Salmiya

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...