A fatwa (a religious edict) issued by a Saudi cleric, calling for opponents of the strict segregation of men and women to be put to death if they refuse to abandon their ideas, has drawn criticism from prominent clerics in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. "This embodies fanaticism in its full sense, Souad Saleh, an Egyptian Muslim scholar said. She added that the segregation described by the fatwa could not be applied. "Islam is a simple, logical and flexible religion. However, some clerics insist on tarnishing its image by issuing hardline fatwas," Saleh told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. Sheikh Abdel-Rahman al-Barrak said in a fatwa that the mixing of genders at the workplace or in education "as advocated by modernisers" is prohibited because it allows "sight of what is forbidden, and forbidden talk between men and women". "All of this leads to whatever ensues," he said in the text of the fatwa published on his website (albarrak.islamlight.net). "Whoever allows this mixing ... allows forbidden things, and whoever allows them is an infidel and this means defection from Islam ... Either he retracts or he must be killed ... because he disavows and does not observe the Sharia [Islamic law]," said Barrak. Mohamed al-Nejimi, a member of the official Saudi Council of Jurisprudence, slammed the fatwa as an individual view. "This fatwa and its like could greatly damage society as many people might follow it and bar their girls or boys from education," al-Nejimi said. He added that there should be a council responsible for passing fatwas, "instead of perplexing Muslims across the world". Barrak, believed to be 77, does not hold a governmental position but he is viewed by Islamists as the leading independent authority of Saudi Arabia's hardline version of Sunni Islam, often termed Wahhabism. Western diplomats believe that King Abdullah's push for reforms is resisted by a mainly older generation of clerics who still control the religious establishment there. The monarch dismissed a cleric from a top council of religious scholars last October after he demanded that Muslim clerics vet the curriculum at a new flagship mixed-gender university. In 2008, Barrak issued a fatwa that two Saudi writers should be tried for apostasyfor their 'heretical articles' and put to death if they did not repent after the two wrote articles questioning the Sunni Muslim view in Saudi Arabia that Christians and Jews shoudl be considered infidels. He has also denounced shi'ite Muslims as 'infidels' in another edict that coincided with sectarian tensions in Iraq. Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, in response to the fatwa, said that mixing between girls and boys is 'religiously permissible to seek knowledge with a commitment to morality and values set by the Islamic Sharia. Gomaa, Egypt's leading Muslim cleric, noted that there is nothing in Islamic law that prevents the mixing of young men and women, 'whether in schools or universities and among others who seek knowledge.' He was quoting the words of the Prophet when he added that "seeking knowledge is obligatory on every Muslim man and woman".
