The website of Dar Al-Ifta Al-Masriya (the Egyptian House of Issuing Fatwas) is a popular online database, which logs millions of Fatwas in the form of Q&A. Muslims from all over the world submit an inquiry about a certain personal, familial or social issue; and religious scholars respond with a ruling. According to this article, the...

(Read “A Reflection on Drama-Loving Islam [part 1]”)   A reader of Free Thinking Lebanon sent me the link of the video below after reading my post “Lebanon: it can’t be 2010?!”. He wrote: “[…] This link is for a funny video of a guy faking a cry during Ashura celebration. I hope you’ll enjoy it” I watched the video and it is hilarious....

I’ve always wondered why so many non-Lebanese people hold an extremely pessimistic view of Lebanon. I guess I’ve known the reason all along: religious extremists. But since Lebanon is my home country, sometimes I tend to ignore this sad reality, and convince myself that Lebanon is the most developed country in the middle east as well as the one with the most open-minded people—which is true to some extent. However, every time...

A couple of days a go, Google launched an interesting search application, Google NGram Viewer, used for graphing how one word, or a combination of five words, have been trending (by word frequency) in books since the 1500’s. I played around with a few word combinations. Here’s one of my evil results; It shows the trend for the word “god”...

I’m glad to announce that this blog is back online as of today..Although if you read the last post, I had already said that I would be back to blogging but I wasn’t able to! The reason was that back then I had been very busy and I had to decide between taking a long break from Free Thinking Lebanon or losing my mind. Also those who follow(ed)...