Category Archives: Animals

Muhammad the Profit: Commerce, Play, and Entertainment in the Neoliberal Imperium

Animals, Danish Cartoon Controversy, Islamophobia, Muhammad, Sudan

Following a link on the website www.korans.com can take you to the website www.teddybearmuhammad.com, which hawks the cute and cuddly namesake of Islam’s prophet. As the site explains, the bear commemorates the Sudanese government recently accusing 54-year old British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons of blasphemy for “allowing” her class of 7-year old students at Khartoum’s Unity High School to choose what some considered the wrong name for the class stuffed animal. (The children named the bear after a popular classmate, not directly for the Prophet). The incident provided Sudanese politicians with an opportunity for local pandering, geopolitical bluster and a demonstration of sovereignty in reaction to international condemnation of the genocide in Darfur.

Cultural sensitivities about divine names and images are real, even when in particular instances they are feigned, exaggerated, or used as weapons in military or political conflicts. This reality is what gives their manipulation its potential power, although it also lays such manipulations open to exposure, derision, and failure. Continue reading Muhammad the Profit: Commerce, Play, and Entertainment in the Neoliberal Imperium →

Traveling Light in Arabia

Animals, camels, Travel, Yemen

[Note: the following list of items for light camping in Arabia is provided by G. Wyman Bury for the early part of the 20th century.]

CAMP EQUIPMENT
Try to do without a tent. Arabs hate pitching tents after a long day’s march, and seldom pitch them well. They draw fire and afford no protection, while preventing your own observation; they also betray the site of your camp to bad characters and casual callers on the look out for supper.

BEDDING
Avoid Wolseley valises or anything with pleats and folds, which become the permanent abiding places of parasitic insects.
‘Blankets.’ One each for the men. A few extra for convalescents or invalided men. Two for yourself.
‘Pillows.’ Carry your spare clothes in a green canvas sack. Continue reading Traveling Light in Arabia →

A Sailor and His Camel Ride

Animals, camels, Travel, Yemen


[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 →