Mick Hartley

It can be tricky negotiating your way through the minefield of sex while adhering to the teachings of the Prophet. Luckily there are religious teachers ready and willing to provide the necessary guidance. Is it, for instance, permissible for a husband to be breast-fed by his wife? Egyptian cleric Muhammad Al-Zoghbi weighs in:

"Is it permissible for a husband to be breastfed by his wife? Let's say that a husband suckles on his wife, during foreplay… Of course, there is no shame in talking about these things. Let's say that he swallows some milk and it gets into his stomach… Does his wife become forbidden to him, like his mother? Some fossilized fanatics tend to say so, but this is nonsense, of course. When we deal with this kind of question, the rule is that the husband may enjoy his wife however he pleases. The only things that are forbidden are those prohibited by Allah: anal penetration and sex during menstruation or after giving birth. Apart from those things, everything is permitted by Allah."

The Islamic law forbidding sexual relations between a man and a woman who's breast-fed him has, it may be recalled, led to some peculiar suggestions in the past. Some years ago a lecturer at Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University proposed that, in order to get around the ban between men and unrelated women being alone together – in the workplace say – the woman could breast-feed the man. After five breast-feedings, he suggested, the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law, and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair. Presumably the breast-feedings would have to take place in the presence of a third party such as the woman's guardian, to meet the requirements of Islamic law, but I'm not sure if such details were properly thought through.

A Saudi cleric even issued a fatwa on the subject, in the days before Saudi women were permitted to drive:

Many were stunned when Saudi cleric Sheik Abdel Mohsen Obeikan recently issued a fatwa, or Islamic ruling, calling on women to give breast milk to their male colleagues or men they come into regular contact with so as to avoid illicit mixing between the sexes. But a group of Saudi women has taken the controversial decree a step further in a new campaign to gain the right to drive in the ultra-conservative kingdom, media reports say. If they're not granted the right to drive, the women are threatening to breastfeed their drivers to establish a symbolic maternal bond. 

"Is this is all that is left to us to do: to give our breasts to the foreign drivers?" a Saudi woman named Fatima Shammary was quoted as saying by Gulf News.