Sir: According to a news item, a Saudi cleric has claimed that the earth does not revolve around the sun. This is not the first time a Saudi scholar has made bizarre claims like this one. In the 1980s, another Saudi cleric declared that it was un-Islamic to say that the earth is round and that any Muslim who did so risked being put into the fire after death. We sometimes despair about the state of education in Pakistan but if Saudi Arabia can produce such illiterate so-called scholars despite being perhaps the richest country in the Islamic world, we should not be surprised that Muslims are in such a mess today. SHAKIR LAKHANI Karachi