Breastfeeding fatwa

The breastfeeding fatwa is a fatwa (a religious ruling within Islam) issued by a lecturer of Cairo's Al-Azhar University that suggested that male and female colleagues could use breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

Fatwa
The fatwa said that if a woman fed a male colleague "directly from her breast" at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work.

"Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage," he ruled. "A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed."

The issuer had drawn on Islamic traditions that forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of men and women. Wetnursing, the practice of one woman breastfeeding another's baby, was widespread in Arab culture, and the child refers to the woman as his "milk mother", thereby creating a social relationship that would preclude later marriage. This relationship makes the two people mahram (unmarriageable) to each other. See also Islamic marital jurisprudence.

Reaction
The fatwa sparked outrage, with critics deriding the author on Egyptian television. The University later suspended the lecturer, and he issued a retraction a few days later, saying it was "a bad interpretation of a particular case."