According to all three major monotheisms even God needed time to take a rest and so the sabbath was created. With the spate of mosque bombings, torture of prisoners and outright mayhem dominating the news about the Middle East these days, it might help to sit back and read what the American humorist Mark Twain wrote about his Missouri-born creation Tom Sawyer set loose in the Holy Land more than a century ago. Continue reading “when I asked him what a Moslem was”
[Illustration: Arabian Camel from George Shaw, Zoology (1801)]
[Joseph Osgood was a Black American sailor who visited the Yemeni port of Mocha about a dozen years before the start of the American Civil War. He offers a rich, descriptive account of his visit to the Yemeni coast, including a sailor’s view of the ship of the desert.]
No wheel carriages are used here, the most general mode of transportation being by camels, for which the males along are serviceable. The flesh of the camel forms a staple article of food, the head and neck being excepted, because one of the race unwittingly rendered these parts unholy by obtrusively poking his head and neck into Mahomet’s tomb. Wellsted says that a camel is welcomed at its birth, by the Arab, with “another child is born unto us.” Continue reading A Sailor and His Camel Ride