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Slate.com Table of Contents explainer Can You Be a Gay Mormon? fighting words Advanced Search Fidel Gets Religion architecture foreigners For Sale: 200,000-Square-Foot Box Still Waiting for Chinese Democracy books foreigners How To Read the Quran War of Words books gabfest The Dark Matter of Our Cherished Document The Quaker Meeting Gabfest corrections gaming Corrections Wii Will Rock You! culture gabfest hey, wait a minute The Culture Gabfest, Identity Crisis Edition Only in America? culturebox hot document I Vant To Upend Your Expectations CBS's Dream Team culturebox human nature The J. 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LLC 1/85 politics the undercover economist Obama's White House, Clinton's Team Only the Good Buy Young politics today's business press Spread the Wealth Around Markets Deflate politics today's papers Tackling the Tough Issues Economy Crashes, Washington Watches politics today's papers Dishwasher in Chief Panic Grips Wall Street politics today's papers Green Old Party Come on and Save Me press box today's papers Rupert Murdoch and the Reverse Ferret Exit Quietly recycled today's papers How Wildfires Get Their Names First Step Science today's papers Bullies Like Bullying Money Makes the World Go 'Round slate v today's papers Musical Numbers: Bonds National Securities slate v war stories Grand Unified Weekly Serious People slate v war stories Cubez: Google Can We Really Negotiate With the Taliban? slate v well-traveled Dear Prudence: Pack Rat on Steroids Life Classes sports nut what's up, doc? Change You Can't Believe In Shots All Around! technology Second Bite at the Apple television 18 Million People Watch NCIS Advanced Search Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET television In Search of Lost Crime the big idea architecture The Genius Cabinet For Sale: 200,000-Square-Foot Box the chat room What happens to the store when Wal-Mart leaves town? iPhoning It In By Julia Christensen Wednesday, November 19, 2008, at 7:06 AM ET the green lantern An Order of Lo Mein With a Side of Guilt Big-box buildings are the large, free-standing, warehouselike the has-been structures that have become dominant in the American Famous Patoots landscape, constructed by one-stop-shopping retailers, grocers, Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/85 and category-killers. Hundreds of new big-box buildings are into cups so that when one drinks from them one consumes built each year—and hundreds are vacated. In a healthy God's divine power. The mere act of writing out the words of the economy, retailers often leave behind one store to build an even Quran—the art of Islamic calligraphy—has been elevated into bigger one nearby. In tough times, weaker chains are forced to the supreme artistic expression in the Muslim world. close stores. Circuit City recently announced it will close 155 stores before the holiday season. What happens to big-box The inherent sacredness of the Quran has historically created an buildings when a retailer abandons them? unusual problem for many Muslims. Since the end of the seventh century CE, when its verses were collected into a single, The big-box aesthetic does not immediately lend itself to any authoritative canon, the Quran has remained fixed in Arabic, the other use. The buildings are often upward of 150,000 square language in which it was originally revealed. It was believed that feet. There simply aren't many enterprises that need that much translating the Quran into any other language would violate the space, and because the buildings are built for a single-use divine nature of the text. Translations were done, of course. But purpose, it's not so easy to break them up into smaller units. Yet to this day, non-Arabic versions of the Quran are considered all over the country, resourceful communities are finding ways interpretations of the Quran. Unless the original Arabic verses to reuse these buildings, turning them into flea markets, are embedded on the page, it cannot technically be called a museums, schools—even churches. Quran. Click here to read a slide-show essay on how to recycle a big- The consequences of this belief are obvious. For much of the last box store. 14 centuries, some 90 percent of the world's Muslims for whom Arabic is not a primary language had to depend on Islam's clergy—all of them men, as women are not allowed to enter the clergy—to define the meaning and message of the Quran for them, much as pre-Reformation Christians had to rely on priests books to read them the Bible, which at the time was available only in Latin. That is now changing. Over the last century, the Quran How To Read the Quran has been translated into more languages than in the previous 14 A new translation captures the confusion. centuries combined. A great many of these translations have By Reza Aslan been done not by Muslim clergy but by scholars and academics, Thursday, November 20, 2008, at 3:03 PM ET by Muslim laity and non-Muslims, and, perhaps most significantly, by women. (The first English translation of the Reading the Quran can be a baffling experience. Unlike the Quran by an American woman, Laleh Bakhtiar, was published in Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the Quran is not a collection of 2007.) books recounting the mythical history of a community of faith. It is not, like the Gospels, a pseudo-biographical sketch of a Arabic is a language whose words can have multiple, sometimes particular prophet in a particular time. It does not narrate the life contradictory, meanings, so how one chooses to render a of Mohammed, nor does it chronicle the rise of Islam (indeed, particular word from Arabic to English has a lot to do with one's Mohammed is barely mentioned in it). Though the Quran is biases or prejudice. Take the following example from Sura 4:34, divided into 114 chapters (called suras), these are arranged which has long been interpreted as allowing husbands to beat neither thematically nor chronologically but rather from longest their wives: "As for those women who might rebel against you, to shortest, the lone exception being the first and most important admonish them, abandon them in their beds, and strike them chapter, al-Fatiha, or "The Opening." The chapters are given (adribuhunna)." The problem, as a number of female Quranic evocative titles like "The Cow" or "The Feast," but these have scholars have noted, is that adribuhunna can also mean "turn almost nothing to do with the content that follows. The Quran away from them." It can even mean "have sexual intercourse itself states that its verses have multiple meanings, some of with them." Obviously, which definition the translator chooses which are unfathomable to human beings and known only to will be colored by whatever his or her preconceived notions are God. And yet, in both style and content, the Quran is unique about a husband's authority. The new crop of Quran translators among scriptures. are brushing aside centuries of traditionalist, male-dominated, and often misogynistic clerical interpretations in favor of a more The words of the Quran are thought to be infused with divine contemporary, more individualized, and often more gender- power. Muslims believe it to be the actual speech of God handed friendly approach to the Quran. In the process, they are not only down through Mohammed between 610 and 632 CE. The reshaping the way Islam's holy book is read; they are physical book—its cover and pages—is considered sacred and is reinterpreting the way Islam itself is being understood in the to be handled only in a state of purity. Its verses are inscribed on modern world. buildings and tombs in order to sanctify them. They are placed in lockets and worn as amulets to ward off evil. They are etched Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/85 The latest entry into this cornucopia of Quran translations comes also seems to imply that it is natural to be confused by what we from eminent professor of Islamic history Tarif Khalidi, who is read. It is through the attempt to make sense of our confusions, currently at the American University of Beirut. Written in what to work through them with reason and with faith, that the Khalidi calls "measured modern English," his is an eloquent and Quran's dramatic monologue transforms into an eternal dialogue eminently readable translation, but one that does not stray too far between humanity and God. Indeed, of all the sacred texts of the from other conventional English versions of the Quran. (Khalidi, world, Khalidi argues that the Quran is perhaps the one that most like the majority of his male predecessors, renders the word self-consciously invites the reader to engage with it, to challenge adribuhunna as "beat them.") However, Khalidi's Quran is it, to ponder and to debate it.

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