Probably 72 in this bunch, I’d say.
Was Muhammad really a foodie? Grapes or virgins…virgins or grapes. Well, they do have one thing in common, once you have them they’re not what they used to be. (HT Pat S.)
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars — and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam’s founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.
A scholar in northern Germany writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg because, he says, his controversial views on the Quran risk provoking Muslims. He claims that chunks of it were written not in Arabic but in another ancient language, Syriac. The “virgins” promised by the Quran to Islamic martyrs, he asserts, are in fact only “grapes.”
Don’t you hate it when that happens? Especially when you’re hungry for something else.
Gives new meaning to “I Heard it Through the Grapevine”.
I always thought that they’d get more takers to become martyrs if they were promised 50 Vegas hookers – or if your Taliban, 50 pre-pubescent teen boys…it is all in the marketing…
Hey anything that destroys a Koran is good news. Btw I see our esteemed Commander-in-chief wants to arm the Saudis to the hilt.
I guess by this time, though, we’re talking raisins or wrinkles.
Interesting to read that whereas most religions would welcome insight into the origins of their beings, the hardcore Islamists have no desire to hear anything that may shed new light on theirs.
Why am I not surprised?