ARABIC, SYRIAC, VIRGINS, AND GRAPES: I've been following this story for some time but haven't yet commented on it in PaleoJudaica. The gist is that someone, allegedly a German scholar, who writes under the pseudonymn " Christoph Luxenberg" ("for security reasons") has published a book saying that the Arabic of the Qu'ran is really a sort of mixture of Syriac and Arabic and that the meanings of some passages are changed as a result. The International Herald Tribune had an article on it a couple of days ago:

Nicholas Kristof Virgins or grapes? The Koran revisited
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'The virgins are calling you," Mohamed Atta wrote reassuringly to his fellow hijackers just before Sept. 11, 2001.
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It has long been a staple of Islam that Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins. But a growing body of rigorous scholarship of the Koran points to a less sensual paradise - and, more important, may offer a step away from fundamentalism and toward a reawakening of the Islamic world.

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But now the same tools that historians, linguists and archaeologists have applied to the Bible for about 150 years are beginning to be applied to the Koran. The results are explosive.

The Koran is beautifully written, but often obscure. One reason is that Arabic was born as a written language with the Koran, and there's growing evidence that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

For example, the Koran says martyrs going to heaven will get "hur," and the word was taken by early commentators to mean "virgins," hence those 72 consorts. But in Aramaic, hur meant "white" and was commonly used to mean "white grapes."

Some martyrs arriving in paradise may regard a bunch of grapes as a letdown. But the scholar who pioneered this pathbreaking research, using the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for security reasons, noted in an e-mail interview that grapes made more sense in context because the Koran compares them to crystal and pearls, and because contemporary accounts have paradise abounding with fruit, especially white grapes.

Luxenberg's analysis, which has drawn raves from many scholars, also transforms the meaning of the verse that is sometimes cited to require women to wear veils. Instead of instructing pious women "to draw their veils over their bosoms," he says, it advises them to "buckle their belts around their hips."

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But Muslim fundamentalists regard the Koran - every word of it - as God's own language, and they have violently attacked freethinking scholars as heretics. So Muslim intellectuals have been intimidated, and Islam has often been transmitted by narrow-minded extremists.
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Still, there are encouraging signs. Islamic feminists are arguing for religious interpretations leading to greater gender equality. An Iranian theologian has called for more study of the Koran's Syriac roots. Tunisian and German scholars are collaborating on a new edition of the Koran based on the earliest manuscripts. And just last week, Iran freed Hashem Aghajari, who had been sentenced to death for questioning harsh interpretations of Islam.

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I haven't read the book myself yet and don't expect to have time to in the near future, so I can't make any very useful comments. It was reviewed very positively by Robert R. Phenix Jr. and Cornelia B. Horn in Hugoye last year, but quite negatively by Fran�ois de Blois in the Journal of Quranic Studies . If anyone who specializes in both Syriac and Arabic has read it and has a view on it, please drop me a note.