Foreign Policy: The List: The World’s Stupidest Fatwas

Foreign Policy: The List: The World’s Stupidest Fatwas:

Polio vaccine

Who: "Local mullahs in rural Pakistan"

What: "Pakistan’s largest Islamist umbrella group, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), issued a fatwa in January 2007 endorsing the provincial government’s efforts to immunize children from polio in the country’s Northwest Frontier Province. But even though health workers carried copies of the ruling with them as they trudged across the province, The Guardian reported in February 2007 that the parents of some 24,000 children had refused to allow the workers to administer polio drops. It turns out that influential antistate clerics had been issuing their own fatwas denouncing the campaign as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims. Although Pakistan only saw 39 cases of polio last year and most children have now been immunized, a similar religiously motivated firestorm against polio drops in Nigeria in 2003 allowed the eradicable disease to spread to 12 new countries in just 18 months."

Comment: This may be an example of a situation in which the factual basis of a belief promulgated by religious leaders should be argued in public. See my previous post on the general issue. JAD