Is that better or worse than a dick in a box?
--- In [email protected], "gina_ellis_ca"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I got this from another e-list.
>
> Scholars Scrutinize the Koran's Origin A Promise of Moist Virgins
> or Dried Fruit? New York Times (and International Herald Tribune),
> March 4, 2002
>
> ........
> Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at
> Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known
> copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the
> document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these
> copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern
> Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth
> and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad,
> Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the
> ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on
> what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg's
> radical theory is that many of the text's difficulties can be
> clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language
> group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time. For
> example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on the word
> hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning
> simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands
> for "houri," which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists that this
> is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at
> least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means "white
> raisin."
>
> [Suggested t-shirt: I blew myself up and all I got was these damned
> raisins. And I'm even forbidden to make brew out of them...]
>
