When “Highly Trained” Isn’t Enough: What the Towering Fatwas Reveal About Clerical Power in Islam

 

When “Highly Trained” Isn’t Enough: What the Towering Fatwas Reveal About Clerical Power in Islam

Adis Duderija

There is a particular kind of modern Muslim anxiety that doesn’t come from atheism, secularism, or even Islamophobia. It comes from within: the sinking feeling that, at any moment, a “highly trained” cleric—credentialed, authorised, and amplified—may issue a ruling so spectacularly unmoored from reason and moral sensibility that it becomes difficult to explain, even to ourselves, how such things can pass as “Islamic guidance.” The Critical Muslim list of “Top Ten Towering Fatwas” is written in a satirical register, but the underlying material is not fiction: it is a catalogue of rulings attributed to official muftis, senior seminary institutions, and state-linked councils. 

The list begins with a Saudi grand mufti’s insistence—after “considerable study,” we are told—that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it. If satire works here, it’s because the ruling is not merely wrong; it is an emblem of a deeper epistemic pathology: a theological posture that treats inherited textual interpretation as a competitor to accumulated human knowledge rather than a partner to it. In classical Muslim civilisation, the religious sciences were never meant to require the denial of mathematics, astronomy, or observation; yet this fatwa dramatizes what happens when a clerical habitus confuses piety with intransigence, and submission to God with submission to a narrow interpretive class. 

A second set of rulings in the list reveals a different, equally troubling distortion: the bureaucratisation and commodification of moral judgement. We read of a Deoband “cash for fatwa” scandal and the mass production of legal opinions “every week,” including the ruling that triple talaq pronounced over a mobile phone is valid even if the wife cannot hear it due to network problems. The ethical ugliness here lies not only in the outcome (a marital bond dissolved without the woman’s even knowing), but in the mechanisation of a relationship Qur’anic ethics treats with gravity and care. When law becomes a conveyor belt, moral responsibility is replaced by formalism; human vulnerability becomes collateral damage to procedural cleverness. 

A related logic appears in the UAE ruling encouraging divorce by SMS, as if the dignity of persons and the weight of lifelong commitments can be reduced to a text notification. The point is not to romanticise marriage or deny that divorce is sometimes necessary. The point is that an ethic that permits—let alone encourages—such frictionless disposability has quietly drifted away from any recognisable moral beauty. It is, to borrow a philosophical distinction, not simply “non-rational,” but irrational: a pattern of reasoning that runs against the grain of coherent moral thought and the basic human goods (care, reciprocity, stability) that ethical systems exist to protect. 

Then comes the list’s most revealing cluster: rulings obsessed with policing bodies—especially women’s bodies—through oddly specific prohibitions. One fatwa attributed to an Al-Azhar-affiliated dean declares that being completely naked during sex annuls the marriage. Another ruling, attributed to a Moroccan scholar within the religious hierarchy, reportedly permits intercourse with a deceased wife on the grounds that death does not alter the marital contract. Here the problem is not merely “conservatism.” It is a method: a jurisprudence that can produce grotesque outcomes because it elevates casuistry over conscience, and formal analogy over moral intuition. When “legal reasoning” is untethered from any thicker account of virtue, mercy, and harm, it begins to generate conclusions that are ethically unintelligible. 

The Malaysian National Fatwa Council’s rulings in the list offer a similarly unsettling window. One edict labels women who wear trousers or behave “manly” as “tomboys” and therefore forbidden; another condemns yoga as an “aberration” capable of destroying Muslim faith because of Hindu spiritual elements. Even if one grants concerns about religious syncretism, the disproportion is the point: an insecurity that imagines faith as so brittle it can be shattered by stretching, breathing, or bodily discipline. That is not reverence; it is a theology of panic—and panic is a terrible foundation for ethics. 

Perhaps the most infamous entry is the Al-Azhar-related “breastfeeding colleagues” ruling: the suggestion that women could breastfeed male co-workers to make workplace interaction permissible by creating a kinship relation. It is hard to find language that captures the moral disfigurement without slipping into mockery. Yet the significance is analytical: this is what happens when a legal tradition becomes preoccupied with boundary maintenance (“mixing”) while lacking robust moral resources to address the actual modern ethical question—how to organise dignified, safe, equitable workplaces. A jurisprudence that responds to contemporary life with symbolic loopholes is not protecting morality; it is evacuating morality. 

Finally, the list returns to Saudi Arabia: the 1991 ruling (revealed via WikiLeaks, according to the list) that women should not be allowed to drive, justified by fears of “mixing,” women being alone in cars, and ensuing “social chaos.” Again, the point is not only the restriction itself but the ethical imagination behind it: a worldview in which women’s mobility is treated as a threat requiring containment, and in which “public order” is purchased through gendered coercion. That is not just “traditional.” It is ethically ugly: it makes women the bearers of communal anxiety and turns male guardianship into a technology of control. 

So what do these towering fatwas mean? At minimum, they illustrate a central sociological fact: Islamic authority is not a single, centralised papacy. Fatwas—especially in Sunni contexts—are typically non-binding legal opinions, sought voluntarily and contested through plurality. But the modern media ecosystem has changed the practical reality: non-binding opinions can still become socially coercive when they are broadcast by institutions, state-backed councils, or celebrity preachers with immense reach. In other words, the lack of formal binding force does not prevent real-world domination—especially over women, minorities, and the socially vulnerable. 

And this is where the deeper thesis emerges: these fatwas are not merely “bizarre” exceptions. They are symptoms of an approach to Islamic theology, law, and ethics that has become unreasonable in its epistemology (hostile to knowledge), irrational in its moral logic (producing outcomes that violate basic ethical intuition), and nonsensical in its juridical technique (substituting loopholes for moral deliberation). The cleric may be “highly trained,” but trained in what—exactly? If training reproduces a method that cannot distinguish the purposes of law (justice, mercy, welfare understood contextually, rationally and relationally) from its technicalities, then training becomes part of the problem. 

This is why the question cannot be reduced to “we need better clerics.” We do—but not only that. What we need is a structural rethinking of religious authority itself. The right to speak about Islam cannot remain the monopoly of a clerical class whose incentives reward gatekeeping, boundary obsession, and patriarchal control. A healthy Muslim public sphere requires counterweights: interdisciplinary scholars, ethicists, historians, women’s voices, community advocates, and professionals who understand lived realities—people who can ask not only “Is it technically permissible?” but “Is it truthful, just, compassionate, and wise?” 

To say Islamic authority “cannot and should not be left in the hands of clerics” is not to declare war on learning. It is to insist that knowledge in Islam was never meant to be a closed guild, and that moral reasoning was never meant to be a clerical performance insulated from human consequence. The towering fatwas, for all their dark comedy, are a warning. They remind us that when authority is concentrated in a narrow interpretive class—especially one shaped by conservative and puritanical anxieties—religion can become a machine for producing rules rather than a tradition for cultivating ethical beauty.

In the end, the real scandal is not that some fatwas are ridiculous. It is that so many Muslims have been trained to confuse clerical output with divine will. The cure is not cynicism, but a renewed commitment to public reason, moral accountability, and plural participation in the interpretation of Islam—so that the next time a “towering” ruling appears, it meets not fearful compliance, but confident, informed, ethically serious dissent.