh. Without the money-making Happy Hours, the famous watering holes from Najd to Hijaz to the Empty Quarter will go out of business. It is a good thing they don’t have any Hooters other than owls and some local singers in the kingdom……….

Cheers
mhg

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Duel of the Arab Muftis: Al-Assad Muftis vs. Al-Saud Muftis vs. Arab League Muftis…..

         


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“Supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a “religious obligation” of all Muslims, whether they live inside or outside of Syria, the country’s supreme religious ruling body said Monday. The state television quoted Grand Mufti Shiekh Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun as urging all Arabs and Muslims to fight so called “enemies of Syria.” The Assad government had recently claimed in an interview with The Sunday Time that it was the last “secular” state in the Middle East, reiterating that radical Islamists would come into power if the Alawite president was overthrown…………”

This from the Sunni Mufti of Syria, for what it is worth. Which prompted a prominent Saudi cleric to respond by calling him ‘evil’ and calling on ALL Muslim clerics to issue a common fatwa against the Al-Assad regime (but not against any other repressive Arab regime).
Each of these sides, these schools of thought of (Sunni) Islam, the Syrian Mufti and the Al-Saud Wahhabi Mufti and ulema, supports its own regime. They are truly alike and consistent and similar. The Saudi ulema now claim the Syrian Mufti is ‘evil’. Yet he is saying exactly what the Saudi Mufti Shaikh Al Al Shaikh always says: going against the regime is un-Islamic and evil. He is saying what the Egyptian Muftis and the Shaikh of Al-Azhar said about the Tahrir protests two years ago: that they were un-Islamic.
In Egypt the dust has not settled yet, but it is a homogeneous society and it has not gone through a civil war: not yet, hopefully never. Syria is another issue: Jihadist militias dominate the battlefield on the opposition side: maybe not just a straw that the regime clings to, more like an oar.

Cheers
mhg

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Our Wild East: Where Martyrdom is as Cheap as a Fatwa……….

         


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Martyr: 1: a person who voluntarily suffers death as the penalty of witnessing to and refusing to renounce a religion  2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle  3: victim; especially : a great or constant sufferer…….. “
“Person who voluntarily suffers death rather than deny his or her religion. Readiness for martyrdom was a collective ideal in ancient Judaism, notably in the era of the Maccabees, and its importance has continued into modern times”
                                                                   
Merriam Webster Dictionary

[Middle English, from Old English, from Late Latin, from Late Greek martur, from Greek martus, martur-, witness.] The Free Dictionary

Aljazeera network (of Qatar) announced that one of its correspondents in Syria was “martyred” the other day.
Now I don’t recall a fatwa that news reporters are to be considered “martyrs” if they die on the job. Several reporters have died in Syria, killed by both sides, but nobody has declared them martyrs. Okay, most of these reporters have been “heathens” who can’t go to Paradise anyway, unlike the rest of us good and pious Muslims. But still, there is some injustice here. I would suggest to international news agencies and networks that they hire in-house shaikhs to issue a fatwa each time one of their correspondents dies near a war zone. He would fatwa that he or she died a martyr. That would be the equalizer. After all, if a Salafi terrorist suicide bomber can be called a “martyr”, then I can call my BFFF a martyr if she ever gets run over by a car or a horse or gets mauled by a bear, heaven forbid.
Martyrdom has important implications: it means the ‘subject’ goes straight to heaven, with all the attendant perks and benefits, and no more responsibilities. Al-Jazeera also bestows martyrdom on anyone on any side of any conflict that it sees fit. Most of the Middle East does that (except perhaps for the Israelis, although they probably do have their own Jewish fatwas). If a Bahrain or other potentates crashes his car into a cement wall while drunk, some palace shaikh can pronounce him a “martyr”, and all transgressions are forgiven. A few years ago there was a fire at a tribal wedding inside a huge tent in a GCC state. Dozens of people, mostly women and children died. The fire was set by a jealous earlier wife of the groom. Some shaikh came out with a fatwa that all who died in that fire are “martyrs”. That was fine by me, I agreed in that case: it comforted the bereaved families of the innocent victims of that act or vengeance.
Every day tens of Iraqi civilians are murdered by Salafi terrorist bombs, yet not a single Arab news agency of network would call these innocent victims “martyrs”. Possibly it is probably hard for some “Muslim” media to call a dead Muslim of another sect a “martyr”. Maybe it all depends on who killed them, but it goes beyond that.
Many Lebanese have died at Israel hands during their wars, and no doubt Israeli Jews (and Druze) are considered heathen by most if not all Muslims. Yet no palace shaikhs, and hardly any Arab networks, came out and called these “martyrs”. On the contrary, I know, that some of them thought otherwise. Yet unlike the Iraqi victims, these Lebanese were not killed by decent Wahhabi suicide Jihadists. Which makes me wonder if these Lebanese, like the innocent Iraqi victims, are also considered “heathens”.

Ich glaube we should call all those who die in any conflict ‘martyrs”. That simple but practical would solve the problem for me. Better yet: why not declare anybody who dies anywhere of any case a “martyr”. Then, someday we’ll all be martyrs.

Cheers
mhg

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A New Friday Scientific Fatwa, a Warning of Treason, and WTF in Arabic……………

   


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The Saudi Mufti Shaikh Abdulaziz Al Al Shaikh, who is also president of the Commission of Higher (Ulema) Scientists, has issued a new (scientific) fatwa. He has made it (scientifically) ‘haram’, taboo, not kosher, to communicate with foreign satellite television networks and cooperate with them in publicizing the country’s secrets. His shaikhness noted that these networks aim at spreading confusion, anarchy, and division (fitna) among all Muslims and that they destroy the unity of the umma (wtf that be).
His Scientific Muftiness said that the proper Shari’a way to deal with public issues and concerns is to write to officials about them rather than go to media outlets or protest publicly. (Like you can write the King about stopping all the Al-Saud prices looting the country’s resources and end up spending the rest of your life in prison, probably without being tried for it).
His Scientific Muftiness said that providing any information to such media is a form of treason and helps the “enemies” of Islam. He also warned against covering up for or helping hide or sheltering anyone who tries to organize assassinations or other unlawful acts.
At the end of his sermon during the Friday prayers at the Imam Turkey Bin Abdullah he no doubt left some of his congregation muttering:
WTF, in Arabic?
Cheers
mhg

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Saudi Mufti Diagnoses Arab Uprisings: Sectarian Fitna, Sinful Anarchy, Ali and the Umayyads, Al Shaikh Female Drivers..….

 


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Saudi Mufti Shaikh Al Al Al Shaikh (called affectionately Al by the princes) is famous for his fatwas and announced positions on various issues. That is what he is paid for. Now he has, again, blamed miscreants and sinners among Muslims for instability in the Middle East. In that, he is no different from some interesting American political pastors who blamed 9/11 attacks on similar factors (mainly sinning). 
A Saudi daily quotes Shaikh Al Al Al Shaikh that “what the Islamic countries are experiencing of divisions (fitna) and disturbances and insecurity are a result of their sins and crimes” The Mufti charged that mobs have been wearing the mask of “democracy and justice” in order to commit acts that cause injustice and chaos among Muslims. Shaikh Al Al Al Shaikh will promise in his next speech stability, justice, and prosperity to everyone in the whole Muslim world, as long as they adopt the Wahhabi absolute tribal monarchy model of governance and looting.
Of the sectarian divisiveness (fitna): nobody in the history of the Muslim world has pushed and encouraged and caused it more than the al-Saud dynasty and their vast media and their tribal and Salafi affiliates and their paid academic mercenaries across the Gulf, along with their Walis (satraps) in Bahrain. At least nobody since the battles of Ali and the Umayyad usurpers almost fifteen centuries ago.
 
About the Mufti (for new readers only): the Al Al-Shaikh (call me Al) are descendants of Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdulwahhab, an old Saudi ally after whom the Wahhabi sect is named. They have had close relations with the al-Saud ever since and many hold high positions at the Saudi court and bureaucracy. I expect that when the Saudi king finally decides to allow women to drive (drive cars not their spouses) he will give the first franchise to an Al Al Al Shaikh chick to be the first legal female driver in the Kingdom without Magic (no, the famous Manal al-Sharif will not be the first driver: she may have the wrong surname). As I have repeated here, the shaikh is not to be confused with Mohammed Abdelwahab, the late great Egyptian musician, singer, and occasional actor from the golden (pre-Sadat-Mubarak) days of Egyptian art and culture who was no Salafi, Wahhabi, nor any kind of fundamentalist but a bon vivant in his own right.

Cheers
mhg



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