As the Holy Month of Ramadan approaches, many Muslims soccer players are faced with a dilemma. Naturally, fasting takes a toll on the body, fatiguing it and lowering its performance level. Thus, footballers are faced with a tough decision, sacrificing their work performance or their religious obligations. Last year, the club team FSV Frankfurt gave three players a warning for fasting, as their contracts contained a clause stating that fasting was not permitted without permission from the club.

Indonesia's highest Islamic body has followed up a series of contentious fatwas with a new edict banning Muslims from watching TV gossip shows or having sex-change operations.

INDONESIA'S highest Islamic body today abandoned a proposal to ban Muslims from drinking the world's most expensive coffee, which is extracted from the feces of a small mammal called the civet.
It had considered issuing a fatwa against the rare coffee, made using beans picked out from the excrement of the nocturnal, cat-like creature, on the grounds it was unclean.

In a landmark verdict, the Bangladesh High Court has ruled as criminal offence handing down of punishments like caning or beating to women in the name of "fatwa" or Islamic decrees.

With no centralized Islamic religious authority like a Pope or Dalai Lama, pretty much any Muslim “scholar” can create a fatwa, a religious edict for modern life supposedly guided by the Koran or the (less authoritative) hadiths- stories from Muhammad’s life. In recent years, supply has far outstripped demand, and it’s getting laughable. Most fatwas are harmless and a little mundane, but lately, some Islamic jurists have gone straight crazy.

by Abdul Sattar

When Can A Mufti Refuse to Answer a Question?
1. The Situation Being Asked About Does Not Exist.
Often times, the questioner (mustafti), will approach the scholar and ask him a question involving a scenario which has not yet happened. Sometimes the question may make assumptions which can result in changes to [...]

A Pakistani cleric declares jihad on suicide bombers. And the story is just beginning.

Pakistani newspapers recently picked up an intriguing story from the country's security establishment. Reporters learned that their government had intercepted a secret message circulating within Tehrik-e-Taliban, the most prominent of several militant groups trying to overthrow the government in Islamabad. The jihadists, it seemed, had just added a new target to one of their death lists. His name is Tahir ul-Qadri, and he's no government official. He's one of Pakistan's leading Islamic scholars, an authority on the Quran and Islamic religious law.

It's no wonder the terrorists want to see Qadri dead. Last month he promulgated a 600-page legal ruling, a fatwa, that condemns terrorism as un-Islamic. A few Western media outlets gave the news a nod, but the coverage quickly petered out. And that's a pity, because the story of this fatwa is just beginning to get interesting. "I have declared a jihad against terrorism," says the 59-year-old Qadri in an interview. "I am trying to bring [the terrorists] back towards humanism. This is a jihad against brutality, to bring them back towards normality. This is an intellectual jihad." This isn't empty rhetoric. Last year militants killed one of Qadri's colleagues, a scholar named Sarfraz Ahmed Naeem, for expressing similar positions.

Prominent Muslim scholars have recast a famous medieval fatwa on jihad, arguing that the religious edict radical Islamists often cite to justify killing cannot be used in a globalized world that respects faith and civil rights.

The leader of a global Muslim movement has issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that he calls an absolute condemnation of terrorism.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker, says the 600-page fatwa bans suicide bombing "without any excuses, any pretexts, or exceptions."

The leader of a global Muslim movement has issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that he calls an absolute condemnation of terrorism. Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker, says the 600-page fatwa bans suicide bombing "without any excuses, any pretexts, or exceptions."