I'm confused. Doesn't the mere fact he has 72 virgins make the Islamist just as decadent as the Westerners he just bombed?

[shish_kebab]

I mean I can see a guy having eight or nine girlfriends, but doesn't 72 seem a bit over the top? What would you do with 72 virgins? That's a whole lot of maintenance right there. The birthdays alone...

Seems like one giant headache to me.

[lightbulb27]

You'd end up in a lot of PMS headaches and have a lot of stockings hung all over the house.

It's "pleasure of 72". He's promising "a sense of pleasure", bliss, it's an analogy which to some extent would be accurate. I doubt women get it, he was definitely a human... selfish!

There's something about that number 7 in those old cultures, wonder what that is. Forgive not 7 times but 77.

the two tens holder, don't know. Arabs came up with the number system and read all the hadiths, they should know. Mohammed heard a voice... but why?

[shish_kebab]

How many would you want?

[Zack-Bann]

Not just virgins, but eternal virgins.
Meaning once you’ve done having sex with one, she regains her virginity again while waiting for your next visit.
In Arabic they are known as “sirens” instead of “virgins”

[shish_kebab]

So it's kind of like a pez dispenser?

[capriVib]

First time im even hearing about this 72 virgins thing, whoever made that up is on something. why 72 virgins anyway, what if i actually want an experienced woman lol

[shish_kebab]

I've known about the 72 number for years, I just never understood why. I'm going to copy and paste what AI says but it went way over my head. Maybe you can understand it.

[shish_kebab]

The figure of "72 virgins" does not actually appear anywhere in the Quran. Instead, the text mentions heavenly companions—known as hur or houris—described as pure, beautiful, and of modest gaze, without assigning any specific count to them.

The specific number 72 comes from secondary oral traditions (hadiths), most notably a narration recorded in the collection of Sunan al-Tirmidhi (Hadith 1663). In that narration, it is listed as one of several honors given to a martyr (shahid), stating he will be wed to 72 wives from the maidens of paradise.

Why 72 specifically?

Idiomatic usage: In classical Arabic and Semitic languages, numbers like 7, 70, and 72 were frequently used idiomatically to denote an abundance, multiplicity, or a generous, boundless quantity rather than an exact mathematical tally.

Textual disputes: Many Islamic theologians and hadith critics treat the specific chains attributing the exact number 72 with skepticism, classifying them as weak (da'if) or secondary, while main canonical collections (like Bukhari and Muslim) generally speak only of companions without that specific number. In modern popular culture, the phrase became widely magnified through media and political rhetoric far beyond its status in mainstream Islamic theology.