may have heard about the koran 's idea of paradise being seventy two 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
defined thirty six times as gardens watered by running streams since i live on a houseboat on the runningstream 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
part of the problem i think is that we imagine that the koran can be read as we usually read a book as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach
as though god and the koran is entirely in the voice of god speaking to muhammad were just another author on the best
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
so this past spring as i was gearing up to begin writing a biography of muhammad i realized i needed to read the koran properly as properly as i could
my arabic 's 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 koran constantly refers its frame of reference i knew enough that is to know that i'd be a tourist in the
koran an informed one an experienced one even but still an outsider an agnostic jew reading
so i read slowly
set aside three weeks for this project and that i think is what is meant by hubris because
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
but every time i thought i was beginning to get a handle on the koran that feeling of i get it now it would slip away overnight and
in the morning wondering if i wasn't lost in a strange land and yet the terrain was very familiar
the koran 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 familar 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 year 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's said that the koran is really the koran only in arabic
take the faatihah the seven verse opening chapter that is the lord 's prayer and the shema israel of islam combined
it's just twenty nine words in arabic but anywhere from sixty five to seventy two 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
it wants to be chanted out loud to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue so the koran in english is a kind of shadow of itself
called his version an interpretation but all is not lost in translation
as the koran 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 koran 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
you first and even then god is mercifulforgiveness is supreme and so essentially
better if you
some of these verses are definite in meaning it says and others are ambiguous the perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities
the phrase god is subtle appears again and again and indeed the whole
most of us have been led to believe as in for instance that little matter of virgins and
old fashioned orientalism comes into play here the word used four times is
as dark eyed maidens with swelling breasts or as fair high bosomed virgins
yet all there is in the original arabic is that one word houris not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in
now this may be a way of saying pure beings like in angels or it may be like the greek kouros or kara an eternal youth but the truth is
and that's the point because the koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be a new creation
and that you will be recreated in a form unknown to you which seems to me a far more appealing prospect
number seventy two never
seventy two virgins in the koran that idea only came into being three hundred years later and most islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on
harps paradise is quite the opposite it's not
it's plenty it's gardens watered by
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