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paradise is filled with the poor and hell filled with women.
    Time passed, and by a few centuries after Mohammed’s death the sayings attributed to him by Islam’s theocracy numbered over six hundred. A good many of those phrases, especially the ones that curse women, have become religious truths received from heaven and untouchable by human doubt.
    Yet the Koran, the holy book dictated by Allah, says that man and woman were created equal and that Eve had no art or part in Adam’s seduction by the serpent.

MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER

    He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university.
    He studied at Princeton, taught in New York.
    He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States.
    He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded.
    That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare.
    He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read.
    He died in New York in 1859.
    His name was George Bush.

SUKAINA

    For women in some Muslim nations, the veil is a jail: a peripatetic prison that travels wherever they go.
    But Mohammed’s women did not cover their faces, and the Koran never mentions the word “veil,” though it does recommend that women cover their hair with a shawl outside the home. Catholic nuns, who do not follow the Koran, cover their hair, and in many places in the world non-Muslim women wear shawls or wraps or kerchiefs on their heads.
    But a shawl worn by choice is one thing, and a veil worn by male dictum, obliging women to hide their faces, is something else.
    One of the most implacable enemies of face-covering was Sukaina, Mohammed’s great-granddaughter, who not only refused to wear one, but denounced it at the top of her lungs.
    Sukaina married five times, and in each of her five marriage contracts she refused to pledge obedience to her husband.

MOTHER OF ALL STORYTELLERS

    To avenge a woman who betrayed him, a king killed them all.
    At dusk he married and at dawn he widowed.
    One after another, the virgins lost their virginity and their heads.
    Scheherazade was the only one to survive the first night, and then she continued trading a story for each new day of life.
    Stories she heard, read, or imagined saved her from decapitation. She told them in a low voice, in the darkness of the bedroom, with no light but that of the moon. In the telling she felt pleasure and gave pleasure, but she tread carefully. Sometimes, in the middle of a tale, she felt the king’s eyes studying her neck.
    If he got bored, she was lost.
    From fear of dying sprang the knack of narrating.

BAGHDAD

    Scheherazade lived her thousand and one nights in a palace in Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River.
    Her thousand and one stories were born in that land or had migrated there from Persia, Arabia, India, China, or Turkistan, just as the thousand and one marvels brought by merchant caravans from far-off lands ended up in the city’s market stalls.
    Baghdad was the center of the world. All roads, of words and of things, met in that city of plazas and fountains, baths and gardens. The most famous physicians, astronomers, and mathematicians also met in Baghdad, at an academy of sciences known as the House of Wisdom.
    Among them was Muhammed al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra, which got its name from the first word of the title of one of his books, al-jabr .

VOICE OF WINE

    Omar Khayyam wrote treatises on algebra, metaphysics, and astronomy. And he was the author of underground poems that spread by word of mouth throughout