The Grand Mosque of Oman

The world's largest Persian rug is inside – roughly the size of a football field. It took 600 Persian women four years to sew it. I desperately wanted to see it, but evidently you have to be a Muslim if you want to see the damn rug after 11 a.m. So said the Muslim pilgrims outside the mosque. I was about to argue, but then I realized that the guys I assumed were Muslim pilgrims – the ones wearing wine-colored dishis in the picture below, like they just stepped out of Raiders of the Lost Ark – were not pilgrims at all, but mosque guards. You know how I figured it out? Because they were wearing f#©&ing guns.

I decided not to push my luck on the rug thing.

As you probably noticed, this last picture isn't the Grand Mosque. It's the "Islamic Science Center," whatever that means. Islamic science has been on a wee bit of a break these last thousand years or so – as my friend Dennis pointed out, the fact that many of our Arabic students can't do simple algebra is particularly upsetting given that the Arabs invented algebra. I guess you can't complain too much about the Islamic Science Center, though – it presumably bears a closer relationship to actual science than does Christian Science.