Salmiya

When I recently visited Yemen , I had read about a sensation which had happened more than 30 years ago. When restoring parts of the Grand Mosque in Sana’a in 1972, workers stumbled in a small niche between the outer and inner structure of the roof across fragments of paper manuscripts. Careless as they were, they packed the pages into potato bags and subsequently forgot about them. Years later, the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, Qadhi Ismail al-Aqwa’, realized that he had to ask for international assistance to study what is now known as one of the oldest versions of the Holy Qur’an. It was the German Qur’anic paleographic Gerhard R. Puin who started the restoration of the tens of thousands of fragments of the Holy Scripture. Little has been published in the meantime since the message might be too disturbing for the common faithful Muslim. See the article by Toby Lester in The Atlantic Monthly here . In upcoming August, there might be another heavy dispute about the hid...

Pentecost might be the right holiday for asking this simple question: Can Christians, or even agnostics , be touched by verses of the Holy Qur’an? Yes, they can (we are not in Obama’s campaign here). Some years ago, when I had just moved to Kuwait, which is a very conservative Islamic country, I got a gift from my brother, Navid Kermani’s doctoral thesis about the beauty of the Qur’an . Its main topic (on a bit more than 500 pages) was, in particular, what Muslims know as i‛ğāz , meaning the miracle of the supernatural beauty of their Holy Book. I am quite convinced that he (my brother) has not read it, but on me it had a profound effect. It is, of course, a scientific text but easy to read and of admirably persuasive power. The effect was twofold. I first became interested in the Qur’an, and even religion at large. And then I detected that I am not really religious. The holy book I am more familiar with, the Bible, obviously lacks beauty and poetry, and Kermani, a German-Iranian orien...