My reading for the holy month is on target, I'm pleased to say. Yesterday I finished Seyyed Hossein Nasr's The Garden of Truth, quite a sobering read after Tariq Ramadan's sometimes rhapsodic meditations on the life of the Prophet - peace be upon him - and Gai Eaton's engaging polemic. Having said that, the implications of much of what Nasr has to say about the Sufi understanding of life, the universe and everything are a good deal less than sobering, taking one into some potentially dizzying territory once the old mind gets wrapped around them.
The ultimate dizzying experience is pretty much a guarantee of any reading of the Holy Qur'an in any translation, or, I should say interpretation, the text being seen by Muslims as essentially untranslatable. Arberry's version, which I'm reading in an old World Classics paperback, is a good example of both its dizzying-ness and resistance to conventional translation. It's taken me quite a time to really get going on the reading. Normally I can complete a reading in around fifteen days, but that's of versions with which I am broadly familiar. The Arberry has had the effect of 'making strange' my reading, usefully so.
And I'm finding another kind of strangeness in the last of the books on my list which I started on today. This is a translation of the section of Ibn Al-'Arabi's Meccan Revelations given over to a discussion of fasting. In places I think there are mistakes in the printing, the grammar seeming definitely out, but it's hard to say as the translator, one Aisha Bewley, seems to have gone for something very literal. Anyway the result is an occasionally knottily puzzling wrinkling of the old brow. Not a bad way to keep oneself active when the great temptation is to doze one's way through the days.
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