fabrication, it might have been created to answer a controversy regarding Muslim ritual. In the second century of Islam, the seminal jurist Abanfa allowed recitation of the sra in Persian, a permission that he first granted unconditionally and then narrowed to those Muslims who did not yet have knowledge of Arabic.8
I wanted to submerge myself within the Qur’n and read it purely on its own terms, but the Qur’n does not have “its own terms.” As literature scholar David Bellos has remarked, “No sentence contains all the information you need to translate it.”9 When the Qur’n mentions trees, the heavens and earth, men, women, orphans, angels, prophets, greed, mercy, and Allh, it requires me to apply knowledge that does not exist within the Qur’n. As the Qur’n constructs its meaning through words whose meanings are determined outside its covers, I cannot explain any word in the Qur’n without using other words. Perhaps this should have been self-evident when I leaned on a stack of dictionaries, lexicons, and concordances for my “Qur’n as the best commentary on itself” project, or my own experience of life on this planet to understand what the Qur’n means when it mentions a “garden” or “fire.” I cannot speak of an unmediated encounter with the Qur’n, because every word finds meaning through whatever stands between it and myself.
Orientalist scholars have sometimes treated the Qur’n, particularly its larger sras, as structurally incoherent, charging that the Qur’n throws clusters of verses together without regard for how they relate to each other. This assumption has been challenged with closer reads of specific sras, primarily in works by non-Muslim scholars aimed at making the Qur’n’s text more accessible for non-Muslim readers.10 For my project, I decided to start with the fifty-third sra, popularly titled al-Najm (“the Star”), because this sra offers some meat on the question of gendering divinity. During my ayahuasca visions, Allh appeared as what could be called the “divine feminine,” though the Qur’n refers to Allh exclusively with male pronouns and can be read as condemning anyone who conceptualizes divinity as feminine. The fifty-third sra contains some of the Qur’n’s most heated attacks on goddess worship, even dismissing the notion that angels could be female (it appears that the pre-Islamic goddesses were believed to be Allh’s daughters and/or angels). Belief in Allh having daughters is rejected as an insult to the divine, as the fifty-third sra notes that humans prefer sons. Amid the Qur’n’s androcentrism, what could it mean that the Qur’n’s divine “he” spoke to me as a woman? I also found the fifty-third sra compelling because it discusses what could be a direct encounter between Mu
fabrication, it might have been created to answer a controversy regarding Muslim ritual. In the second century of Islam, the seminal jurist Ab