AN Al-Azhar cleric has issued two controversial fatwas (religious edicts) branding Internet social networking sites as illegal and their loggers as sinners. "Since logging onto the Facebook and other networking websites could lead to a serious harm to public opinion in Arab and Muslim nations, and since it is a tool of damage, surfing the site is against Islamis Sharia," said Sheikh Abdel Hamid el- Attrash, the former head of Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee. He added that the Facebook could encourage the proliferation of illicit affairs among its users, whom he said, should turn to some more useful ways of spending their time. El-Attrash's fatwa was based on a recent study conducted by the Cairo-based National Centre for Criminological and Sociological Studies, which found that one in five Egyptians who divorced their wives were having affairs on the Facebook. "Networking this way makes it easier to have illicit affairs with partners," he said in the fatwa. Many other Muslim clerics and human rights activists have defied el Attrash. "Everything can be good and bad according to how it is used. The Facebook is like television, mobiles and any other technology. It can be invested to make good things or can be used in devilish ways" said famed TV preacher Souad Saleh. She gave the examples of using the Facebook to access news or make contacts with relatives living in foreign countries. Meanwhile, Al-Azhar's Fatwas Committee, which is responsible for issuing religious edicts said that women could be allowed to work as taxi drivers, but only if those taxis were allocated for serving women only. The committee also set a number of conditions for the regulations, which they said would protect women who work in this sector from “outlaws” and those “not following the teachings of Islam”. The allocation of taxis for female drivers has raised concerns and controversy in human rights centres across Egypt, particularly the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR). They reject the idea. "This is an attempt to isolate women and separate them from the society,” the ECWR, a non-governmental group said in a statement. It added that the move was trying to “find a naïve solution, which could have serious ramifications for social and security problems”.
