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.