Terrorism is not about religion

[Igel]

74. That's not the claim.

The claim is that the word understood by native speakers of Arabic to mean "virgins" in that one passage actually is similar to, IIRC, to the Aramaic word for "raisin," and that when the Qur'aan was written that's what the author meant.

Consider it to be not a mistranslation but a 1200-year-old misunderstanding. (After all, the Qur'aan was written down a hundred years after Muhammed from collections of sayings attributed to Muhammed.) It's not how a translator got it wrong, but how a millennium of Muslims got it wrong.

There are, in every old text, words hard to understand.

We have "the apple of my eye" when the Hebrew word for "apple" meant "pupil." Easy enough fix. But some words were obscure enough that Gesenius in the early 1800s had no clue what they actually meant, and comparative and historical linguistic approaches to Hebrew lexicography were still 60 or 80 years away. They knew to consider Aramaic, but they didn't look at Arabic for insight. Phoenician and Assyrian weren't available, the Nag Hammadi library and the Qumran scrolls weren't known. The same problem occurs with the Greek NT, and it wasn't until some papyri were discovered with similar grammar and even vocabulary that the idea of Koine Greek being a special divine creation just for the purposes of the NT died it's well-deserved death.

Muslims weren't into lesser anything, so the idea of Aramaic information their understanding of their sacred writings wasn't an option.

At the same time, I really have trouble believing anybody would be motivated to die in battle for a handful of raisins.