Back in the 1960s, when I was studying to become a Sufi saint in North Africa, my Sheikh told me to read the Koran again and again, stopping only for prayers, meals and sleep. At that stage in my life I had only the most elementary knowledge of the background to the Koran. Equally crucially, I had no knowledge of, or access to, the vast body of exegetical literature developed over the centuries to explain it. The only sort of training I had as any kind of exegete or glossator was being taught for A-level how to read Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens. In the circumstances, the repetitive reading of the Koran day after day was a curious experience. The book is quite short - shorter than the New Testament - so I found it possible to read the whole thing in a day. My reading in the broiling sun became a kind of fever. The powerfully rhythmic text was full of enigma, menace and (not surprisingly, considering my environment) mystical promises. Attempts to read it as a story, in the way that one can read a Gospel, were doomed to failure. Faced with obscurities in the Koranic text and true to the intellectual world I had grown up in, I tried to supply my own explanations, based partly on my reading of Sufi masters, but also on a half-baked knowledge of existentialism, Zen Buddhism and the ethos of Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Only slowly over the decades was this exciting approach to reading a major religious text replaced by more academic strategies. (I comprehensively failed all parts of the exam to become any kind of saint.)

LRB 7 August 2003 | PDF Download