Boreal
Remembering Uzza
If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub
Beowulf and the Koran
Uzza:
I learned Arabic because I had no choice. I learned English because it would allow me to meet interesting
people; and I learned to speak and read French because I love the language.
Gerry: So, you can read the Koran in the original?
Uzza: That is total crock [as Uzza gets more inebriated her language becomes more familiar].
Gerry: Huh?
Uzza: If I gave you a 1,400-year-old English text could you even begin to make sense of it?
Gerry: Beowulf is a thousand years old. It is the oldest preserved old English long story. I dare anyone with a normal understanding of the English language to attempt to read it in the original without throwing up his or her hand in despair.
Uzza: And that goes for a 1,400-year-old Arabic text, to a lesser extent. What you call the original Koran was written in classical Arabic[353], when punctuation was almost nonexistent and no vowels. To make matters worse, research indicates that the original Koran contained verses in Hebrew and in Aramaic, the language associated with Jesus[354]. The Koran has probably gone through more editing to make it understandable than any other so-called Holy Book[355].
Bob: Then, why do preachers say that unless you understand Arabic you will not be able to understand the Koran?
Uzza: Because that is what they want you to believe. They want to discourage you from reading the damn book.
Gerry: The “damn book!”
Uzza: You know what I mean. Any good translation will do. I recommend the one by Majid Fakhry, the first mainstream translation by a native Arab speaker[356]. Any good translation will be able to accurately communicate Allah's Message and it's the message we should be concerned with.
Bob: Then, why the emphasis on learning Arabic?
Uzza: It is a way of maintaining cohesion and a sense of purpose for the struggle ahead; to give you a greater appreciation that you belong to a community of like-minded people and not that other one which does not care to live according to the Book. If they did they too would learn to read Allah’s “glorious Koran”[357] in easy Arabic[358].
Archie: Glorious Koran?
Uzza: Allah is not shy when it comes to promoting His Book.
Bob: You can say that again.
Gerry: Arabic is not easy to learn. I’ve tried and gave up.
Uzza: For those not used to reading and writing from right to left and whose language contains vowel sounds which are explicit not implied in Allah’s native language can be a difficult language to master, I agree.
Bob: And all this time I thought God’s native language was Hebrew.
Uzza: Learning Arabic may have nothing to with getting the Koran right or pleasing Allah and everything to do with a winning strategy. Having everyone learn Arabic is a tremendous advantage for an international force bent on the destruction of a foe who must depend on interpreters to gage what is happening.
Gerry: If Arabic offers a strategic advantage and is a way for Muslims, I mean believers, to set themselves apart from the greater population, why did countries like Canada introduce Arabic immersion in schools with the objective under its multicultural policy. To quote some Minister, ”to facilitate the integration of children from Muslin countries”.
Uzza: Because they are stupid, stupid, stupid and so is unthinking multiculturalism, which, by the way is probably responsible for an uptick in what Western jurisprudence considers a crime and some religions don't.
Archie: You mean one religion, don't you?
Uzza: Do not put words in my mouth. Steven Weinberg said that religion makes good people do bad things. It may have to do with the Koran replacing moral imperatives in Judeo-Christian teaching with relativistic ones, not only removing the sin aspect, but actually encouraging stealing, lying and generally treating someone with contempt if that someone happens to be an unbeliever. Now, don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with a country seeking to accommodate the innocuous traditions and customs of different cultures within a national identity. What is wrong is not differentiating between the benign and the malignant thereby allowing champions of irreconcilable value systems to compete Darwinian-like for supremacy where the most ruthless usually wins. A concept Muhammad and those who follow his example understood only too well.
Footnotes
Classical Arabic (CA), also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary text from Umayyad and Abbasid times (7th to 9th centuries). It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the direct descendent [of Classical Arabic]...
While the lexis and stylistics of Modern Standard Arabic are different from Classical Arabic, the morphology and syntax have remain basically unchanged (thought MSA uses a subset of the syntactic structure available in CA). The vernacular dialects, however, have changed more dramatically ...
Tradition has it that the caliph Ali, after reading the Qur'an with errors in it, asked Abu al-Aswad al Du'ali to write a work codifying Arabic grammar. Khalil ibn Ahmad would later write Kitab al-Ayn, the first dictionary of Arabic ..."
From Modern Arabic poetry 1800-1970: the development of its forms and themes by Shmuel Moreh
[354] Research into the origins of the Koran, such as that conducted in Germany by Christoph Luxenberg (pseudonym), have revealed a great number of words in Aramaic and/or Syriac which would indicate that many verses may have had a Christian or Jewish origin.
[355] Estelle Whelan writing in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, explains how we got to the Cairo edition (lightly edited to conform to the naming convention used throughout this book e.g. al-Madinah changed to Medina):
In the last two decades a controversy has arisen over the period in which the text of Muslim scripture became codified. The traditional Islamic view can be summarized as follows.
Both Abu Bakr (632-34) and Umar (634-44) made efforts to gather together the scraps of revelation that had been written down by the faithful during the lifetime of the Prophet, on bones, on palm leaves, on potsherds, and on whatever other materials were at hand, as well as being preserved in "the breasts of men."
But it was the third caliph, Uthman (644-61), who first charged a small group of men of Medina with codifying and standardizing the text.
Alarmed by reported divergences in the recitation of the revelation, he commissioned one of the Prophet's former secretaries, Zayd b. Thabit, and several prominent members of Quraysh - Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr, Sa‘id b. al-‘As, and Abd al-Rahman b. al-Harith are those most often mentioned - to produce a standard copy of the text, based on the compilation in the keeping of Hafsah, daughter of Umar.
If there was disagreement over language among members of the commission, it was to be resolved in accordance with the dialect spoken by Quraysh.
Once the standard text had been established, several copies were made and sent to major cities in the Islamic domain, specifically Damascus, Basra, Kufa, and perhaps others.
Although there are variations in detail, for example, in the list of names of those who served on Uthman's commission and in the list of cities to which copies were sent, this basic outline is not in dispute within the Muslim world.
Oral recitation nevertheless remained the preferred mode of transmission, and, as time passed, variant versions of the text proliferated - the kind of organic change that is endemic to an oral tradition.
In addition, because of the nature of the early Arabic script, in which short vowels were not indicated and consonants of similar form were only sometimes distinguished by pointing, writing, too, was subject to misunderstanding, copyist's error, and change over time.
In the early tenth century, at Baghdad, Abu Bakr Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) succeeded in reducing the number of acceptable readings to the seven that were predominant in the main Muslim centers of the time: Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Basra, and Kufa.
Some Qur'an readers who persisted in deviating from these seven readings were subjected to draconian punishments.
Nevertheless, with the passage of time, additional variant readings were readmitted, first "the three after the seven," then "the four after the ten."
The modern Cairo edition, prepared at al-Azhar in the 1920s, is based on one of the seven readings permitted by Ibn Mujahid, that of Abu Bakr ‘Âsim (d. 745) as transmitted by Hafs b. Sulayman (d. 796).
Forgotten Witness: Evidence For The Early Codification Of The Qur'an, Estelle Whelan, Journal Of The American Oriental Society, 1998, Volume 118.
[356] In the translator’s own words “we have tried to express ourselves in a simple, readable English idiom.” Publishers Weekly wrote of Fakhry’s notable accomplishment: “Succeeds in expressing the meanings of the original Arabic in simple readable English.”
85:21 Yet, it is a glorious Qur’an,
85:22 In a Well-Preserved Tablet.
43:3 We have made it an Arabic Qur’an that perchance you may understand.