A Jewish white woman’s view on Islam, paradise, 72 virgins and killing the unbelievers

Lasley Hazleton is an American white Jewish that has written quite a number of books on Islam and its history. She just released the autobiography on Prophet Muhammad. In a talk she delivered when she appeared in TedTalks on October 2010 at Seattles in Washington, Hazleton explained that the Quran was immensely rich in literature and knowledge. She delivered a ten minute talk “About the Koran’s idea of paradise.”

“You may have heard about the Koran’s (Quran) idea of paradise being 72 virgins But here in the North West, we’re living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise defined 36 times as ‘gardens watered by running streams.’ Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. But the thing is how come it’s news to most people?

I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who’ve begun reading the Koran, but given up disconcerted by its otherness. The historian Thomas Carlyle considered (Prophet) Muhammad as one of the world’s greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran ‘as toilsome reading as I ever undertook a wearisome confused jumble.’

Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine the Koran can be read as we usually read a book—as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach—as though God and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad were just another author on the best-seller list. Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it’s so easy to quote, that is, to misquote.

Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the highlighter version, which is the one favoured by both Muslim fundamentalist and anti-Muslim Islamaphobes.

So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Prophet Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly; as properly as I could, that is.

My Arabic’s reduced by now to wielding a dictionary. So, I took four well known translations and decided to read them side-by-side, verse-by-verse along a transliteration, and the original seventh century Arabic. Now, I did have an advantage: My last book was about the story of Shia-Sunni split, and for that I worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. I knew enough, that is, to know that I would be a tourist in the Koran, an experienced one even,  but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading some else’s holy book.

So, I read slowly. I had set aside three weeks for this project and that is, I think what is meant by hubris because it turn out to be three months. I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle of the Kora—that feeling of ‘I get it now’— it would slip away overnight. And I would come back in the morning wondering if I wasn’t lost in a strange land.  The Koran declares that it came to renew the message of the Bible and the Torah. So one-third of it reprises the Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary and Jesus. God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahwes—jealously insisting on no other gods.

The presence of camels, mountains, dessert wells and springs took me to the years I spent wondering the Sinai dessert. And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders’ hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. And I began to grasp why it’s said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.

Take the Fatiha, the opening seven verse chapter of the Koran that is the Lord’s Prayer and the Shema Israel of Islam combined. It’s just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. And yet the more you add the more seems to go missing. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. So the Koran in English is kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, “an interpretation”.

But all is not lost in translation.  As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises— a degree of environmental awareness for instance and of humans as mere stewards of God’s creation, unmatched in the Bible.

And where the Bible is exclusively addressed to men using the second or third person masculine, the Koran includes women talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honourable men and honourable women. Or take the infamous word about killing the unbelievers. Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca where fighting was usually forbidden. And the permission comes hedge about with qualifiers. Not, you must kill unbelievers in Mecca, but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over, and only if there’s no other pact in place, and only if they try to stop you (from) getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. And even then, God is merciful. Forgiveness is supreme.

This was perhaps the biggest surprise—how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. “Some of these verses are definite in meaning,” it says, “and others are ambiguous. The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities trying to create discord by pinning down meaning of their own.  Only God knows the true meaning.”

The phrase “God is subtle” appears again and again. And indeed the whole Koran is more subtle than most of us have been led to believe, for instance that little matter of virgins and paradise. Old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here. The words used four times are Houris rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair high-bosomed virgins. Yet all that is in the original Arabic is that one word: Houris; not a swelling breasts and high bosom in sight. Now this may be a way of saying pure beings—like angels—or it may be like the Greek Kouros or K’ore, but the truth is nobody really knows and that is the point because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you’ll be “a new creation in paradise” and that you will be recreated  in a form unknown to you,”  which seems to me  a far more appealing prospect than a virgin and that number 72 never appears in the Koran: there are no 72 virgins. That idea only came into being 300 years later and most Islamic scholars see as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. Paradise is quite the opposite—it’s not virginity, its fecundity, it’s plenty, its gardens watered with running streams. Thank you. (Applause and standing ovation.)

Lesley Hazleton is a British-American author whose work focuses on the intersection of politics, religion, and history, especially in the Middle East. She has described herself as “a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion”