A Natural Curiosity Read Online Free PDF Page B

receiver and passionate disseminator of News. But he had not foreseen the rebirth of Islam, the rise of the Ayatollah, the war between Iraq and Iran, the boy soldiers clutching the Koran, the Turkish women returning despite menaces to the veil, the murmuring in the Soviet colonies, the floggings and the amputations of Pakistan. What is it all about?
    He has discussed this with various Middle East experts of his acquaintance, with Hugo Mainwaring the journalist, with Harry Painter the historian, and with a varied collection of television reporters from various countries, some of whom had once worked for Charles’s own company, Global International Network (a company now, incidentally, in severe financial difficulties). He has discussed it with experts in famine relief, with members of the International Red Cross, with employees of Amnesty International. Some of them, he suspects, had not foreseen all this either, although some of them (himself, most of the time, included) lay claim to hindsight, cast backwards premonitions that they had never truly felt, or had felt late, late, late.
    He had even discussed Islam with one believer, a friend from college days, a gentle-mannered woman married to the American-born WASP director of a multinational conglomerate. She was bringing her children up in the faith. Why? He had wanted to know why? She had explained that the extremists, the fundamentalists, were as far from her conception of the true Islam as Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons or American Bible Belt faith-healers were from the Church of England. How can that be, he had wanted to know, as Ishrat smiled gently and poured him another cup of tea. He had not been able to comprehend her replies. They are fanatics, said Ishrat, but that need not make me an unbeliever.
    It was his ex-wife Liz Headleand who suggested that he should pursue his inquiries by reading the Koran. Frankly, this notion had not occurred to him, nor had it been put to him by any of the experts on Middle Eastern affairs. But, in the grip of obsession, he had humbly taken himself to the nearest bookshop, the Owl in Kentish Town, and purchased a Penguin Classic:
The Koran
, translated with notes by N. J. Dawood, first published in 1956, many times reprinted. He attempted to open his mind, he attempted to make his way through it: Charles was not used to reading, he was accustomed to news flashes and teletext bulletins and telex reports and memoranda. He found the Koran heavy going, and was more than slightly put off to learn that the chapters of the version he was reading had been rearranged, their traditional sequence abandoned. The original editors of this sacred text had, apparently, arranged its chapters not chronologically but in order of length, ‘the longest coming first and the shortest last’. He complained about this narrative anarchy over the phone to Liz: Liz, not having read the Koran herself, was intrigued by this revelation. ‘You mean you can read them in any order, like the chapters of an experimental novel?’ she asked. ‘Like that novel in a box, by whoever it was in the sixties?’
    Charles, who had never read an experimental novel, and very few traditional ones, cut the conversation short. ‘How can you understand the minds of people who don’t respect
sequence
?’ he wanted to know.
    ‘I’m sure there must be
some
kind of sequence,’ said Liz, vaguely. ‘Why don’t you read on, and see if one emerges?’
    Charles read on, but not very far. He managed to find one or two pleasant passages about rich brocades and sherbet and fountains and young boys as fair as virgin pearls, but he found a great deal more about unbelievers and wrongdoers and the Hour of Doom and the Curse of Allah and thunderbolts and pitch and scalding water and the Pit of Hell. ‘Will they not ponder on the Koran? Are there locks upon their hearts?’ Charles decided that there was a lock upon his heart: was it because he had been seduced by Satan, as the Koran