Will Saudis Ban the Letter ‘X’?

January 16th, 2007 · No Comments

Trackbacked at blonde sagacity, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Pirate’s Cove, Planck’s Constant, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, and basil’s blog:

This is so absurd that I hesitate to write about it. This has all the earmarks of in internet hoax, but then again so much coming out of the Middle East is hard to believe anyway.

From the New York Sun:

The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In a kingdom where Friday preachers routinely refer to Christians as pigs and infidel crusaders, even a twisted cross ranks as an abomination.

Among the commission’s deeds is the famed 1974 fatwa — issued by its blind leader at the time, Sheik Abdul Aziz Ben Baz — which declared that the Earth was flat and immobile. In a book issued by the Islamic University of Medina, the sheik argued: “If the earth is rotating, as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom.”

Main Entry: paranoia
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, from Greek, madness, from paranous demented, from para- + nous mind
1:a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations
2:a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others

This is a group of people that are still strongly clinging to the Middle Ages which, ironically, was the last time Islam was a world power. While the rest of the world exited the Middle Ages into an age of enlightenment and renaissance, Islam has steadfastly remained in a dark theocracy with little social, economic, or technological advances. Methinks Islam would love to return to the 7th century … assuming (of course) that Islam has ever left the 7th century.

Saudi Arabia, fatwa, Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Islam