101 Getting acquainted with Mohammed the Messenger of God

There are quite a number of books in English that have the life of the Prophet Mohammed as subject. Both Karen Armstrong and Tariq Ramadan have written acclaimed biographies. There is also a book called The People versus Mohammed by J.K. Sheindlin that sets out to prove that the Messenger of God was a dangerous mental case with a germ phobia. I didn’t think that book would be of much help. In the end I choose Muhammed his life from earliest sources by Martin Lings (1909-2005) a British convert to Sufism, Arabist and Keeper of. Oriental Books and Manuscripts at the British Library: another one of those weird and wonderful enthusiasts who colour the western Islamic firmament. Lings’ biography of Mohammed reads as a story from the Thousand and One Nights. But most importantly it gives a comprehensive picture of not only the life and times of the man but also the customs and circumstances of mid first millennium Arabia. The Surah in the Koran may not be chronologically presented. The biography of the Prophet adds enormously to understanding the content. Quite a bit is known about his life from testimonials of his wives, his close companions and other believers. All the stories, sayings and experiences were collected after his death in three books of what is called the Hadith. Still there is some debate if Mohammed was a historical person or not. There seem to be no contemporary accounts of him except those by the believers. Some suggest that he is a made up character to give Divine credence to stories from Mecca and Medina made up by people with the sole purpose to bring the frisky Arabian tribes together under one banner and challenge the Byzantine power. I heard an online talk in which Wilders’ advisor on Islam Hans Jansen made a suggestion to that extent. It sounds a bit as explanations after the fact.

100 What’s going on?

After my breakfast reading of the Koran was completed I was reeling. Although one professes to be open to the unexpected and wants to be surprised one really wants to be confirmed what one always thought one knew. What I had learned from reading the Koran was something I did not expect at all. Okay, I was never negative towards Islam and I didn’t share Geert Wilders’ prediction of ‘our culture’ loosing out against a normative, violent and invasive religion. Had I read a different Koran from the one he (or rather his Koran advisor Hans Jansen) portrayed in his short film ‘Fitna’? Or had poor N.J. Dawood the Jewish Arabist from Bagdad been so enamoured with ‘his’ Koran that his willingness ‘to increase the understanding and pleasure for the uninitiated’ had won it over a straightforward translation? Had I been blinded by my ‘Lesbian Feminist’ viewpoint, my historical interpretation and my intra-textual endeavours? I had expected writings that would confirm what I had seen everywhere in the Islamic world. I had taken for granted that the Koran would be a Divine acknowledgement of male superiority over women and allocate a subservient role to women in all things starting with religion. After careful reconsideration I came to the conclusion that I had been too fanciful in reading the text. I should have done less ‘reading’ between the lines and setting it in a historical context. Some subconscious sympathy for the vilified religion had coloured my judgement, I was sure. I resorted to Wikipedia again and found that there were extensive writings about the man through whom the Koran had been channelled: the Prophet Mohammed. I set myself to find out more about the man Geert Wilders characterizes as a child-molester and a pig.

99 The emancipation of women

The biggest surprise I got from my reading of the Koran at the breakfast table was how emancipatory and revolutionary the text is. Early in my reading I discovered that I could not read the text as a monolithic timeless structure. I constantly had 7th century Middle Eastern society in my head with Christian Byzantium as main trendsetter together with Coptic Egypt coloured by Hellenism and African Christian Ethiopia who were surrounding hungrily frisky heathen Arab tribes. I saw the riches of Syria and the decadence of Byzantine overlords. Reading the Koran text I also got a vivid picture of how the 7th century Arab tribes treated their women worse than their beloved camels. How they buried infant girls alive if there wasn’t enough food to go around or if they deemed there were too many of them. How orphans were robbed of their dead father’s property. How males preferred each other to females whom they abused and neglected. How group rape of innocent travellers was their idea of hospitality. How mercy, compassion and solidarity with the unfortunates wasn’t on the agenda. How greed, violence and exploitation reigned. Through The Act Of Recitation, Allah urged any man who would listen to change their ways and become decent, God fearing and considerate. Men were in particular urged to do good by women, girls and orphans. Allah let it be known through his Messenger Mohammed that women were equal to men in everything except in child making and rearing. In the historical setting of 7th century Arabia this was so revolutionary it was neigh impossible to demand. The obvious strategy for immediate change was taking one privilege or custom from men and granting them another lesser damaging thing. That’s why the Koran is directed equally to men and women in all things spiritual, ‘intellectual’ and communal while talking to men solely when it is about daily life, the treatment of others and acceptable behaviour. Or so I understood as a female and Lesbian reader.

98 A book of admonitions

Dawood’s translation of the Koran is 430 pages of densely written text. That promises a lot of content. But a hefty portion of the text is repetitive admonitions; something that had put me off the very first time I opened its pages 45 years before. Passages abound like this one: ‘Allah knows those who are truthful and those who are lying. Or do the evil-doers think that they will escape Our punishment? How ill they judge!’ Still all the warnings didn’t make for an aggressive tone, because in the same breath the do-gooders are assured of the rewards that await them. One could say that Allah was a ‘Mad man’ avant la lettre. He used near endless repetition to sell his product. The admonitions are the commercials in a TV program: ten minutes of every hour broadcasting. In seventh century Arabia it helped the Koran ‘reciters’ to let the audience reflect on what they heard ‘between commercials’ and in the meantime be subconsciously influenced by the repetitive ad-monitions. One could call it also ‘the chorus’. The whole Koran is one long warning: don’t do this, but do that. And what was one supposed to do to please Allah? The Koran was the last rescue operation of Allah for hopelessly erring humankind. Through the Koran the God of Abraham gives us earthlings a definitive guidance and directive. In the seventh century peoples ‘of the Book’ and Arab tribes had replaced the worship of the one God in favour of a pantheon of tribal gods, saints and holy rabbis. The main aim of the Koran was to get people to do away with idolatry and bow once again for the God of Abraham. That was the first easily understood meaning I got from my daily reading.

97 On reading the Koran

Of course when I started reading the Koran to get at its meaning I hadn’t realized what I let myself in for. There is a giant body of work written over the ages and is still being written trying to understand the meaning of the revelations. Who was I to ‘do’ it over breakfast 10 pages a day and ‘get’ it? Maybe it was a good thing that I was a total innocent. I set out with the brightly positive attitude that I would take God and his Messenger for granted. However I had forgotten to set aside my other biases. I tend to look at everything from a woman’s and a Lesbian’s point of view and I was aware that I could run into all kinds of terrible things written about women and LGTBs. In my own experience Islamic society was very male oriented and patriarchal. I braced myself for the onslaught. The only way to read a book like the Koran without prior knowledge or feedback and as only guidance the footnotes in the translation is to listen to the tone. What does the tone say? Is it aggressive or forgiving? According to the accusations of Wilders Islam is an extremely violent and unforgiving religion. He likes to refer to reports about stonings and beheadings of women accused of adultery and self-proclaimed atheists coming from Sharia ruled countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan and warns that it’s coming ‘our’ way. I open the Koran and see that every Surah opens with the proclamation: ‘In the name of Allah the Compassioned and Merciful’. How so?

96 Dawood and his translation of the Koran

Dawood the translator of the Penguin edition claims that ‘The Koran is not only one of the greatest books of prophetic literature but also a literary masterpiece of surpassing excellence’. Not bad for a text that according Wilders is akin Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The writer for the publisher writes on the back flap that ‘Mr Dawood has produced a translation which retains the beauty of the original.’ and adds the mysterious remark about Dawood’s effort ‘altering the traditional arrangement to increase the understanding and pleasure for the uninitiated’. In his introduction Dawood explains: the original ‘recitings’ were at one time or another written down by listeners in Kufic script on paper, pot shards, stones and even palm leaves. Only later the whole lot was collected but without a chronological sequence. Dawood also warns that some passages are either ‘obscure’ or multi interpretable and he had not tried to explain them. So far so good. In my edition it says nothing about the translator himself. I resorted yet again to Wikipedia. N.J. Dawood (1927-2014) was a Jewish Arabist from Bagdad who came to England in 1945. After the success of his translation of ‘Tales from the Thousand and One Nights’ as Penguin nr 1001 he was invited to do the Koran. It became his life’s work. Although the first edition was published in 1956 he kept revising it for the rest of his life, incorporating new philological findings and notions. For instance when the gender specific ‘man’ was generally changed in ‘mankind’ he took that on board too. My edition is the second revised edition of 1966. His last revised edition was from 6 months before his death in 2014.

95 Starting the “Koran’ project

Geert Wilders made me take the Koran from the bookshelf. The book was one of those nice compact Penguin Classics with a black ridge. It’s top was covered in a thick layer of dust and it smelled a bit musty. I was daunted. So I took to Wikipedia first and looked up Islam. I learned that the word Islam meant ‘subjection’. Koran is 'the act of recitation'. The credo of the Muslims was: ‘there is but one God and Mohammed is his Messenger.’ Over a period of 23 years God gave Mohammed a great many revelations. Mohammed had to ‘recite’ them and others had to recite them after him. It came down to 114 Surahs or chapters and every Surah was divided in a random number of 'Aya' or verses. Even before I opened the Penguin I felt a revulsion coming up I often get with sacred texts. They are all so…. Male! I wanted to put the paperback back and forget about finding out if Wilders was right. In the end I came to the conclusion that I wanted to go on. But before I could I had to change my attitude. I had to accept the credo for what it was and take it seriously whether I believed it or not. From then on there would be only one God and his messenger would be Mohammed. I was going to read through the entire Koran translation taking in 10 pages every day at breakfast starting with the introduction by the translator N.J. Dawood. For better or for worse I would open my brain to the meaning of the revelations and trust the translator for not having made a cock-up.

94 The Geert Wilders Effect

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who heads a influential ‘single issue’ party in the Dutch parliament. His ‘single issue’ is ridding Europe and in particular The Netherlands of everything Islamic. As even he recognizes that it is democratically impossible, he attacks the religion relentlessly within the boundaries of the law and freedom of expression, but not within the boundaries of human decency. Among his proposals: to scrap article one of the Dutch constitution the non-discrimination principle, closing the borders for non-western immigrants and putting a moratorium on the opening of Islamic schools and mosques both for at least 5 years, a ban on foreign Imams and preaching in other languages but Dutch, that Muslims if they want to stay in The Netherlands are only allowed to read a censured version of the Koran and a tax of Euro 1000,- on the wearing of the Hidjab. He also likened the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, called the Prophet Mohammed a child molester and a pig, opinionated that ‘we’ are suffering from an invasion of ‘Islam’ which aim it is to transform The Netherlands into ‘Nederarabia’ a province of an Islamic super state Eurabia (this last remark is quite funny really). There are a lot of people who vote for him (his party is the second largest in parliament) because ‘he dares to say it instead of covering the ‘truth’ with soothing words and denials’. A majority of Dutch people believe in one way or the other that Islam forms a real thread against ‘our culture’. They believe that Islam is intrinsically violent and threatens our ‘freedom’ and our ‘democratic rights’. Is that really true? Does Islam stands for forced conversions, dictatorship, violence against women and the killing of anybody who isn’t a ‘true’ believer? I’d better find out and I finally took Dawood’s translation of the Koran from the shelf.

93 Dawood’s Penguin Koran

Through Pop Art I became interested in Islamic art. And I wasn’t the only one. In the sixties and seventies carloads of Islam related trinkets, posters and handicrafts of all kinds were brought back home by backpackers and other tourists. The bright colours of the prints and the decorative patterns of the Arabic script were viewed as prime examples of popular art. It was never meant to be ‘artistic’ but it had still a natural artistry. By now probably most of these ‘trophies’ have been thrown out with the trash or have disintegrated over time. As a souvenir from the era I still cherish a screen print ‘scored’ in Afghanistan of a drawing of a brightly coloured rose bush with the 99 names of Allah, carefully framed and hung next to a historic poster of the first Andy Warhol exhibition in Great Britain. But I didn’t leave it at that. In 1967 on my way to or from India I bought in Teheran or Kabul (I can’t remember) a Penguin paperback edition of the Koran translated by N.J.Dawood and published in 1956. At the time I did my utmost to read it but it was so full of admonitions that I quickly got put off. And anyway I was told that the ‘Qu’ran’ has to be read in Arabic. Otherwise you couldn’t get to the divine meaning of the text. As they told me: ‘There are many Bibles but there is only one Qu’ran.’ Meaning the Bible you can read in whatever translation, but the Koran you cannot. Was I really interested in reading a divine text be it Islamic or other? I don’t think so. It was the cultural effects the text had had on the believers I was interested in. Of that I got plenty of experience. In the end it took Geert Wilders for me to take Dawood’s Penguin translation from the bookshelf again.

92 God, the Divine, my Mother and I

The concept of God and/or the awareness of the Divine was not given to me with my Mother’s milk. And I still don’t get it. My Mother raised me on a recipe of Social Justice and the intrinsic goodness of Human Beings. If people did bad things they were ‘misguided’. Another principle was that you had to do it now because there would be no ‘later’ and what you left by your deeds was your legacy to the future. Carrying on like that she could have started a religion, but she didn’t. Religion to her was an educational tool ‘we’ didn’t need. Her amazing example was the why and how of prayer before dinner. Prayer before and after meals was prevalent in religious households when I grew up. ‘Why?’ I asked my Mother when I came home from a friend’s house where I had witnessed this phenomenon. ‘Because it is good for the metabolism to sit down properly before you eat and take a few moments for your system to prepare for the onslaught of food.’ Knowing this, there was no prayer needed to whet the metabolism. I’m not an atheist, nor am I an unbeliever. Nobody has to ‘prove’ for me that God does not exist nor do they have to convince me of the opposite. God is something for others and I recognize the value it has for others. With the ‘Divine’ it is the same and spirituality is also wasted on me. But I won’t trash it either. Religion is a complex human effort that has defined our existence, moral judgement and place in the scheme of things since times immemorial. It fascinates me no end.

91 Generalisations about Pop Art and Islamic Art

My first trips east left undoubtedly the most enduring impressions. I studied art in a time that ‘rationalisation’ was the most prominent feature in Western art. It permeated all levels of the prevalent culture. Being in art school I had the feeling that things were happening on a cultural level that were me. I was connected. Pop replaced figurative art. Numerical systems akin to cybernetics were dominating abstract art. In fashion simple lines and pret-a-porter transformed ‘Haute Couture’. In literature the French Nouvelle Vague concentrated on the cool description instead of emotion. Even in cinema the laws of storytelling were challenged by notions of ‘real life’. Pop culture seemed to do away with the ‘originality’ of individual expression. We were seeking the ‘common denominator’ and we were aiming for the ‘highest’ common denominator. By being ‘ordinary’ we hoped to become less ‘ego centric’ human beings. A lot of these ‘modern’ notions I found to my amazement back in Islamic Art. For me simply stated: ‘Islam’ was the popular culture of the Islamic world and the Koran was the ‘common denominator’. Calligraphy, numerology and mathematics that combine both in a ‘rational’ way were the artist’s tools of expression. This ‘rationalisation’ was used to conceptualize spirituality. For me the results were very much the same level as what I saw in the contemporary art of where I came from. The beauty of the mathematical patterns of shapes in all forms of calligraphy, architecture and crafts and its availability to all was totally ‘Pop’ to me. It opened up an interest in Islam.

90 Generalisations about the Islamic world and me

When in 1966 I made my first trip east hitchhiking, I was struck by the division in the Muslim world between the realm of men and of women. As a foreign traveller I would only meet men. Men peopled the street and kept shop, men talked to strangers and offered rides. It was a men’s world. It was not much different from what I was used to in my own country. Except that in my own country I as a woman was supposed to participate publicly in this state of affairs. In the Muslim world women didn’t have to participate or were not supposed to. I walked around in public spaces as a curiosity, a brazen anomaly: young, blond and foreign. Finally it was obvious to the whole world who I was: not fitting in. I felt comfortable with it. And just like at home it seemed difficult to reach out to women. However when I met women it was on their own terms and always without the meddlesome intervention of men. What a relief! At the time Muslim men seemed lost. They roamed the streets and they roamed in their heads. They didn’t seem to know who they were and what they were supposed to do to be themselves. On the international platform there was a Cold War going on with both the US and the USSR trying to convince the Muslim men their side was the one to follow to get the best, most and happiest. Popular culture was flown in from America and Europe and made them question their own culture. Pan-Arabism was urging them to become ‘modern’ or miss out. The Muslim men were cranky and unsure and were feeling more and more insecure. On the other hand this cultural, political and moral upheaval all passed by the majority of women. As they didn’t have to participate they could stay themselves and stayed comfortable in their own culture. In the West they tended to call Muslim women ‘backward’ but I loved their self-confidence and conviction. Something I lacked myself as a thoroughly modern girl.

89 Am I an ‘Orientalist’?

People often ask me if it is through Bert Hogervorst and her Flying Hippo travel organisation that I travelled sketching through the Middle East and Morocco. They are surprised when they hear that from the age of 19 I’ve travelled and even lived and worked in the nearby Islamic world. Ever since as a child I was read from the Thousands and One Nights (with illustrations of Rie Kramer), I’ve had a fascination for the ‘East’. One could call me an ‘Orientalist’. However Orientalism and the Orientalist does have a patronizing and disparaging connotation. Nineteenth century British and French male travellers come to mind. They were lured on by perverse fantasies of alluring, sex-crazed women locked up in Harems. They would use the excuse of ‘study’ to scan the place for colonial purposes and they would undertake expeditions solely to establish ‘scientifically’ their own and their religion’s superiority over the indigenous Islamic and Jewish population. I don’t know if I fall under that definition of an ‘Orientalist’. I’m an elderly woman from a European country and a Lesbian to boot and I don’t have the tendency to ‘go native’. Maybe that could make me a sexist with neo-colonial tendencies and feelings of moral superiority. The only thing that I know for sure about myself is that I’ve always felt myself at home and safe in most of the Islamic countries I visited. Paradoxically I was also spurred on by an exiting sense of the dangerous unknown like so many travellers before me.