Monday, August 21, 2006

Suicide bombers and their just rewards...

While recently reading 'End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason' by Sam Harris I found the following endnote that explains a new theory about why Muslim extremist suicide bombers think they'll be rewarded with virgins when they reach Heaven (from an endnote on p253):

Christopher Luxenberg (this is a pseudonym), a scholar of ancient Semitic languages, has recently argued that a mistranslation is responsible for furnishing the Muslim paradise with 'virgins' (Arabic hur, transliterated as 'houris' - literally 'white ones'). It seems that the passage describing paradise in the Koran were drawn from earlier Christian texts that make frequent use of the Aramaic word 'hur', meaning 'white raisins.' White raisins, it seems, were a great delicacy in the ancient world. Imagine the look on a young martyr's face when, finding himself in a paradise teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as a fistful of raisins. See A Stille 'Scholars are quietly offering new theories of the Koran' New York Times, March 2, 2002.

If this is true then for me it prooves that if there is a God he/she/it/they have a weird (wicked?) sense of humour... That said, it does help clarfiy what female suicide bombers can expect in heaven...