Sayed Kashua Quotes
Whom do you speak to about introducing a leap year? Is it heresy to request such a thing? Why do the Jews have one and we don't?
Kashua, Sayed. Native: Dispatches from an Israeli-Palestinian Life. Grove Press, 2016.
In Caesar’s famous adventure in Cleopatra’s Egypt he discovered that in many ways, the Egyptian culture, physicians and scientists were far superior. Rome had become the superpower by adopting new ideas and technology wherever they found them. Caesar, living in Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria which was then the great center of learning of the known world, worked with the Egyptian Astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria to understand the Egyptian calendar which he then adopted and ordered Rome to change in 45 BC, and has since been referred to as the “Julian calendar” which is close to what we use today. The Egyptians of Cleopatra’s era were so scientifically sophisticated that Sosigenes not only knew that the planets revolved around the sun, but had calculated the orbits of the inner planets. See {621716}.
His reference was to an absence of very much religious language in American documents of the founding fathers. While some founding fathers were very religious, and all knowledgeable about religion, Meacham argues from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and many other documents of the founding of America that the absence of religious language that was present in much other literature, demonstrates a conscious effort to assure that there would be separation of church and state for they had seen the horrors of interreligious strife in Europe and were very cognizant about the problems caused in early Colonial America by established religions.
Saudi Arabian Newspaper. In March of 2002, a Saudi Arabian Professor at King Faisal University wrote an article for a Saudi newspaper that was a virulent slander of the Jews and their holy book. See {593096}. The article was published under full Saudi Arabian censorship which means that the government OK’d the contents. The editor claimed that he had been away when the offending articles had been published. The lie that Jews use the blood of non-Jews to bake their holy bread has been a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda through the centuries.
This is an interesting quotation as it shows that there were opponents of literal interpretation of the Bible in the 17th century, and that they were among the leading men of the day. The argument that the Bible has divine inspiration but was written by men and should not be taken literally, has been made since the Ancient Jews received the Bible.
Sayed Kashua (Arabic: سيد قشوع, Hebrew: סייד קשוע; born 1975) is a Palestinian author and journalist born in Tira, Israel, known for his books and humorous columns in the Hebrew language.
