Aside from believing that the Koran is God-given, the next most prevalent dogma is that it is the most beautiful piece of writing in the world. Now I haven't slogged through much of the muddle, but I think this is a pretty significant claim. It would be all too easy to say, "This is simply the claim of a religion, of a nation, that I don't believe in. These are the barbaric remnants of theology to plague mankind." But the fact that so many people have been moved by the Koran makes me step back, makes me insecure; I step away from my culture, I step out of the world generally, and I see this phenomenon of The Book.

The Jews worship the Torah; there may be plenty of lip-service to God, and plenty of rumination about idols, but if the idolaters used their graven images as symbols for the gods, that's exactly what the Jews do with the Torah. The Torah exists in place of God; indeed, it is the highest proof of his existence -- never did so perfect a book exist to prove the heathen wrong. Its sound moves men to zeal, every word has holy meaning, each syllable is the ecstasy of the Shechinah -- indeed, never in the history of the world has any man produced a better book, except that that book be the Koran.

Because the Koran needs to be experienced in Arabic to be at all appreciated. Nevermind that Coleridge said he didn't feel any Westerner would be able to slog through the book without the severest pains and the greatest difficulties, and this, according to A.J. Arberry, not without a hint of sympathy -- this judgement was based on translation, and with translation the attendant ills of being part and parcel to "western" culture; our value system just as our language has blinded us to the beauties of the book; it is, to the task at hand, assigned by its own sympathies, inferior. Just as with the Torah, just as with Jesus, just as with God, the fault lies not in the work itself, but if one feels at all dismayed by the presence, if one does not feel the Shechinah, if one suffers, indeed he suffers from his own; the fault lies entirely with him.

These lies, perpetrated as they are by large and blind religious sects, should make us feel superior. We should feel a certain complacency when we look at these book-worshippers and their silly dogmas. Every syllable has meaning -- absurd! Divine inspiration -- impossible! To be preserved throughout the generations and holy on every tongue -- ludicrous! Ludicrous like Byron, ludicrous like Shelly, ludicrous like Keats and Joyce and Yeats. And let us not forget Shakespeare, who surpassed every other glorious author in his glorious abilities with language. When he questions the beauty of the Koran, doesn't Coleridge say that if the Koran be holy for its beauty, then Homer were a God? And what of Cicero and Ovid and all those other crisping holy books lining the shelves of Reed College's most esteemed academic library? And what of our professors -- they are priests! Priests of the imagination, as Joyce would say.

Mankind worships the Book, not the Arabs or the Jews or the Christians (though I must say, and this I believe is the first thing I will have said about the religion in a spirit of admiration, that it seems much less preposterous to worship a man than a book, and even though the figure of Jesus is a literary character, at least he has more the feeble flux of a mortal life). This holds as true for oral cultures, it seems to me, as for literary cultures. We worship language. We say that language is beautiful, that language has the power to redeem; these holy tongues, this elevation of Arabic, this study of revelation (which went hand and hand, for the Arab scholars, with a development of the science of grammar) suggests the conviction of modern science that man, and only man, is capable of abstract thought through sound -- and it is the penumbra of that larger collossus, magic. There is no ampler expression than the power of tongues, indeed of the tongue, the whole biological apparatus itself. The tongue, the click of a syllable, can move mountains, can cause streams to flow backwards, can scorch the seas and set all hell lose. It was Luther's hand, if not his tongue, that singularly tore Europe apart; and it was the respectable and echoing murmur of Confucius that kept China so stable for so long.

Now for this claim that one must read the Koran in Arabic. Well we must read Baudelaire in French; and the mastery of each language brings to the mind vast new horizons, we must not forget, opens the brain, expands it, purifies it. Until you can write in Latin and Greek, you are to be counted only among the vulgar, after all -- Western Civilization rests on two languages, perhaps three, perhaps four, and nevermind that the revered authors in each would have counted everyone but his own to be Barbaric in the quite literal sense of the word (again, the power of the tongue that grants humanity to absolve its speaker from the same) -- still, we must learn them all. Now are alliteration, assonance, word-play, rhyme, and all the other collocations of sound so pure and wonderful in and of themselves that they enhance infinitely our appreciation of the material? Is reading in the original instead of translation a true gain, or is it another immense religious dogma of the human mind -- the human mind, that for its best efforts cannot escape superstition, that is, we might say, superstition! God who resides in our brain speaks from one tongue to the next, spreads like a contagion, and if even one mind suffers from its own delusions and can express them "beautifully" they will be propogated through the entire race, and for thousands of years no less.

I speak these things, I who am the word's most devout initiate. How often have I turned away from friends, from food, from sex, in short, from the neccesities of life to kneel at the altar and offer my youth in sacrifice? I too am plagued, my diseased mind absorbs even now the Latin and the Greek tongues, and each new horizon demands another language -- Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, German...an edifice as big as the Sphinx; and I will be swallowed up. I will not recover. I am very likely bound for death.

So is there some pleasure in the original language? Perhaps. But is there anything more? Do we gain anything more than blind pleasure! Is that why I study, so that I can stoop over the text like an Arab or a Jew, so that I can murmur the words, eyes glazed, and appreciate in the passing fragrance of a few sounds (and how can we forget here Baudelaire's prophetic utterance, les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se repondent) my own unique Godhead? And that is exactly the idolatry that seems to lie beneath hippy poetry readings, the love of a great author, the reading of garbled modernist gibberish, the appreciation of the original. Indeed, an anecdote will suffice.

I was studying Latin with someone and we were arguing quite a bit about the meaning of a few sentences. This went on for too long, apparently, because an observer who quite subscribes (like all of us, like the whole human race) to this worship of sound suddenly looked up at us and, in what can be described only as a fit of frustration, said, "Less English, more Latin" -- grammar, the endeavor to figure out exactly what Cicero was saying, was distracting us from what was really important -- the tangible beauty of his sounds. Now Judaism inadvertently struck, not on the truth, but on one truth -- men will not worship abstractions; the Godhead must be revealed and he must be tactile -- if we cannot see him in ourselves, or see in him ourselves, we must at least be able to smell the incense, to taste the wine, to touch the Torah, and to hear the echo of our own voice on the cantor's lips.