> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Wonsil [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> 
> Challenging the Qur'an
> 
> A German scholar contends that the Islamic text has been 
> mistranscribed and promises raisins, not virgins

hmmm... that brings to mind a favorite joke about the monks charged with hand-copying the bible in some remote monastary.  The new guy comes in and asks what the deal is about copying it by hand and is told about various traditions and such that lead to this order doing the copying by hand, and how they have never made a mistake in all their years of copying.  When he asks how they can be certain they have never made a mistake, he's told that the absolute original version is locked away in a vault down below the sub-cellar.  He questions this a bit, and the other monks just shake their head and say "it's just the young and impatient that challenge everything", but ultimately he is persistent enough in his questions that finally the oldest and wisest monk figures the only way to shut him up is to go down and compare, word for word their latest copy.

Mind you, such a comparison is a monumental task, so each day the head monk would go down in the morning, compare a few chapters, and be back at noon for lunch and all that.  One day he misses lunch, but nobody thinks much about it, figuring he is just very involved in the current chapter.  Dinner time rolls around and he still hasn't shown, so some of the monks are curious as to what might be up.  Finally around 9:00 that night they can't take it any more and they go down en masse to see what could be keeping him so wrapped up in his task for the day.

As they approach the vault, they detect a faint weeping and wailing from within -- now fully concerned they rush in the door to see what is the matter.  There in the middle of the floor is the head monk, original and copy opened to a the same page, and the head monk completely in tears.  Everyone asks what is the matter, and the head monk weakly replies, "he was right -- we've missed a word"  Relieved, everyone says he's overreacting and that one word out of the thousands over the span of a few hundred years can't be all that bad, but the head monk just shakes his head and croaks out, "no, you don't understand -- the word we missed was CELIBRATE!"

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