A Fascinating World

(Meanwhile, Wikipedia relates that when Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden, the stone came burning out of the sky to show them where to build the first temple. This is a beautiful story and also very useful for my general argument, so I wish it were genuine, but as far as I can tell it’s completely made up. The citation points to a book by the British convert Martin Lings, in which the story about Adam and Eve does not appear. It’s also not in any book of sunnah. The Islamic orthodoxy is that the stone was carried down by angels to Abraham when he built the Kaaba. As far as I can tell, the Adam story was invented in April 2015 by a Wikipedia editor called The Herald, who identifies themselves as a Christian from Kochi in Kerala. The Herald appears to have spent over a decade writing perfectly respectable articles on Colombian landslides and the poetry of Robert Frost, for the sole purpose of burying this one fabrication. That fabrication now appears in articles on the BBC and, funnily enough, Arab News. It was also repeated by Shaykh Afifi al-Akiti, Fellow in Islamic Studies at Oxford, in an interview with CNN. Even great theologians just crib everything from Wikipedia. I’ve contacted The Herald for comment. We live in a fascinating world.)

The dust of God - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge