Category Archives: Bible and Holy Land

A Salacious Salafi

Bible and Holy Land, Egypt, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Islam and Christianity


Sheikh Wanis and his fellow adulterers

Al-Ahram has published an account of a salacious encounter of an Egyptian Salafi who is a former MP.

Egyptian authorities have decided to put on trial a Salafist ex-MP who was caught allegedly performing an “indecent” sexual act with a woman in public, a judicial source said on Thursday.

Ali Wanis’s trial is set for Sunday and will take place on time although he has gone missing since police found him last month engaged in a sexual act with a 22-year-old woman in a car parked on a highway.

The woman, a university student, is behind bars and the public prosecutor’s office has ordered the arrest of Wanis, a cleric and former MP for the ultra-conservative Al-Nour party.

After the incident in early June, Wanis denied any wrongdoing and said in a video posted on his website that he had parked along the side of the road because his passenger “became sick.”

But the pair have been accused of performing an “indecent” sexual act in public.

Al-Nour party, won the second largest number of seats in parliamentary elections last winter after the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was hit with a scandal in March when another lawmaker was forced to resign from parliament and from his party after claiming he was injured in a carjacking — to explain bandages on his face — when in fact he had had a nose job.

Wow — a blow job and a nose job and the appeal of Salafism takes a nose dive. Continue reading A Salacious Salafi →

Tabsir Redux: Is There a Middle East?

Bible and Holy Land, Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Travel

[The following post is about a conference held five years ago, but the papers from the conference have been published in a new volume edited by the late Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael Ezekiel Gaspar entitled Is There a Middle East?. This is a book well worth reading and owing.]

Is there a Middle East? At first glance we either have a very silly question or an occasion for an academic conference. In this case it was the latter at Yale University this past weekend. The Council for Middle East Studies of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies hosted a dozen scholars from various disciplines. Papers were given on the history of the term “Middle East,” its geographical borders in maps and mental templates, how the region implied has been imagined, colonially appropriated and the continuing relevance of the region in a world hooked on oil and stymied by regional terrorism. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Is There a Middle East? →

An end to creationism?

Anthropology/Sociology, Bible and Holy Land, Environment


In Monday’s Washington Post there is a report that the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is predicting that in another 15-3o years the evidence for evolution will be so overwhelming that creationists who believe in a literal Adam and Eve (which includes about half of the American public, according to opinion polls) will finally throw in the towel. Would that it were so, but the evidence has been overwhelming for well over a hundred years. Every aspect of scientific discovery since Darwin rests on the assumption that life, and indeed all matter, has evolved over a process that involves millions of years. There is not a shred of evidence for the old Bishop Ussher chronology that it all began in a garden called Eden with a lump of clay, a serpent, a couple of symbolic trees and a refashioned rib; not a shred. Push back that divine origin story several thousand years and there is no difference.

If I am still around in another 15-35 years I do not expect the ardent creationists to be any less active. They continue because of an ideology that refuses to accept that the Bible is myth and not the inspired science and history of a rather old and unconvincing idea of God. Creationists do not approach science with an open mind, so they will not be convinced no matter what scientific evidence there is. The theology of the creationists has not changed. Take this old “history of the world” text book I have from the early part of the 19th century (the title page is missing, but the last information is for 1815). It may very well have been one of those books that Abraham Lincoln sought as a child for his own education. I include here the first section, which takes the sacred history of Genesis as real history. This was a book used in the public schools before Darwin published his revolutionary Origin of Species, not a religious tract. Science has come a long way, notwithstanding David Hume’s contributions not long before this book came out; creationists have not and never will.






5,000 Years and Counting, but which way?

Bible and Holy Land, Gender and Sexuality, Obama Administration


Brigham Young and his 21 wives

It should not be surprising that North Carolina’s Republican legislators have made it a state law that marriage is only between one man and one woman, but the rationale is a bit puzzling for one of the buckles of the Bible Belt. Here is Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council claiming that “We can’t think that we can tinker with the definition of marriage and say, it’s no longer between a man and a woman which 5,000 years of human history has shown.” What Bible has Tony Perkins been reading? Let’s assume that he also wants to set back the clock to Bishop Ussher’s number game that Adam and Eve were created in 4004 BC. If Adam only married Eve, which would be news to the legendary Lilith and make it really interesting to speculate where Seth got his wife, then why not push it back another millennium. The problem is that many of the Biblical Patriarchs were not aware of the one man/one woman rule. Certainly not Abraham or Jacob. David and Solomon were only two of the Israelite kings who had rather sizeable harems.

Throughout most history, whether in the orbit of Biblical myth or not, marriage has not been exclusively between one man and one woman. Continue reading 5,000 Years and Counting, but which way? →