Taliban zealots in Afghanistan have discovered that a sports arena could also be used spectacles of a different kind. Thousands assembled at a sports stadium in Kabul on Februrary 28 to witness the hands of two men being amputated in one corner of the field. At the other end, a teenage girl clad in a burqa from head to toe was given 100 lashes. The men, whose names were given only as Hamidullah and Habibullah were held guilty of stealing the equivalent of $500 from a local shop. The girl, identified as Suhailullah, was being punished for befriending a man who was not her close relative. The thieves were given a general anaesthetic before their hands were chopped off. As the severed limbs were later displayed to the crowd, a Taliban leader held out the warning over the loudspeaker: "This is the fate of anyone who steals. It is Islamic law". According to people who witnessed Islamic law in action, the teenager who made no sound as she was "gently" given her punishment, took 60 lashes while standing and the remaining 40 while sitting.

Her yesteryears may not have been lived in strict accordance with the four stages of life prescribed by Indian philosophy. But pop icon Madonna, now a mother and nearing her 40 years, appears headed towards the vanashram ideal. The self-seeking goddess of materialism who has so far thrived on sex, scandal and sensation, now seeks the solace of Hinduism. At least, that’s what her latest album, Ray of Light, suggests. Of late, Madonna has turned to yoga and Sanskrit — one of the tracks on Ray of Light (Shanti/Ashtangi) is sung in Sanskrit with lines such as, I worship the guru’s lotus feet/ Awakening the happiness of the self–revealed. Madonna being Madonna has more than her share of critics who believe her transition from sex to romance to spiritualism, all in a short span of six years, are mere gimmick to keep the arclights focussed on her self. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether materialism’s loss and Hinduism’s gain are for real.

Orthodox Jews claim they are not suggesting that "the (Al Aqsa) mosques will be destroyed tomorrow morning". Nonetheless, they are already engaged in the elaborate and arduous ritual involved in preparing the priests for the future temple to be built once the Al Aqsa complex in Jerusalem’s old city is demolished. The 1,300–year–old complex is the third holiest site for Muslims. Jews want to rebuild their ancient temple which they believe was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. According to Jewish tradition, rebuilding the temple will hasten the coming of the messiah. The problem is that the temple cannot be built unless the Al Aqsa mosque, located on the temple ruins, is demolished. And destroying the mosque is very likely to trigger an unimaginable holy world war between believing Muslims and Jews. So, orthodox Jews are hoping for a "divine act" to remove the Al Aqsa mosque complex. Meanwhile, a group of Rabbis have already appealed to families from the Cohanim priestly caste — which served in the ancient temple — to hand over at least 19 newborn boys to them for "purification" so that they are ready to serve as priests in the future Jewish Temple. On March 1, the Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported Rabbi Yosef Elboim as telling the newspaper that he had been asked by the secretive ‘Movement for Establishing the Temple’ to identify future mothers willing to part with their male offspring for at least 13 years. Since the dead are impure for Orthodox Jews, the priests to be trained must be isolated to preclude the possibility of contact with any dead person. Priests now, Temple to follow?

If Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem are worrying about how to rebuild the Temple, their preoccupation in New York is different: law enforcement authorities in New York are investigating news reports that wives have been hiring hoodlums to beat up their Orthodox Jewish husbands to force them to agree to a religious divorce or to give up their claims for child custody. The victim husbands claim they have been threatened, harassed, badly beaten. According to Jewish law, a woman cannot remarry or get otherwise involved with another man until her husband agrees to a get — the Jewish equivalent of the Christian annulment of a marriage. So, Jewish wives in New York have found an unholy way out of the ‘holy bondage’ their husbands insist on keeping them chained to.

For the last 1,000 years in Buddhist majority Sri Lanka, you could either be a woman or a priest. But history was recreated last month when the first batch of 20 Sri Lankan women arrived in Bodh Gaya, India, along with Inamaluwe Sri Sumangala Nayaka, the controversial head-priest of an important Buddhist temple in Dambulla in central Sri Lanka, to be ordained as monks. According to Buddhist historians, Sanghamitta, the daughter of Emperor Ashoka who was sent to Sri Lanka to spread the teachings of Buddha, had set up the Bhikuni order around 300 BC. But the order disappeared in the 11th century and subsequent attempts to revive it were squashed by the male clergy. Since the latter half of the 19th century, women have been admitted to a spiritual order but on a lower plain than men. Called Silamata, these women were not considered part of the clergy and were given no religious role. By tradition, the ordaining of a woman requires the presence of 10 women monks and 10 Bhikuni male monks. Since women monks had become extinct in Lanka, they had to come to Bodh Gaya where Chinese monks and nuns conducted the "higher ordainment" rituals. Back in Sri Lanka, the ordainment of the first batch of women after 1,000 years was greeted mostly with stony silence from the priestly heirarchy. The few who have spoken so far have criticised it as an attempt to foist the Mahayana tradition (practised in Korea, Japan and some other countries of south Asia) on Theravada Buddhism (practised in Lanka, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia).

IN a paper presented at a international conference in Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka recently, a historian bemoaned the fact that history teaching has almost disappeared in schools and universities in Sri Lanka. According to the country’s National Education Commission, only 12 per cent of the university students now opt for history. The growing preference for science and information technology subjects is said to be the reason why less and less students are interested in the arts, history included. Ironically, the move away from history in the last 15 years or so has coincided with a raging ethnic strife in Sri Lanka.

Historians are worried that if "history teaching becomes history", self-seeking politicians and others who preach hate politics will distort history as never before. "The answer to distortion of history is not to turn your back on history but to see that it is correctly taught to every citizen so that independent judgments that good history teaching/learning can develop in children and youth will help them to discriminate between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and bad," says historian Dr. Wimala Ratnayake.