BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
Monday, August 18, 2003
Raisins and terrorism. The
Globe's Sunday Ideas section has an interesting profile by Lee
Smith of Ibn
Warraq, the pseudonym for
an agnostic critic of Islam who is the author of a 1995 book called
Why I Am Not a Muslim.
An anecdote: during Easter weekend
in 2002, I covered
the annual convention of American
Atheists, which was being
held in Boston that year. Warraq -- who spoke at the convention --
got off one of the best lines of the weekend. He noted that recent
scholarship suggests the Koran promises holy warriors "white raisins
of crystal clarity" rather than 72 virgins. The lesson, he said, was
obvious: terrorists should "abandon their culture of death and
concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this
world."
Smith enlists Khaled Abou El Fadl,
a scholar of Islamic law, to critique Warraq. El Fadl participated
this past April in a roundtable-style piece on the future of the US
role in Iraq, which you can read here.
El Fadl also wrote a cover essay
for the Boston Review this past spring titled "Islam
and the Challenge of Democracy."
Warning to Mac users: for some
reason the piece displays in Zapf Dingbats if you try opening it up
in Safari. Mozilla seems to work fine.
