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.