Jewels of the Quran 2022

quent matters so the jewels of the quran relate to the makhasid of the quran
so he defines the 763 verses are he calls them jewels
and then he has 741 he calls durar
pearls these are the two types of verses that he's identifying
that essentialized the meaning of the book of allah the first one is embodied in la illah
and the second one is embodied in muhammad rasulullah so all of the quran
can be divided into la illah and muhammad
that tell you who your lord is they tell you his nature his attributes
his actions um what he wants from us what he doesn't want from us what will happen if we do
what he wants what will happen and so the the it tells us about god
the the the pearls are those that tell us about how to get
to god now it's very interesting that he chose to use jewels because the jewel is formed uh in the earth but the pearl
is formed in an animal and the pearl and and one of the things
she's allowed to you know rumi says is that the heart
is he says it's like encased in the mother of pearl and the pearl emerges
because of sand that gets into the the oyster and so the oyster releases this
um to in case the the in the same way that in when you get sick very often
your body will actually put something around the the uh what's harmful in the body to
protect the body from it so it will actually isolate what's dangerous so what happens with the this aggravation
inside the oyster shell is what creates the pearl and so what he's saying is
that allah is going to aggravate you with all these trials and tribulations
and if you respond appropriately you your heart will become like that pearl
that that it's it's the aggravations and the tribulations of life that will actually bring you into
that beautiful state now you have to dive into the ocean to get the pearls
so it's the deep dive that he's asking us to take in life not to stay at the
shore not to look at the ocean and say oh it's nice no to to go in and so
that's what what what he's doing so these are like for instance just to give
you some examples this is the first one that he uses about the jawahar
he made for you the earth a firash what is a firash
is a bed facade says the earth is neither too hard nor
too soft it's perfect to build on because if it was too hard you couldn't build on it if it was too soft you could
build on if it was rock you couldn't build on it it was sand you couldn't build but he made it this perfect
uh uh like a bed because you don't want a bed that's too hard you're uncomfortable and
you don't want a bed that's too soft because you won't you'll wake up in a bad state
so and then he and was so he made the heaven a canopy a roof
what does a roof do it protects you now we know that we're getting constantly bombarded with radiation and we've got
van allen's belts that are protecting we know now that we really do have a roof
over the earth that's protecting us from cosmic radiation and then a sema
and then so he brought forth from the heaven that he sent down this water and it brought forth the the provision the
fruits of the earth but is
so do not set up undead the nid is somebody who is equal to god and nobody
lisa committed
everything that occurs to your mind allah than that and so the nid is the opposite and that's why a man once came
to the prophet and and he said something and he said
if god wants and you want he says don't put me equal with god because the
wow makes it like they're equal so so you're supposed to say in insha allah
you know you you say something that shows you the separation the difference uh as opposed to a conjunctive
approach and so uh and then this is a beautiful this is in arabic
it's called the joomla this is important because people that associate idols with god out of
ignorance unless the message comes to them the they're living according to the dominant school
and so allah is telling us once you know don't do that if you're living in
ignorance then allah doesn't take people to account until he sends a messenger the more test
said you know you know rasulullah we we don't punish
them until we send a rasool but i said it was that
that the the maturity and the athari they say no it's the rasool that has to come and then
maturity have a nice nuance uh about that too because they do recognize some
um responsibility with with tamiyas and aqua
so another one is
if my servants ask about me say i'm near uji would that with today i will answer
the call of the one calling the prayer of the one calling it when he calls me felies
so let them respond to me in other words if you want god to respond to your prayers respond to his call
and the word is the same so god calls us and we call god
why should we expect god to answer our prayers if we're not answering his call it's
even though allah nonetheless we should answer his call
so and then he says will you be let them or you know let them believe in me
in order for them to be rightly guided which is
kind of intelligence in your behavior so prudence you know
being rasheed
so allah testifies that there is no god but
except for god well and the angels puts and this is very interesting
because these are so it's the angels justify and those who have
knowledge this is this is uprightness and justice
repeat it again
and this is tokid you know it's for it's asserting and and you do this when somebody might
have some doubt about it that's when you use it he could have said adino and allah islam but when he
said innadina and allah islam it's it's for anybody who has any doubt dispel that doubt this
is god speaking and saying that the religion with god is al-islam
and you know some translate that as submission which is true but it also means the religion that
the prophet isaiah gave so it's not simply submission it's both submission and
this religion that we call alisna
and then also another jauhar wamam and [Music]
so anything that crawls on the earth is a dabba there's not a creature in the earth nor
a uh a a bird flying with its two wings
except that they are communities like unto you i mean now we know this in with zoology i mean
it's amazing the communities of animals and and how they commune with one another how they live all these things
they actually have pilgrimages i wrote a a an essay on this
about all the amazing pilgrimages that animals do to these places even the butterflies
the monarch butterfly goes to one place birds will fly across the ocean it's quite stunning
what they do fly across the ocean and one of the things about the birds when they're in flight they say is that they will
literally forego any temptations on the journey they're completely focused so even if they see like a fish they would
normally get they will focus and not be distracted which is why uh in the great um
poem of the uh the birds the thirty birds that set out uh for god i mean uh the persian poet
used the the birds as an analogy of that and so
and then allah says we have not
omitted anything from this book you know there's one of this
syrian scholars in orientalist said to him do you really believe that you know that god hasn't omitted anything in the book he
said absolutely he said so you can tell me like how many loaves of bread you
could cook in a in a uh in a bag of flour
and he said it it's in the quran he said where and he told one of the students go get so-and-so so we went and
got him he came he said how many loaves in a in a bag of flour he said the little bag i can get five out of it the
big bag i can get 20. and he's and he's he said well there's your answer he said
that's not in the quran he said yes it is an expert and he said he's the baker
i have a audience here that's completely silent you have permission to laugh
that's like you know these poor um comedians that say something and then nobody laughs it's a horrible feeling
so [Music]
this is one of the most extraordinary rhetorically extraordinary verses um it's really a stunning verse then it
was said earth swallow up your water and sky hold back and the water subsided the command was fulfilled the ark settled on
the mount of judy and it was said gone are those evil doing people
and then ya yohanas [Music]
this is it now in the pearl so i'm just giving examples from these so this
is now related to the path all those other ones were about god and how and
how god operates in the world this is about the path this is the very first commandment in the quran
is the first commandment linearly this is the first commandment
chronologically this is the first commandment linearly in the book so this is the very first commandment that allah
gives in his book telling us to worship our lord who created us
so don't get into door and tesselso this actually negates dor and tasensel which is amazing because these are the two
problems what they call the chicken and egg problem in philosophy in order to ward off harm in order to to
guard yourselves but also to be mindful to be conscientious so the allegories of the jewels and the
valuables in the quran he goes into these symbols so he he has he has these
names the red brim stone al-kibrita tiriyaka rakbar and
what he's showing is one of imam al-khazadi's contentions is
everything in creation has a meaning that the physical presence of it
is has to be penetrated in order to get to the meaning so for instance uh sheikh
bin habib is divine he says
that allah's creation are our meanings set up in images and whoever understands
these meanings is from the people of discernment and so he's using these to show you
that everything is like what is an antidote well
an antidote will protect you from sumum but he's saying that the quran is an antidote
and so so this thing that's in the world has a metaphysical reality what is
the the red the red brimstone or the red sulfur was
a an alchemical term that was used for it was a substance that's apparently
extremely rare and whoever finds it is able to transmute lead into gold and so
he uses this as a metaphor for the spiritual path that transmutes the toxic lead of the nafs into the spiritual gold
of the ruach and also in mizkad alfar so
this is something that that somebody for instance allah
the beauty of ood or musk is that it this smell comes from it and so
those righteous people what he's saying is that it's similar to that is that the the the presence
that they have is like fragrant musk and uh and then alos it it's only when
you burn it that it produces a beautiful smell and so this is another metaphor that
sometimes allah has to burn you in order to bring forth what's what's beautiful and so these
again are the trials and tribulations of life so he uses these as analogies um for them and so he says that
alloswood is smoke rising from the ashes of god's punishment of hypocrites and his enemies brings great benefit to
believers the fame of a person of knowledge spreads everywhere like musk even if that person prefers obscurity so
one of the things uh even says he says that um
that uh that whoever worships you know wants obscurity is abdul uh al-humul like if
you want obscurity then you're a slave of obscurity if you want fame you're a slave of fame and he said
the servant of god is the same whether he he makes him well known or he keeps in in obscurity and
that obscurity is a great blessing that people refuse and fame is a great tribulation that
people desire and the prophet isaiah said it's enough for a fitnah for a person that people
when he walks by they point at him with their fingers say oh there goes so and so
and many people that become famous they they end up really
wishing i mean there's some people that are addicted to these things but they wish that they had uh remain in obscurity and then he says
that the antidote is cures from the poisons of heresy passions and errors entering the soul and then the kibrita
that which turns the essence of the soul from the vices of a beast and the era of ignorance to the purity of the angels
and their spirituality so these are all things and then he gives an incredible presentation of
al-fatiha opening up these eight doors of paradise bismillah
according to the majority of the quran
begins with bismuth his recitation begins with
alhamdulillah raheem again or maddie omega
those are the um that was a review just of what we did
last year in all the sessions so you i i wanted to bring it back so that we could then look
at these and there are a few things that i wanted to the book that i'm going to be using for this is a book based on the jawahar so
this translation was done by dr thomas cleary it's called the essential quran the
heart of islam an introductory selection of readings from the quran so dr cleary
i think did us a great service in this book because it's
an incredibly accessible book for a lot of people um to get to the heart of the quran
without having to read the entire quran and the the notes that he wrote in the back
are really really quite stunning but one of the most beautiful aspects of this book is the
introduction and i think that um he really
gave us a a beautiful summation of the purpose of the quran in
that so that's the book that i'm going to be using but i also want to draw your
attention i will on sunday i'm going to be talking about this book with the book club before i talk about
[Music] the arborist translation so this book is by bruce lawrence it's
from the lives of great religious books from princeton university press it's called the quran
k-o-r-a-n and he distinguishes between quran which is arabic and quran which is translation so he actually
prefers to keep the old which is the same one that dr clear used here
most muslims prefer the transliterated one where you have a l q u r and then
have a [Music] a little apostrophe for the
the hamza quran like that but he this is a biography of the quran
in english and one of the things that is important for us to come to terms with
is that english has become a preeminent islamic language for whatever reasons
it's my native tongue it's not my ancestors native tongue my ancestors native tongue was gaelic
but it is my native tongue now because the english colonized
ireland and scotland and and cut their tongues out for speaking gaelic so um 800 years of that
now the irish are actually quite eloquent in the english language in fact they're noted for their poetry
um so but it is an important language
it's the language of academia many people from other countries
write in english most scientific papers have to ultimately be published in english to be
well read so it's become a really important religious
language we forget that the south asians were colonized from 18 from
the late 18th century well into the 20th century 1947 the
indian subcontinent which is one of the most important lands of islam was colonized by the british the british
basically instituted english as a formal language in education the south asians actually became very
very skilled at english many of them read english literature and and for that reason some of the best
translations of the quran were actually originally produced by south asians
believe it or not the the reason why the indian and pakistanis began originally
they were all indian but the the reason why the indians
translated the quran was because they actually wanted to address the mistranslations of the ones
that were in english that were translated by religious
uh usually protestants that wanted to proselytize in the muslim world so they
were responses and one of the the main movements against the religious proselytization proselytization of
christianity in india was the ahmadiyya movement so this is how
ahmed became famous because he would debate the christians and
one of his students muhammad ali did the the ahmadi quran
which is published in ohio and still can be found in almost any bookstore in the united
states because they've been publishing that quran i think it's in its 50th edition
there are other great translations of the quran that come
later you have marmaduk pickthal who was influenced by he was at the woking
masjid in um in england which was an ahmadi masjid so he was actually influenced by the
mawlana muhammad ali translation but he was a very famous
novelist in england and he became muslim he's actually one of the most prominent english people to become muslim and he
wrote uh he he ended up learning arabic uh the nizam of hyderabad who at the
time was the single richest man in the world he was i don't want to
compare him odiously to some of our oligarchs just interesting aside here i kind of
was fascinated by the fact that the all the russian billionaires are called oligarchs but they don't call our
billionaires oligarchs i mean that's very interesting so
the the he was a billionaire by today's standards and he basically was the
patron of marmaduke pickthal he gave him a good salary and he was able to translate the quran in hyderabad where
he was living at the time became a very important quran aj arbury who was a professor he was a
student of dr nicholson he also did what i think is the most eloquent in english of the
translations of the quran we can debate on these things and i know there's a lot of debates about that but
i would say that now the other resource that i want to bring to light here
is the lights of revelation this
this is such an incredible work and i have to say that dr jibril haddad who is a really
brilliant scholar incredibly meticulous really really knows the tradition he i
know one of his teachers was a brilliant arabist and islamic scholar
but really really deeply steeped in the arabic language he
he really praised him as a student he said he was really an excellent student but he has become a sheikh in his own
right this is a fantastic if you want to to take a deep dive into how our great
scholars looked at the quran this is the first hisp of the quran translated it has the
arabic for those who can read arabic it actually has the arabic in it but it's
it's really a stunning work and and the meticulousness i mean the the amount of
scholarship that went into this this is worth 10 phds in my estimation
um the uh yeah so
and then the book this is arabic this is a very nice uh edition of imam al-bagui it's a slightly
abridged edition but imam bawi and imam al-bagawi were the two
most popular madrasa tafsirs
the jellalain was a a very basic tafsir and it's very useful and there is an addition
that was done by uh the translator aisha beuli who's an american she actually did her
arabic at university of berkeley nearby berkeley university uc berkeley but she
lives in england and she's translated many works but she actually did a translation for faja publications of the
jalalene the jalalene is an incredibly useful aid to understanding the quran because
it fills in a lot of the lacunae and one of the [Music]
students that was at a regular in singapore were actually in malaysia but she was
from singapore really wonderful um somebody did a lot of work for the
singapore muslim community but she had taken a course uh at university that really unsettled
her and one of one of because one of the things that the professor said is that
the quran is filled with lacunae in other words things that have to be filled in by commentary
and she couldn't understand how a revelation why would god
give us a book that has these lacunae and at the time
i don't think i gave her a uh the best answer but it really got me thinking a lot
about that and one of the things that occurred to me was
in in the ayah in which allah says this is a reminder for you and your
people imam malik said it's saying so and so said about the quran
so and so said about the quran so and so said so it's the is not tradition and
one of the really important aspects and something that i've focused on for probably 30 years since i've come back
to the united states is really trying to drive home to our community the importance
of traditional chains of transmission one of the few areas where it's really
left is in tishweed because people still do learn tischweid based on a synod
but in most of the other sciences and there's undeniably been a delusion of islam so
a lot of people you know go collect is not and people give them freely and
um so it's not it's just like you have diploma mills so are you gonna get
the doctor who trained at johns hopkins or are you gonna get the doctor
uh that you know is a quack and and uh you know
got got a naturopathic diploma from a uh
you know an online course they did for six weeks
i mean there are people that do that you know it's quite and that's not to say because naturopathic there are
naturopathic colleges that are are reputable
um like the one in portland and i think harvard actually has now a naturopathic program
so uh that that's the difference so it's very important to know
that um you know the importance of of chains of transmission
and and that's why i think there are lacunae is because allah
has forced us to be reliant on transmission
that the quran has to be transmitted in that way the prophet explained the quran to his
people his life was an explanation of it and in in any uh
in any case those are just some initial reflections um
so uh the first question comes in how much of the quran is literal and how much is metaphorical and ambiguous can we rely
on one particular approach in understanding the quran or should we apply different approaches there are
the quran has there are very few actual hazy verses in the quran
that are problematic but there are many things in the quran that can be taken metaphorically the the
methodology of sunnah is not to esotericize the quran
but to recognize that there are esoteric interpretations the prophet saws said in a hadith that the
ayah has a had and it has a vahron and a botnun and a muthala or a matala
so the he's indicating that there are four
levels of interpretation and in even in traditional western uh
christian interpretation they had four levels of interpretation so they had the the historical the out the allegorical
the the moral and then the anagogical so there are ways multiple ways of
interpreting things so for instance uh in allah says that some of the verses are
hazy with the shabby hat and then others are they're they're they're they're they're
come they're they're they're clear in their meanings and those who have sickness in their
heart tend to esotericize and wander off into the occult um so we we uh
we we're people of the inward and the outward and we assert that there has to be a balance between the two
that's that's the sunni tradition and and the shia really also
next question for someone beginning to read the quran in translation how can the jews of the quran be discovered
without one being overwhelmed was a good question i mean we have to recognize the limits of translation but also we have
to recognize the benefits of translation so even reading the quran in arabic if
you're not trained in balara and sarf
you have to be very careful and not many people even modern arabs who've gone through 12 years of arabic education or
even into college they don't have the type of grammatical skills or rhetorical
skills that people that went to traditional madrasa acquired and still acquire in places
where where they they're focused on so you still have i mean there's great grammarians in mauritania geraldo benbe
is an extraordinary grammarian he's a rhetorician he's a logician and so
you have to be careful translations are problematic they they um
there are many possibilities some verses literally you will get it's not that
common but in some of the contraries you'll get very extremely different interpretations as if they're almost
like completely opposite so imam al-khazadi's work can sometimes
roughly be divided into works for scholars and works for the average muslim that's true where did the jewels
of the quran fit in i think it fits in an educated muslim i think if you're if
you have a good level of education and i'm not talking about so much islamic education i think you can
benefit greatly from the jewels of the quran but it's a really good question because
there are works that are for scholars and then there are works i i look at it like prescription and
over-the-counter um you know there's things you can buy over the counter
and they're not going to be harmful you read the side and it says you know it might say we recommend that you
ask your doctor before you use this so but generally over the counters are are
pretty safe but even tylenol can kill so
even with just going um you can get into trouble so you just
have to be careful but i i do believe that we should if we don't have access to the arabic my first reading i became
muslim from reading the quran dr almar became muslim from reading the autobiography of malcolm x
there's different ways to get to islam but my experience was with george sales
quran which is pretty amazing because as a really old that was that 1734
was and george sale the first one was uh robert of kenton
uh back in the in 1643 was the first translation into latin
which is actually considered a good translation apparently in latin my latin's too rusty to read that but
um [Music] but uh george sale there was an argument because it was
reprinted in america in 1832 i think and they actually in the introduction
claimed that he was probably a crypto muslim because he he was too he was
he was too uh relatively neutral not entirely i mean
he does you know they you people people have to realize that at that time you had to say nasty things
about islam or you'd be accused of being a muslim and could really get into trouble
it was a different world and so a lot of people don't understand that that that
about that nature of that time is there any methodology method methodical common ground between how
al-khazadi approached the quranic text and the way ibn arabi approaches it well there's two even arabies i mean there
are more than two but the two main ones when you're talking about the quran tend to be
abu bakr binarabhi who was a student of the imam al-ghazadis
and he was largely although he had a commentary that was apparently multi-volume
unfortunately it it was lost with the fall of andre lucia but he did do a four
volume known as if you're talking about mahidin ibn
arabi who was a 13th century scholar
and mystic and he's more known for what some people term theosophy which is
like spiritual philosophy but i uh if so i don't know which one you you
you mean but i would say in terms of even out of the aldi
he's very much focused on camera quran but it has beautiful insights if you
want his more [Music] spiritual book it's called
which is a fantastic book that got published beautifully it was a book i waited for 25 years for and it was
finally done in a really good edition by a friend of mine from algeria um so
it's it's a stunning book rajon and has just amazing insights into it
and he does deal with the quran ibn arabi did there is a a tafsir there is a tough
seer attributed to him which i bought in fez in 1978 my first trip to fess
i actually bought it in a bookstore and i i could have no it wouldn't be possible for me to
have been able to read it at that time but but i did buy it so i have that copy still in my library
that was probably written by his student al hashani but it uses a methodology in which
is consistent one if you read just a few chapters you will learn his methodology
and then it becomes relatively easy to navigate what he's doing so usually for instance
he'll interpret as the heart allah brings the earth back to life
after its death so the heart is the place of cultivation it's where you cultivate good deeds or you cultivate
bad deeds so you're sowing seeds in your heart and you water that that heart with either good deeds or bad deeds so the
seeds grow and the heart either becomes virtuous or vicious and so
what he's that that that's one of his approaches um it doesn't deny the outward either
and so he was not a esotericist i mean even
and even tamiya has his criticisms particularly but even tamiya does say
that he benefited greatly from his book the future so even to me i read ibn aarovi i would not recommend ibn aurobi
i am not an ibrahim scholar by any stretch um i i have read in the future
but i i would not recommend it's that level of
is for it's like trying to go to a a quantum physics book before you've
learned basic physics so i i would not recommend it and see
who i feel more close to uh asked his sheikh about ibn arabi and he
said in other words i don't want to say anything and he asked him again he said
look some people say he was a kotab and some people say he wasn't a muslim he said i say it to sleep you know just
stay out of the debate yeah you don't want to make took fear of people that aren't kafir and
um there's there's a book by uh i think it's called tambihal rabbi
lehmann you know waking up the idiot uh in his making tak
fear of ibn arabi that uh siuti so
you know even arabi was highly honored in the ottoman tradition um
and but he is a he is a contentious um uh even amongst some of the great
scholars uh one of the greatest scholars of islamic tradition is the great
the renewer of the second millennium he did not agree with ibn aurobi and he
actually wrote his own understanding of tohid to
counter the understanding that was presented by ibrahirovi but he didn't make takfir
these are debates so we should be very careful about these
i just want to ask if there are any tips for a mother who struggles with a baby and at the same time wants to finish the quran and understand it well first of
all you get a great reward in struggling with your baby don't throw the baby out with the
bathwater so sometimes you know you just have these problems one of the great
stories that we have in in the western tradition is the story of
the pied piper of hamlin which is about a rat infestation in this
town and so this piper comes to town and says he can get rid of all the rats
and and so he pipes them all out and they follow him and he he destroys them but then
they won't pay him so he gets really angry so he pipes the children out and they all go into a cave and disappear
and they lose their children i i liken that to people that use the
television to get rid of the rattiat the pesky aspect of children um you're gonna pay the piper by losing
your children so it's very important just to be patient with children
the idea of leaving a child crying uh a young infant
crying uh like this that's how the they say the generation of the nazis was a result of
a kind of dr spock book that was published in the 1880s on how to raise
children and and it was all about punitive measures it was all about not
you know letting them cry themselves to sleep it created a generation of people that lost empathy so it's really important to
have empathic children the way you get that according to erickson a psychiat
psychologist that i really liked when i was a read psychology in college you know he had the
these um crises developmental crises and the first one was trust versus mistrust
so if a child knows that it's in a trustworthy family it's going to resolve that crisis but if you're ignoring the
child it's going to really traumatize that child early on
and i'm more and more convinced that most of the problems in the world are a direct result of childhood trauma
um do you have any reflections on nj dawud's attempt to present the quran in the order of revelation rather than
compilation how reliable is the order he offers nj dilutes an interesting
this is one of the important translations that emerges in the 19th century
it was published at the turn of the century in i think the everyman library or something so it
actually became quite widely read it's still in print
we do know that imam ali had a a must-have that was based on
the actual dates of revelation so imam ali kept
that and but it's lost and even jose and kelby said if we had it we
would have access to great knowledge so it's unfortunate
there there are some interesting aspects to what he did it's not entirely
uh verifiable but some of it is i mean we do know when some things were revealed
although one of the miracles of the quran is that as it was coming down gibril was saying
put this here put this there and so which is a much more miraculous way to
do a book i mean it wasn't just given to him in any linear fashion
so um yeah i would take that with a grain of mila
next one
okay i got it you don't have to spell it out
can you please shed light on the idea of a poetic translation of the quran we have a popular product translation of
the quran in the sindhi language by murphy i mean i would argue that
the quran is stunningly powerful we don't call it out of adapt to the
quran but to use the word uh you know somebody
who watched gary wills is what is the quran they we got some emails saying oh he called
it poetry well if you look up poetry in the in the dictionary it has different
meanings and one of them is just beautiful language like we could say his speech was pure
poetry just meaning it was really beautiful and eloquent that's all it means so
there is a translation right now i think it's being done by dr bruce lawrence i don't know if he's finished
it but he wrote this book on the quran in english and he's actually doing one in verse which i personally
wouldn't do because the quran says
you know we did not teach him poetry and it's not appropriate for him
the great algerian mujahid and scholar
who fought the french and was a scholar in his own right has an incredible commentary on the quran
called it's really one of the most amazing books i've ever read
but he and he has a book called tempeh rafi
that i read many many years ago and really benefited from it he says in that book
that the reason that the the they call the prophet's poets is because
a poet is doing something that other people can't do
and and when you hear a great poet uh it just it's quite amazing
and and so there's a there's a there's an inspiration
that is clearly part of a great poet in fact many poets will
tell people that they just the poem was there
frost talks about that and then there's the craft of poetry also
but um the the quran is definitely not poetry
but whoever translated translates it should really have an extraordinary
gift with the language he's translating it into one of the reasons why i really really
like dr cleary's translation is that
he he has this minimalist style which and the quran is very very
minimalist despite its extraordinary eloquence it has a really stunning
um conciseness what's called e-jazz it has ilpanet but generally
e-jazz is is and and he really he has that and he has a
just a very interesting word diction um one of the things that um
bruce dr bruce uh says about
dr cleary's translation he says
that he actually mentions me in light of because he does say um
and he does he he that there's an american who who did his own uh translation of the quran
he's not a muslim but his name is sandal burke and he mined cleary for constructing his
own hybrid version of the quran but he had read he he did it because he wanted americans to know more about islam after
9 11. but one of the things that he said is he read all these different commentaries but it was dr cleary's commentary that really
grabbed him but because it was in copyright he didn't use it he ended up using one that
was out of copyright but dr clear he says here that the translation is
it can be problematic right because for instance that
he seems to lose his way in rendering evil as ill a drastic d metaphysical reading of what
are often used as apotropaic texts and that's because in in
in the the chapter anes he says in the name of god the
compassionate the merciful he says or in dawn rather right he says
say i take ref