There’s a story making the rounds on the internet today about a prudish Islamic cleric “residing in Europe” who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to handle phallic food items like bananas and cucumbers.
“He said that these fruits and vegetables ‘resemble the male penis’ and hence could arouse women or ‘make them think of sex’,” reports the Egyptian website bikyamasr.com.
That’s some pretty good flame-bait, but is it legit? According to the article in bikyamasr.com, the story originally appeared on something called “el-Senousa news”, but good luck finding it. In fact, a Google search for “el-Senousa news” only points back—many times over—to the article in bikyamasr.com.
Between that and the somewhat intangible location and identity of the “unnamed sheikh” in the article, the tale of the vegetable-fearing Mullah is starting to look a little short on authenticity. What’s more likely is that the independent news service bikyamasr.com is reacting to the troubling emergence of the hard-line Salafi Al-Nou party in Egypt’s (reportedly fraud-ridden) election—a story that, sadly, isn’t so cockamamie.