All I can say today is, “Thank Ceiling Cat I’m not a Muslim.” For there’s nothing I like to see more when I’m hungry than a sign that says “all you can eat” (or, in England, the characteristically more polite “all you care to eat”). It is a Rule of Eating if you like good food, you like lots of good food. A true gourmet will also be a gourmand. If I’m in Louisiana, give me a table, a pitcher of beer, and someone who will pour endless buckets of boiled crawfish onto the butcher paper covering my table. The same goes for crabs in Baltimore and oysters in Charleston. That is why, when I’m in a strange town and hungry, I will ask restaurant advice from strangers who are, well, a bit portly.
Sadly, the Saudis may no longer have this option, for, according to Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned media outlet located in Dubai, a Saudi cleric has issued a fatwa against all-you-can eat buffets:
The cleric, Saleh al-Fawzan, recently issued a fatwa through a kingdom-based Quranic TV station prohibiting open buffets, saying that the value and quantity of what is sold should be pre-determined before it is purchased.
“Whoever enters the buffet and eats for 10 or 50 riyals without deciding the quantity they will eat is violating Sharia (Islamic) law,” said Fawzan on al-Atheer channel.
I’d like to know the part of Sharia law that dictates this, but I’m sure there’s something in there that can be interpreted this way. I guess “enough to fill me up” doesn’t qualify as a “quantity” according to that law. Or perhaps al-Fawzan just got a case of heartburn.
Affronted (and hungry) Muslims, however, are striking back:
Using the Twitter hashtag “prohibiting-open-buffet” (in Arabic), some of the site’s users criticized Fawzan’s fatwa.
“Restaurants will be ruined if they didn’t quantify the food they sold. This negates the sheikh’s premise that the quantity is unknown,” said on Twitter user. [JAC: I don’t understand what this means.]
“This is not Quran just a mere fatwa, if you want to follow it, you are a free man but you can not impose it on others,” wrote another.
One user sarcastically wrote: “Congratulations! Open buffets have made it in the list for what is forbidden for us.”
But there are also supporters of this fatwa. Fortunately, fatwas are not binding on all Muslims, for interpretations of sharia law vary from place to place. Were I a Muslim, I’d just laugh and take another helping.
h/t: Grania
Bon appetitte!
Maybe he means that the restaurants have a pretty good idea of how much the average person eats…
Yes, that’s the way I read it. A restaurant owner would surely have considered how much food would likely be consumed before enacting the policy. Cruise ships, for example, usually have all you can eat dining going all day long, in one form or another. Not only do they have to consider the costs carefully, they also have to purchase and load a week’s worth of food before the cruise starts, so obviously the quantities and the value can be pre-determined. The cleric is talking about things of which he knows nothing, but that is pretty much his whole job so no big surprise there.
“Saudi cleric issues fatwa against all-you-can-eat buffets”
My heart goes out to today’s satirists. How can they top reality?
Maybe we won’t top this reality, but we can make an all-you-can-eat buffet out of this fatwah.
Have Saleh al-Fawzan contact former NY mayor Bloomberg. They probably have a common ground.
Yeah, they are Leisure Fascists, determined to decide what other people can eat and drink.
Will they also issue a Thinwa against Weight Watchers?
That wins the thread.
LMAO!
Flipping briliant! Ha! 🙂
I hope Jerry never comes up to me on the street and asks me where a good place to eat is. 😀
And as far as this fatwa is concerned, are we really surprised? It appears that many religions aim to make life as unpleasant as possible for humans by forbidding even the little pleasantries in life. I’ve noted how many devoutly religious people rarely smile and look so serious and glum. I thought that was how we atheists were supposed to behave!
I think the religious leaders’ practice of forbidding things is used to obtain and demonstrate control of their followers. Sex and food are two mighty big levers.
Fat-wah!
Atheists don’t need all you can eat buffets. We’re too busy eating barbecued babies. 😉
“(or, in England, the characteristically more polite ‘all you care to eat’)“
Your original photographic evidence aside, Jerry, I have yet to see this anywhere over here!
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I hardly ever see anywhere that does this – in fact I would probably not choose such a place – they seem to be mainly the chain Harvesters & the like that do that.
Enough is as good as a feast!
I have an aversion to buffets because I don’t like the amount of people who could be handling the food. It’s most likely irrational but still….
Yes – leering over it…
More to Jerry’s taste is a Brazilian beef place in Picadilly at the lower end of Soho I went to a few months ago – they take you meat of various types until you tell them “Hold! Enough!”
A churrascaria? Wonderful. We used to have a very good one in Lincoln (not Nebraska!). And we visited a great one in in Visalia once.
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You would think Muslims would get tired of all these intrusive fatwas…but I guess not.
That settles it, tonight…I feast on all you can eat Arabian food with enough rice, falafel, and kabasa to stuff godzilla. Of course there will be wine too…not sure if that is allowed, but necessary.
“Were I a Muslim, I’d just laugh and take another helping.”
Me too…except I’d run the risk of getting arrested by the Saudi “Religious Police”, who are charged with enforcing such fatwas.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_religious_police
Nah, they’re out dining in an All You Can restaurant, free of charge.
Good one!
Why does this makes me want to go to the all you can eat rib joint?
With the wrist breaking pitchers of beer.
Pork spare ribs?
Of course! At Herschel’s All You Can Eat Barbecue, the Mecca of pork products.
“en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_religious_police”
No matter how disgusted I get w/ the human race it seems like it’s never enough.
“interpretations of sharia law vary from place to place.”
Yeah, maybe, but that just means you never know if you’ve violated a fatwa on not.
“Of course there will be wine too…not sure if that is allowed, but necessary.”
Nope, intoxicants are not allowed. http://islam.about.com/od/health/f/alcohol.htm
Funny how pages like that always seem to omit verse 16:67. Note how the faithful desperately try to spin their way out of the contradictions.
My copy of the Qur’an has that verse slightly differently.
“And from the fruit
Of the date-palm and the vine,
Ye get out wholesome drink
And food: behold in this
Also is a Sign
For those who are wise.”
The commentary then goes to note that wholesome foods mean non-alcoholic drinks (and other food) as well as…
“If sakar must be taken in the sense of fermented wine, it refers to the time before intoxicants were prohibited: this is a Meccan Sura and the prohibition came in Medina.”
I can’t read or speak Arabic so I don’t know how good the translation is.
I was told by an Iranian-backgroun classmate of mine that before the Islamic revolution in Iran there were a fair number of congregations and clerics who held that the Islamic prohibition “really” was about getting drunk …
Many of the Saudi royal family look as if they haven’t missed too many meals…..
I wonder if that is part of the reason. Saudi Arabia has a huge diabetes problem much of it likely due to overindulgence in food and lack of exercise (consider that women really can’t do any outdoor exercise and I suspect gyms for women are quite rare and not that accessible due to other fatwas). So they are attacking from a different angle.
Has a fatwa ever been issued against fatwas?
+1
Oooh, a metawa!
Perhaps there have been Sunni fatwas agin Shia fatwas and vice-versa.
Certainly makes sense. Also, you missed probably your only chance to use “vice-verswa.”
A shiawah?
Sounds like Pinker talk to me.
Bound to happen, Sunni or later.
You’re right. Shiat happens…
😀
@JBP
🙂
Pinker is Canadian so he would only make polite suggestions.
We call them ought-to-wahs.
LOL. Thanks…dunno why, but I had him pegged as a native Bostonian.
Pinker is Canadian so he would only make polite suggestions.”
Please refresh my memory; if Canadians “make polite suggestions,” what do Amuricuns do? (I’m American, and I do perceive that our popular culture has more than a bit of the Philistine about it.)
Awe. Poor Americans. I work with a lot of Americans and honestly I don’t see that much difference. I should ask them if they see a difference with us.
The polite Canadian thing was typed with my tongue firmly in cheek. There really isn’t that much difference.
Our laws are slightly different but our Republican Prime Minister is doing his best to correct that.
Still, I gather that there does not exist some sort of cultural/psychological conceit called “Canadian Exceptionalism” or “Canadianism.”
Only on the ice.
No, it’s the opposite and I sometimes think it has to do with growing up next to the US. The Canadian zeitgeist (and many Canadians would agree with me) is we think everything we do is crap and we try to eat our young by running down any company or achievement that is Canadian.
Wikipedia says this of the modern Canadian identity:
What? No more all-you-can-eat falafel???
Reblogged this on Cal Sarwar.
““Restaurants will be ruined if they didn’t quantify the food they sold. This negates the sheikh’s premise that the quantity is unknown,” said on Twitter user. [JAC: I don’t understand what this means.]”
What it means is that restaurants have a pretty good idea how much food the average person eats, how much they fill up on relatively cheap foods (an overflowing bowl of rice or salads still very cheap to produce) and how they are offset by picky but small eaters. Furthermore, all-you-can-eat buffets have a predetermined amount of food ready for their expected clientele. Unless you have a horde of capacious, hungry hippos come in as you open your doors, you won’t suffer a loss, much less go out of business. There’s a reason many places go that route.
@ “Fortunately, fatwas are not binding on all Muslims, for interpretations of sharia law vary from place to place.”
Thank Allah for that: I live next to the Balti Triangle in Birmingham, loads of cheap all-you-can-eats run by Muslims – my Saturday nights are still OK, then.
Btw. a journalist friend of mine, around 2000, was deputed by the local rag to interview Debbie Harry who was over here: he had little reluctance in jumping at the chance.
Interview done, she phoned him up later and asked if he knew of a decent curry house in the Balti Triangle; he said ‘yes’ and met her there later that evening. His night out with Blondie – swoon!
Do he say what type of curry Debbie Harry favours? I’m guessing jalfrezi.
She was the only rock/pop star whose poster I had on my wall as a kid.
correction, *did* he say, sorry for sounding like a 3 year old there.
No he do not! That’s all there is of my Harry Curry Story.
Bon appétit.
As HL Mencken said:
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
The Citizen and the State, p. 624
But maybe this is a good thing if it leads the Saudis to flout the fatwa.
Mencken nailed so many things! What a mind and what a pen!
Just for the record,they’re called “all you can eat buffets” here in the UK too.
I guess you could say that they’re against Judeo-Christian law too, since gluttony is proscribed. It just depends how zealously you want to apply your religious laws – and Muslim clerics are nothing if not zealous. I bet somewhere, though, a Christian pastor has objected to these restaurants on the grounds that they encourage the sin of gluttony. (Now I put it like that, I’m rather against them myself …)
“Virtue is nothing without the trial of temptation” – St. Leo the Great
Surely the Church should be encouraging All-you-can-eats, and cheap ones too.
Indeed. Brothels too, why not?
I gather that the (Roman Catolic) Church (hierarchy) would consider the mere contemplation of an on-off switch for ones sex drive a sin.
Reblogged this on The Road.