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“... Don’t​ talk about God – be it! Find the place, the formula … Ah, Larry, it isn’t that life is so short, it’s that it’s everlasting!’ Henry Miller wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient crew ...”

“... I mounted​ the stallion of reading,’ Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri wrote, recalling the moment, around the year 1316, when he quit his job. He had been a financial clerk in the Mamluk Empire, employed by the Sultan al-Nasir to manage the royal properties and handle all species of paperwork. He knew how to balance the accounts and calculate profits, ‘and in this respect I was as brilliant as a fire on a hilltop ...”

“... What do​ the fish call Muhammad? One of his earliest disciples said that different creatures called him by different names. He was known as Abd al-Quddus under the sea and Abd al-Ghaffar among the birds, Abd al-Mughis in the insect kingdom and Abd al-Rahim to the jinn.‘His name is Ahmad,’ Jesus said of the one who would come after him, according to the Quran ...”

“... The​ earliest known author was married to the moon. In the 1920s, in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. Near a ziggurat they unearthed evidence of the life and verse of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana ...”

“... In​ 711 ce, the last king of the Visigoths, Roderic or Rodrigo, was defeated by Umayyad conquerors, an event that marked the loss of Andalusia to Muslim rule. According to legend, Rodrigo had defiled the daughter of a certain Count Julian, who in revenge invited the Umayyads to invade Spain. Four hundred years later, the Andalusi Muslim historian Ibn Bassām recorded a prophecy that had been circulating widely:A man once told me he heard it said … that once upon a time this Peninsula was conquered and taken away from a ruler named Rodrigo, and that another Rodrigo was one day destined to take it back – a prophecy that has filled all hearts with terror, and made men feel that what they feared and dreaded most would soon come to pass!This second Rodrigo was Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid ...”

“... mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. Anna DellaSubin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon from Jesus Christ to Prince Philip and Narendra Modi, written with a poise and lucidity that allow full play to the comic ...”

“... to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, which also appears in the Quran. In Not Dead but Sleeping, Anna DellaSubin reflects on this widespread myth and the role of the sleepers’ dog, often illustrated in Arabic manuscripts.Jacopus recounts the legend of Mary Magdalene’s body, said to have been dug up and taken from ...”