religion

Moksha in Russia

Moksha is a language of Russia spoken by the Moksha people in the Republic of Mordovia. A river of the same name flows through the region.

Akbar never denied his mother anything but this …

Ecbar Shaugh [Emperor Akbar] … never denyed [his mother] any thing but this, that shee demanded of him, that our Bible might be hanged about an asses necke and beaten about the towne of Agra, for that the Portugals … tyed [the Quran] about the necke of a dogge and beat the same dogge about the towne of Ormuz. But hee denyed her request, saying that, if it were ill in the Portugals to doe so to the Alcoran, being it became not a King to requite ill with ill, for that the contempt of any religion was the contempt of God.

Fela Kuti and his Professor Hindu

Fela Kuti, often called Africa's Bob Marley, had a spiritual advisor named Professor Hindu who had the power to "kill and wake"—to kill a man and bring him back to life. Kuti turned down a million dollar deal with an American record label on Hindu advice.

Whitman's Gita and the Herald

When the first edition of the American poet, Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that it read like “a mixture of the Bhagavat Ghita [sic] and the New York Herald”.

The Holy Samosa

In 2011, Somalia's Islamic terrorist group, al-Shabaab, banned the humble samosa apparently because its triangular shape supposedly resembled the Christian Holy Trinity.

Absence of Satan

A fundamental sanity in Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.

Here is the mosque and there the tavern

Yeh masjid hai yeh maikhana, taajub is per aata hai
Janabe-e-Shaikh ka naqsh-e-kadam yoon bhi hai aur yoon bhi

(Here is the mosque and there the tavern; What amazes me is to see
The imprints of the holy man's feet going from the one to the other.)

religion