An Iranian-American feminist has "reinterpreted" the Koran's prescriptions for male behavior towards women. Not knowing Arabic, let alone its classical idiom, I naturally defer to speakers on this question. However, common sense does obtrude when one is confronted with this semantic disparity:

The passage is generally translated: "And as for those women whose illwill you have reason to fear, admonish them; then leave them alone in bed; then beat them; and if thereupon they pay you heed, do not seek to harm them. Behold, God is indeed most high, great!"

Instead, Bakhtiar suggests "Husbands at that point should submit to God, let God handle it -- go away from them and let God work His Will instead of a human being inflicting pain and suffering on another human being in the Name of God."

Stalin once said the method of extracting confessions was "Beat, beat and once again, beat." Now if I were to say that in the original Russian, this translates back to, "Hey, don't sweat it. Just give him time, he'll come around," what would you say? (And Russian is a language with literally two words for truth: pravda, the big, metaphysical Truth, and istina, empirically verifiable fact.)