The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment.
That is a well-known religious edict, or fatwa, issued two years ago by Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia. The blind theologian's status gives his fatwas great weight, though his opinions have often raised eyebrows or embarrassed worldly Saudis.Once considered a minor, almost marginal, aspect of Islamic religious practice, fatwas are no longer seen as humorous or harmless.
Another Muslim fundamentalist theologian, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman of Egypt, on trial in New York for plotting to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and other landmarks, is said to have issued a fatwa authorizing five Islamic militants to assassinate Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, in October 1981.
Then, there is, of course, the most famous fatwa of all, the one issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.
The British author's novel "The Satanic Verses" was regarded by Khomeini - and seemingly by a majority of the world's Muslims - as a sacrilegious ridiculing of the Prophet Mohammed.
Rushdie has lived under police protection ever since. But Iran, too, paid a heavy price in international isolation for maintaining the religious edict even after the death of Khomeini.
With militant Islamic fundamentalism gaining strength as a political force in much of the Muslim world, fatwas have become increasingly useful tools by clerics.
Since the late 1980s, fatwas issued by a spectrum of Muslim scholars and Islamic revolutionaries have both opposed and supported peace with Israel, sanctioned or, more often, forbidden the genital mutilation of women, and banned scores of works by filmmakers, artists and writers, including Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate for literature.
Secularist opponents of Islamic rule mock the fatwas, saying that their harsh or contradictory nature have done lasting damage to the image of Islam.
But few deny their power among militants. When a group of young Egyptian fundamentalists ambushed and stabbed Mahfouz outside his home last October, many linked the attack to a newspaper's plan to publish a novel that theologians at Al Azhar University had condemned.
Their edict said that "The Children of Gebelawi," first published in 1959 but then quickly banned, scoffed at religion and insulted the Prophet Mohammed.
Islamic revolutionaries, some of whom were champions of the radical left in the 1960s, have used fatwas to weave an ideological fabric that justifies suicide bombings in Israel, hostage-taking in Lebanon and the killing of foreigners in Algeria and tourists in Egypt.
To be sure, Christian and Jewish theologians across the ages have issued their own interpretations of religious law or doctrine, edicts that sometimes ran counter to scientific findings or modern notions.
It took more than 350 years - until 1992 - for the Roman Catholic Church to reverse its condemnation of Galileo, who argued that the earth revolved around the Sun; some rabbis still disagree over whether selling Israeli land to Arabs violates Jewish law.
Throughout Muslim history, fatwas have had their ups and downs. In the first few centuries of Islam, when the Muslim empire stretched from Arabia to Spain, fatwas tilted in liberal progressive directions, reflecting the triumph of a new faith. Clerics often issued fatwas counseling kindness toward Christians and Jews.
Today, sheiks tend to disapprove of Western literature.