“Tolerance and intolerance, apparently in equal measure.”

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     Perhaps no book in history has been more misunderstood than the Koran.  And not just by Western societies who view the book as a violent, scary book that gives rise to extremism, but also by those who consider themselves to be experts on the holy text.  Although to suggest those people misunderstand the Koran is perhaps not accurate.  I think that any text considered to be holy, whether it be Koran or Bible or something else, is rarely misunderstood.  By their very nature, these books lend themselves to hundreds or thousands of different interpretations, and there is no real way to determine which is the “correct” one.

     I have a real problem with anyone who talks about the “correct” interpretation of books like the Koran, as several religious figures do in Inside The Koran.  It seems to me that there is no such thing as a “correct” interpretation of anything.  That’s what makes it an interpretation.  But as this documentary makes clear, it isn’t just biased interpretations of the Koran that are dangerous, it is also the purposefully selective reading of the book, and the wilful ignorance of certain passages, that is truly dangerous.  The Koran says that if an adulterer, or a thief, acknowledges his or her mistake and repents, that they should be forgiven.  In countries where public stonings and hangings and beheadings still take place, this passage is conveniently ignored.

     In fact, the film takes a look at certain cultures and religious leaders who use the Koran to their own ends in a more over way – the Saudi officials who edited the text of the holy book to specify Jews and Christians as the enemies of the Muslim faith, and even added text referrin to modern weapons like tanks and missiles as an example of the proper way to retaliate against the enemies of Islam.  How people can read that today, believing that it is the Word Of God from 650 AD, is beyond me.  But the culture of various Muslim countries is more important, most of the time, than the book that unites the whole faith.

     Which makes one of the most interesting revelations of the movie less interesting.  A copy of a written Koran dating from about 720 or so is discovered, and the text appears to have been edited several times.  This goes against the teachings of the faith, which say that the words have been preserved, unblemished and unchanged, since the 600s.  But if Saudi officials can edit the text to promote terrorism and anti-semitism, then it probably shouldn’t matter that the text was edited 1300 yeas ago.  It’s still happening today.

     The documentary opens with a self-styled martyr reading from the Koran, and this is, of course, one of the biggest central themes of the film – does the Koran really say that it is the obligation of every good Muslim to wage war against the perceived enemies of the faith?  It’s pretty easy to look at the faith from a Western perspective and say – who cares if it does or not?  Why are you following a book anyway?  Even if it does say that, it’s still just a book.  But of course, it is not that simple.  There are so many Muslim countries in the world, and so many of those countries base their cultures almost exclusively on the teachings of the Koran, that the interpretation of the text is all-important.

     And this is what makes the difference in cultures in Muslim countries so incredible.  One woman, a human rights activist interviewed for the movie, says that in Cairo in 1974 you would not have seen a single veil on the streets of Egypt.  Now, however, the vast majority of the women walking the streets, including this activist herself, wear the full covering, hiding their faces and their bodies with only their eyes visible.  This is the other big topic tackled in the film.  The treatment of women in the Muslim religion, and the differences between Turkey and Iran and Saudi Arabia and other Muslim cultures.

     “Our facial expressions are like another language…it seems to me that covering the face is like cutting off one’s tongue – taking away a form of communication.”

     This is the assessment of the narrator, who is questioning a Muslim woman who covers her face in deference to her husband.  (It’s my assessment too, and that of many Westerners, I expect.)  But most of the women interviewed in the movie disagree.  Most of them have another perspective on the niqabs and the veils, and they feel that it brings them closer to God and that they wear them by choice.  But then, just like the other facets of the Muslim religion, there are vast differences from culture to culture when it comes to the covering of women.

     Some of the more brutal practices of Islam are investigated during Inside The Koran.  Honour killings, female genital mutilations, and public executions are touched on briefly.  I think I would like to have seen a little more about this – specifically about the reasoning behind not allowing young girls to go to school in some countries and the general oppression of women in those areas – but that could be a whole documentary unto itself.  And the general point of the movie is that in the end, the bad stuff that comes out of the Koran doesn’t really come out of the book, but rather from the culture itself and the way they want to interpret the Koran.

     If you want to cover your women up, then you decide that the Koran says they ought to be covered.  If you want to hate Israel, you decide that the Koran speaks against Jewish people.  And although the Koran is explicit about the sanctity of life and the sinful act that is suicide, you can justify suicide bombings if you try really, really hard to re-interpret some passages and try really, really hard to ignore the live-and-let-live ones.  (There is one fun moment in an otherwise very serious movie that suggests that the “correct” – again I hate that word – interpretation of the text says that upon their death, martyrs will receive seventy-two grapes to eat.  Not seventy-two virgins.)

     And of course, like any good documentary, when this one is over each person who watches it can put their own “interpretation” upon what they have seen.  Just like the Koran itself.  And I have done so – I took several things away from this movie and here’s an example.  The man who, at the beginning, is explaining why his wife is completely covered, really bothered me.  He says that women must cover up completely because “everything about them is seductive”.  And in keeping with that idea, he begins to cover up his daughters.  From the age of three.  If you’re even considering the possibility that something about a three-year-old could be “seductive”, then there are some serious problems with your rationale.

     More than anything though, this film made me want to read the Koran.  It is a loose collection of “guidelines” for life that follows no chronology at all – totally unlike any other bible.  By its very nature, it is incredibly open to thousands of different interpretations.  Some of the scholars in this movie say that the Koran is pretty clear that no one is closer to God than anyone else, and that it speaks out explicitly against any kind of clergy, priests or religious officials.  They just don’t make sense with the Muslim faith.  But there are a lot of people making their livings as religious leaders in the Muslim world, and this would be an inconvenient thing for them to acknowledge.  It would certainly mean they would lose their power.  And maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

     An informative, comprehensive and important documentary, Inside The Koran comes out June 23rd from First Run Features.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 11:28 am and is filed under 2008, Documentary, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.