Posted on 03/10/2010 2:43:09 AM PST by reaganaut1
I was tempted to turn my abaya into a black masquerade cloak and sneak into Mecca, just hop over the Tropic of Cancer to the Red Sea and crash the ultimate heaven’s gate.
Sir Richard Burton, the 19th-century British adventurer, translator of “The Arabian Nights” and the “Kama Sutra” and self-described “amateur barbarian,” was an illicit pilgrim to the sacred black granite cube. He wore Arab garb and infiltrated the holiest place in Islam, the Kaaba, the “center of the Earth,” as he called it, in the Saudi city where the Prophet Muhammad was born.
But in the end, it seemed disrespectful, not to mention dangerous.
So on my odyssey to Saudi Arabia, I tried to learn about the religion that smashed into the American consciousness on 9/11 in a less sneaky way. And that’s when the paradox sunk in: It was nearly impossible for me to experience Islam in the cradle of Islam.
You don’t have to be a Catholic to go to the Vatican. You don’t have to be Jewish to go to the Western Wall (although if you’re a woman, you’re squeezed into a slice of it at the side). You don’t have to be Buddhist to hear the Dalai Lama speak — and have your picture snapped with him afterward.
A friend who often travels to Saudi Arabia for business said he thought that Medina, the site of Muhammad’s tomb, was beginning to “loosen up” for non-Muslims. (As the second holiest city in Islam, maybe they needed to try harder.) But the Saudis nixed a trip there.
I assumed I at least could go to a mosque at prayer time, as long as I wore an abaya and hijab, took off my shoes, and stayed in the back in a cramped, segregated women’s section.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Is that Dowd? She’s kinda cute.
Mr. niteowl77
Keep her... give her a real closely cropped hairdo... just below the ears.
LLS
Obama is no Muzzie either. He’s a godless socialist. After all, he hung around with Communists for much of his life and they tend to be atheist.
Welcome to Reality, Maureen. Sit in the back, please.
The thing that stuns me is that this is an op-ed in the NYT! Dodd’s contributions are not opposite of that rag’s editorials.
"From my cold dead hands....."
Wolverines!
um no...Catherine Zeta Jones
Dowd fits right in at the New York Times...
After all, it's been nine years. It's time to reconsider Islam and the whole 9/11 thing, in light of our modern understanding and recent events, don'tcha know... Surely it was all our fault, at the end of the day... If only we had not provoked them!
Not guilty. No way. No how.
Stupid cow. She finds it offensive to be “consigned” to a portion of the Western Wall, but finds no problem in sitting in a “segregated” part of a mosque. And dressed according to Mohammedan law.
I’m sure that the Mohammedan invaders will treat her more kindly for her willingness to accept them - in a harem!
:)
Could we revoke her passport and leave her in Saudi?
She would make a Sultan a good wife. (after the ritual numerous beatings)
Maybe now she has glimpsed the tip of the shadow of the towering monolith of violent cultural imperialism that is Islam.
Living in Saudi.... yes, infidels have to take the mecca bypass.
She's way too old and has way too much mileage to get such a gig. She could be a housemaid who is available to service the old perv when one of his teen brides is not though...
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