Yesterday the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia announced that the kingdom’s girls are, in the eyes of men and Allah, ready to marry at the age of 10 or 12. Rebuking those who called for the servitude marriage age to be raised, he noted that Islamic law doesn’t oppress women and cited the old ones as [...]
Tags:Egypt·Iran·Islam·Islamic apologetics·Karim Sadjadpour·Max Fisher·Middle East·Mona Eltahawy·Muslim·Pakistan·patriarchy·Saudi Arabia·sex·sexism·women·Zara Jamal
In a series of just published articles not so subtly titled Murderers and Martyrs: The Difficult Struggle of Christians in the Orient, the German newsmagazine Spiegel details the sorry plight of Christians in Egypt and Pakistan. Although the facts and reporting are unfortunately accurate, this is sure to ratchet up the already considerable levels of [...]
Tags:Bernard Lewis·Christians·colonialism·Coptic Christians·Copts·Edward Said·Egypt·essentializing·Germany·imperialism·Murderers and Martyrs·Muslims·Orient·orientalism·Pakistan·persecution·radical Islam·Spiegel
The recent release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks has had several salutary effects, not the least of which is to demonstrate there is no such thing as a unified or essentialized “Muslim world” in which various countries whose citizens call themselves Muslims subordinate their conflicting interests to idealized religious goals. The “Muslim world,” in [...]
Tags:American Muslims·Christian world·Egypt·essentializing·idealized·Iran·Islam·Muqtedar Khan·Muslim nations·Muslim world·Pakistan·reified·Saudi Arabia·WikiLeaks
In a recent study published in Biology Letters, Tobler and colleagues found that an indigenous religious ritual has caused genetic change in a local fish population. During an annual fertility ritual, the Zoque people of Mexico use a plant poison to stun and harvest fish from a section of nearby river; unsurprisingly, the fish in [...]
Tags:ancient urbanization·disease resistance·Egypt·fertility ritual·Ian Barnes·indigenous religious ritual·leprosy·M. Tobler·Mesopotamia·Mexico·pathogen resistance·pathogens·poisons·tuberculosis·Zoque
As you can see from Texas A&M’s anthropology aggregating site (which is one of my favorite places on the net), at least a dozen stories have appeared in the past week about new archaeological finds near Stonehenge. Using ground penetrating radar and other non-invasive technology, archaeologists have discovered another henge — which was wooden, approximately [...]
Tags:Aztecs·Babylon·barrows·burial grounds·chieftains·city-states·cosmology·Druids·Egypt·elites·empires·ground penetrating radar·materialism·Mayans·megalithic·megalithic architecture·megalithic structures·pagan·pyramids·royal family·Stonehenge·Sumeria·symbolism·temples·unilineal evolution·Woodhenge·ziggurats
There have been many articles over the past week reporting that an unusually large group (150 members) of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda has been engaging in systematic territorial expansion by attacking and killing neighboring groups. The Nature article notes that this is “cooperative behavior” and then quotes from the New York Times story:
These [...]
Tags:aggression·Blackfoot·Cheyenne·chimpanzees·chimps·city-states·cohesion·Comanche·cooperation·Cree·Crow·David Sloan Wilson·ecology·Egypt·Flathead·foragers·Gros Ventre·group level selection·Kibale National Park·kinship·Kiowa·Lakota·Levant·Matt Rossano·Mesopotamia·Nicholas Wade·Plains Indians·power·religion·religious warfare·Sarsi·shamans·Shoshoni·territoriality·The Faith Instinct·war
