Thoughts on the Koran

The BBQ Pit
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I’m starting the thread here advisedly, discussions about religion tend to get a little heated.

OK, first things first. I’m an atheist and I don’t believe any of the so-called holy books are divinely inspired. But it’s the Koran I want to talk about today.

I’ve been reading Gibbon again and when he comes to writing about Mohammed he’s pretty fair, dismissing with contempt the ludicrous slanders of the Christian writers against the prophet. But in discussing the life of Mohammed he relates a couple of incidents, verified by the Koran itself, the perusal of which occasion astonishment in the reader.

From Chapter L, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

Amazing! What chutzpah! You have to admire the guy. What a way to keep nagging wives at bay! But seriously is there any other supposed divine revelation which changes in response to the writer’s circumstances? Apparently such additions are common in the Koran with Mohammed constantly writing new stuff to suit with his personal needs.

Sure, the Christians were adding new doctrines all the time but it wasn’t Jesus slipping stuff in to shut annoying women up or to cope with the various changes that life may bring. I know people can believe the silliest things but really you’d need to completely extinguish all common sense to fall for this stuff.

If you can’t see the hand of a man rather than of any god in these passages of the Koran (the Zeineb one is Surah 33:37, not sure of the other but I’ll try to find it) then you have to be either a fool or a liar.

Incidentally, and it’s a genuine question, is the Koran really poorly written or is it just that the translations are pedestrian? One can read the Bible and delight in the richness of the syntax and imagery, most especially in the King James version, but reading the Koran is a real chore.

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Technically speaking, I believe no translation is really the Quran. Only the original Arabic is the real Quran.

I’ve only read the Quran once all the way thru, but I don’t recall as many different literary forms in it as in the Bible, especially the Old Testament. The Bible has poetry and songs and parables and folk tales and folk history and regular history. The Quran is IIRC mostly straight exposition, and it only has one narrator.

I’m not Muslim, so it might be easy for me to miss or overlook the literary merits of the work in a way that I don’t with the Bible.

As far as the “fortunately Allah says I can do what I feel like”, meh. If Islam has any value as a set of principles, and I think it does, those principles are not invalidated by their being violated. As I said, I am not a Muslim, and I don’t think of Muhammad as flawless. It’s sort of like Martin Luther King’s adultery and plagiarism - if he was right about something, where he was wrong about something else doesn’t change that. IYSWIM.

Regards,
Shodan

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Not trying to start nothin’, but it’s not exactly clear whether the ‘Egyptian captive’ was a male or female. Is that by intention?

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I’m almost finished in my year-and-a-half-long project of reading the Koran with commentary, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. I not only re-read the Dawood translation, but also the translation with the commentary. I also read, in parallel, 4 other translations that I’ve gathered through the years (I realized that I actually had more translations of the Koran than of the Bible, or any other religious book).

I have some comments to make, but this is not the time or place. I’ll try to write at greater length later.

Just one item – the Koran is said by its readers to be a piece of beautiful writing. It’s the only religious text I’ve ever heard that claim about*. Not one translation I’ve read comes close to fulfilling that promise of beautiful writing. Even allowing for the fact that the translations almost certainly value accuracy over beauty, the translations are repetitive and tough going, the Penguin Dawood translation being the most readable, IMHO. Predictably, it has been criticized for theological inaccuracy.

*Please note that I do not say that is IS the most beautiful religious text, or that other religious texts are not beautiful. But it is a fact that this is the only religious text for which I have heard this claim made.

Certainly other religious texts are frequently badly written and clumsy. This is certainly true of some of the first books in the Old Testament. The Greek of the New Testament is notorious for its grammatical clumsiness. The original editions of the Book of Mormon have rustic Americanisms. Mark Twain famously called it “chloroform in print”, and didn’t think more highly of Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health with the Key to the Scriptures”. I can’t speak for the Indian and Chinese scriptures I have (although, if the text of the Analects resembles the translations I have, it’s a problematical work). It’s probable that many poetic texts from various religions ARE beautiful – some of the Psalms, or the Song of Solomon, or the Maharbharata, or such. But I’ve never read the claim that they, in fact, were beautiful.

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The elegance of the writing in the Koran is a matter of faith. It presumes a miracle, that an illiterate craftsman could write in “classical” Arabic. This, in their mind, underscores the story that the Koran was dictated to Muhammad from a divine source, since he would not have been capable of “making it up” in the form presented to us.

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Non-believers can be Lied to .

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That trait is not exclusive to that particular religion.

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Find the Jews & Infidels hiding behind every Bush & Tree and cut off their heads .

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I doubt it - she has a female name. Of course it doesn’t explicitly say she wasn’t a camel either. :slight_smile:

I think it wouldn’t occur to ancient writers that anyone would ask the question. If Allah had actually said “It’s OK for the Prophet to f*ck boys” I think they would have made a bigger deal about it, and not left it to implication.

Yes, it is very stylized. When I read it, I got sick of reading “there will be for them a painful punishment”, which seemed to recur every other paragraph.

I have heard the Gospel of Luke called “the most beautiful book ever written”. It was in the prefatory notes to my first copy of the RSV.

But Greek was generally a trade language, and the author of Luke was an educated man. His Greek is rather different from, say, Mark.

It is very hard to do “good” translation, especially of vernacular or poetic speech. One of my pet peeves, not of translations of the Quran but of the Bible, is that they try too hard to make it understandable and take out all the poetry. I don’t need everything to be written on a sixth-grade level. One of the several reasons I love the RSV is that it isn’t writing down to me.

Not always, though. There is a passage in the OT, where King Saul thinks David is plotting to replace Saul on the throne, is planning to have David killed, and finds out that his son Jonathan assisted David in escaping.

“Thou son of a perverse, rebellious woman!” shouts the king at Jonathan, which sounds rather lofty and poetic. One translation I read put it, “You son of a bitch!”

Not as poetic, but a lot more vivid.

Regards,
Shodan

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Muhammad was a merchant … and well respected in his time as an honest one …

“Islam Empire of Faith. Part 1 Prophet Muhammad and rise of Islam” {YouTube 53’55"} – a documentary from PBS so it’s got to be true

“BBC Two - The Life of Muhammad (Part 1 of 3)” {YouTube 59’11"} – another documentary from PBS Of course it’s true

And a Huffington Post review of the second cite above “‘Life of Muhammad’ PBS Series Explores Prophet’s History” – Aug 17th, 2013

Truly shocking how little the West knows about the spiritual leader of close to a quarter the world’s population …

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When Khadija Died Mohammad went off the deep end (and the mishegoss all started)

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Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Exodus 22:20: “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.”
Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. they must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
Psalms 79:6: “Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name.”
Matthew 27:24-25: “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.”
John 8:44: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”(Jesus, speaking to the Jews)
1 Corinthians 10:20-21 “But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table, and of the table of devils.”
1 Thessalonians 2:14-15: “…ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.”
Revelation 2:9: “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.”

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ETA: If I may ask a General Question here of Shodan:

I hear lots of things peoples claim is written in the Koran, for which I wonder “when did you learn to read Arabic?” … one thing that particularly tickles me is “When Allah created The Sudan, He laughed” … curious if this is, in fact, written in the Koran …

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I don’t recall it, but I only read the Quran once. Google says it is a Sudanese proverb.

And a quick search of the English translationsdoesn’t find it. I don’t read Arabic at all.

Regards,
Shodan

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Thanx … I guess I could have Googled it myself … [blush] …

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Not in the Quran, and thus a bit off-topic, no?

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I’m surprised; the beauty of Psalms and Job is widely celebrated, even among atheists. The poetry is superlative.

I’m not sure if you want to include the Greek and Norse myths as “religious texts” but they, too, are very beautiful (in places.) The Odyssey and Iliad are stunningly beautiful (again…in places.)

I’ve heard the same said of the Bhagavad Gita, but dunno. I tried reading it once, and :o didn’t get very far into it.

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The Quran is an oral document first, and so it is different from the primarily written forms of many parts of the Bible.

The Arabic is not poor… indeed it greatly marked the development of the Arabic poetry after it. And it can not be said that the poetry of the Arabs has been badly regarded although all poetries are a matter of the individual taste…

But there is a very strong ideological hostility to the idea of the translation, unlike for the Bible since several centuries, and there is great reticence among the true believers to render ‘beautiful’ versions of a translation into the other languages, and the translation is supposed only to be the bridge to the true Quran in the original language…

I do not think the non-believer non-passionate translation project will ever render a translation of recitational text or the semi poetic text in a way that is attractive as the original. It is already a difficult type of translation to achieve.

So perhaps you see the difference between ideological orientation to the very idea of the translation.

At least there is the awareness in this of the problem of translation - what may be unfortunate is that even within the Classical language, the meanings of words have changed and also accumulated over 1400 years, which in particular the Salafistes remain blind, insistently blind, too as a problem.

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Useful comments and I add that properly we Muslims should not think of Mohammed as flawless, he specifically denied the divinity. It is an annoying christinizing aspect of the Salafistes that they do this.

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I was hoping you would stop by.

Oral in the sense that it is meant to be read out loud? Or that it arose from an oral tradition?

Is the Quran written in poetry, in whole or in part? Does the distinction exist?

That’s an interesting way of thinking about it - “don’t create anything that would distract from the original”, if that is what you are saying.

But you are correct - there once was considerable resistance to the idea of the Bible in the vernacular. Being a Lutheran, I was told this was so that the priests of the Roman church could control the interpretation of the Bible.

Which allows me to recite one of my favorite anecdotes. William Tyndale was one of the first scholars to translate the Bible into English (Martin Luther translated it into German). In 1522, Tyndale was summoned before the Diocese of Worcester to give an account of his desire to make the Bible known to the laity. He was confronted by a clergyman who accused him of undermining the teaching authority of the Pope about the meaning of Scripture. Tyndale responded, “If God gives me life, I will make the boy who drives the plow to know more of Scripture than you do.”

Tyndale died for it - but before God he did his best to bring it about.

Regards,
Shodan