Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

by those forces, was the only possible approach to the subject; and that one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc’s voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul’s “real” experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel. Revelation was to be understood as an interior, subjective event, not an objective reality, and a revealed text was to be scrutinized like any other text, using all the tools of the critic, literary, historical, psychological, linguistic, and sociological. In short, the text was to be regarded as a human artifact and thus, like all such artifacts, prey to human fallibility and imperfection. The American critic Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as “a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it.” Anis Rushdie thought he knew what was wrong with the Qur’an; it had become, in places, jumbled up.
    According to tradition, when Muhammad came down from the mountain he began to recite—he himself was perhaps illiterate—and whichever of his close companions was nearest would write down what he said on whatever came to hand (parchment, stone, leather, leaves, and sometimes, it’s said, even bones). These passages were stored in a chest in his home until after his death, when the Companions gathered to determine the correct sequence of the revelation; andthat determination had given us the now canonical text of the Qur’an. For that text to be “perfect” required the reader to believe (a) that the Archangel, in conveying the Word of God, did so without slipups—which may be an acceptable proposition, since Archangels are presumed to be immune from errata; (b) that the Prophet, or, as he called himself, the Messenger, remembered the Archangel’s words with perfect accuracy; (c) that the Companions’ hasty transcriptions, written down over the course of the twenty-three-year-long revelation, were likewise error-free; and finally (d) that when they got together to arrange the text into its final form, their collective memory of the correct sequence was also perfect.
    Anis Rushdie was disinclined to contest propositions (a), (b) and (c). Proposition (d), however, was harder for him to swallow, because as anyone who read the Qur’an could easily see, several
suras
, or chapters, contained radical discontinuities, changing subject without warning, and the abandoned subject sometimes cropped up unannounced in a later
sura
that had been, up to that point, about something else entirely. It was Anis’s long-nurtured desire to unscramble these discontinuities and so arrive at a text that was clearer and easier to read. It should be said that this was not a secret or furtive plan; he would discuss it openly with friends over dinner. There was no sense that the undertaking might create risks for the revisionist scholar, no
frisson
of danger. Perhaps the times were different, and such ideas could be entertained without fear of reprisals; or else the company was trustworthy; or maybe Anis was an innocent fool. But this was the atmosphere of open inquiry in which he raised his children. Nothing was off-limits. There were no taboos. Everything, even holy writ, could be investigated and, just possibly, improved.
    He never did it. When he died no text was found among his papers. His last years were dominated by alcohol and business failures and he had little time or inclination for the hard grind of deep Qur’anic scholarship. Maybe it had always been a pipe dream, or empty, whiskey-fueled big talk. But it left its mark on his son. This was Anis’s second great gift to his children: that of an apparently fearless skepticism, accompanied by an almost total freedom from religion. There was a certain amount of tokenism, however. The “flesh of the swine”was not