An influential Saudi cleric claims that the sun revolves around a stationary earth in a video flagged by the Washington Free Beacon.
Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibar, who is part of King Salman’s Senior Ulema Council, the kingdom’s highest religious body, made that claim during a lecture in the United Arab Emirates this past January.
“This gives you an idea of where Saudi Arabia is headed under King Salman,” David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told the Free Beacon.
Al-Khaibar is not the first person from that region to make such curious claims. The BBC reported his fellow countryman Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan saying about women driving cars, “Medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards, [causing] children [to have] with clinical problems of varying degrees.”
And back in 2010, The Guardian reported senior Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi saying, “Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.”
This prompted mockers to create a Facebook page inviting women to show extra skin in order to create a “boobquake.”