When it comes to read Quran...
All rights reserved by TED. 0:11 You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. But in fact, here in the northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "gardens watered by running streams." Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its "otherness." The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran "as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble." 1:04 (Laughter) 1:06 Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran ca...