Muslim Women Should Breastfeed Their Co-workers?

Dr. Izzat Atiya,
head of Al Azhar University’s Department of Hadith

In 2007 issued a fatwa, or Islamic legal decree, saying that female workers should “breastfeed” their male co-workers in order to work in each other’s company.
According to the BBC:He 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.”Atiya based his fatwa on a hadith—a documented saying or doing of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and subsequently one of Sharia law’s sources of jurisprudence.
Many Egyptians naturally protested this decree—hadith or no hadith—though no one could really demonstrate how it was un-Islamic; for the fatwa conformed to the strictures of Islamic jurisprudence. Still, due to the protests—not many Egyptian women were eager to “breastfeed” their male coworkers.

And Back in 2010
a high-ranking Saudi, Sheikh Abdul Mohsin al-Abaican
issued a fatwa confirming that “women could give their milk to men to establish a degree of maternal relations and get around a strict religious ban on mixing between unrelated men and women.” But unlike Atiya’s fatwa, “the man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman. He should drink it [from a cup] and then [he] becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam’s rules about mixing.”

Kuwaiti Islamic activists
supported the adult breastfeeding fatwa issued by the Egyptian Salafi, Sheikh Jamal al-Murakbi in the context of relation of man & wife.

—they are divided over the particulars:

*Sheikh Nazim Misbahi,
head of the Fatwa Committee of the Islamic Heritage Revival Society in Kuwait
supports the decree, agreeing that “it is not forbidden [haram] for a man to breastfeed from his wife.

*Sheikh Bassam al-Shatti
a Sharia professor
specifies: “If the husband deliberately sucks to obtain milk from the breast of his wife, this is forbidden; however, if it happens unintentionally during foreplay with his wife, then there is no problem—though it is disliked according to the four schools” of Sharia.

*Sheikh Sa’d al-Anzi
stressed that” if the man, while being intimate with his wife, sucks her nipples, it is nothing, considered foreplay; but if the milk reaches his mouth, he should spit out—even if goes down in his stomach,” i.e., vomit.

—such fatwas are reminders of the inescapable strictures of Sharia law: while these sheikhs offers various circumstances and interpretations concerning “adult breastfeeding,” they are all confined to the words of the prophet of Islam.