The Qur'an

So, for my first month of sagely living (see previous post) I'm going to be reading and studying the Qur'an (the Koran), the holy book of the Muslims as revealed by God to the prophet Muhammed. I chose this book for many reasons, some of which political, some of which spiritual, but I've simply never read it at all and there are a lot of people who have (20% of the world). Because school is starting in a week, and because I'm always trying to balance my life, I didn't want to overload on Chinese Medicine (though I was very tempted to read and translate The Art of War). I'm happy to be beginning this project and I chose Thomas Cleary's "Essential Koran" translation as a starting point.

There are some interesting things I've already learned. For one, the idea that reading the Qur'an in English is rather impossible task. As I've written here before about the limited nature of English, and the multi-layered meanings inherent in languages like Chinese and Arabic, a translation of this book into English lacks a great deal at the onset. Cleary understands this and creates some devices to help stretch English, like using poetic phrasing and pronouns. However, this is one of those things that would be hard to understand even if I did speak Arabic:

The text of the Qur'an reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word. It is as if human language were scattered into a thousand fragments like a wave scattered into drops against the rocks at sea. The Qur'an displays human language with all the weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before a power which is infinitely greater than man can imagine. -- Seyyid Hussein Nasr

Thus, "the dramatic shifts in person, mood, tense, and mode become exhilirating exercises in perspective and translation of consciousness into a new manner of perception."
Whoah.