The rattle of desert sands

Religion

Never did I feel an urge to read the Quran until three things happened one after the other a few weeks back. One: a Muslim friend, whom I came to know years ago through blogging, said he had never read the Quran because he found it “boring.” I was amused, but not surprised because this friend’s wife was a Hindu and so his religious sentiments were, in all reasonable probability, not quite strident, let alone militant.

The second thing that happened within hours of the above Muslim friend’s confession was another friend’s – a Christian, this time – claim that he had read the whole of Quran and that he found hatred spilling out of “every page” of it. “Every page?” I was incredulous. “Well, almost,” he edited his statement rather reluctantly.

And a day after the above two came the third and the most amusing incident. A female Muslim blogger-acquaintance sent me a friend request on Facebook which I accepted without my usual hesitation merely because I knew her as a fellow-blogger. Then she didn’t like something I wrote about Islam somewhere in the vast world of FB. I responded to her comment by articulating my feeling that her religious sentiments appeared as brittle as those of most of her co-religionists. She let loose her fury before unfriending me as quickly as she had befriended me.

The first thing I did after all these was to google for “the best translation of the Quran.” Thus Amazon delivered to me in a couple of days the Oxford Classics edition of the holy book.

The 30-odd pages of Introduction by the scholarly translator prepared me for the shocks that awaited me in the suras (chapters) and ayas (verses) that followed. I was prepared to be wary of the Quran’s way of alluding to events without giving their historical background. Even God’s revelations are not eternal, I understood. They too belong to a particular historical time and geographical space. A lot of things that the Prophet heard from his God back then would be entirely different had he lived today. This implies that following the Quran literally today is absolutely absurd. We don’t live in the belligerent tribal cultures of the early medieval Arab world anymore.

The Introduction also taught me, among a lot many other things, that the holy book has a “highly concise style” which makes the meaning of the verses rather abstruse and hence amenable to numerous interpretations. The Prophet was a poet and the Quran is highly poetic. Poetic lines can be interpreted in infinite ways. Each reader can discover a meaning to suit their unique needs.

I had always thought that reading a holy book didn’t require so many introductory cautions. That a holy book was meant to inspire noble thoughts and feelings in us. That it was a moral and spiritual guiding star. A light that shines gently in the engulfing darkness of human affairs.

But the Introduction to the Oxford classical translation of the Quran by M A S Abdel Haleem taught me otherwise. I knew I was going to skate on thin ice the moment I turned the last page of the Introduction to the first sura: “In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy!” That line opens every sura only to move on to rather merciless, if not utterly terrifying, ayas. My second friend above was not wrong entirely, I began to think as I moved from sura to sura, aya to aya.

My first friend above is not right. The Quran is not at all boring. It is exciting. It excites an entire gamut of human passions many of which aren’t all that edifying. Any simple self-help book will do a lot better, I thought as I moved on. I understood why my third friend above behaved the way she did. No, not boring at all. Quite the contrary.

I have only read about a quarter of the book. That too, in a week’s time. I’m treading slowly and cautiously. It’s a bit too much for me to absorb. My bones can’t withstand all the rattle from an Eliotean land of roots that clutch at slippery desert sands. So I took a break and wrote this. My oasis among the rattling sand grains.

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