Counting Cats in Zanzibar highlights the work of Professor Sabri Abd Al-Rauf and the importance of a fragrant bride:
The mother [of the bridegroom] and other female relatives may look at the bride’s hair and neck, and may smell her private parts… But the groom is forbidden to look at any part of her except her face and hands.
The video of Professor Al-Rauf being interviewed has an endearingly demented quality, as these things often do. But it’s probably worth noting that the professor previously appeared on Saudi Arabia’s Iqra TV, explaining to viewers the finer points of wife-beating. Specifically, that, “beating [one’s wife] doesn’t mean beatings with a rod or beatings that draw blood… The beatings are intended to instil fear… declaring that [the husband] isn’t satisfied with this wife.”
The Quackometer takes issue with the Society of Homeopaths:
The result of this careful study was that the homeopathic treatment was no better than a placebo. But the homeopath authors do not conclude that homeopathy did not work; they speculate the tablets had not been stored properly or that the wrong combination of sugar pills was made. At no point do they propose as a possibility that homeopathy can have absolutely no effect on a third-world child with [diarrhoea].
And Deogolwulf spies a contender for Greatest Comment Ever by a Guardian reader.
I nearly missed the bit about not being satisfied with THIS wife.
This savage is a university professor…?
At al-Azhar, the “chief seat of Sunni Islamic learning in the world.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Azhar_University
Among other things, it’s a perfect nesting site for sexual neurosis and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
A typical university then.