The French might as well bomb Belgium

I am always open to spiritual guidance from any quarter, all the more so if that guidance is of practical import. So I was especially grateful to hear reports of a fatwa from the prominent Saudi Arabian cleric, Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah. This fatwa apparently made it clear that it was perfectly permissible for me, if suffering from ‘severe hunger’, to eat my wife. Either eat all of her — or merely, as it helpfully elucidated, some of her ‘body parts’. It did not say which body parts. In lieu of further enlightenment, I assumed that all of them were up for grabs.

Anyway, many has been the time that I have rooted through the fridge for something to stave off a ravenous hunger and found nothing but those tiny yoghurts that women eat to assuage constipation. I have stamped around and cursed, not understanding that the answer to my problem was sitting a few yards away in the living room, watching a re-run of Wolf Hall. Some, perhaps including the renowned Quranic scholar David Cameron, will no doubt say that such a fatwa (which Abdul insisted was a fabrication) would exemplify a ‘perverted’ view of Islam. Perhaps. But might it actually be rather moderate in stipulating that this recourse is available only to men suffering ‘severe hunger’? There may be other Muslim clerics who would argue that we should eat our wives even if we feel only a little peckish, or have got the ‘munchies’. The disputed fatwa, by the way, was said to reinforce the thesis that wives should be obedient to their husbands and that eating them was merely another way that ‘2 become 1’, as the Spice Girls once had it.