Behold a Prophet from the Lands of Canada!

By Anouar Majid

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the new prophet (I will call him Teacher from now on) who has appeared in the province of Alberta, growing up in the frontier town of Fairview, of which there is no account during or before the Great War, where temperatures can reach below 42 degrees and where the nights are even colder. Behold Jordan, son of the teacher Walter, who doesn’t like parties but drinks beer occasionally in the big city of Edmonton and starts college at Grande Prairie Regional College, some 90 miles away from home, before transferring to Edmonton, the city of all risks, to get his undergraduate degree.

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The Second Machine Age and Its Discontents

By Anouar Majid

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and young cyber tycoon, wants the whole world wired and every human being to have access to the Internet. To bring Wi-Fi to people who can’t be reached by a cell tower, he may rely on high-flying balloons or solar-powered drones. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is on a crusade to reduce preventable deaths among children and escape extreme poverty. And physical engineering, which has been eclipsed by social media technologies, is returning to Silicon Valley to design a new line of high-tech “wearables” to improve the lives of consumers.

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A Brief History of British Tangier

By Anouar Majid

In my book Freedom and Orthodoxy I make it clear that the classical world order was radically altered by Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the continent that would later be bear the name of another European explorer, Amerigo (Americus in Latin) Vespucci.  

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Jesus Was Not Christian

By Anouar Majid

Not long after I reviewed Reza Aslan’s work on Jesus, I came across Geza Vermes’s excellent study, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (2013), that shows how Jesus’ iconoclastic but decidedly Jewish message grew in time into the complex faith of Christianity. We need to know that Judaism was, at first, a monolatry, meaning that Jews, without having to discredit other people’s divinities (not just hand-made idols), worshipped their God only. The idea of one God for the whole world—monotheism—developed in the 6th century BC following the exilic (forced transfer to Babylonia) and post-exilic (return to Judah) periods. Still, Judaism was a religion of deeds, not one of faith and dogma, as the belief system developed by Paul and John would later become. The Christianity that emerged in the first five centuries of our era would have been unrecognizable to the charismatic preacher known to us as Jesus.

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