103 Mohammed and women

In ‘Religion: a discovery in comics’ Dutch graphic artist and theologian Margreet de Heer compares the ‘men’ behind the five biggest world religions for their women friendly reputation. Is it really a surprise Mohammed wins hands down? And him being a ‘child molester’ according to Geert Wilders. Reading about his life and accounts in the Hadith he loved the company of women. His first wife Khadija was not only considerably older than he, she was also his employer and socially and financially superior to him. He could have resented this. Instead he let himself be tutored. They seem to have had a happy marriage. They had six children. Three girls survived to adulthood. Fatima became the best known. When Mohammed started to get revelations, he was afraid and unsure. He didn’t turn to other men for advice but to his wife. She was very supportive and so became the first Muslim. After Khadija’s death and Mohammed’s subsequent move from Mecca to Medina at the request of his mother’s people his life changed completely. There were only a few people who followed him to Medina. Among them were Abu Bakr and his small daughter Aisha. Aisha was the first child born in a Muslim household. It was fitting that she became his new wife and yes: she was only 9 when they married. In Medina he became a statesman and a warrior. His other marriages reflect that. There are many stories in the Hadith about Mohammed and his wives and the women among his companions. They are often rather funny. At least that’s my opinion. Some Muslims might find it blasphemy. In their eyes he is ‘perfect’, but I see him as a man who sometimes is bumbling and tries to get out without scratch. Mohammed also liked to have sex and cared that his women were equally happy and satisfied. And yes, he had also concubines. Mohammed was strictly Hetero and that wasn’t very common at the time. His position on women must have been so strong that it has survived all misogynist interpretations by the men who collected testimonials for the Hadith.

102 The messenger and the message

According to the Hadith his wife Aicha testified that Mohammed ‘lived’ the Koran. That made him at the same time a man, a lover and a Prophet. But in his youth in Mecca he was an orphan who became by marriage the foreman of a caravan and after his move to Medina he became a statesman and a warrior out of necessity. These eight ‘roles’ are very important to keep constantly in mind when reading the Koran. He clearly was a man who knew what was going down in the world from hands on experience. One could speculate about why this man at that time and place was the chosen human to channel the Divine message. But reading his life and how he dealt with the challenges the revelations presented it fits. Of course it could have been made to fit by either God or if you are cynical, by subsequent writers, but one way or the other this man acquitted himself of his difficult task. The question is: is it God who forms the words of the revelations or Mohammed? It must be God because Mohammed’s human (fallible, time shackled) brain would not be able to process what is Divine. At the same time the message must have been made superficially understandable for Arabs living in the 7th century and given an eternal quality as it would be the last Divine communication. That should make the message multi layered and extensive. It had to address urgently the wrongs of the moment but it had also to have a lasting validity, guiding humanity on its merry and erratic way through time and forever changing circumstances. This way one had to expect that not everything could be understood equally always and not everybody could be happy with its meaning at all times. A meaning could become clear over time when circumstances demanded it. Anyway to me it seems like a giant jigsaw puzzle: extremely complicated but meant to be solvable… somehow… eventually, Inshallah…

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.