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.

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.