practice had persisted unhindered. Shortly after the
conference, Jàd al-£aqq, then grand shaykh of al-
Azhar, issued a fatwa declaring that uncircumcised
girls tend to “a sharp temperament and bad habits”
and are like to fall prey to “immorality and corrup-
tion.” He described genital cutting as “a laudable
practice that does honor to women” and as a reli-
gious practice as important as praying to God. The
government’s response to this fatwa was to lift the
ban and require that the service be available at gov-
ernment hospitals one day a week. The rationale
was that at least then the surgery would be con-
ducted under safe hygienic conditions; however,
given that the government hospitals charged five
times more than the going street rate, this initiative
was unlikely to attract poorer families and was
doomed from the start. Interestingly enough,
¢an†àwì’s statement on the subject was in clear
contradiction to Jàd al-£aqq’s position. He argued
that the modesty of young girls depended not on
circumcision but on a proper religious and moral
education and upbringing; furthermore, he had
found no evidence that the Prophet had had his
own daughters circumcised. The Egyptian Organi-
zation of Human Rights filed a lawsuit against Jàd
al-£aqq for his support of female circumcision. A
court later dismissed the suit; in any case, by then,
Jàd al-£aqq had passed away and ¢an†àwìwas the
new grand shaykh of al-Azhar. In June 1996, the
government finally banned female circumcisions in
all hospitals, public and private, and prohibited
any licensed medical professional from performing
the surgery. The following year, however, the new
grand mufti, Shaykh Naßr Farìd Wàßil, issued a
fatwa decreeing that female circumcision should be
permitted even though it is not obligatory under
Islam. Soon after, a court overturned the govern-
ment’s directive prohibiting licensed health work-
ers from conducting the surgery on the grounds
that the government could not interfere in profes-
sional practice through a ministerial decree.
In 1998, Wàßil issued a fatwa that a woman who
had been raped was entitled to surgery that would
“restore” her virginity; because state and society
had failed to protect her, he argued, it was up to
them to provide this service so that she might go on
to lead a normal life. This controversial fatwa pro-
vided an excuse for media and public discussions
on the issue of rape; some critics expressed concern
that such surgery would serve to deceive the
woman’s future husband, while others, such as
women’s groups, did not see the mufti’s proposal as
the most appropriate way to meet the needs of a
raped woman.
overview 173bangladesh
In Bangladesh, where there is no official fatwa-
issuing authority comparable to the Dàr al-Iftà±or
al-Azhar University of Egypt, the fatwas that have
made national and international headlines are of a
very different nature. In addition to the death sen-
tence against the writer Taslima Nasreen, through-
out the 1990s there were reports of incidents in
which ordinary landless village women were pub-
licly humiliated, beaten, and in one case, burned to
death following local salish(village tribunal) in-
dictments, usually under charges of adultery. While
a salishcomprising the old wise men of the village
was a traditional part of the rural informal justice
system, the use of the term fatwa to describe its
decision on a case was a distinctly new phenome-
non. In addition, women who had become involved
in NGO projects in order to earn money, receive
medical care, or attend literacy classes, became the
subject of fatwas by local religious leaders: some
fatwas called for these women to be ostracized
from the community, others declared them apos-
tates and automatically divorced from their hus-
bands. Finally, in a number of areas, local religious
leaders issued fatwas stating that it was “un-
Islamic” for women to vote in local and national
elections. In many of the cases investigated, it was
found that the women were proxies in larger fights
between families and that the “fatwas” were
endorsed by the wealthier party in these disputes.
This helps to explain why the poorer and less pow-
erful members of the community felt they had no
alternative but to go along with the fatwas issued,
even when they considered them unjust or even un-
Islamic. Non-Muslim women were not spared the
brunt of this new form of gendered oppression: a
Hindu teenager was punished by a salishin 1994
simply for talking to a Muslim man.
The public response to such fatwas in Bangladesh
has been divided between secularists and Islamists.
For the former, these incidents simply confirm their
worst fears regarding the public use of religion: if
state and society are not restored to the secularist
principles on which the country was founded, the
country is doomed to medieval barbarism. Accord-
ing to the Islamists, half-educated village religious
leaders have been able to get away with their un-
lawful fatwas precisely because there is no national
and official fatwa board in the country that can
issue genuine Islamic fatwas. They insist that fat-
was are an integral part of Islamic jurisprudence
and are horrified that the secularists have coined
the derogatory term fatwabazto refer to anyone
who issues a fatwa.