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.

89 Am I an ‘Orientalist’?

People often ask me if it is through Bert Hogervorst and her Flying Hippo travel organisation that I travelled sketching through the Middle East and Morocco. They are surprised when they hear that from the age of 19 I’ve travelled and even lived and worked in the nearby Islamic world. Ever since as a child I was read from the Thousands and One Nights (with illustrations of Rie Kramer), I’ve had a fascination for the ‘East’. One could call me an ‘Orientalist’. However Orientalism and the Orientalist does have a patronizing and disparaging connotation. Nineteenth century British and French male travellers come to mind. They were lured on by perverse fantasies of alluring, sex-crazed women locked up in Harems. They would use the excuse of ‘study’ to scan the place for colonial purposes and they would undertake expeditions solely to establish ‘scientifically’ their own and their religion’s superiority over the indigenous Islamic and Jewish population. I don’t know if I fall under that definition of an ‘Orientalist’. I’m an elderly woman from a European country and a Lesbian to boot and I don’t have the tendency to ‘go native’. Maybe that could make me a sexist with neo-colonial tendencies and feelings of moral superiority. The only thing that I know for sure about myself is that I’ve always felt myself at home and safe in most of the Islamic countries I visited. Paradoxically I was also spurred on by an exiting sense of the dangerous unknown like so many travellers before me.