On reading the Koran - Lesley Hazleton

You may have heard about the Quran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. But in fact, here in the Northwest, we're living very close to the real Quranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as gardens watered by running streams. Since I live in a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me.

But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Quran but given up, disconcerted by its otherness. The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Quran "the toilsome reading" as "I ever undertook, a wearisome confused jumble." Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine the Quran can be read as we usually read a book. And so we can curl up with it on this rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach.

As the God and the Quran is alien, the voice of God speaking to Muhammad, we're just another author on the bestseller list. Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Quran is precisely why it's so easy to quote; that is, to misquote phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "highlighter version," which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes.

So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Quran properly — as properly as I could, that is. My Arabic's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary. So I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side by side, verse by verse, along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic.

Now, I did have an advantage: my last book was about the story behind the Shia-Sunni split, and for that, I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories. So I knew the events to which the Quran constantly refers — its frame of reference. I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Quran: an informed one, an experienced one even, but still an outsider — an agnostic Jew reading someone else's holy book.

So I read slowly. I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by hubris, because it turned out to be three months. I did resist the temptation to skip to the back, where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Quran — that feeling of "I get it now," it would slip away overnight. I'd come back in the morning wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land. And yet the terrain was very familiar.

The Quran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. So one third of it reprises the stories of biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus — God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh, jealously insisting on no other gods. The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells, and springs took me back to the air I spent wandering the Sinai desert.

And then there was the language — the rhythmic cadence of it — reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. I began to grasp why it said that the Quran is really the Quran only in Arabic. Take the Fatiha, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer in the Shmai's hail of Islam. Combined, it's just 29 words in Arabic but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation.

And yet, the more you add, the more seems to go missing. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. So the Quran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Aubry called his version, an interpretation.

But all is not lost in translation, as the Quran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises. A degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine, the Quran includes women — talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women.

Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers: yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context — the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca, where fighting was usually forbidden. And the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers: not, "You must kill unbelievers in Mecca," but "You can, you are allowed to." But only after a grace period is over and only if there's no other pact in place, and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. Even then, God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme, and so essentially, better if you don't.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was how flexible the Quran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. Some of these verses are definite in meaning; it says, and others are ambiguous. The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create the score by pinning down meanings of their own. Only God knows the true meaning. The phrase "God is subtle" appears again and again, and indeed the whole of the Quran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe.

As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. Old-fashioned Orientalism comes into play here. The word used four times is "hurris," rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts or as fair high-present virgins. Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word "huri," which is not a swelling breast or high prism inside.

Now, this may be a way of saying pure beings, like in angels, or it may be like the Greek "koi" and eternal youth. But the truth is nobody really knows, and that's the point, because the Quran is quite clear when it says that you will be a new creation in paradise and that you will be recreated in a form unknown to you, which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. And that number 72 never appears; there are no 72 virgins in the Quran. That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps.

Paradise is quite the opposite; it's not virginity, it's fecundity, it's plenty, it's gardens watered by running streams. Thank you.