Following the presidential victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi, the very first fatwa to appear by Egypt’s highest fatwa council addresses—not social, political, or economic issues in Egypt—but rather frogs. Specifically, it bans Muslims from hunting and killing frogs to sell to those nations that dine on the amphibians. As the fatwa explains, according to Islam’s prophet Muhammad as recorded in a hadith, a frog’s “croaking is praise [to Allah].” Accordingly, “a number of jurists [fuqaha] have relied on this [hadith] to forbid the eating of frogs, under the notion that ‘that which is banned from being killed, is forbidden from being eaten.’”
