Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Tom Hanks is married to a Muslim!   posted by Razib @ 4/05/2006 02:39:00 PM
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OK, not really. But, I saw in my RSS that Dienekes' weblog has a post on the religion of famous celebrities and it said Tom Hanks is "Greek Orthodox." This piqued my interest, and I found out that Tom Hanks is "Orthodox" via marriage to Rita Wilson, born Margarita Ibrahimoff, who is Greek Orthodox. Wikipedia says that her father is a Bulgarian Pomak and her mother is Greek, and I'm willing to credit this because the name Ibrahimoff strongly suggests Muslim antecedants. Pomaks you see are Slavic speaking Muslim minorities in the Balkans (as opposed to Turks, who do not speak the local language as their native tongue). Obviously Wilson was raised in her mother's religion, but according to Islam you are Muslim if your father is, and since her father was Muslim...well, let's just make sure Tom doesn't take Rita to Afghanistan anytime soon!

Related: Eliza Dushku's father is Albanian (hence the weird name).