On reading the Koran Lesley Hazleton
you
may have heard about the quran’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
quranic idea of paradise
defined 36 times as gardens
watered by running streams
since i live in 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 quran but given
up
disconcerted by its otherness
the historian thomas carlisle considered
muhammad one of the world’s greatest
heroes
yet even he called the quran as toilsome
reading as i ever undertook
a wearysome confused jumble
part of the problem i think is that we
imagine that the quran can be read as we
usually read
a book and so we can curl up with it on
this rainy afternoon with a bowl of
popcorn within reach
as the god and the quran is alien the
voice of god speaking to muhammad
we’re just another author on the
bestseller list
yet the fact that so few people do
actually read the quran
is precisely why it’s so easy to quote
that is to misquote
phrases and snippets taken out of
context in what i call the highlighter
version
which is the one favored by both muslim
fundamentalists
and anti-muslim islamophobes
so this past spring as i was gearing up
to begin writing a biography of muhammad
i realized i needed to read the quran
properly
as properly as i could that is my
arabics reduced by now to wielding a
dictionary
so i took four well-known translations
and decided to read them side by side
verse by verse along with a
transliteration
and the original seventh century arabic
now i did have an advantage
my last book was about the story behind
the shia sunni split
and for that i’d worked closely with the
earliest islamic histories so i knew the
events to which the quran constantly
refers
its frame of reference i knew enough
that is to know that i’d be
a tourist in the quran an informed one
an experienced one even but still an
outsider
an agnostic jew reading someone else’s
holy book
so i read slowly
i’d set aside three weeks for this
project and that
i think is what is meant by hubris
because it
it turned out to be three months
i did resist the temptation to skip to
the back where the shorter and more
clearly mystical chapters are
but every time i thought i was beginning
to get a handle on the quran
that feeling of i get it now it is slip
away overnight
and i’d come back in the morning
wondering if i wasn’t lost in a strange
land
and yet the terrain was very familiar
the quran declares that it comes to
renew the message of the torah and the
gospels
so one third of it reprises the stories
of biblical figures like
abraham moses joseph mary
jesus god himself was utterly
familiar from his earlier manifestation
as yahweh jealously insisting on
no other gods the presence of
camels mountains desert wells and
springs
took me back to the air i spent
wandering the sinai desert
and then there was the language the
rhythmic cadence of it
reminding me of evenings spent listening
to bedouin elders recite
hours long narrative poems entirely
from memory and i began to grasp why
it said that the quran is really the
quran
only in arabic take the fatiha
the seven verse opening chapter that is
the lord’s prayer in the shmai’s hail of
islam combined it’s just 29 words in
arabic
but anywhere from 65 to 72 in
translation
and yet the more you add the more seems
to go missing
the arabic has an incantatory almost
hypnotic quality
that begs to be heard rather than red
felt more than analyzed it wants to be
chanted out loud to sound its music in
the ear and on the tongue
so the quran in english is a kind of
shadow of itself
or as arthur aubry called his version an
interpretation but all is not lost in
translation
as the quran promises patience is
rewarded and there are many surprises
a degree of environmental awareness for
instance
and of humans as mere stewards of god’s
creation
unmatched in the bible and where the
bible is addressed exclusively to men
using the second and third person
masculine the quran
includes women talking for instance of
believing men
and believing women honorable men and
honorable women or take the infamous
verse about
killing the unbelievers yes it does say
that
but in a very specific context the
anticipated conquest
of the sanctuary city of mecca where
fighting was usually forbidden
and the permission comes hedged about
with qualifiers
not you must kill unbelievers in mecca
but you can
you are allowed to but only after a
grace period is over
and only if there’s no other pact in
place and only if they try to stop you
getting to the kaaba
and only if they attack you first and
even then
god is merciful forgiveness is supreme
and so essentially better if you don’t
was perhaps the biggest surprise how
flexible the quran
is at least in mind that are not
fundamentally
inflexible some of these verses
are definite in meaning it says and
others are ambiguous
the perverse at heart will seek out the
ambiguities
trying to create the score by pinning
down meanings of their own
only god knows the true meaning
the phrase god is subtle appears again
and again
and indeed the whole of the quran is far
more subtle than most of us
have been led to believe as in for
instance that little matter of
versions and paradise
old-fashioned orientalism comes into
play here
the word used four times is hurris
rendered as dark-eyed maidens with
swelling breasts
or as a fair high present virgins
yet all there is in the original arabic
is that one word
who is not a swelling breast or high
prism inside
now this may be a way of saying pure
beings like in angels
or it may be like the greek cross or koi
and eternal use but the truth is nobody
really knows
and that’s the point because the quran
is quite clear when it says that you
will be
a new creation in paradise and that you
will be
recreated in a form unknown to you which
seems to me a far more appealing
prospect than
a virgin
and that number 72 never appears
there are no 72 virgins in the quran
that idea only came into being 300 years
later
and most islamic scholars see it as the
equivalent of
people with wings sitting on clouds and
strumming hearts
paradise is quite the opposite
it’s not virginity it’s fecundity
it’s plenty it’s
gardens water by running streams
thank you
you