Monday School: Muslim Cleric wants to ban bananas?

Welcome back! It’s time for another edition of Monday School! Your weekly helping of the ‘Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday!’

This week’s lesson is going to be a mouthful, literally. I found this article online last week that covered a proposal by some Islamic Cleric that has clearly lost his marbles. According to the piece written by International Business Times, an Islamic Cleric somewhere in Europe has declared that women should not touch or be anywhere near bananas and/or cucumbers in order to avoid men from having sexual thoughts.

I really wish that I was making this up.

This cleric wants to ban women (just women) from eating certain foods because there is a chance that men who see them eat it will have impure thoughts. That has to be the most absurd thing I have ever heard. If a woman is eating a banana or anything else shaped like a certain male appendage, is that her fault? No, the fault lies with the men who are incapable of keeping their mind out of the gutter. Apparently according to this irrational cleric, every woman eating a banana looks exactly like this:

I don’t know about you, but no one eats a banana like this… at least not in the real world.

What gets me is the absurdity of only banning women from eating these foods. Why not ban men as well? Islam considers homosexuality to be a sin so why allow men to eat them too? Why not stop everyone from eating bananas to stop men from having impure thoughts about everyone? You’d think by banning everyone from eating bananas that by the same logic it would help prevent men from have thoughts of a homosexual or pedophiliac nature, right? Wouldn’t the cleric want to prevent men from having those lurid thoughts as well? The fact that only women are not allowed to eat them is just another sad chapter in Islam’s ongoing oppression of women.

This insane double standard is sexist because this Cleric only merely targeting women because of his own impure thoughts. Muslim men love to accuse women of being overly serialized and thinking about sex but the truth is it is the men who have this problem. It’s shameful that these sick men refuse to control themselves and incorrectly blame women for their own failures/lusts. Religious hypocrisy at it’s finest.

Here’s an idea: rather than ban women from touching these foods, why don’t these idiotic clerics crack down on their men for having a dirty mind? Of course that will never happen because Muslims are sexist and would rather blame women for problems rather than look at the actual source of the problem. Let’s offer another logical suggestion: if this Cleric were really serious about this, he could have just banned women from eating whole bananas rather than just bananas in general. That’s really the guts of the issue, right? I mean I doubt the cleric would be angry if women were seen eating any of these:

This goes to show you how insane this debate has gotten.

In defense of one of my favourite fruits, bananas are a great source of potassium, taste amazing and are known to be a key ingredient for some amazing foods. To blame the banana for the dirty thoughts of men is insane because I am sure there are many other foods that could easily give men the same inappropriate thoughts. If this Cleric gets his way, I’m sure these foods could be next to get banned by Islam for causing men to toss their minds into the gutter:

If we don’t stop this madness, great foods like hot dogs, popsicles and ice cream from following in the same fateful footsteps of the dear banana. If you can’t feel the sarcasm oozing from this entry, I will just say that this absurd article made me laugh out loud. Sexual thoughts don’t occur to everybody equally. The cleric’s cause for concern, if you think about it, is pretty comical. Now we know what he spends his time thinking about.

Peter