The gods are so techie

[onager]

5. Muslims actually had those devices years ago.

I saw them all over the place in Egypt from 2005 on. They were about the size of a small cell phone, and could contain a lot of different religious apps. And they were priced so that just about anybody could afford one, though naturally there were Deluxe and "bare-bones" models.

At minimum, IIRC, most of them featured:
1. Searchable Koran and hadiths
2. Qibla compass (i.e., always pointed toward the direction of Mecca)
3. Koranic chants in MP3 format. (Great Koranic chanters are like rock stars in the Middle East. They have to be booked months in advance for a wedding or other event, and they make a lot of money.)

We infidel Westerners called these things...what else? The I-God.

By now, I'd guess all their functions have been incorporated into smart phones, I-Pods, etc. I left Egypt in 2009.

I also worked in Saudi Arabia for 2 years, but that was a lot longer ago. Saudi Arabia is a lot more strict about religion than Egypt. e.g., Egyptian women would come up and talk to me on the street. That never happened in Saudi Arabia. Even Western women there had to be careful about not riling up the Religious Police. The RP generally wouldn't arrest a Westerner unless they had done something really outrageous. But they had lots of little humiliating things they could do for harassment.