
Kitchens, Prayers, and Politics
All this praying will make us thirsty, but I haven’t told anyone yet. I took the cook’s advice. I have fasted like a bird.
All this praying will make us thirsty, but I haven’t told anyone yet. I took the cook’s advice. I have fasted like a bird.
Once inside, I splash my face with water from a plastic bottle. My eyes are red and my lungs still hurt. I look around for my husband. He is helping an old lady get up off the road. The police continue with their lathi-charge. Their batons are being used indiscriminately. I move away quickly – out of their range.
Had Khaldoun lived in our verity-challenged times, he would surely have taken today’s media to task for embracing “alternative facts” and spreading disinformation and fake news. Sensationalism, chaos and fear-arousing disinformation always sells and is good for ratings, which in turn drive advertising dollars, and the media figured that out a long time ago.
I think the human story of science, evolution and scholarship becomes more enriching if it seen as a collective human endeavor, and not necessarily as petty triumphs of one over the other – the West, the East, Christianity, Islam, Judaism.