72 virgins in heaven.

Overblood

Is it true that the muslim idea of heaven includes recieving 72 virgins? Do the muslims here believe in that? And, is it in the Koran?

hivizman

There are various descriptions of Jannah (the Garden of Paradise) in the Qur'an, most particularly in Surah al-Waqi'ah (Surah 56). In Muhammad Asad's rendering of the Qur'an into English, The Message of the Qur'an, the passage 56:15-38 is:

[They will be seated] on gold-encrusted thrones of happiness, reclining upon them, facing one another [in love]. Immortal youths will wait upon them with goblets, and ewers, and cups filled with water from unsullied springs by which their minds will not be clouded and which will not make them drunk; and with fruit of any kind that they may choose, and with the flesh of any fowl that they may desire.

And [with them will be their] companions pure, most beautiful of eye, like unto pearls [still] hidden in their shells.

[And this will be] a reward for what they did [in life]. No empty talk will they hear there, nor any call to sin, but only the tiding of inner soundness and peace.

Now as for those who have attained to righteousness - what of those who have attained to righteousness?

[They too will find themselves] amidst fruit-laden lote-trees, and acacias flower-clad, and shade extended, and waters gushing, and fruit abounding, never-failing and never out of reach.

And [with them will be their spouses], raised high: for, behold, We shall have brought them into being in a life renewed, having resurrected them as virgins, full of love, well-matched with those who have attained to righteousness.

The reference to 72 virgins has been traced to a hadith reported by Al-Tirmidhi, on the authority of Abu Sa'id al-Khudhri, who attributed to Muhammad the following statement:

The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy-two houri, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a.

The word "houri" appears in several places in the Qur'an, and is translated by Asad as "pure companions". Abdullah Yusuf Ali renders the original word as "companions", while Marmaduke Pickthall's version is "fair ones". Whether it is correct to translate "houri" as "virgins" has been disputed, and indeed some scholars appear to regard the above hadith as "da'if" or "weak" (this normally refers to problems with the chain of transmitters of the hadith rather than its substantive content).

Overblood

Wow I didn't know you get 80,000 servants.

So there is no general consensus on what you get 72 of? Is it even decided if the 72 "companions" are male or female?

Mickeroo

I was reading a comic a while back,its a religious satire,most likely highly offensive to most religious people,mainly christians i would think, but there was one part where 2 of the characters were taking a stroll around heaven, they were pointing out how people of all different religions and beliefs had got into heaven but the one that sticks out was when they saw a martyred suicide bomber who had received the award of 72 virgins for his sacrifice, the 72 "virgins" however were only a few months old and he was doomed to change their dirty nappies for all eternity

tolteq

I think you have to take a lot of muslim literature with a pinch of salt.

cojomo2

tolteq wrote: »

I think you have to take a lot of muslim literature with a pinch of salt.

same can be said about christian literature..or indeed any/most religious literature

Overblood

cojomo2 wrote: »

same can be said about christian literature..or indeed any/most religious literature

All religious literature.

So is nobody willing to divulge their beliefs of the muslim heaven? Is there any consensus?

Fernicia

I read somewhere (Not from this source but it'll give you a quick summary) that the whole 72 virgins is a mistranslation of instead the promise of 72 "white grapes".
http://jiblog.blogspot.com/2004/08/72-white-grapes.html

MrStuffins

Mickeroo wrote: »

I was reading a comic a while back,its a religious satire,most likely highly offensive to most religious people,mainly christians i would think, but there was one part where 2 of the characters were taking a stroll around heaven, they were pointing out how people of all different religions and beliefs had got into heaven but the one that sticks out was when they saw a martyred suicide bomber who had received the award of 72 virgins for his sacrifice, the 72 "virgins" however were only a few months old and he was doomed to change their dirty nappies for all eternity

I also saw one where the 72 virgins were 72 spotty fat teenage boys all sat at their computers playing World of Warcraft

Love it

hivizman

Fernicia wrote: »

I read somewhere (Not from this source but it'll give you a quick summary) that the whole 72 virgins is a mistranslation of instead the promise of 72 "white grapes".
http://jiblog.blogspot.com/2004/08/72-white-grapes.html

This argument is associated with a person writing under the name of "Christoph Luxenberg", whose book Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (2000 - English Translation The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran - A Contribution to the Decoding of the Koran: 2007 - extracts available on Google Books) argues that passages of the Qur'an were misinterpreted in the two centuries after the death of Muhammad. The reason for this, Luxenberg claims, stems from the way in which written Arabic was evolving during this period. The Arabic in which the earliest copies of the Qur'an were written did not include vowel marks and also some letter shapes stood for several different consonants. Over time, various "diacritical marks", such as combinations of dots, were added to consonants to distinguish different sounds. For example, the basic shape of the letters "ba", "ta" and "tha" is the same, but "ba" is written with a dot underneath, "ta" with two dots above and "tha" with three dots above.

Luxenberg's thesis is that, in the process of adding diacritical marks and vowel signs, errors crept in. His case is that the language in which the Qur'an was revealed was closer to Aramaic than to classical Arabic (which he considers to be largely a later development). Stripping away the later diacritical marks and interpreting the remaining consonants as Aramaic words rather than as Arabic words leads to different interpretations of particular passages.

One key verse is Sura al-Waqi'ah 56:22. Transliterating the Arabic text as "Wa hurun 'in", Muhammad Asad (in The Message of the Qur'an) points out that "hurun" is a plural form of a word which means "someone or something characterised by intense whiteness", and " 'in" is a plural form of " 'ayn", meaning "eye". "Hurun" can refer in particular to people with intensely white eyeballs and by contrast lustrous black irises (he refers to leading commentators on the Qur'an such as Al Tabari and Ibn Kathir in support of this interpretation). Hence he translates "hurun 'in" as "pure companions, most beautiful of eye".

Luxenberg, however, claims that the word transliterated as " 'in" was actually an Aramaic singular form implying something with a gleaming appearance. He notes that "hurun" can simply mean "white things", and interprets the "things" to be "grapes" from references to non-intoxicating drink and fruit elsewhere in the Sura. He observes that verse 23 of the Sura refers to "pearls hidden in their shells", and he therefore translates verse 22 as "And crystal-clear white grapes".

I would criticise Luxenberg on two levels. Just looking at the verse, he has made a big leap in interpreting "hurun" as referring to white grapes, since the word itself is basically adjectival in form and it's not explicit what "white" (or "pure") objects or people are being referred to. More fundamentally, I am not convinced by his core assumptions and methodology. The key thing is that the primary means of transmission of the Qur'an in the early years was not through written copies but rather through recitation - the Qur'an has always been communicated orally as much as if not more than through writing. Luxenberg's thesis requires not only errors in adding diacritical marks and vowel signs, but errors in oral transmission. If we accept the standard history of Islam, such errors on the scale required by Luxenberg are simply inconceivable.

As I noted in an earlier post in this thread, the authority for the "72" virgins (or grapes) isn't the Qur'an but rather a hadith considered by some scholars to be weak.