American Churches That Are Reading the Koran

'American Qur'an' is an old/new masterpiece

Analogy from "American Qur'an" artwork by Sandow Birk. (2016 past Sandow Birk)

Images are the easiest style to lie. Images enter our minds as infallible: Few of u.s.a. wonder whether the rug on the flooring is truthful or imitation, whether the person who smiles at u.s. on the subway is existent or unreal. Daily life would be impossible without this visual credulity. But the aforementioned instinct that tells us everything we run into is true makes us intriguingly vulnerable to distortion and suggestion in art.

It is this visual vulnerability that prompts virtually schools of Islamic thought to prohibit images of sacred figures — prophets, angels, Allah — and in a few extreme cases, images of whatever living being whatsoever. In a religious context, images tempt us to worship the concrete rather than contemplate the abstruse. It's far amend — or then the bulk of Islamic thinking goes — to leave the unseen, unseen.

That being the example, artist Sandow Birk's massive, richly illustrated "American Qur'an" would seem, at the starting time, to represent a contradiction. Birk prepared for this project — a full-size Koran, transcribed entirely by hand according to the exacting medieval tradition, merely in English instead of Arabic — by carefully studying the rules of the fine art form. The margins must be a certain width; the medallions that mark 1's progress through the holy book placed at specific intervals.

But rather than leave the margins empty or decorate them with abstract geometric patterns, as is customary, Birk frames each page with lush, mural-similar depictions of American life: farmers in their fields, clerks at their checkout counters, congregants at Sunday church; migrant workers, homeless people, hunters, surfers, men, women, children, along with cars, garbage, floods. An undertaking that could veer easily into sentimentality or cynicism does neither. Birk depicts the dazzler and mess of Americana with the detachment of a lensman. And he marries the outcome — in a way that is at once baffling and oddly intuitive — to an English estimation of the holy book of Islam. It is a masterpiece, and its flaws only serve its virtuosity.

Birk states that he cobbled his Koran together from several different English translations bachelor in the public domain. This is possibly the most American component of the project: taking bits and pieces of things you similar and remixing them to go far at something you like ameliorate. But translating the Koran is a notoriously difficult chore. Classical Arabic, based on a root system of complex, interrelated meanings, is a language that implies rather than dictates, leaving much of the key terminology in the Koran open to different interpretations. It is unsurprising, and then, that English language translations of the Koran are so fraught. Each translator has a specific pedagogy; each translation is a consummate thought. Subtle contradictions sally depending on the interpreter's background and motive. By mixing and matching translations to arrive at his version, Birk has inadvertently created i of the almost accessible interpretations of the Koran in English, only likewise one of the most ideologically opaque. This is neither the literalist translation propagated by the Saudis nor the rationalist ane composed past Jewish catechumen Muhammad Asad, nor the stilted interpretation popularized by the Victorians. It is something else, something more comforting but less instructive. This, too, is greatly American. We like our religion, but we like our religion anodyne.

"American Qur'an" by Reza Aslan and Sandow Birk (Liveright)

Regardless, it would exist foolish to assume that the text itself is the betoken of Birk's artwork. The text is there to provide allegorical reference for Birk's marginalia. The story of the birth of Jesus is illustrated with images of
a significant adult female getting an ­ultrasound; Surat al-Baqarah, the Chapter of the Cow, features ranch hands and livestock. Yet Birk is capable of subversive subtlety. Surat al-Fatihah, the Chapter of Opening, often invoked as a prayer of guidance and mercy, is superimposed over a bird's-center view of downtown Manhattan. Affiliate fifteen, al-Hijr, here translated as "Rock City," is illustrated by off-road trucks roaring through a muddy hinterland. Though seemingly impudent, this pairing is not only apt but precise: "Stone Metropolis" is indeed a story about a city called Rock, whose worldly ­inhabitants reject the prophet Salih. Al-Hijr too repeats the story of Iblis, the devil, who refuses to bow to human being beings, and since they are made of mud, tempts them with the cloth distractions of a dirty earth. Every bit an allegorist, Birk is at once simplistic and uncannily insightful.

"American Qur'an" is not a Koran in the sacred sense. Every bit an English estimation, and a non-academic one at that, it is not subject to the aforementioned rules of ritual purity that practicing Muslims would extend to an Standard arabic iteration. Instead, it'south a masterful reminder that America and Islam are, as ideas and every bit histories, deeply, painfully interlinked.

Thousand. Willow Wilson is co-creator of the Ms. Marvel comic volume series and writer of the novel "Alif the Unseen."

American Qur'an

Illustrated by Sandow Birk

Liveright. 464 pp. $100

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/american-quran-is-an-oldnew-masterpiece/2016/01/21/c067c350-becd-11e5-9443-7074c3645405_story.html

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