I am obsessed with the Quran. I love the Quran like little boys love Harry Potter. Like white folk loved Outkast's Speakerboxxx and thugs loved Outkast's ATLeans. Like geeks love MySQL. Like girls love Gucci. I love it like Dantes loved Mercedes. I love it like Rumi loved Shams; Hallaj, God; and Nietzsche, himself. I love the Quran like Bela Bartok loved laughter and Romanians love them gypsies. I love the Quran like I loved Sophie Marceau when I was a lonely teen. I love the Quran more; much more.

The Quran is my favorite novel, favorite poem, favorite recording, favorite creation. Its Prophets are more real to me than a thousand Aragorns and Legolases. Its Karuns and Zulqurnains are more devastating than a thousand Saurons. At the end of the day, when my toes won't bend from having walked in the cold so long, and my eyes won't close from having stayed open at work so long, I go to the Quran and Tawfeeq al Sayegh busts out in a recitation of al-Fajr, and my achilles heel melts in warmth, and my spinal cortex straightens and sets. I am overawed by the humanity of the book and I feel transcendence. Like any slave to beauty, I want nothing more than to scatter the perfume of the Quran in a thousand directions and share with others the luxuriant fragrance.

But there are those who turn "my preciousss" into pungence; my warmth into fire; my beloved into a blizzard of death; my love into a lizard. Their names come easy to the mouth, like phlegm should: Osama, Zarqawi, Bakri. They echo against the names of others who knew how to bastardize beauty: Stalin, Bakunin, Cheney.

However, these men are merely expressions of a deeper malaise. They have theological enablers who leaked the wines of worship from the Quran and injected instead the blood of desert scorpions. I speak of those men who change the verses of the Quran to serve their own disreputable ends; who by way of parantheticals not actually in the Arabic create a class of hate that breeds only blood and bombs.

The Fatiha, The Opening, Magisterial and Evocative, which begins with "Praise For The Lord Of The Worlds" ends up in a taxonomy of exclusion by way of parentheses:

Guide us to the Straight Way. The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).

No longer in this newly rewritten Quran is a believer left to reflect upon his being in relation to the unknown, his entry into the mysteries of existence, but to hate the Jew, hate the Christian. How could the Lord of all the Worlds accept such rancor toward His creation? Don't ask God; ask the government of Saudi Arabia which peddles this "noble" anti-Quran; ask the "Islamic" University of Medina; ask Shaykh Bin Baz, Saudi Grand Mufti until 1999 who certified these insertions; and the King Fahd Center For Printing of the Holy Quran.

This is what Michael Sells calls War as Worship; Worship as War. This is the Quran I hate; this caricature of beauty. This is the Quran I will jihad against. (You must wait for my plot, but I shall plot).

Aslam a lacum

Hate, anger, and revenge will not lead to any good.
Yet this is what seems to drive many Muslims today.
In the mosques in America, the talk always seems to turn to the Jewish conspiracies. What is wrong with us?
May Allah give us guidance.

Ali Eteraz.. nice poetry.
Nice sure If I or other Muslims would agree with everything in i, but I do like the style.

Dakota,
Thank you for the honest expressioin one rarly sees on message boards, unless it's some young firebrand only repeating/having the courage TO repeat what he hears daily in his Mosque or from his elders.

Brother Ali, you have just elaborately laid down in words what I have been thinking of and fighting against for a long time. First thing I do when I want to evaluate a copy of translated Quran is open the page of Al Fatiha and search for "such as the Jews/such as the Christians", if it's there, then forget about it; if not, then this may be a good one. It's really outrageous that people are reinforcing their own interpretations of Quran, and, worse, inserting that amidst the Divine words. I think the best interpretation/translation of Quran I ever encountered was that by Muhammad Asad. It's free from any cultural/social influences on Quranic interpretation.
Thanks for the article.

{i]"...First thing I do when I want to evaluate a copy of translated Quran is open the page of Al Fatiha and search for "such as the Jews/such as the Christians", if it's there, then forget about it; if not, then this may be a good one...

Virtually none of the Major and usually sourced versions of the Koran do add what you cite:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/quran/001.qmt.html

Where are you seeing those that Parenthetically add 'Jews" or "Christians"?

Abuafak, I have a Qur'an that was given to me as a gift in Amman, but was published in Damascus. It is an annotated Arabic copy, and each ayah has commentary on the page, also in Arabic. The text of the Quran has not been altered with these words, but the commentary contains phrases that are similar to the ones that Ali Eteraz describes above. This commentary would translate as, "and do not put us on the path of anger, of they that knew the law and did not work within it, they are the Jews,... and those wo did not favor the path, the Christians." And for the record, it is noted as being an approved copy by various ministries in Saudi Arabia (1977), Egypt (1979), and Jordan (1979).

<Where are you seeing those that Parenthetically add 'Jews" or "Christians"?>

I have seen more than one copy that adds the parenthetic phrase, hard copies I mean. And here's an online version of that:

http://www.al-sunnah.com/call_to_islam/quran/surah1.html

Very very true. Meaning is forced. Tafseers take precedent over what you read. We are being forced to accept final interpretations of what is supposed to be an unfolding truth. It would be more true to the ayahs if they were restricted to their intended subjects, but the words have not only been broadened but also locked in meaning.

How bold. People are dismissed for discussing ayahs but we are all supposed to tacitly reconcile ourselves to the orthodox establishments interpretations.

Salaam Alaykum,

I agree that commentary must be kept very separate from the actual text of the Qur'an. However, I diagree with the implication that these interpretations of the Qur'an are the root of all evil. Our Ummah is besieged and what happens on the ground is the catalyst for those who choose to respond with violence. It's similar to when pro-Israeli columnists attempt to draw a correlation between Palestinian resistance and what their children our taught in schools. You mean to tell me their militancy has nothing to do with the bulldozer in their back yards?

Salaams.

What is unfortunate about this translation as well is that converts are sucked into believing that the words in parenthasis are actually words of the Qur'an! I've had sisters insist that the Qur'an tells them to cover everything except one eye to see the way, pointing to their Khan and Hilali translation of 24:31. Blah!

Who are those who have angered Allah? I agree with Muslim scholars who said that they are those who "have knowledge but do not want to act according to their knowledge". Are these Jews? I believe some Jews yes but also some Muslims and some Christians.

For example, If you are a Muslim and know that you must pray but you do not want to pray because you are lazy, then you could evoke God's anger.

And who are those who have gone astray? Anyone who lost his way: Muslims, Christians, Jews or others. For example, you are a Muslim and you read the Qur'an regularly but you associate partners with God without knowing it. This takes place a lot in Egypt (where I come from) where you find a lot of ignorance and superstitions. One Phd thesis proved that a man who lived many years ago and is buried in a mosque called by his name where people (including highly educated ones) visit was really a man who stopped praying at one point of his life and never prayed again. They go there for blessings! Even if the man had been a good one, still you would have been associating partners with God because the translation of God's words in Chapter 72 of the Qur'an is:

(72: 18) And places of worship are for Allah, so do not invoke with Allah anyone.

Certainly we do not want to evoke God's anger and we do not want to lose our way. That's why I always pray: O Allah show us the truthful thing as true (right) and make us follow it and show us the untruthful thing as untruthful (wrong) and make us avoid it.

And that is why reciting Al Fatiha in every prayer with all your heart which only happens when you reflect on the meanings will protect you from evoking God's anger and from losing your way. Amen

I looked at that link on al-sunnah.com - makes me embarrassed to tell my non-muslim colleages that I am a Muslim. Surely the various peoples will be judged by Allah, not by Saudi scholars - or have I missed something?

Your love shown for the Quran is awsome and beautiful. I am slowly learning to understand the book you love so much through my husband's teachings. I have only just begun my journey but have already fallen in love not only with the words of the Quran but the people who fallow them.

Origins of the Koran

"...While modern Muslims may be committed to an impossibly conservative position, Muslim scholars of the early years of Islam were far more flexible, realizing that parts of the Koran were lost, perverted, & that there were many Thousand variants which made it impossible to talk of the Koran.

ie. As-Suyuti (d 1505), one of the most famous/revered of the commentators of the Koran, quotes Ibn ëUmar al Khattab as saying: "Let No one of you say that he has acquired the entire Quran, for how does he know that it is all? Much of the Quran has been Lost, thus let him say, "I have acquired of it what is availableí"
Aíisha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, says, also according to a tradition recounted by as-Suynti, "During the time of the Prophet, the chapter of the Parties used to be Two Hundred verses when read. When ëUthman edited the copies of the Quran, only the current (verses) were recorded".

As-Suyuti also tells this story about Uba ibn Kaíb, - great companion of Muhammad:

This famous companion asked one of the Muslims, "How many verses in the chapter of the Parties?" He said, "Seventy-three verses." He (Uba) told him, "It used to be almost equal to the chapter of the Cow (about 286 verses) & included the verse of the stoning..."

As noted earlier, since there was No single document collecting all the revelations, after Muhammadís death in 632 CE, many of his followers tried to gather all the known revelations and write them down in codex form.
Soon we had the codices of several scholars such as Ibn Masud, Uba ibn Kaíb, ëAli, Abu Bakr, al-Aswad, & others (Jeffery, chapter 6, has listed Fifteen primary codices, & a large number of secondary ones). As Islam spread, we eventually had what became known as the metropolitan codices in the centers of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kufa, Basra.."

Uthmanís codex was supposed to standardize the consonantal text, yet we find that many of the variant traditions of this consonantal text survived well into the fourth Islamic century. The problem was aggravated by the fact that the consonantal text was unpointed, that is to say, the dots that distinguish, for example, a "b" from a "t" or a "th" were missing. Several other letters (f & q; j, h, & kh; s & d; r & z; s and sh; d & dh, t & z) were indistinguishable.
In other words, the Koran was written in a scripta defectiva...."


The rest at: http://www.sullivan-county.com/x/koran_prob.htm