I think it’s heartening to see bold, new interpretations of problematic verses in the Quran. One scholar of Semitic languages, Luxenberg, argues that the term ‘houris’ does not denote maidens at all, rather the term refers to ‘white raisins’. From this TED lecture, I gleaned that Hazelton seems to think that ‘houris’ are not female companions with whom the faithful will have intercourse. She thinks houris are mysterious, perhaps asexual, creatures. Her interpretation requires a bit of linguistic creativity, but I think it is less embarrassing and less raunchy than interpreting such verses as ‘swollen breasts’, ‘perky bosoms’, ‘untouched by man (sexually)’, ‘bashful virgins’; namely, the received interpretation of generations of Muslim theologians. Just read the exegeses of Al-Tabari, Al-Qurtubi, Ibn Katheer, or Al-Suyuti on the nature of houris. To medieval theologians, such creatures embodied the essence of male sexual fantasies.

I fear demon possession as much as I fear possession by the flying-spaghetti monster. To say such things are vastly improbable is an understatement. Ancient Arabs, like ancient Europeans, did not have a scientific understanding of health and disease, hence their promiscuous allusion to mischievous spirits and imaginary agents. Having no conception of the germ theory of disease or the physiology of illnesses, the ancients relied on various mythologies to explain the incidence of maladies. It was normal to attribute all manner of illness – from small pox to influenza, from epilepsy to schizophrenia, from polio to cancer - to evil spirits, insidious ghosts, the Devil, or the wrath of God. Scientists now know better. Naturalistic causes are, indeed, sufficient in explaining diseases of the mind (brain) and body. Unfortunately, a lot of people still have this unsavory tendency to refer to gods and devils whenever they do not understand natural phenomena. You would be hard- pressed to find a mental health expert (a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist) who would refer to a jinn (or for that matter, a leprechaun) as a diagnostic explanation for psychosis. I wonder why? Oh well, I guess know-things and ninnies will continue to invoke evil spirits and jinns as a source of disease in the 21st Century. What did El-Motanabbe say? يا أمة ضحكت من جهلها الأمم P.S. Apparently, the jinn is 1,970 years old. Her name is Ashreetah. And she has a crush on the patient. Useful medical history, no?

I'd resurrect a prominent philosopher or scientist. David Hume, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, maybe Charles Darwin. I'd love to see what he thinks of modern biology, the discovery of his long-sought after locus of inheritance (DNA), and, more generally, the fact that his theory has become the cornerstone and bedrock of biology . But if I weren't so interested in scientific acumen, I would resurrect a historical figure, preferably with mythical qualities, so as to disabuse the devout of their dogmatism.

I find exorcism videos rather amusing. In this particular video, the quack cynically poses for the camera, always shifting, always eying the camera, to ensure his suggestible and, quite frankly, daft audience is awed and hood-winked by his dubious healing powers. Shamans, Witch Doctors, Exorcists, Faith-Healers, and medical quacks command the imagination of the scientifically illiterate, the cognitively challenged, the down-trodden classes. And while it is risible to watch the unseemly theatrics of pious nincompoops, it is impossible to loose sight of the patient’s plight. Surely, he presents with the classic symptoms of psychosis, but what other symptoms does he present with? Does he have vitamin B12 deficiency? Many metabolic and chemical imbalances are responsible for the clinical manifestations of psychotic breaks and manias. Perhaps it’s not a chemical or metabolic disorder. Is it genetic? Could it be an autoimmune disorder? Or worse, he has structural brain pathology: an injury, an infection, a tumor? Without doing basic blood panels, CHEM-7, and the familiar diagnostic tests, a doctor would have no way of devising a narrow differential diagnosis. Doesn’t this patient deserve real medical treatment? Medicine is uniform and objective. Quackery, on the other hand, is diverse and varied. Some quacks prefer to recite Quranic verses; others swear by the exorcism qualities of the Veda texts; still others prefer the healing powers of the Bible. Alas, the mindless recitation of holy hymns has no proven medicinal benefit, to say nothing of the biological implausibility that underpins such primitive fantasies.

Sugihara uses no editing tricks. His props are cardboard and glue, no special effects. All he does is find the precise angle where our brain assumes an impossible act. In this case, he chooses the angle that makes down-sloping planes look like up-sloping planes. Then he changes the angle and you see how he did it. (Or more correctly, how you did it.) -- Robert Kurlwich

I’m a bit baffled (and miffed) by their decision to terminate his contract. I scoured a few progressive blogs like DailyKos to find more details, but no one really has any information. And I doubt it has anything to do with the putative wish of conservative executives at Comcast to quash liberal opinion. I guess we’ll know more in the next few days.

If TED is famous for its inventive and informative videos, then EDGE is famous for its questions. An inter-disciplinary panel of prominent scientists and brilliant thinkers are asked an annual question. Queries from previous years include: what is your dangerous idea, what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it, what have you changed about your mind and why, what questions have disappeared, what's your law? This year's question has elicited a number of fascinating responses. The question: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? These simple rules of thumb militate against cognitive illusions and errors. Nomads would do well to incorporate these tools in their intellectual toolkit. http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_index.html

"The truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me" - Mark Twain Censorship is almost never sensible. When done by pious control-freaks, it's enraging. When done by empathetic humanists, it's distressing. Perhaps I should not be enraged or distressed.

Censoring Mark Twain's 'n-words' is unacceptable A new edition of Huckleberry Finn expunges its repeated use of 'nigger' for understandable reasons, but betrays a great anti-racist novel in the process So, Mark Twain stays in the news even 100 years after his death. First, with the initial volume of his Autobiography, finally published in the form planned by the author. Second, with the controversy stirred up by a "new" edition of Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in which the offensive racial epithets "injun" and "nigger" are replaced by "Indian" and "slave" respectively. Undoubtedly the use of the word "nigger" – surely the most inflammatory word in the English language – makes Huckleberry Finn a tricky novel to teach. The book has recently repeatedly been judged as unsuitable for schoolchildren to study in the US educational system – and one can fully understand the feelings of anger and humiliation that many African American children and parents feel at having such a word repeatedly spoken in the classroom (the word appears 219 times in Twain's book). But that is not necessarily a reason for replacing it with a gentler (bowdlerised) term. Twain was undoubtedly anti-racist. Friends with African American educator Booker T Washington, he co-chaired the 1906 Silver Jubilee fundraiser at Carnegie Hall for the Tuskegee Institute – a school run by Washington in Alabama to further "the intellectual and moral and religious life of the [African American] people". He also personally helped fund one of Yale Law School's first African American students, explaining: "We have ground the manhood out of them [African Americans], and the shame is ours, not theirs, and we should pay for it." And his repeated use of that derogatory term in Huckleberry Finn is absolutely deliberate, ringing with irony. When Huck's father, poor and drunken white trash by any standard, learns that "a free nigger ... from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man ... a p'fessor in a college" is allowed to vote, he reports: "Well, that let me out ... I says I'll never vote agin ... [A]nd the country may rot for all me." It is very clear here whose racial side Twain is on. Similarly when Aunt Sally asks if anyone was hurt in a reported riverboat explosion, and Huck himself answers "No'm. Killed a nigger," she replies, "Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt." The whole force of the passage lies in casual acceptance of the African American's dehumanised status, even by Huck, whose socially-inherited language and way of thinking stands firm despite all he has learnt in his journey down-river of the humanity, warmth and affection of the escaped slave Jim – the person who truly acts as a father to him. Language counts here. As Twain himself said: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." I respect the motivation of Alan Gribben, the senior Twain scholar who is responsible for the new edition, and who wishes to bring the book back into easy classroom use, believing "that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers will welcome the option of an edition of Twain's ... novels that spares the reader from a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol." But it's exactly that vitriol and its unacceptable nature that Twain intended to capture in the book as it stands. Perhaps this is not a book for younger readers. Perhaps it is a book that needs careful handling by teachers at high school and even university level as they put it in its larger discursive context, explain how the irony works, and the enormous harm that racist language can do. But to tamper with the author's words because of the sensibilities of present-day readers is unacceptable. The minute you do this, the minute this stops being the book that Twain wrote. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jan/05/censoring-mark-twain-n-word-unacceptable

I have a question for the tin-foil hat brigade. If your claim is that Hollywood is in cahoots with the military, how do you explain away the dozens of anti-war and anti-military movies that flag-waving, chest-beating conservatives rail against? Cognitive dissonance? Does not compute, eh? Enter selective bias. Ignore all evidence contrary to your favorite nutty conspiracy theory. Hollywood produced those anti-military films in order to deceive us into thinking they're anti-military. QED. To quote Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Paranoia and hysteria don't constitute evidence.

لا تبـك ليـلى ولا تطـرب إلـى هنـد *** واضـرب على الورد من حمراء كالورد كأسـا إذا انحـدرت فـي حلق شاربها *** وجـدت حمرتهـا فـي العيـن والخـد فــالخمر ياقوتــة والكـأس لؤلؤة *** فــي كـف جاريـة ممشـوقة القـد تسـقيك مـن يدهـا خـمرا ومن فمها *** خـمرا فمـا لـك مـن سكرين من بد لــي نشــوتان وللندمــان واحـدة *** شـيء خـصصت به من دونهم وحدي

lool@ Jacaylbaro's khamreyaat. والخمر قد يشربها معشر** ليسوا اذا عدوا بأكفائها

رهبان مدين والذين عهدتهم*** يبكون من خوف الإله قعودا لو يسمعون كما سمعت حديثها*** خروا لعزة ركعا وسجودا

NG, unhinged conspiracy-mongers who blithely exclaim that 9/11 was an inside job, or that Paramount is conspiring with the Pentagon erroneously assume that mere speculation and allegation are a good substitute for evidence and serious scholarship. Conspiracy theories are discredited and derided in intellectual circles for a reason. Populist narratives are invariably unfalsifiable and unparsimonious, informed by all sorts of bigotries and fears. Never mind the leaps in logic, the confirmation bias, and the historical relativism that is required to sustain such delusions. There's a difference between real conspiracies (Watergate, Siyaad Barre's coup) and imaginary conspiracies (evil Jewish cabal, Hollywood-Military collusion).

The author strikes me as a conspiracy theory crackpot. Some Muslims, afflicted as they are with a victim complex, may suppose his spurious claims are factual. It would strain credibility to argue that Hollywood, the most liberal industry in the US, is colluding with the military, the most conservative institution in the US government. But the insufferable ninnies who think that Bush was behind 9/11, that the moon-landing was a hoax (filmed in a Hollywood studio, no less), that Tupac and Elvis are still alive, and that the Illuminati and Bilderberg Group are hatching a new plan for world domination are going to add this nonsense to their catalog of dark conspiracies.

Abu Nuwaas' tongue-in-cheek verses about prayer are mild compared to the deliciously irreverent poems found in the Forbidden Texts anthology النصوص المحرمة دع المساجـد للعبـاد تسكنهـا ***وسر إلى حانة الخمـار يسقينـا ما قال ربك ويل للأولى سكـروا*** بل قـال ربك ويـل للمصلينـا

Al-Thoghoore was an equal opportunity offender. His screeds against sacred rituals are quite humorous. عجبت لكسرى واتباعه** وغسل الوجوه ببول البقر وقيصر لما ثوى ساجدا **لما صنعته اكف البشر وعجب اليهود برب يسر **بسفك الدماء وسم القتر وقول النصارى اله يضام **ويظلم حقا ولا ينتصر وقوم اتوا من اقاصي البلاد **لحلق الرؤوس ولثم الحجر فوا عجبا من مقالاتهم **ايعمى عن الحق كل البشر ؟

Here are some of my favorite stanzas from Al-Ma'arri and other rationalists of yore. كأن منجم الأقوام أعمى**لديه الصحف يقرؤها بلمس لقد طال العناء، فكم يعاني**سطورا عاد كاتبها بطمس دعا موسى فزال، وقام عيسى**وجاء محمد بصلاة خمس وقيل يجيء دين غير هذا**وأودى الناس بين غد وأمس ومهما كان، في دنياك، أمر**فما تخليك من قمر وشمس وآخرها بأولها شبيه**وتصبح في عجائبها، وتمسي قدوم أصاغر، ورحيل شيب**وهجرة منزل، وحلول رمس لحاها الله دارا ما تداري**بمثل المين، في لجج وقمس إذا قلت المحال رفعت صوتي**وإن قلت اليقين أطلت همسي Samir bin Adkan was intimately familiar with religion. He scoffed at a cantankerous caliph who acted as though the Jews were not mindful of the ruses of religion. يصول ابو حفص علينا بدرة**رويدك ان المرء يطفو ويرسب كانك لم تتبع حمولة ماقط**لتشبع ,ان الزاد شيء محبب فلو كان موسى صادقا ما ظهرتم**علينا ولكن دولة ثم تذهب ونحن سبقناكم الى المين فاعرفوا**لنا رتبة البادي الذي هو اكذب مشيتم على آثارنا في طريقنا**وبغيتكم في ان تسودوا وترهبوا It's hard to understand the divine injunction to abstain from innocent mirth in the herein only to enjoy it in the hereafter. أأترك لذة الصهباء عمدا** لما وعدوه من لبن وخمر؟ حياة ثم موت ثم بعث** حديث خرافة يا أم عمرو يقولــون حـور فـي الغـداة وجنـة**وثمــة أنهـار مـن الشـهد والخـمر إذا اخــترت حـوراء هنـا ومدامـة**فمـا البـأس فـي ذا وهو عاقبة الأمر؟ A cup of wine, a sense of wonder, and a winsome woman. Theories of happiness abound. But Al-Khayyam was probably right.

Ah, leave it to a puritanical dunce to get all preachy and moralistic about something as innocuous as wishing others a merry Christmas or a happy New Year. Happy New Year, Nomads.

Awoowe, I loathe the "poetry" of the unlettered masses (الشعر النبطي). It's the prattle of poetasters. It's impossible to read it and not be overwhelmed by sentiments of vicarious embarrassment and aesthetic rage.

lol@ clan is everything. I would say it is more a tribute to altruism and magnanimity than a clarion call for tribal loyalty and solidarity. The following verses would be a more apt distillation of the 'clan is everything' law : أمرتهم أمري بمنعرج اللوى *** فلم يستبينوا النصح الا ضحى الغد فلما عصوني كنت منهم وقد أرى *** غوايتهم وأنني غير مهتدي فهل أنا إلا من غزية ان غوت *** غويت وان ترشد غزية أرشد

This tournament was a monumental success. Congrats to the Champs. It would have been an even bigger milestone if it was hosted in Mogadishu Stadium. Let's hope this happens within the near future.

Ectopia cordis= Intelligent design. Subhanallah, indeed.

Somalia's borders are not etched in stone, as borders are not real things, but imagined things. And imagined things can always be imagined anew. Nothing is sacred. The naive nationalism of Somalis is fueled by wooly-eyed ideals. There is nothing intrinsically objectionable about secession. Having said that, I don't think it follows that secession is a game without rules. If Somalia is divisible, does it follow that Somaliland is divisible as well? In principle, any territory is divisible. When the Serbs decided to secede from the former Yugoslavia, they quickly discovered that there were provinces inside Serbia that wanted to secede in turn. This problem has been dubbed the Russian Doll Problem: inside one country (Somalia) is a smaller region (Somaliland) that wants to secede, and in that region is still an even smaller region that wants to secede (Sool, Sanaag). Some would object that it is not analogous. In any event, the Serbs could not tell any province that it had no right to secede. It wasn't even a matter of territorial legalities and legacies. It would be ironic if supporters of Somaliland's secession decided that it was acceptable to coerce, rather than cajole, dissidents within Somaliland into accepting their project. But sensible supporters of secession are clever enough not to use the familiar jingoistic and tribalistic language of the Balkans. The project of secession, if it is to be successful, must have common appeal for people of all provinces in Somaliland. It's a tall order, but not an impossible one.