Egypt's Fatwa Crisis

Even our own Grand Mufti (no, he is not a fictional character created by J.K. Rowling) is so fed up with the soaring number of Fatwas in this country that he is calling for a supreme authority to handle the business alone: no impostors welcome, thank you very much. Based at Al-Azhar in the heart of Islamic Cairo, the Mufti is not only a power-seeking careerist; he rightly notices that when more Fatwas has been issued in the past decade than in the past 1,400 years, something is wrong.

And that is in this country alone. Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed says media is to blame. TV is just too popular and no one is checking the credits of lesser Muftis who are heading to the silver screen. As they are trying to outbid each other, it is no wonder we have Fatwas about every aspect of daily life today. Al-Rashed says these unruly Muftis are too popular; they can’t be controlled. The only alternative for the Grand Mufti is to set up a body for media to consult when selecting their religious experts

Yes! Let's have a religious ranking of our telly-muftis. And let the people vote with a sms-system like the one they use on pop music channels. How fun it would be to see the rolling banners on the screen: “love fatwas by mufti-abdallah; sms 4321; career-fatwas by mufti-hameda; sms 6789.”