Maybe I Should Hide My Qur'an...

I just finished another conversation trying to explain why in the world I would want to read the Qur'an. Someone even said, "Isn't that that terrorist book?" I realize that was surely, surely, a joke, that this is the Bible belt, that I can stand on half the street corners in these small southern towns and see anywhere up to 3 Christian churches at one time, but are we all really this tunnel-visioned? Yes, the Bible has loads of truth in it. As does the Qur'an, and the Tao Teh Ching, and The Bhagavad Gita. I would never call myself a Universalist by any means; I don't believe we're all on different paths up the same mountain to the same God sitting at the top. However, I do believe in some great Absolute (we can call it God). I also believe that truth is available to everyone, at all places, at all times, and that this Absolute will use anyone and anything to reach us, no matter how deficient. As one thinker put it, "all the world's thoughts, all the world's most beautiful languages and literatures, are but vehicles for that ineffable message which comes to the heart in rare moments of ecstasy... For me the embodiment of that voice has been in the noble words of the Arabic Qur'an" ('Abdullah Yusuf 'Ali).

For me the embodiment of that voice has been in the words of Jesus Christ; but when I look for it, I find truth everywhere. As it says in Jeremiah 29, "You will search for me and find me when you search for me with your whole heart. I will be found by you." When I read the Bible, I find stories of love and a God that sacrifices everything just to have us. When I read the Tao Teh Ching, I find order, balance, and something universal uniting us all. When I read Nietzsche, I see what sexist, racist, ageist, nationalist man turned bitter looks like (this is a joke...). The point is that every text I read gives me a slightly bigger picture of all this--of life and God. Why wouldn't I read the Qur'an?

I'm tired of saying we're Christians when we've never read a single Sutra or Surah or Veda, much less our own Bible, and the same goes for professed atheists. We say we're Christians or atheists or whatever, but we're really just ignorant. And as far as Agnostics go, you can't choose doubt as a philosophy of life any more than you can choose immobility as a form of transportation (Life of Pi). Agnosticism may be a stage in life (I'll attest), but it's no place to stay.

Whew. Glad I got that out of my system. Here's what God used to speak to me this morning:

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The Holy Qur'an  C.23 & 24


But he [Muhammad] grew steadfastly in virtue and purity;
Untaught by men, he learnt rom the, and learned
To teach them; even as a boy of nine,
When he went in a trade caravan with Abu Talib
To Syria, his tender soul marked inwardly
How Allah did speak in the wide expanse
Of deserts, in the stern grandeur of rocks,
In the refreshing flow of streams, in the smiling
Bloom of gardens, in the art and skill with which
Men and birds and all life sought for light
From the Life of Lives, even as every plant
Seeks through devious ways the light of the Sun.


Nor less was he grieved at Man's ingratitude
When he rebelled and held as naught the Signs
Of Allah, and turned His gifts to baser uses,
Driving rarer souls to hermit life,
Clouding the heavenly mirror of pure affections
With selfish passions, mad unseemly wrangles,
And hard unhallowed loathsome tortures of themselves.