I recently found an intriguing book chapter on the
subject of critical textual study of the Koran.  What
is most interesting about this research is that
scholarship tends to deny the much-bespoken eloquence
attributed to the Koran.  Far from a masterpiece of
style, the book is literally riddled with errors and
clumsy style which yield little more than a piece of
sacred music.  The Iranian intellectual Ali Dashti
(died 1983 in Khomeini’s prisons) counted over one
hundred deviations from the proper structure of
classical Arabic:  lack of proper syntax, errors in
verb tense and person, words used in unusual context
or meaning, uneven rhythms, forced rhymes, awkwardly
repeated beginning words or clauses.  So in short, the
recitation of the Koran might have a very loose
musical appeal upon superficial listening, but without
fulfilling any real standard of style by higher
outside criteria.…  So in short what does all this
remind us of?  Rap music.  Maybe there should be a new
hip-hop album entitled “Al-Qur’an al-Karim Freestyle”
by Method Man and Ghostface Killah.  (“Freestyle”
implying dreaded innovation? or admixtures from
heterodox codices outlawed and burned by the caliph
‘Uthman?)  Cat Stevens could do the backup vocals.

And what more appropriate setting than in the halls of the rock music club, where elsewhere satanic verses mingle with the divine?  A Recitation wherein any card may be wild, and time will tell whether the Angel Gibreel did truly authorize each directive.

In a cloud of radio-tower static, the electronic muezzin chants his clumsily-rhymed dawaganda over the endless sea of steel minarets, fueling the fanaticism brewing within the monastery-fortresses of the South Bronx frontier.  The circumambulating mujahidiin shout in ecstatic rage, raising their voices in the historicidal overthrow of Yazdegird III.  Or perhaps it’s now the Rule Book’s turn to step down:  As the Curtain draws back from the stage, I see that a lovely fifty percent of this crowd have dispensed with al-hijaab... and then some.  And the Kaaba, true to its name, is now a music box that plays Ice Cube.

Their latest album, "al-Qur’aan al-Kariim Freestyle", emerged from the Hijazi wastelands to a long-awaited critical acclaim; and I too breathe a sigh of relief: after twelve centuries this “poetry” has finally gotten the “Parental Advisory – Explicit Lyrics” label it deserves.  As the new freestyle rhymes reach the record shelf, how are we to interpret their influence upon the adolescent Hijirenes?  Are these a Pushtun tribal code, Wahhabi war tract, or none of the above?
 

Transfixed am I by the unitary focus facilitated by a message however innocuous.  For before the flawed rhymes Blacks, whites, Macro-Malaccans, Aztec descendants, and the multi-hued distillates of so many ancient migrations and delicious miscegenations.  For just as all nations of the world came together as one under the unlikely banner of Mahound, so does this panorama of humankind sway before the darkened speakers, much as multihued pilgrims did rotate for different reasons around the ancient Black Stone.

The performance ends, and as I exit the door, I shed a faked tear as the seventy-two-odd dark-eyed houris vanish forever into the concrete gardens of this gangsta’s paradise.  Too bad, some of us just gotta make do with the one shot we have.  But as I bike home through the shadows of evening, I reflect that on the night of that miraculous celestial journey, I was nearest to all the urban ghazi world’s spectacle.