"The Arab Sole"

Whoever writes the headlines at Forbes, wrote a clever one for Tunku Varadarajan's column today about Muntader-al-Zaidi, the Arab journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush during the President's recent joint press conference in Baghdad with Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki, "The Arab Sole". Below is a brief excerpt from Varadarajan's column:

The Arabs, who once upon a time boasted Averroes and Avicenna, are now reduced to eulogizing a boorish act of agitprop as a heroic achievement. America gave us Martin Luther King; South Africa gave us Mandela; India gave us Gandhi; the Arab world gives us ... Muntader-al-Zaidi. A people who invented the zero are now reduced, themselves, to zero. Only a people who live under the boots of their rulers celebrate the throwing of a shoe at a guest.

A commenter on Varadarajan's column on Forbes's website objected that zero was actually invented by the Hindus. According to Scientific American's take on this question, by former Harvard professor of mathematics Robert Kaplan ("What is the origin of zero? How did we indicate nothingness before zero?"),

The first recorded zero appeared in Mesopotamia around 3 B.C. The Mayans invented it independently circa 4 A.D. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth. Zero reached western Europe in the 12th century.

The symbol changed over time as positional notation (for which zero was crucial), made its way to the Babylonian empire and from there to India, via the Greeks (in whose own culture zero made a late and only occasional appearance; the Romans had no trace of it at all). Arab merchants brought the zero they found in India to the West.

Don King Has Lunch with the Financial Times

There probably aren't many Obama supporters with positive things to say about President Bush, but Don King is one of them. From Harry Haman's interview with King in yesterday's Financial Times ("Lunch with the FT: Don King"):

King has been a prominent supporter of George W Bush and has been a regular guest at Bush’s ranch in Texas. “Every black looked at me like I had bubonic plague,” he says, although he is unrepentant, calling Bush “a revolutionary president”. I ask him to explain. “George Walker Bush had the most diverse cabinet of any president in the history of this nation: he had the Latinos, he had the blacks, all those who had been degraded, dehumanised and cast into a ... package of negative associations. He took those [people with] negative associations and he put them to the forefront of the nation.”

King believes Bush prepared the way for an Obama presidency, and compares his willingness to put African-Americans in charge of national security to a defining moment in baseball history, the 1947 decision of Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey to sign the black player Jackie Robinson, thus integrating the sport.