00:16You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back
00:22to those virgins, but in fact, here in the Northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of
00:29paradise.
00:30Defined 36 times as gardens watered by running streams. Since I live in a houseboat on the running stream of
00:38Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. But the thing is, how come it's news to most people?
00:46I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran but given up, disconcerted by its otherness. The
00:55historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran,
01:02as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble.
01:10Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read,
01:15a book.
01:17As that we can curl up with it on this rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach.
01:22As the God, and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad, we're just another author
01:28on the bestseller list.
01:32Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote,
01:39that is, to misquote phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the highlighter version,
01:47which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes.
01:53So, this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad,
01:59I realized I needed to read the Koran properly, as properly as I could, that is.
02:06My Arabic's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations
02:12and decided to read them side by side, verse by verse, along with a transliteration and the original 7th century
02:20Arabic.
02:23Now, I did have an advantage.
02:26My last book was about the story behind the Shia-Sunni split, and for that I'd worked closely with the
02:33earliest Islamic histories,
02:35so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference.
02:40I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran, an informed one, an experienced
02:48one even,
02:49but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading someone else's holy book.
02:57So, I read slowly.
03:04I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by hubris,
03:09because it...
03:13It turned out to be three months.
03:17I did resist the temptation to skip to the back, where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are,
03:23but every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran, that feeling of, I get
03:28it now,
03:29it'd slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land.
03:35And yet, the terrain was very familiar.
03:39The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels,
03:44so one-third of it reprises the stories of biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus.
03:53God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh,
03:59jealously insisting on no other gods.
04:02The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells, and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai
04:11Desert.
04:12And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it,
04:16reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory.
04:25And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran, only in Arabic.
04:34Take the Fatiha, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined.
04:43It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation.
04:49And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing.
04:55The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed.
05:05It wants to be chanted out loud to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue.
05:10So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arbery called his version, an
05:19interpretation.
05:21But all is not lost in translation.
05:25As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises.
05:29A degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible.
05:39And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine,
05:44the Koran includes women,
05:47talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women,
05:51honorable men and honorable women.
05:55Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers.
06:00Yes, it does say that.
06:02But in a very specific context,
06:04the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca,
06:09where fighting was usually forbidden.
06:11And the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers.
06:15Not you must kill unbelievers in Mecca,
06:18but you can, you are allowed to,
06:20but only after a grace period is over.
06:24And only if there's no other pact in place.
06:27And only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba.
06:31And only if they attack you first.
06:34And even then,
06:35God is merciful,
06:37forgiveness is supreme,
06:39and so, essentially,
06:42better if you don't.
06:47This was perhaps the biggest surprise.
06:49How flexible the Koran is,
06:52at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible.
06:56Some of these verses are definite in meaning, it says,
07:00and others are ambiguous.
07:03The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities,
07:07trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own.
07:11Only God knows the true meaning.
07:15The phrase,
07:16God is subtle,
07:17appears again and again.
07:19And indeed,
07:20the whole of the Koran is far more subtle
07:22than most of us have been led to believe,
07:24as in, for instance,
07:26that little matter of
07:27virgins and paradise.
07:31Old-fashioned Orientalism comes into play here.
07:34The word used four times is
07:37huris,
07:39rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts,
07:44or as fair, high-posomed virgins.
07:48Yet all there is in the original Arabic
07:50is that one word,
07:52huris,
07:53not a swelling breast or high-posom inside.
07:58Now,
07:59this may be a way of saying
08:01pure beings,
08:01like in angels,
08:03or it may be like the Greek
08:05khoris,
08:06or khori,
08:06an eternal youth.
08:08But the truth is,
08:09nobody really knows,
08:10and that's the point.
08:12Because the Koran is quite clear
08:14when it says that
08:16you will be a new creation in paradise,
08:19and that you will be
08:21recreated in a form unknown to you.
08:25It seems to me
08:26a far more appealing prospect
08:27than a virgin.
08:37And that number 72
08:39never appears.
08:40There are no 72 virgins in the Koran.
08:44That idea only came into being
08:46300 years later,
08:47and most Islamic scholars
08:49see it as the equivalent
08:50of people with wings
08:52sitting on clouds
08:53and strumming harps.
08:55Paradise
08:56is quite the opposite.
08:59It's not virginity,
09:01it's fecundity,
09:03it's plenty,
09:05it's gardens
09:07ordered by running streams.
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