The new Jesus and Mo strip, “hater,” came with a note:
“According to William Dalrymple, anyway.”
And the link (Dalrymple is a great historian and writer, by the way) goes to Wikipedia:
The historian William Montgomery Watt states that Muhammad’s kindness to animals was remarkable, citing an instance of Muhammad while traveling with his army to Mecca in 630 AD, posting sentries to ensure that a female dog and her newborn puppies were not disturbed.
And of course we can’t neglect the cats, especially the apocryphal story of Muhammad’s cat Muezza, who was sleeping on the Prophet’s sleeve when the call to prayer came. As the story goes (it didn’t really happen!), Muhammad cut off the sleeve of his robe so he wouldn’t disturb the cat when going off to pray. However, according to Wikipedia, many of the hadith show Muhammad to have been an ailurophile. I suspect this is the reason why the mosques I’ve visited in Turkay harbor so many cats.
Anyway, the strip, in which Mo lies by omission:
I can’t resist adding this picture of me feeding the beloved cat Gil, who lived in the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul for 16 years. (I always carry dry cat food in my backpack in Istanbul):
Reminds me of Garrison Keillor’s apology: ‘Having been called names, one looks back at one’s own angry outbursts over the years, and I recall having once referred to Republicans as “hairy-backed swamp developers, fundamentalist bullies, freelance racists, hobby cops, sweatshop tycoons, line jumpers, marsupial moms and aluminum-siding salesmen, misanthropic frat boys, ninja dittoheads, shrieking midgets, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, pill pushers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, the grand pooh-bahs of Percodan, mouth breathers, testosterone junkies and brownshirts in pinstripes.” I look at those words now, and “cat stranglers” seems excessive to me. The number of cat stranglers in the ranks of the Republican Party is surely low, and that reference was hurtful to Republicans and to cat owners. I feel sheepish about it.’.
He he he!
What’s so bad about being a cheese merchant? Or is this some coded USian sports insult – there’s some ballgame team called “cheese heads”, isn’t there?
Without bothering to look it up — since who really cares? — a hadith reports that Aisha was awaiting Mo’s attentions in a bed and Mo was acting weird, wouldn’t “come unto her”, because Aisha had a puppy in the room. Mo’s antipathy to dogs is well known AFAIK and reflected in Islamic culture for the last 1400 years. I didn’t dream this, did I?