Soon after the tsunamis struck South and South-East Asia in December 2004, a Bengali newspaper published from New York prominently carried a report on how Bangladesh escaped the disaster. The report, by Bangladeshi geologists, concluded that the shallow continental shelf of the Bangladesh mainland acted as a kind of buffer. A few days later, an angry reader left this message on the editor's answering machine: "How, could you, a Muslim, publish such a report? It was Almighty Allah who saved Bangladesh." The proposition that God saved Bangladesh from the destructions of the tsunamis is of course a matter of faith,...