Rolf@Arab spring

[Sasaki Kojiro]

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backc...EqMQOQoo.email

[drone]

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backc...EqMQOQoo.email

What? You mean the Daily Mail is wrong? Inconceivable!

[Sasaki Kojiro]

What? You mean the Daily Mail is wrong? Inconceivable!

May be more interesting than that:

http://volokh.com/2012/04/27/questio...osed-in-egypt/

AllahPundit (Hot Air), Andrew Sullivan, and Dan Murphy (Christian Science Monitor) question whether a bill allowing people to have sex with their dead spouses (for up to six hours after the death) was indeed proposed in the Egyptian Parliament. The story apparently began in the Al Ahram newspaper, and was then taken up by the Al Arabiya newspaper; AllahPundit suggests they are not to be trusted:

Al-Ahram is controlled by the Egyptian government, which I assume means it’s heavily influenced by the ruling military junta. And the junta, of course, is invested in discrediting the Islamists in order to defend its prerogatives against parliament’s growing power. (It’s worth noting too that Al-Arabiya, which picked up the story from Al-Ahram, is a Saudi outfit and the Saudis are mighty anxious about the idea of Islamist populists seizing power from sclerotic tyrannical regimes.)

AllahPundit counsels skepticism, but is not sure:

[N]one of this is to say the story isn’t true — the part about the marriage age being lowered is all too plausible — but it’s not hard to see why Mubarak allies might want to make something up or inflate something one of the fringier parliamentarians said in order to galvanize international opinion against the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists. It is, however, hard to see why the MB would allow parliament to entertain a law like this at a moment when they’re busy gladhanding westerners to reassure them that the Brotherhood are “modern” Islamists who are worthy of foreign aid and trade deals. If this really is being kicked around by MPs, I’d bet it’s the Salafists who are pushing it. But we’ll see.

Sullivan and the Monitor seem to go further. I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, but thought I’d note the possibility that Al Ahram and Al Arabiya may not be accurate on this.

[Fragony]

We will see http://english.alarabiya.net/article...25/210198.html

[Hax]

We actually talked about this in class this very day.

Al-Ahram is definitely wrong here. The article linked earlier was actually quite correct: a few years ago there was an apparently self-styled (important!) imam from Morocco by the name of Abd al-Bari Zamzami, from a relatively influential family of religious scholars in Morocco (not Egypt) who ruled that there is nothing in the shari‘a that forbids (note the wording) a man having sex with a woman a few hours before his death. He viewed this as a way for the man (I'm totally serious here) to eh..say farewell to his wife one more time.

Cue an intrepid reporter asking questions such as: "Can a woman have sex with her dead husband?" and (seriously): "If a man has four wives and if one of which dies and he immediately remarries, can he still legally have sex with her corpse?". Apparently, Zamzami didn't really know how to reply to this and was actually in something of a hilarious interview from what I heard.

Besides, crazy fatwas are declared all the time, especially since after Mubarak's fall, and they don't have to mean anything. On Facebook there are links going around of "the craziest fatwas of 2011", check this link for example.

[Strike For The South]

The nuance is never is good as the outrage :(

[Fragony]

The nuance is never is good as the outrage :(

The parlement actually discussing necrophilae more then makes up, or is it down, for ehm...... it, though. I don't think nuance is always good. Once heard eyeballs cool down faster, they are like binballs