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Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice

Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice

The Complete Layman’s Guide to the Koran

Chapter 1

Revelations and Generalizations

THE PEOPLE

114 An-Nâs

In the Name of Allah,

the Compassionate, the Merciful

114:1 Say: “I seek refuge with the Lord of the People,

114:2 “The King of the people,

114:3 “The God of the people,

114:4 “From the evil of the slinking whisperer [Satan],

114:5 “Who whispers in the breasts of people,

114:6 “Both jinn and men.”

Both jinn and men! That is it, the last verse of the Koran. What a read! What a revelation! What is a jinn? Jinns are spirits that inhabit another dimension. There are good and evil jinns. The caricature of the genie is probably based on this creature of the Koran.

When I decided to read the Koran I was determined to get a Muslim’s interpretation, an interpretation that could only be viewed as being favourable to Islam. This was important. I did not want to be accused of deliberately seeking an interpretation of the Koran that maligned the religion. I also wanted an interpretation that was easy to read and understand.

The interpretation of the Koran that seemed to satisfy these requirements was a translation by Majid Fakhry, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut, which had the seal of approval of Al-Azhar University of Egypt, a world-renowned center for Islamic study for more than 900 years. In the translator’s own words “we have tried to express ourselves in a simple, readable English idiom”, and for the most part, he has succeeded admirably in producing a very readable interpretation of one, if not the most read book in the world.

My goals in reading the Koran were diverse. At the top of my list was gaining an understanding of what makes this book so special; to understand what makes the religion based on its content so attractive to so many and yes, to satisfy my curiosity about what God sounds like, or more accurately, reads like. I also read the Koran in the hope of dispelling some prejudices and apprehensions that I had developed after reading about Islam from authors, devoted Muslims most of them, who had mostly nothing but praise for Allah and His “perfect religion.”

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You will not be subjected to very many drawn-out discussions about the abundance of verses, more than two thousand, you will find in Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice. I take this approach because the meaning of the verses selected is, for the most part, self-evident. Also, even though I consider myself well versed (no pun intended) in the Koran and the life and times of God’s Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad, I don’t believe I am qualified to comment at any great length on the professed word of God.

To reiterate what I wrote in the Foreword to Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice; I am not a religious scholar and I don’t pretend to be. It would be the height of presumption on my part to think that I could properly mine the Koran for the purported hidden meanings behind many of the verses. I prefer letting God speak for himself, offering only a layman's opinion where I feel one is warranted. Also, to avoid being accused of selecting portions of verses and ignoring others, I usually give you the complete verse even when, from my perspective, it is not required in order to support the argument I am trying to make.

Authors who chose to write about Islam, the Koran or the life of the Prophet Muhammad must also tread very carefully lest the believers perceive their writings as an insult to Islam. The death sentence invoked against Salmon Rushdie, author of the satirical novel The Satanic Verses; the assassination of professor Hitoshi Igarashi, translator of the Japanese edition; the near successful assassination of the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo (he survived multiple stab wounds and an attempt at evisceration) and the attempted murder of Norwegian translator William Nygaard by similar means serve as a constant reminder that you can never be too careful.

This Islamic equivalent of the Sword of Damocles which hangs over the heads of authors of books and articles on Islam, in my opinion, compels the vast majority of them to adopt a trinity of personalities or points of view when writing about the self-proclaimed “perfect religion” so as to confuse their detractors.

One exception is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Dutch Member of Parliament and author of Insoumise, “I Will Not Submit” (my translation) and The Caged Virgin. She does not apologize for Islam’s excesses, is openly critical of the Koran, and does not profess a boundless admiration for the Prophet Muhammad. Quite the opposite!

To spread his vision and teachings, which he believed to be from God, and to consolidate his secular power, Muhammad built the House of Islam using military tactics that included mass killing, torture, targeted assassinations, lying and the indiscriminate destruction of productive goods. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The Caged Virgin, p. 173.)

The author was, of course, put under twenty-four hour police protection having received countless death treats. These threats became even more credible with the vicious murder on an Amsterdam street of Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh had directed her short film, Submission, about the brutal prison that is Islam for many Muslim women.

Unlike Ayaan Hirsi Ali, apologising or rationalising is the closest most authors get to criticising any elements of the Muslim faith. One Muslim-Canadian writer who comes close to questioning the foundation of the faith and the teachings of the Koran but then backs away is Irshad Manji, broadcaster and writer. In her book The Trouble with Islam - A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change she calls herself a Muslim-Refusenik. There is no such thing! But it is a way of saving your life if you are going to flirt with the idea of abandoning your religion and that religion is Islam.

A Muslim renouncing his or her faith commits the capital crime of apostasy and automatically incurs a death sentence. If there is one person that the God of the Koran hates more than an unbeliever, and that is saying a lot as you will come to appreciate, it is a believer who chooses to no longer believe. For the God of the Koran, there is no salvation in this world or the next for such a person.

Allah’s extremist views when it comes to apostates has been interpreted by many Islamic scholars and Muslim clerics, the Ayatollah Khomeini being the most notorious, as giving Muslims a licence to kill apostates wherever they find them; to expedite their delivery to Allah so to speak, so that he can deal with them personally. He promises them a particularly “painful punishment.” Then again, as you will discover, He promises anyone who will not submit to His will a painful punishment.

Women and sex, in my estimation, is second only to unbelievers, whether they never believed or believed then disbelieved, in being an all-consuming passion of the God of the Koran. It is not a passion that is meant to elevate the sex, to put women on a equal footing with men or even slaves and unbelievers.

As Bernard Lewis explains in his book What Went Wrong, Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Muslim women occupy the lowest rung of Muslim society, they have even fewer rights than slaves and even fewer rights than men who don’t believe a word of the Koran, let alone that it is God’s words.

According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principals of legal and religious equality – unbelievers, slaves and women. The woman was obviously in one significant respect the worst-placed of the three. The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any time become a believer by his own choice, and thus end his inferiority. Only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was… (Bernard Lewis. What Went Wrong ?, pp. 67-69.)

In Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice you will read about why and how the God of the Koran confined Muslim women to this prisoner-like existence. You will understand why the girls of Reading Lolita in Teheran by Azar Nafisi live in constant fear of the clerics and the bearded young and older men who lust after their “tender” (that is Allah’s quite appropriate description, not mine) young bodies.

You will also read about why the Koran can be interpreted by young men living in such a civilized city as Paris, as encouraging them to rape and brutalize young believing women and girls.

The most troubling book I read on the impact of the Koran on the minds of young Muslim men and boys was Samira Bellil’s [1972-2004] Dans l’enfer des tournantes, “In the Hell of the Gang Rapes” (my translation). It is the sad, pathetic, true story of a young Muslim girl living in the predominantly Muslim immigrant outskirts of Paris. She is not only brutalized by her father and mother at home but when she ventures out, to escape the hell that is her household, to live like any normal Parisian girl she is raped and brutalized by gangs of young, mainly Muslim men.

The young men who indulge in this vicious, reprehensible behaviour do so believing that the brutality is sanctioned by the Koran because these women and girls are not conforming to Allah’s ideal of the perfect woman. And it is an ideal, as you will discover, that even Mother Theresa, if she had chosen to become Muslim, to marry and stay at home, would have had difficulty in living up to. You may also be surprised about the events leading up to Allah’s declaration on women’s rights and obligations. It may not have been His intention to impose such a strict, confining code of conduct on generations of females.

When Allah is not boasting about how horrible your time in His Hell will be He waxes poetically about what Paradise will be like for the believers. Unlike the Christian view that Hell is the abode of Satan, Hell, in the Koran, is Allah’s personal torture chamber. It is an absolutely horrifying place which can be viewed, from a safe distance by the occupants of Paradise. After reading about Allah’s description of Paradise you may begin to understand the note of encouragement left behind by Muhammad Atta for his fellow terrorists prior to the attacks of 9/11.

Know that the gardens of paradise are waiting for you in all their beauty and the women of paradise are waiting, calling out.

So many innocent people dying a horrible death, some blown to bits; others burnt alive by exploding jet fuel; others falling or jumping to their death in the plaza below to escape the fire above; the survivors of the initial attack crushed between slabs of concrete as the buildings collapsed, their lives squeezed out of them like so much toothpaste. So many dead – men, women and children – so much pain, so much destruction all for the sake of satisfying a group of merciless young men’s sexual fantasies about what awaited them after their killing work, in the name of their God, was done.

The Koran is the book upon which the Taliban, the Islamist fundamentalist movement which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, based their concept of God’s government on earth. The Koran serves as the core document, the constitution you might say, of Islamic regimes around the world. In countries where the Koran is the equivalent of a western constitution no government can pass any laws or regulations that contravene the Koran. The final arbiters of whether a law is “constitutional” i.e. does not contravene the Koran, are the religious authorities, the mullahs.

The Taliban, like all believers, were and are required to memorize or at least attempt to memorize the Koran in its entirety. The memorizers of the Koran are also expected to accept Allah’s instructions without question. This has not been my approach in presenting my impressions, the impressions of a former Catholic, now an agnostic, on first reading the Koran.

As an unbeliever, I hope I can safely express my opinions about the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad, although nothing is certain. Dutch filmmaker Theodore Van Gogh’s gruesome death at the hands of a believer for making a film about abused Muslim women does not provide much reassurance.

While my writing may never match the scholarship and penmanship of the authors mentioned here or those to whom you will be introduced later, I hope to provide an honest, forthright view of the Muslim God, His anointed Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad and their legacy: the Koran. This view takes Allah and His Messenger at their word; most of the Muslim world does just that and so should you.

I must apologize from the outset for the somewhat critical appraisal that is Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice of Islam’s core religious text. It was not my intention to write such an appraisal when I undertook to read the Koran, not once, not twice but three times, with countless return visits to make sure I had not misquoted God or His Messenger.

Translations of the Koran are usually called interpretations because believers claim that only the Arabic version of the Koran can convey the true meaning of God’s words. If you can’t read the Koran in the original, they say, you are bound to misinterpret Allah’s words. Do they have a point, or is it just a pre-emptive rationalization? A pre-emptive excuse for some of the frightening revelations contained within the Muslim Holy Book. Revelations that may leave some unbelievers wondering if it is God’s words they are reading or those of his nemesis?

For unbelievers especially, the God of the Koran definitely does not come across as the Compassionate and Merciful God that is acclaimed by Muslims everywhere. Scattered throughout the Koran you find cruel, sadistic passages of almost unimaginable brutality; brutality almost exclusively reserved for the unbelievers. The excerpts that you will be reading in this guide comprise a significant sample.

The Koran is written in verses or ayats, therefore it is true that you will not be able to appreciate the rhythm and rhyme that only the original can convey, but any good translation will be able to communicate the meaning of the poet’s words and the meaning of the words is what you should be concerned with.

An English translation of the Koran will run to about 77,700 words; the approximate size of a standard 300 page book. The Koran is made up of 114 chapters or surahs. To avoid confusion when referring to chapters of Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice and the Koran in the same sentence or paragraph or in close proximity, I use the Arabic transliteration (converting from one alphabet to another) of chapter, which is surah, when referring to "chapters" of the Koran.

Each surah is further divided into verses or ayats. There are 6,346 verses in the Koran if you include the 112 unnumbered Basmalahs, the formula-invocation “in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate” which appears at the beginning of every Koranic chapter except the first and the ninth. In the case of ayat, I have chosen to remain with the English understanding of what is an ayat.

In Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice I refer to verses by the chapter number and verse; for example, verse 2:282. Or by chapter name and verse: The Cow, verse 282. A verse can be just a few words long or more than 200 words such as verse 2:282, the longest verse in the Koran which deals, in part, with the virtue of good bookkeeping practices and why, when it comes to transactions involving money or chattel, a woman on her own cannot be trusted to accurately remember things.

Towards the end of some chapters you will find supplementary material following a squiggly line (~~~). It is additional information which I consider important that could not be conveniently presented in footnotes.

Just a few editorial notes before we get down to business and let the God of the Koran speak for Himself. All quotes from the Koran are from Majid Fakhry’s interpretation unless otherwise indicated. Text added by Fakhry within a quoted verse to improve understanding is enclosed within square “[ ]” brackets. Other clarifications by Fakhry, including footnotes, are enclosed in round “( )” brackets. Any underlining of words in verses for emphasis is my doing not Fakhry’s.

I hope that Majid will forgive me if I have substituted the more familiar Koran for Qur’an when quoting verses and comments from his “English translation of the Meanings.”

At the beginning of twenty surahs, following the invocation In the Name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, are written a letter or a group of letters of the alphabet e.g. Alif – Lam – Ra. According to some Islamic scholars, these letters are abbreviations or Muqatta'at, of Arabic words, in this instance, the English meaning can be interpreted as “I am Allah, the Most Seeing.” Other Islamic scholars, according to Fakhry, believe they are “secret symbols with which the Angel Gabriel opened the revelation or surah in question.” I have included these letters or groups of letters in quoted verses where they appear.

Where appropriate verses are accompanied by sayings or descriptions of actions of the Prophet called hadiths. Hadiths are hearsay evidence of what God’s Messenger said and did – including the silent approval of actions done in his presence – collected approximately 200 years after his passing. A hadith is a legal precedent if it does not contradict the Koran.

There are more than ten thousand of what are considered authenticated hadiths (Ahadith is often use to indicate the plural form but not here). A authentic (sahih) or good (hasan) hadith is one that can be traced to a witness (often referred to as Companions of the Prophet) of what the Prophet said or did, or did not do, via of chain of reliable transmitters. A weak (dhaeef) hadiths is one where there is a break in the chain of transmitters and/or the integrity of the narrator(s) is suspect.

Sunni Islam considers the hadiths collected by six men – al-Bukhari, Imam Muslim, At-Tirmidi, Ibn Majah, Abu Dawood and An-Nisa’i – as the “six canonical collections.” Al-Bukhari's collection of 7,275 hadiths is the largest and considered the most authoritative, All of Bukhari’s (d. 870) and Imam Muslim’s (d. 875) hadiths are considered authentic by Sunnis.

For Shiites (or Shi'as) it’s a bit more complicated. They consider the recollections of the “Companions of the Prophet” who voted Abu Bakr, a good friend of the Prophet his successor when God’s Messenger passed away usurpers who corrupted Islam and whose words cannot be trusted.

Shiites consider the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, and his descendents the legitimate heirs of the Prophet. Shiites have developed their own books of hadiths which are largely based on what members of the “House of the Prophet” reported; that would be the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, his cousin and son-in-law Ali, and Ali’s two sons Hassan and Hussein.

The Four Books, containing more than 40 thousand hadiths, are their most important collections.

One final editorial observation: all quoted verses have been carefully reviewed to ensure that Fakhry's interpretation has been faithfully rendered. Many verses such as 44:43-44 must be read together to form a complete sentence or thought; therefore do not assume a typographical (typo) or grammatical error if a verse does not end with the expected punctuation.

44:43 The Tree of Zaqqum (the Tree of Bitterness) will certainly be

44:44 The food of the sinner.

Punctuation or lack thereof, is usually a good indication of when verses must be read as a group.