Darul UloomDeoband - the Islamic seminary representing Wahabi Sunni Islam, has declared women watching of football match as haraam’.
In a fatwa, Muslim cleric Mufti Athar Kasmi said that women should not football as they should not watch men playing with bare knees.
Rs Rs What’s the point of women watching football matches IJ What is its benefit IJ They’ll be looking at footballers’ thighs and all their attention will be on that. They would not even care about the competition or scores,” said the cleric.
Castigating those men who ‘allow’ their wives to watch football he said, “Do you have no shame IJ Do you not fear God IJ You let her watch these kinds of things.”
Issuing such fatwa is not something new by Deobandi clerics and many times these kick up controversy for bordering on the weird.
The Deobandi cleric referred to a similar fatwa issued by a cleric from Saudi Arabia who had said that it was unacceptable for women to watch football – live or on television and labelled it as Rs haraam’.
In October last year, Darul Uloom Deoband in Saharanpur had issued a fatwa banning Muslim women from plucking, trimming, shaping eyebrows and cutting their hair. Terming it ‘un-Islamic’, the body also urged women to stay away from beauty parlours.
Earlier this month, Mufti Mohammad Azeemuddin of Jamia Nizamia in Hyderabad had ordained that Muslims must not consume prawns as they were not fish and categorised it as an arthropod and labeled it as ‘makruh tahrim’ (strictly abominable).
As per Islamic dietary laws, food is divided into three categories – halal (lawful) haraam (unlawful and prohibited) and makruh (abominable).