Agnostic Khushwant

The Quran is one of the world’s greatest scriptures and some of its prose is as powerful as that of the Old Testament …. Numerous passages can be read for their moral messages or their literary excellence. Several of the shorter suras [chapters] have powerful poetic imagery. And the Quran has lot a lot of music in it.

Many years back on a bright Sunday morning, a couple of bearded maulvis (Islamic scholars) presented me with a Punjabi rendering of the Holy Quran by Gyani Ibadullah, a Sikh convert to Islam. They were Ahmediyya missionaries who had devoted their lives to tableegh – spreading the message of the Quran. It occurred to me that except for passages quoted in some books and in biographies of Prophet Mohammed, I had never read the Quran from cover to cover. The only scriptures I had gone through completely, apart from the Granth Sahib, were some of the smaller Upanishads and the Gita, which takes less than an hour to read.

I have no great enthusiasm for religious scriptures. Though I had to read many of them during my short tenure as a visiting lecturer with the Department of Religion at Princeton University and later at Swarthmore College (both in the USA), I find religious classics somewhat repetitive and boring. And yet, when I meet people who spend many hours of their day reading their scriptures and see how profoundly they are moved hearing them recited, I feel I am missing something very precious. Perhaps it is the music of the words in which they are couched. This is certainly true of the Sanskrit of the Gita, much of the Santhbasha used by Guru Arjun and the Arabic of the Quran.

In fact, not many Muslims bother to read translations of their holy book or understand its message: they simply memorize a few passages in its original Arabic to be able to pray. Non-Muslims are even less familiar with the Quran. And, more often than not, they are inhibited by preconceived prejudices from studying it. It is one of the world’s greatest scriptures and some of its prose is as powerful as that of the Old Testament. In the words of Dr Samuel Johnson (the renowned British lexicographer): ‘There are two objects of curiosity – the Christian world and the Mohammedan world – all the rest may be considered Barbarous.’ His views were not shared by other European scholars. Dante Alighieri, Voltaire and Thomas Carlyle had many unkind things to say about the Quran without having read it. None of them knew Arabic.

The earliest known translation of the Quran into the English language is The Alcoran of Mahomet, published in 1649 by one Alexander Ross, who translated it from a French edition. However, it is George Sale’s 1734 edition titled The Al Koran of Mohammed, based on a Latin translation, which was claimed to be the first ‘scholarly’ translation. This most widely read English translation is available even today. The first English translation of the holy book from Arabic – Selections from the Koran – by E. W. Lane appeared in 1843. Subsequently, many others were published till Marmaduke Pickthall, a convert to Islam, published his Meaning of the Glorious Koran (published by Knopf) in 1930. Pickthall not only admitted that the Quran was untranslatable (Islamicists, including Professor H. A. R. Gibbs, are agreed on this point) but went on to say: ‘No holy scripture can be fairly presented by one who disbelieves its importance and its message.’ He specially referred to its emotive quality: ‘The very sounds of which move men to tears of ecstasy.’

The gift of the Gurumukhi translation of the Quran impelled me to pick up the English translations that I had on my book shelves. I recall that over 70 years ago, I had dedicated one full month to reading the Quran and picked up Pickthall’s version. I had struggled with it with the help of a maulvi in Lahore who recited the original while I followed the translation. I didn’t get beyond the first three suras (chapters) when, for some reason, my mentor gave up the exercise. It was the same with A. J. Arberry’s translation. I gave up after I had gone through half of the text. I did not rate Arberry very high as a translator because, in his anxiety for accuracy, he robbed words of their music. And the Quran has a lot of music in it.

It was Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s version with commentaries that rekindled my ambition to read the holy book from cover to cover. Every morning I switched on to Radio Pakistan, listened to the qari (one who recites the Quran) recite four ayats (verses) and followed the recitation with the Arabic text printed alongside the translation. Then I acquired N. J. Dawood’s The Koran. Dawood, an Iraqi, had settled in London and translated many Arabic classics including Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. His translation of the Quran was first published in 1916. Since then it has been reprinted numerous times and is probably the most widely read translation of the holy book. My only grievance against his otherwise eminently readable rendering has been that he changed the order in which the verses appeared in the authenticated version. This confused me because I wanted to read it in the same order as Muslims do. Then I acquired Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s Tarjuman-ul Quran (translation of the Quran), published in three volumes in 1930, as also Ahmad Ali’s The Qur’an – A Contemporary Translation, published by Oxford University Press in 1984. (I shall come to Azad’s edition towards the end of this chapter.)

There are many good reasons for reading the Quran. One is that it means more to Muslims than other scriptures mean to people who follow them. Muslims are people of this one book, whereas other religions have a multiplicity of sacred texts. There is an old Latin saying Caveab homine unius libri: Beware of the man of one book. We have hundreds of millions of Muslims scattered over the globe who, even if they have read no other book, are familiar with the contents of the Quran. This single-minded devotion to a single book may have given rise to the apocryphal story about Muslim conquerors burning the library of Alexandria, who declared: ‘If these other books agree with our Quran, they are superfluous and should be destroyed. And if they disagree with it, they are wrong and deserve to be destroyed.’ Or words to that effect. If you wish to know what Muslim values of life are, you must read the Quran.

The Quran has no known author. Muslims believe that it was revealed by Allah to Prophet Mohammed in bits and pieces over a period of years. These revelations were memorized by his followers, written down on palm leaves, camel hide, stones and bones. An authorized version was compiled some years after the Prophet’s death. The copyright of the Quran vests in Allah who is its real author and not with the Prophet who only published it by word of mouth. How this happened was quite dramatic. But before we come to that, we should know something about the Prophet himself.

Mohammed was the posthumous child of Abdullah of the Qureish tribe and was born in Makka (Mecca) in A.D. 570. His mother died while he was still a child and he was brought up by his grandfather and his uncle. He grew to be a handsome man with a dynamic personality. His honesty became a byword in the city, and he was given the sobriquet al amin – worthy of trust. Though he remained unlettered, he was employed by tradesmen and accompanied caravans to distant parts of the Arab world. His last employment was in the service of a rich widow, Khadija, who was 15 years older to him. At the age of 25, he married Khadija. It was a close and fulfilling relationship and he refused to take another wife till after she was dead. The Prophet had three sons, all of whom died in infancy, and four daughters. Fatima was his youngest and favourite child. It was during his marriage to Khadija that the Quran began to be revealed to him. Khadija was the first to believe that God had nominated her husband as his messenger.

Mohammed was given to retiring to a cave not far from Makka where he spent long hours meditating in solitude. His mind was disturbed by the people’s lack of faith in the One God and their worshipping of goddesses alleged to be Allah’s ‘daughters’, whose idols had been installed in the Kaaba (a cube-shaped structure in Makka). One night, during the latter part of the month of Ramazan of the year A.D. 610, he was shaken out of his reverie by a voice commanding him to recite. ‘What shall I recite?’ he asked. (In Arabic, the word Quran means recital.) The order to recite was repeated three times before the voice told him what to say:

Recite in the name of your Lord who created man from clots of blood.

Recite: Your Lord is the Most Bountiful one, who by pen taught man what he did not know.

The night when this happened is known as the Leilat-ul Qadr or the night of glory. It is recorded in one of the suras as follows:

We revealed the Quran on the night of Qadr. Would that you know what the night of Qadr is like. Better is the night of Qadr than a thousand months.

Revelations followed one after the other. Some at Makka were fairly lengthy; others after he fled the city in A.D. 622 – from which date begins the Muslim Hijri (from Hijrat: migration) calendar – were comparatively shorter. There are innumerable references in the Quran to the object of the revelations: ‘This Quran will guide men to that which is most upright ... that which we have revealed in the Quran is a balm and a blessing ... we have revealed the Quran with the truth and with the truth it has come down.’

The Prophet did not claim originality for the revelations and asserted that he was only confirming revelations sent earlier by God to the Jews and the Christians. He was chosen to be its purveyor in the Arabic tongue so that: ‘You may grasp its meaning. It is a transcript of our eternal book, sublime and full of wisdom ... free from all faults and easy to remember.’

There is a lot of repetition in the Quran of the stories from the Old Testament relating to Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Pharaoh, David, Ezekiel, Jonah, Lot and Jesus. The purpose is to warn people who defy Allah and his apostles of the consequences of doing so. Large portions of the Quran deal with crimes and their appropriate punishments, laws of marriage, divorce, inheritance and what may be lawfully consumed and what is forbidden (haram).

I was curious to find out whether or not the consumption of alcohol is haram, as orthodox Muslims of today maintain, or only disapproved of, as those who drink plead. I found as many as seven references to drink, all of which were somewhat ambiguous on the subject. The most quoted lines are from a chapter entitled ‘The Bee’, which run as follows:

We give you the fruits of the palm and of the vine, from which you derive intoxicants and wholesome food.

Surely, in these lines, there is a sign for men of understanding. In a chapter entitled ‘The Ranks’, there is a description of paradise where the deserving will be:

... well provided for, feasting on fruit and honoured in the gardens of delight ... they shall be served with a goblet filled at a gushing fountain, white, and delicious to those who drink it. It will neither dull their senses nor befuddle them.

In a slightly different description in the chapter titled ‘Mohammed’, there is promise of: ‘unpolluted water; and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of delectable wine and rivers of clearest honey.’ There are references to passing goblets from hand to hand, of ewers and cups of ‘purest wine that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason’; of ‘pure wine securely sealed, whose very dregs are musk; a wine tempered with the waters of Tasnim’ (the name of a paradisal stream). This reassures me that my daily sin remains unproven.

My chief purpose in writing this chapter is to inform readers of the literary excellence of the Quran. Before I do that I would like to introduce them to some verses that are most often recited by Muslims at prayer. I will use different translations so that you may make your own judgement of the quality of the translation. Much the most recited is Al Fatiha, the opening chapter usually described as Umm-ul Quran, the essence of the Quran, as well as Sabaan min al Mathani, seven of the often repeated, and al Hamd, the invocation:

Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,

The Beneficent, the Merciful.

Owner of the Day of Judgement,

Thee (Alone) we worship; Thee (alone) we ask for help.

Show us the straight path,

The path of those whom Thou hast favoured;

Not (the path) of those who earn Thine anger nor of those who go astray.

(Marmaduke Pickthall)

Most Muslim prayers end with the chanting of durood (verses in praise of the Prophet). Most often this is from Sura Ikhlas:

Say: He is God,

The One and Only.

God, the Eternal, Absolute.

He begetteth not,

Not is He begotten;

And there is none

Like unto Him.

(Abdullah Yusuf Ali)

The Ayat-ul Qursi or, the ‘throne verse’, from the second sura ‘The Cow (Al Baqareh)’ has special significance for Muslims. It is perhaps the most commonly reproduced verse in Muslim mausoleums and worn in amulets and necklaces (I have a beautiful reproduction in silver on a bidri plate); cups with this ayat inscribed on them are often used to drink out of in the belief that they have healing properties. They are also recited to ward off fear of evil spirits:

God: There is no God but He,

The living, sustaining, ever self-subsisting.

Neither does somnolence affect Him nor sleep.

To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth, and who can intercede with Him except by His leave?

Known to Him is all that is present before men and what is hidden in time past and time future, and not even a little of His knowledge can they grasp except what He will.

His seat extends over heavens and the earth,

And He tires not protecting them

He alone is all high and supreme.

(Ahmad Ali)

The next verse is often quoted to prove Islam’s tolerance of other faiths:

There is no compulsion in the matter of faith.

Distinct is the way of guidance now from error.

He who turns away from the forces of evil

And believes in God, will surely hold fast

To a handle that is strong and unbreakable.

(Ahmad Ali)

For some reason not clear to me, Sura Yaseen is described as ‘the heart of the Quran’. It reassures people of the continuity of life:

It is We who will bring back the dead to life; We record the deeds of men and the marks they leave behind ... they laugh to scorn every apostle that comes to them. Let the once dead earth be a sign to them. We gave it up and from it produced grain for their sustenance. We planted it with the palm and the vine and watered it with gushing springs, so that men might feed on its fruit.

The entrance gate of the Taj Mahal in Agra is festooned with lines from this sura.

A great favourite with Muslims and lovers of literature is the Sura Rehman (The Merciful), with the line ‘which of your Lord’s blessings would you deny?’ repeated after every assertion:

It is the Merciful who has taught the Koran.

He created man and taught him articulate speech.

The sun and the moon pursue their ordered course.

The plants and the trees bow down in adoration.

He raised the heaven on high and set the balance of all things, that you might not transgress it.

Give just weight and full measure.

He laid the earth for His creatures, with all its fruits and blossom-bearing palm,

Chaff-covered grain and scented herbs.