Qatar’s Islamic authorities have joined in the edict. Dubai’s have declared Pokemon un-Islamic. In Jordan rumor has it that “Pokemon,” which is short for “pocket monsters,” means “Jewish” in Japanese. In Egypt the hysteria has reached fever pitch, with parents declaring that a substance found in the cards’ coating will cause their children to grow up infertile. Bizarre as it seems, many explain this as an Israeli conspiracy. “They want us to be less in population, in order to defeat us,” says Mahmoud Abdallah, a primary-school history teacher. None of this is likely to dent Nintendo’s sales, according to company spokesmen. But the credibility of these so-called clerics may take a long time to recover.
