Go To Mars, Get a Fatwa

Artist’s impression of a Martian colony. Image via D. Mitriy.

It’s a sad day for Muslim space enthusiasts. On Monday, the Fatwa Committee of the General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) reaffirmed their fatwa against manned Martian missions.

“Based on the texts, it is not permissible to travel to Mars and never to return if life is not possible there and the expectation of death is more than the possibility of life, due to this action exposing one to self-destruction,” the committee announced through the United Arab Emirates’ state news agency WAM.

A story like this raises a metric tonne of immediate questions. What are the religious reasons for prohibiting manned Mars missions? Why are one-way Martian trips specifically cited as sinful? Is space travel in general off-limits to Muslims? And why was this fatwa issued now?

The question of whether a manned Mars landing is compatible with the tenets of Islam has been pushed recently by Bas Lansdorp, the co-founder and CEO of Mars One. Among the thousands of applicants for this controversial nonprofit Martian settlement program were some 500 Saudis and Arabs, who will now have to choose between religious duty and the dream of becoming the first interplanetary pioneers.

Promotion Mars One video, via YouTube.

“Mars One’s mission is to extend to all humans, including Muslims, the chance to become the Neil Armstrong of Mars,” Bas Lansdorp said in a statement last week. He argued that Islamic history clearly endorses rigorous exploration, especially in the case of the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta.

“His travels, documented in his famous journal, Rihla, have taught us more about the medieval societies in those countries than dozens of other historical texts put together,” Lansdorp said. “In that book, he wrote about seeing the signs of God’s creation wherever he travelled. He told us, ‘Never, so far as possible, to cover a second time any road.’” Your move, Fatwa Committee.

Unfortunately, the GAIAE was having none of it. Their central objection is cynical regarding the voyage’s chance of success, and, as such, openly casts manned Mars missions as suicide under a fancier name. “Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam,” the committee said to the Khaleej Times. Those who volunteer for this “hazardous trip” are just going to die and suffer “punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter.”

Like its fellow Abrahamic religions, Islam considers suicide to be a monstrous sin to be avoided at all costs. Some controversial Muslim leaders advocate for some convenient theological wiggle-room when it comes suicide bombers, though that special dispensation remains a heated, unresolved issue in the religion at large.

And you can understand why there’s so much discord—here you have a committee that considers space exploration to be more interchangeable with suicide than, well, actual, textbook suicide. There’s no question that space travel is risky business and many astronauts have had to make the ultimate sacrifice for our persistent star-eyed dreams.

But Buzz Aldrin is still wandering around punching moon deniers, and the great space shuttle veteran Dale Gardner, who sadly died today at 65, had a long career after his low-Earth orbit days. Space-faring does not have anything close to a 100% death rate. In fact, considering the whole endeavor is based around putting human beings into aluminum cans and exploding them off the planet at unthinkable speeds – and that’s just getting to orbit – it actually boasts a very impressive survival rate.

Lansdorp tried to make this point in his statement, and spent paragraphs emphasizing the safety features of the Mars One settlement plan. But he is simply no match for the inherent weirdness of the Fatwa Committee. Because their reasoning about the mission does, indeed, get even stranger. According to the Khaleej Times, they seem to imply that some would-be Muslim astronauts are only interested in settling Mars to escape judgment from Allah on Earth.

According to the GAIAE, seeking asylum on another planet “is an absolutely baseless and unacceptable belief because not even an atom falls outside the purview of Allah, the Creator of everything.” They cited verse 19 & 20/93 of the Quran to back up this claim. It reads: “There is no one in the heavens and earth but that he comes to the Most Merciful as a servant. (Indeed) He has enumerated them and counted them a (full) counting.”

So there you have it. If you were hoping to slip out the back door without the Creator noticing—no dice, you spacefaring infidel.