Why Haven't We Tried This?

Preferably, with naked women. Really good looking naked women.

Who knows? It just might work. Similar ceremonies have caused the sun to emerge from eclipses.

Slamet, a 32-year-old farmer with a wife and child, explained why he will not leave the mountain. (Indonesians often only have one name.)

“Allah will protect us and so will the spirits.”

He is a devout Muslim, as are 90 percent of this nation’s 220 million people. However, Slamet and his mountain neighbors also hold animist beliefs and feel that the mountain provides for them. In return, they give offerings of rice and packages of fruit to the rivers and streams, and at least once a year a priest climbs to the volcano’s crater and gives a live offering of an animal.

These Muslim men have also been known to gather naked in groups late at night and run in circles around their villages to ward off an eruption. Such immodesty is usually frowned upon in Islamic societies.

And, indeed, in the early hours of Friday morning, a group of two dozen farmers set off on a silent march around one of the villages three miles from the lava flows. The march, they said, was an appeal to the volcano spirits in an effort to “calm” the mountain.

I wonder which sura this came from?