CAIRO (Reuters) - Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University on Monday suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.
The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.
But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Atiya pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.
Atiya is the head of the department which deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.
Atiya's unusual opinion was widely publicised by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.
The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.
But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.
Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar on Monday quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.
An Islamic cleric named Ezzat Atiya issued a '''' to get around  and ''hijab'' in Islam.  He stated that ''symbolic'' breastfeeding could be used to make it permissible for male and female colleagues to work together alone.

Dr. Atiyah had stated that the breastfeeding does not have to be by the woman herself.  "This can also be achieved by means of the man's mother or sister suckling the woman, or by means of the woman's mother or sister suckling the man" he wrote.

Atiya works at the Al-Azhar University, an Islamic seminary in Egypt.  The seminary was established by a Shi'a  and is named after .  Zahra was the wife of .  Al-Azhar University has a fatwa that officially sanctioned  with one condition only: martyrdom operations are only allowed in Israel.  The university has had this ruling for a long time and has stood by it.  

Atiyah had said, 

According to , "If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of Islam, sock him in the mouth."