Drinking the Koran

By: David Stansfield | August 05, 2009 | Non Fiction

The divinity of the script also meant that to this day it had to look as if it had been handwritten, for there were no printing presses in Muhammad’s time, and it was hard to imagine God with an IBM Selectric. This obliged even 20th-century print shops to have three versions of each Arabic letter font, for the beginning, middle and end of words, so that when the fonts were strung together it looked as if the word had been written out in a flowing cursive hand.

Moving through a Roman-script landscape back in Europe was Roman in every sense of the word, with its forbidding inorganic columned typeface, with the more important text spelled out in the sternest shape of all: the eponymous “Times Roman” of the august newspaper, its capital letters standing guard over the culture, serifs cocked at head and foot like so many epaulettes and spurs. Moving through an Arabic-script landscape, on the other hand, was to saunter through an organic, lazy-lettered world where even the STOP sign – qif – instead of standing at attention, lay flat on its back like a lizard basking in the sun with flies bobbing up and down on its nose.

There were other ramifications of Arabic’s celestial origin. The desert dwellers all those hundreds of years ago not only lacked vowel letters, they had no capital letters, which fact coupled with an absence of any kind of punctuation made it impossible to indicate the beginning or end of what Westerners would call a “sentence.” This, too, had hardly changed until very recent times. For God didn’t divvy up his wisdom into discrete little fragments, he spouted it in one continuous stream with no beginning and no end. The only permissible means that had been devised to indicate a new thought was to begin it with the Arabic word for “and” — wa — a practice the desert wanderers had absorbed from Aramaic and Hebrew. This explained why faithful translations of the Aramaic/Hebrew-based Old Testament such as the King James version began almost every sentence with “and,” producing that unstoppable rolling thunder of continuous biblical prose:

And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and God said let there be light and there was light and God saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness and God called the light day and the darkness he called night and the evening and the morning were the first day

Now imagine the effect of that same unstoppable divine thunder rolling through even the most mundane paragraph of everyday Arabic, whether it’s telling you what’s playing at the movies or how to make tomato soup.  As yet another echo of its divine origin, Arabic lacked a future tense, for who but God could talk about the future, which entailed by definition an attempt to create what was going to happen? This accounted for the ubiquitous Inshallah, “If God Wills,” that stood in for the English “will” or “shall,” and also for the fact that traditional Arabs regarded anyone who tried to look into the future as slightly insane. So the language not only froze the past, collapsing it into the present, it ignored the future, condemning all who spoke it to an endless now.

Even the Almighty’s grammatical mistakes were set in stone. One of my fellow students had devoted three years of his life to a doctoral dissertation on the eccentric use of the accusative case in the Qur’an. For this grammatical quirk appeared to break all the rules, an anomaly that Islamic scholars had been struggling to explain away for more than a thousand years since it was unthinkable that the Almighty could have been in error.  For an Arab to misuse his language, to tinker with its spelling or grammar — or worse still to try to modernize it by introducing foreign words — was not merely blasphemous but an act of treason, a desecration of the fundamental Arab narrative. Juliet’s “What’s in a name?/that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet” made no sense at all in the Arab world where everything was in a name.

The Arabs had summed it all up in an adage: “Wisdom has alighted on three things: the brain of the Franks, the hands of the Chinese and the tongue of the Arabs.” And all this hearkens back to the eternal nature of the Holy Qur’an.  You didn’t have to be a Muslim to believe in the sacredness of the language; it was deeply embedded in the psyche of all Arabic speakers. Although the Haidami’s were Muslim, many of their friends were Christian Arabs, but it didn’t make a jot of difference linguistically; their speech was peppered with just as many inshallahs, alhamdulillahs and other quotations from “The Reading.”  All of which goes a long way toward explaining why my Jerusalem friends were so in love with Gamal Abdul Nasser — or habeebina — as everyone called him, our darling.

Every afternoon, after yet another fruitless search for a job, Ahmed would get his pals together and escort me to an open-air café they called the muntazah where the our darling shouted at us through loudspeakers to drive Israel into the sea. If it had been in any other language, we might have had a chance to analyze the message, to criticize it. But in Arabic, whether you were Palestinian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Muslim or Christian — or simply an agnostic from Eastbourne — it was irresistible stuff, by definition uncriticizable. For every word and phrase Nasser uttered was in the language of the Qur’an, the voice of God ringing down the centuries. No wonder the Western journalists were so clueless about the Arab world. If you didn’t know the language, it was impossible to understand what was really going on when an Arab leader addressed his people. No translation could get close. It wasn’t like going from German to English, or even from Hindi to English. It was like going from another galaxy to ours. In every sense of the word, Arabic was a different script that told a different story. And all because of that Moment 1,300 years ago that had deified both its spoken and written form. I had been brought up on the joke — confirmed by generations of movies about the Almighty — that if God spoke, it would be with a British accent delivered by a classically trained actor from the “home counties” such as Lawrence Olivier. Now I knew that God only spoke Arabic. All these years Olivier had been miscast; it should have been Omar Sharif. Or better still, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was yet again exhorting us to drown the Israelis in the Mediterranean.

“So what are we waiting for?” chanted the young men in the muntazah.

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