Interpreting the Koran:
<http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/24/us/20070325_KORAN_GRAPHIC.html
>
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/us/25koran.html>
March 25, 2007
New Translation Prompts Debate on Islamic Verse
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
CHICAGO — Laleh Bakhtiar had already spent two years working on an English translation of the Koran when she came upon Chapter 4, Verse 34.
She nearly dropped the project right then.
The hotly debated verse states that a rebellious woman should first be admonished, then abandoned in bed, and ultimately "beaten" — the most common translation for the Arabic word "daraba" — unless her behavior improves.
"I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can't keep translating," said Ms. Bakhtiar, an Iranian-American who adopted her father's Islamic faith as an adult and had not dwelled on the verse before. "I couldn't believe that God would sanction harming another human being except in war."
Ms. Bakhtiar worked for five more years, with the translation to be published in April. But while she found a way through the problem, few verses in the Koran have generated as much debate, particularly as more Muslim women study their faith as an academic field.
"This verse became an issue of debate and controversy because of the ethics of the modern age, the universal notions of human rights," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian-born law professor and Islamic scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The leader of the North American branch of a mystical Islamic order, Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, said he had been questioned about the verse in places around the world where women were struggling for greater rights, but most of all by Westerners.
Women want to be free "from some of the extreme ideology of some Muslims," the sheik said, after delivering a sermon on the verse recently in Oakland, Calif.
[In Germany last week, a judge citing the verse caused a public outcry after she rejected the request for a fast track divorce by a Moroccan-German woman because her husband beat her. The judge, removed from the case, had written that the Koran sanctioned physical abuse.]
There are at least 20 English translations of the Koran. "Daraba" has been translated as beat, hit, strike, scourge, chastise, flog, make an example of, spank, pet, tap and even seduce.
"Spank?" exclaimed Professor Abou El Fadl, who has concluded that the verse refers to a rare public legal procedure that ended before the 10th century. "That is really kinky. That is the author fantasizing too much."
Ms. Bakhtiar, who is 68 and has a doctorate in educational psychology, set out to translate the Koran because she found the existing version inaccessible for Westerners. Many Jewish and Christian names, for example, have been Arabized, so Moses and Jesus appear in the English version of the Koran as Musa and Issa.
When she reached the problematic verse, Ms. Bakhtiar spent the next three months on "daraba." She does not speak Arabic, but she learned to read the holy texts in Arabic while studying and working as a translator in Iran in the 1970s and '80s.
Her eureka moment came on roughly her 10th reading of the Arabic-English Lexicon by Edward William Lane, a 3,064-page volume from the 19th century, she said. Among the six pages of definitions for "daraba" was "to go away."
"I said to myself, 'Oh, God, that is what the prophet meant,' " said Ms. Bakhtiar, speaking in the offices of Kazi Publications in Chicago, a mail-order house for Islamic books that is publishing her translation. "When the prophet had difficulty with his wives, what did he do? He didn't beat anybody, so why would any Muslim do what the prophet did not?"
She thinks the "beat" translation contradicts another verse, which states that if a woman wants a divorce, she should not be mistreated. Given the option of staying in the marriage and being beaten, or divorcing, women would obviously leave, she said.
There have been similar interpretations, but none have been incorporated into a translation. Debates over translations of the Koran -- considered God's eternal words -- revolve around religious tradition and Arabic grammar. Critics fault Ms. Bakhtiar on both scores.
Ms. Bakhtiar said she expected opposition, not least because she is not an Islamic scholar. Men in the Muslim world, she said, will also oppose the idea of an American, especially a woman, reinterpreting the prevailing translation.
"They feel the onslaught of the West against their religious values, and they fear losing their whole suit of armor," she said. "But women need to know that there is an alternative."
Religious scholars outline several main threads in the translation of "daraba."
Conservative scholars suggest the verse has to be taken at face value, with important reservations.
They consider that the Koran holds that force is an acceptable last resort to preserve important institutions, including marriages and nations. Some scholars have accused some Muslims of trying to make the verse palatable to the West.
"I am not apologetic about why the Koran says this," said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic scholar who teaches at George Washington University. The Bible, he noted, addresses stoning people to death.
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian whose writings underpin the extremism of groups like Al Qaeda, published extensive commentaries about the Koran before he was hanged in 1966.
Islamic tradition states that Muhammad never hit his 11 wives, and Mr. Qutb considered a man striking his wife as the last measure to save a marriage. He cited the prophet's horror at the practice by quoting one of his sayings: "Do not beat your wife like you beat your camel, for you will be flogging her early in the day and taking her to bed at night."
The verse 4:34, with its three-step program, is often called a reform over the violent practices of seventh century Arabia, when the Koran was revealed. The verse was not a license for battery, scholars say, with other interpretations defining the heaviest instrument a man might employ as a twig commonly used as a toothbrush.
Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Islamic scholar who serves as Egypt's grand mufti, said Koranic verses must be viewed through the prism of the era.
The advice "is always broad in order to be relevant to different cultures and in different times," he said through a spokesman in an e-mail message. "In our modern context, hitting one's wife is totally inappropriate as society deems it hateful and it will only serve to sow more discord."
A caller on a television program in Egypt recently asked the mufti if he should stop sleeping with his wife if she was causing discord, the spokesman said. The mufti replied that the measures in the verse were meant to bring harmony, not to exact revenge.
More liberal commentators, particularly women, say the usual interpretation reflects the patriarchal practices of the Arabian peninsula.
This school holds that the sacred texts have become encrusted with medieval traditions that need to be scraped off like a layer of barnacles. Some Saudi women have been trying to do this by emphasizing the public role played by Aisha, one of the prophet's wives, while the Asma Society gathered Muslim women from around the world in New York last fall to explore the establishment of a female council to interpret Islamic law.
Some analysts hold that the verse cannot be rendered meaningfully into English because it reflects social and legal practices of Muhammad's time.
"The whole idea is not to punish her," said Ingrid Mattson, an expert in early Islamic history at the Hartford Seminary and the first woman to be president of the Islamic Society of North America. "It is like a fear of sexual impropriety, that the husband takes these steps to try to bring their relationship to where it is supposed to be. I think it is a physical gesture of displeasure."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/world/europe/23germany.html> March 23, 2007 German Judge Cites Koran, Stirring Up Cultural Storm By MARK LANDLER
FRANKFURT, March 22 — A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman's request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.
In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.
News of the ruling brought swift and sharp condemnation from politicians, legal experts and Muslim leaders in Germany, many of whom said they were confounded that a German judge would put seventh-century Islamic religious teaching ahead of German law in deciding a case of domestic violence.
The court in Frankfurt abruptly removed Judge Datz-Winter from the case on Wednesday, saying it could not justify her reasoning. The woman's lawyer, Barbara Becker-Rojczyk, said she decided to publicize the ruling, which was issued in January, after the court refused her request for a new judge.
"It was terrible for my client," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said. "This man beat her seriously from the beginning of their marriage. After they separated, he called her and threatened to kill her."
Muslim leaders agreed that Muslims living here must be judged by the German legal code. But they were just as offended by what they characterized as the judge's misinterpretation of a much-debated passage in the Koran.
While the verse cited by Judge Datz-Winter does say husbands may beat their wives for being disobedient -- an interpretation embraced by fundamentalists -- mainstream Muslims have long rejected wife-beating as a medieval relic.
"Our prophet never struck a woman, and he is our example," Ayyub Axel Köhler, the head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, said in an interview.
While legal experts said the ruling was a judicial misstep rather than evidence of a broader trend, it comes at a time of rising tension in Europe as authorities in many fields struggle to reconcile Western values with growing Muslim minorities.
Last fall, for example, a Berlin opera house canceled performances of a Mozart opera because of security fears stirred by a scene that depicts the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad. Stung by charges that it had surrendered its artistic freedom, the house staged the opera three months later without incident.
To some here, the judge's ruling reflected a similar compromising of basic values.
"A judge in Germany has to refer to the constitutional law, which says that human rights are not to be violated," said Günter Meyer, director of the Center for Research on the Arab World at the University of Mainz. "It's not her task to interpret the Koran. It was an attempt at multicultural understanding, but in completely the wrong context."
Reaction to the judge's decision has been almost as sulfurous as it was to the cancellation of the opera.
"When the Koran is put above the German Constitution, I can only say, 'Good night, Germany,' " Ronald Pofalla, general secretary of the Christian Democratic Union, said in the mass-market newspaper Bild.
The 26-year-old woman in this case was born in Germany to a Moroccan family and married in Morocco in 2001, according to her lawyer, Ms. Becker-Rojczyk. The couple settled in the Frankfurt area and had two children.
In May 2006, the police were summoned after a particularly violent incident. At that time, Judge Datz-Winter ordered the husband to move out and stay at least 55 yards away from the couple's home. In the months that followed, her lawyer said, the man threatened to kill his wife.
Terrified, the woman filed for divorce in October and requested that it be granted without the usual year of separation because her husband's threats and beatings constituted an "unreasonable hardship."
"We worried that he might think he had the right to kill her because she is still his wife," Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said.
A lawyer for the husband, Gisela Hammes, did not reply to an e-mail message and a telephone message left at her office in Mainz.
In January, the judge turned down the wife's request for a speedy divorce, saying her husband's behavior did not constitute unreasonable hardship because they are both Moroccan. "In this cultural background," she wrote, "it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife."
Ms. Becker-Rojczyk filed a request to remove the judge from the case, contending that she had not been neutral.
In a statement defending her ruling, Judge Datz-Winter noted that she had ordered the man to move out and put a restraining order on him. But she also cited the verse in the Koran that speaks of a husband's prerogatives in disciplining his wife. And she suggested that the wife's Western lifestyle would give her husband grounds to claim his honor had been compromised.
The woman, her lawyer said, does not wear a headscarf. She has been a German citizen for eight years.
Judge Datz-Winter declined to comment. But a spokesman for the court, Bernhard Olp, said she did not intend to suggest that violence in a marriage is acceptable or that the Koran supersedes German law. "The ruling is not justifiable, but the judge herself cannot explain it at this moment," he said.
Judge Datz-Winter herself narrowly avoided injury 10 years ago in a case involving a man and woman whose relationship had come apart. When the man shot up her courtroom, the judge escaped by diving under her desk.
German papers have suggested that that ordeal may have affected her judgment in this case, which the spokesman denied.
A new judge will be assigned, but Ms. Becker-Rojczyk said her client would probably wait until May for her divorce because the paperwork would take until then anyway.
For some, the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses. There have been a string of so-called honor killings here, in which Turkish Muslim men have murdered women.
"For Muslim men, this is like putting oil on a fire, that a German judge thinks it is O.K. for them to hit their wives," said Michaela Sulaika Kaiser, the head of a group that counsels Muslim women.
Sarah Plass contributed reporting.
-- Yoshie