72 Black-Eyed Peas
=v= Apparently the "72 doe-eyed virgins" that supposedly motivated al-Qaeda terrorists is a mistranslation. According to an article in the Guardian (U.K.), the paradisial afterlife of sensual pleasures features not dark-eyed virgins, but white raisins.
One it tempted to make a horribly contrived joke about "Extra Virgin" olive oils in paradise and Popeye converting to Islam, but one will instead be the very model of restraint.
P.S.: The Guardian article is uncredited, so for all I know, they heard it through the grapevine.
Geez, this is an ancient story. Here's an example of us joking about it on rec.arts.sf.fandom two years ago, and so were plenty of people blogging it, including me. It became enough of a cliche joke over a year ago that people got sick of making variants. See here for just a handful. Note dates. (Dates, not raisins: ahahahaha!)
No offense, but exactly news.
Posted by Gary Farber on January 29 2004 16:07
=v= Say, didja hear the one about the travelling exploding shoe salesman and the farmer with 72 Virginian daughters?
Of course I knew that the Guardian article, though new to me, was two years old. I was just so grateful to find a description of a non-Disneyfied paradise (which is what "doe-eyed" makes me think of), that I wanted to share the love.
Posted by Jym on January 30 2004 14:52
Ah. I didn't even bother to look at what you linked to, so I assumed it was a current story coming very late to the game.
Posted by Gary Farber on February 1 2004 18:10
Sorry to come late to this, but I haven't been blogging much this last month.
The whole "white raisins" theory is highly improbable, to put it mildly. And the Guardian article overstates the reception to Luxenberg's thesis, which has been loudly debunked by linguists about as often as it has been praised.
His methodology seems pretty dubious to me; as near as I can make out, Luxenberg assumes that the Koran was not written by Muhammed but was wholly translated from Syriac (which is perhaps not wholly impossible, and certainly there is Syriac influence, but there's no historical evidence to support such a sweeping assertion), then uses this speculation to build up an elaborate hypothesis about its meaning (including the bit about heaven being populated with pure white raisins instead of pure white angels -- in fact, he scours Paradise clean of all erotic elements whatsoever, which hardly seems likely, given the history of Arabic culture).
And then he uses this new interpretation to show that he was right after all about the historical Syriac origins of not only the Koran but all Islamic culture, even to the point of arguing that his hypothesis shows that there was virtually no oral transmission of the supposed ancient Syriac text that became the Koran, even though such a thing would go against everything we know and believe about early history.
The fact that this elaborate thesis seems mostly aimed at showing that Islam is a great big fraud and that Muslim scholars are idiots for not having noticed all of this before, doesn't argue well for the objectivity of the thesis either.
Posted by Scott on February 19 2004 15:52