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.

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.

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.