Unleashing the Beast

106 / U NLEASHING THE B EAST

There may be a strange twist related to the fantasy about the 72 virgins. Those who have studied the Koran have noted that Mohammed had contact with Jews and Christians living in Arabia. Some of the stories in the Koran are from the Bible, and some include Christian and Jewish legends that were popular in the time of Mohammed. John Wansbrough of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London believed that the Koran was a series of voices or texts compiled over a longer period of many years. There is no evidence that the Koran ever existed until A.D. 691, or 59 years after Mohammed's death. This was about the time the Dome of the Rock was built in Jerusalem. Even the inscriptions inside the Dome, according to Dr. Wansbrough, differ somewhat from the present Koranic text. Christoph Luximburg from Germany's Sarrland University has studied early copies of the Koran, and notes that vowel and dot points were added to the Koran in the 8 th and 9 th centuries, similar to the way the old Hebrew alphabet placed dots beneath the letters to demonstrate the vowel sounds. The passage that speaks of the virgins is the word hur . Islamic traditionalists say the word is houri , meaning "virgin." But Luximburg notes that according to early Arabic language and one early Arabic dictionary, the word hur means "white." In researching, he discovered that the passage in the Koran is similar to a fourth century passage written in a Christian document called "Hymns of Paradise." The passage speaks of paradise having flowing rivers of water,