The children's caretakers were all black, all women, and all overweight. I'd gone to 117th Street in Harlem and stood there, a blond, skinny white kid, and led them down the hot tiles to 110th Street, to Central Park. It was a sweltering day. The caretakers were not enjoying themselves overly much, I could tell, because it was a long walk, and the children, all multiple-handicapped, rode in wheelchairs. The caretakers had to push them.
We huffed our way up to the Central Park meadow that slopes down to the stream just west of the Conservatory Gardens at 105th Street. A solitary rock outcrop juts from the grass there. Granite schist, I'd learned. Scarified during the Pleistocene. Later, it became the image I used in The Earthstone, the star-crossed musical that started me on my artistic journey so long ago. This was 1976.
The long and short of it was that, despite their protestations, I convinced the caretakers to unbuckle the children and let them flop around in the grass. I fed the kids Yellow Sorrel (lemon grass), showed them Asiatic Dayflowers up close, let them smell the earth, and shared other acclimatization experiences I thought were so important to the human soul back then.
Later, at the waterfall, I guided the hand of a big, non-verbal Hispanic boy into the water. His squeals of delight will stay with me forever. Most city children have never felt a waterfall. I'm sure he never had, and probably hasn't since. I was a dreamer then.
But that's not what this blog is about. This blog is about that fact that I'm reading The Koran. But before I mention to much more about it, it's important I suppose to tell the story of how I came to own my two-volume set of Abdullah Yusuf Ali's 1934 edition of
The Meaning of The Glorious Qur'an, translated into English.
I bought it on Sixth Avenue extended, in Harlem, about 114th Street, on my walk back home that day. After I'd dropped off the heat-exhausted caretakers and the happy, flopping kids, I passed a modest storefront with Islamic lettering across the lintel, so I walked in. Back then, I was open to everything, fancying as I did that I was on a spiritual journey.
A beautiful black woman stood behind the counter. Her eyes widened dramatically, as only the eyes of a surprised black woman can, but she was civil and curious and greeted me kindly. I smiled and browsed, knowing nothing of Islam. Always in the market for strange tomes, my eyes fell upon The Glorious Qur'an so I bought it, both tomes.
It couldn't, I assumed, be any stranger than Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, my current thought-shattering reading at the time.
Mr. Ali's translation has sat upon my bookshelf nigh these thirty years. I cracked it open briefly a few years back, sensed fire and brimstone, and so put it away. But this Christmas break, if that's what I can call it, I've decided to read it seriously, curious as I am about the belief system that encourages people to detonate themselves in our soldiers' mess halls.
I have found passages which help to explain it. Muslims are no different, as far as the human species goes, from Christians, Jews, Hindus or anybody else with a sacred book system. Raised in a fervent milieu, we all imprint early and deeply. Muslims are, I have discovered by reading The Koran, a very proud people. They are most proud--if they are Believers--of their purity.
"I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Wasn't that our own Nathan Hale? The young spy hanged by the British during The Revolution? Of course, Hale did not voluntarily take his own life. But reading The Koran, I'm beginning to understand why so many Muslims do.
The Koran teaches--along with specific edicts regarding justice, the dispensation of property and women, proper pilgrimmage practices and other "how to live" rules--a profound distrust of anyone who is not a Believer in Islam.
Exhortations toward this distrust permeate the text, and no good Muslim will disagree with me. Although there are occasional citations regarding some few acceptable individuals among the "People of the Book" (that is, Jews and Christians)--with Christians held in slightly higher regard--they don't marshall nearly as much authority as the rule that it is best to distrust all Unbelievers generally. Those outside the Judeo/Christain/Islamic belief system are, if one reads The Koran, destined for God's ultimate penalty, the Eternal Fires, no matter how devout and kind they might be within their own beliefs.
But with Islam, Belief is behavior, and the behavior of those who have Faith has been spelled out in no uncertain terms by the Prophet.
Allow me to quote a few Koranic passages:
Sura II
2. "This is the Book:
In it is guidance sure, without doubt,
To those who fear God."
6. "As to those who reject Faith,
It is the same to them
Whether thou warn them
Or not warn them;
They will not believe."
10. "In their hearts is a disease;
And God has increased their disease:
And grievous is the penalty they (incur),
Because they are false."
And later, in Section 216:
"Fighting is prescribed
For you, and ye dislike it.
But it is possible
Ye dislike a thing
Which is good for you,
And love a thing
Which is bad for you.
But God knoweth,
And ye know not."
The most telling line, though, I 've found thus far, which is repeated often, is:
"Tumult and oppression
Are worse than slaughter."
These are among the more gentle, more non-specific exhortations to be found in this last of the great Middle Eastern spiritual texts. Yet, read in the light of deep Belief, they constitute direct instructions to Muslims who feel oppressed.
So one might create a portmanteau of Nathan Hale's famous patriotic statement for today's Muslim insurgent:
"I regret that I have but one life to give for my Faith."
