Egyptian cleric issues fatwa against the use of social networking sites

Sheikh Abdel Hamid al-Atrash, a top Egyptian cleric and former head of the fatwa commission at Al-Azhar University, has issued a fatwa against the use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, saying such sites have resulted in the rise of marital infidelity. According to the Sharia scholar, Muslims using social networking sites must be considered “sinners”.

“It's an instrument that destroys the family because it encourages spouses to have relations with other people which break Islamic Sharia law,” al-Atrash has said in the fatwa. “While one or other of the spouses is at work, the other is chatting online with someone else, wasting their time and flouting the Sharia. This endangers the Muslim family.” [Source: Economic Times]

The fatwa came after a UK-based law firm Divorce-Online, which specialises in divorce, claimed that almost one in every five cases of divorces they processed had been caused after one of the partners started using social networking sites such as Facebook.

Mark Keenan, managing director, Divorce-Online.co.uk, said, “I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was I was really surprised to see 20 per cent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook.”