The First Commandment: Read!

What prepares us to read the Qur'an? For Norman O. Brown, it was the "simultaneous totality" that he discovered in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (see Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, 89).

My own preparation was Bakhtin's study of Dostoevsky's polyvocal poetics. But once I began to read and appreciate the Qur'an (in the mid-1990's), I found myself returning to Emerson's Nature: for now the Qur'an was no longer something alien to me, and I began to think of it as an American scripture, fit for a post-Christian milieu.

Emerson as refounder was already moving on into that milieu; like John the Baptizer, he came first, pointing the way. By the mid-'90's, I thought we, as a nation, had finally arrived. And since, as Brown tells us, "The Koran is pregnant with the future," it seemed to be the right text for the times (AM, 84).

In 2014, however, American readers of the Qur'an are still ahead of their time. In the United States, we continue to press the accelerator to the floor, but the transmission is stuck in reverse.