April 27, 2009
Awesome: Cleric Gives Thumbs Up to Turning Egypt Into Thailand of Middle East
Are you ready to swing, baby? The Egyptian sex-tour industry just got a thumbs up from the most unlikely of places: one of Sunni Islam's most respected clerics:
Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa announced that "travelers marriages,” known as nikah mesyar in Arabic, are legitimate unless banned by the state....The author of above post is pretty pissed given that it "legalizes" fornication. For an alleged liberal and a man with solid anti-Islamist creds, I do not think he quite gets what freedom and liberty really mean.Some traits of the mesyar marriage are reminiscent of the nikah mutah ["temporary marriage"], practiced by Shiite Muslims. The differences are that the mutah is based on a contract with a fixed date of expiry and it does not require witnesses while a mesyar is open-ended and requires two witnesses to be present.
Even if one doesn't support some kind of contractual relationship between two consenting adults which legitimizes what would otherwise be an illegitimate relationship, they are still two consenting adults. When two adults consent, the state has no legitimate claim to intervene.
