¹ Sayyid Qutb, Fi Zilai al-Qur’an, Volume 8 (Beirut: Arab Heritage Publishing House, 1971) p. 483.

² Immanuel Velikovsky, for example, once said that we ought to take the Biblical account of the sun stopping in its path “literally” as meaning the earth briefly stopped in its orbit (despite the implications of such an event in classical mechanics). I think that made him a crank, but not a fundamentalist. Of these very different approaches to the literal truth that might be found in holy books this collection is largely innocent.

³ See Lorenz Kruger et al., The Probabilistic Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Of special interest to Bulletin readers may be Ian Hacking’s article “Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930?” in the first volume.

⁴ I made a similar argument in “Smashing Idols and the State: Egyptian Sunni Radicalism” in Comparative Studies in Society and History (January 1991).

⁵ Glendon, Mary Ann, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Carter, Stephen, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar.