Muslim Clerics Rage Against Twitter and Facebook

Deja Vu! Saudi Arabia's top cleric, Abdul Aziz Al Shaikh, says that Twitter is a platform for "promoting lies." Two years ago, Al-Azhar's Abd Al-Hamid Al-Atrash reportedly said that Facebook "breaks up families."

Social media doesn't lure a person to flirt with someone, spread a lie about someone, or harness envy, jealousy and hate (read my article "The Accessibility of Envy on Social Media").

Though it is a grandiose statement, it is fair to say that we human beings have been lying since time immemorial. Infidelity is nothing new either. And if I were to ask my father how he flirted back in his heyday, I am sure he would have a few interesting stories to tell me.

Perhaps it is easier to issue a fatwa (religious edict) against an inanimate websites than to tell people to their faces, "you're promoting lies," "you're luring women on Facebook" or "you're enviously staring at pictures of people in your network."

The Egyptian cleric, who later denied having issued a fatwa against Facebook, had allegedly blamed the site for the increasing divorce rate. I spoke to my Egyptian friends about the rumors of such a fatwa for an article (which you can read here) and I remember one of them saying that "they [clerics] would have to ban the Internet, cell phones, e-mail and landline phones." (...)