But don’t worry, he doesn’t want the man being breastfed, he just has to drink it…you know, because that would be gross…

May 22, 2010- A Saudi scholar has waded into controversy after he said that women could give their milk to men to establish a degree of maternal relations and get around a strict religious ban on mixing between unrelated men and women.

According to Shaikh Abdul Mohsin Al Abaican, a consultant at Saudi Arabia’s royal court, a man who often entered a house and came in contact with the womenfolk there should be made symbolically related to the women by drinking milk from one of the women.

Under the fatwa, the act would preclude any sexual relations between the man and the donor woman and her relatives.

However, Al Abaican said that the donor woman should not breastfeed the man directly.

“The man should take the milk, but not directly from the breast of the woman,” Al Abaican said. “He should drink it and then becomes a relative of the family, a fact that allows him to come in contact with the women without breaking Islam’s rules about mixing,” he said, quoted by Kuwaiti and Saudi media on Saturday.

Exactly three years ago, on May 22, 2007, an Egyptian scholar was disciplined by Al Azhar University, one of Islam’s most prestigious institutions, after he issued a fatwa calling upon women to breastfeed their male colleagues.

Dr Izzat Attiyah said that his fatwa offered a way around mixing of the sexes in the work place since breast-feeding established a maternal relation even if the beneficiary was not the woman’s biological son or daughter.