Researchers are cataloging and translating the 10,000 Arabic inscriptions coating the walls and ceilings of Spain’s Alhambra palace.

Many inscriptions consist of aphorisms, terse sayings embodying a general truth, such as “Be sparse in words and you will go in peace” and “Rejoice in good fortune, because Allah helps you.”

What the researchers have found so far is that, contrary to popular belief, verses from the Koran and poetry represent only a tiny minority of the messages in classical Arabic that cover the Alhambra, Europe’s finest example of Muslim architecture.

“They do not make up not even 10 percent of what has been studied so far,” explained Mr Castilla. Instead the elegant Arabic script contains a large amount of sloganeering, predominantly praise for the Nasrid dynasty who ruled Granada for two and half centuries.

The Nasrid motto - “There is no victor but Allah” - is the most common inscription found so far.

The next most common messages are isolated words like “happiness” and “blessing” that are thought to be expressions of divine wishes for the Muslim rulers of Granada.

Until now there have only been partial studies of what the inscriptions meant, including one ordered by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella who sought to purge Spain of Muslims after the reconquest of Granada in 1492.

“It seems incredible that there is no exhaustive catalogue (of the inscriptions) in the 21st century,” said Mr Castilla.

Many of the inscriptions are wrapped around arches and pillars, making them hard to read with the naked eye from ground level.

Further complicating the task is the fact that artisans who did the engraving used an elaborately cursive script, which can be difficult to read. Calligraphy was a major art form in a culture that banned human images.

The researchers hope to have 65 percent of the inscriptions catalogued and translated into Spanish by the end of the year and the entire project finished in 2011.

The inscriptions will be later translated into English and French.

A DVD and book have been published containing the findings in the Alhambra’s 14th-century Comares Palace.

{via the Daily Grail}

{images by cconaty}

Slate editor David Plotz - a self-described “lax, non-Hebrew-speaking Jew” - did what almost nobody does these days: He read the Bible cover to cover. He blogged about it as he went, and, inevitably, the blog has become a book, Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. He offers some thoughts on his adventure:

Everyone should read it—all of it! In fact, the less you believe, the more you should read.

You can’t get through a chapter of the Bible, even in the most obscure book, without encountering a phrase, a name, a character, or an idea that has come down to us 3,000 years later. The Bible is the first source of everything from the smallest plot twists (the dummy David’s wife places in the bed to fool assassins) to the most fundamental ideas about morality (the Levitical prohibition of homosexuality that still shapes our politics, for example) to our grandest notions of law and justice. It was a joyful shock to me when I opened the Book of Amos and read the words that crowned Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn’t really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I’m brokenhearted about God.

So, what works were on the Catholic Church’s infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum? Wikipedia has the answers.

The final version (1948) contained around 4,000 works, most of which are extremely obscure. Among the the well-known writers with at least some forbidden works: Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Casanova, Sade, Flaubert, Hugo, Zola,Rabelais, Sartre, Beauvoir, Copernicus, Defoe, Milton, Graham Greene, and Swift. (Obviously, the odds were stacked against the French.)

More surprising are those whoese works who never appeared on the lists: Marx, Darwin, Hitler, Aristophanes, James Joyce, DH Lawrence.

I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

From “The Missionary in World-Politics” by Mark Twain. Previously unpublished, it will be included in Who Is Mark Twain?, coming in April from HarperStudio. (For more information about the book, see “First look at new book of Twain’s unpublished writings.”)

The Dalia Lama’s biography as a manga graphic novel. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say whether it covers his involvement with the CIA, but I doubt it.

The publisher, Emotional Content, is also putting out manga bios of Mother Teresa, Che Guevera, Malcolm X, MLK, Anne Frank, and Gandhi. More info at Publishers Weekly.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman sums up his new book, Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives:

You can read three of the chapters on his site (links are in the right-hand column).

Biblioklept has a review:

Many of Eagleman’s little stories evoke these moods of sad dissatisfaction and disappointment, repeatedly asking the reader to question their own values. And, as the god of “Great Expectations” shows, it’s not just the everyday folk who get their expectations crushed, but often the deities themselves. Take the god of “Mary,” for example. His favorite book is Frankenstein–he loves the end, where Victor Frankenstein flees his own creation. This is a god who can’t help his creation and chooses to run away from it. Particularly sad is “Descent of Species,” wherein the dead get to choose whatever they like to be. The “you” in this tale unfortunately chooses a horse, believing you’ll enjoy freedom–however, as “you” morph into a horse, so does your consciousness, and you realize that “you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.”

The Associated Press reports:

KABUL - No one knows who brought the book to the mosque, or at least no one dares say.

The pocket-size translation of the Quran has already landed six men in prison in Afghanistan and left two of them begging judges to spare their lives. They’re accused of modifying the Quran and their fate could be decided Sunday in court.

Many clerics rejected the book because it did not include the original Arabic verses alongside the translation. It’s a particularly sensitive detail for Muslims, who regard the Arabic Quran as words given directly by God. A translation is not considered a Quran itself, and a mistranslation could warp God’s word.

The country’s powerful Islamic council issued an edict condemning the book.

“In all the mosques in Afghanistan, all the mullahs said, ‘Zalmai is an infidel. He should be killed,’” Zalmai recounted as he sat outside the chief judge’s chambers waiting for a recent hearing.

{via Muslims Against Sharia}

Twain’s irreverent, posthumously published Letters From the Earth is pretty well-known, and he gets in some passing shots at religion here and there in his canon, like early on in Huck, but his most uncompromising attack on religion doesn’t get much attention and is amazingly out of print.

I wrote about this in my anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, specifically in the further-reading guide, “Good Books.” Here ’tis:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Homespun Blasphemy

“Reflections on Religion” by Mark Twain, from The Outrageous Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

America’s literary titan - Mark Twain (né, Samuel Clemens) - was largely unafraid to reveal and ridicule hypocrisy and stupidity with his legendary razor wit. Religion often felt the blade, but sometimes the results were so bloody that Clemens and his executors wouldn’t let the results be seen. Letters From the Earth - in which Satan’s commentary on humanity’s religious customs is the vehicle for irreverent but basically good-natured criticism - wasn’t published until 1962, fifty-two years after Clemens’ death. It’s been in print ever since.

The five short chapters on religion from his autobiography haven’t fared as well. Like Letters, the publication of these twenty-one pages - dictated in June 1906 - was blocked for decades. On the manuscript, Clemens wrote that they weren’t to be published until 2406, five centuries hence. In a letter to a friend, Clemens mentioned that he didn’t want them published until he’d been in the grave for 100 years. His executors complied for a long time, but his daughter Clara relented in 1960, and the five chapters were finally revealed to the world in the Hudson Review in 1963. Twenty-four more years would pass before they were published again, this time in The Outrageous Mark Twain, a collection containing other writings on religion, masturbation, and the legendary “1601,” a mock-Elizabethan story about a farting contest. Sadly, the anthology didn’t stay available for long, so the chapters are no longer in print. (Portions are included as an appendix in the slightly more recent The Bible According to Mark Twain (University of Georgia Press, 1995). Unlike most of Clemens’ work, the chapters are still under copyright. I approached the law firm handling his estate about reprinting them, but the cost was way beyond our means.)

Unlike Letters From the Earth, these chapters - collectively titled “Reflections on Religion” - are harsh. No gentle mocking here; Clemens took off the gloves and opened a can of whup-ass. Since these are the raw transcriptions of what he dictated to his secretary, they’re not as polished or organized as they would’ve been had Clemens prepared them for publication. Still, it’s a joy to see one of America’s most beloved writers take Christianity behind the woodshed.

He jumps right into the thick of things by attacking none other than God, accurately describing the despicable nature of the Old Testament’s supreme being, who is constantly murdering, mutilating, and otherwise viciously abusing humans. “It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.” He rails against the endless suffering that God continues to cause, saying that “we would detest and denounce any earthly father who should inflict upon his child a thousandth part of the pains and miseries and cruelties which God deals out to his children every day…” But as horrible as the Old Testament God is, Clemens writes, at least he’s consistent and forthright, whereas Jesus spoke of mercy and love yet also threatened people with eternal punishment and damnation. He healed a few people, fed a few people, yet refused to use his God-powers to heal and feed everybody.

The next chapter mainly concerns the fact that the Bible, as well as other sacred literature, plagiarizes earlier holy books and mythologies without admitting it. “Each in turn confiscates decayed old stage-properties from the others and with naïve confidence puts them forth as fresh new inspirations from on high.” Clemens mentions the ubiquitous flood stories but concentrates on gods born of virgins.

In chapter three, the old man rails against the bloody tactics of Russia, Britain, and Belgium, all having Christian governments at the time. After tangentially stating that “the Bible defiles all Protestant children,” Clemens looks into his crystal ball. He sees Christianity eventually going the way of all religions - fading away and being replaced by “another God and a stupider religion.”

Setting his sights once again on God in the following chapter, Clemens wonders how a supreme being can inflict such endless misery on all of his creatures. He scoffs at the notion of prayer, which he likens to begging. The originality of Clemens’ inquiries goes up a notch when he dismantles the excuses that preachers make for the suffering God puts us through - namely, that it helps us, elevates us, purifies us, and makes us worthy of heaven. If that’s so, he wonders, what about the suffering of animals, who experience violence, disease, hunger, and agonizing deaths in ways similar to, and often worse than, humans? No Bible-banger ever claims that “alligators [and] tigers” are being tested and strengthened so that they can earn a heavenly reward. And if God brutalizing his children is so wonderful, why don’t preachers recommend that parents do the same horrible things to their own children? Sure, they often say you shouldn’t spare the rod, but why not torture and starve your kids, purposely give them diseases, kill everyone they love, since these things build so much spiritual character?

Clemens uses his final chapter to ridicule the idea of heaven. “If King Leopold II, the Butcher, should proclaim that out of each hundred innocent and unoffending Congo Negroes he is going to save one from humiliation, starvation and assassination, and fetch that one home to Belgium to live with him in his palace and feed at his table, how many people would believe it?” Finally, turning his baleful gaze to the human race, Clemens unexpectedly softens:

I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it - it is like hitting a child. Man is not to blame for what he is…. He is flung head over heels into this world without ever a chance to decline, and straightaway he conceives and accepts the notion that he is in some mysterious way under obligations to the unknown Power that inflicted this outrage upon him…