Tales from The Quran and Hadith
21ST MAY 2017 ~ SMYOGENDRA
When my best friend from school came a-visiting recently, she asked me what I wanted from India. I resisted asking for mangoes, choosing instead a copy of Rana Safvi’s Tales from The Quran and Hadith. I am both an atheist-agnostic and a reluctant reader of fiction or stories, but I am curious about the nature of faith and about religions, especially to understand human beings and their motivations better. Further, Rana Safvi is blessed with an amazing ability both to regale stories and to make them accessible through her prolific writing, as evidenced by a recent award bestowed on her.
To invoke a cliche, the book is a breezy read. The stories are narrated quite simply and the prose is evocative. I am aware of several Islamic — Shia, Sunni, Sufi — traditions and artifacts such as the Sword of Ali. The stories in the book put flesh on the bones of my knowledge of some of those.
Mohammad’s marital life was one of the most fascinating threads for me. His first wife, Khadija, was a successful business woman, his employer, a widow, and an older woman. This, by any modern standards, is a pretty remarkable woman, not least because she chose him as her husband. Further, in contrast with the practice of the time, he did not take another wife while Khadija was alive. He did subsequently take eleven wives, according to the book, most of whom were widows or slaves or women captured as prisoners-of-war, and some of whom proposed to him. I know this book did not promise that it would dwell on why these narratives of open-minded and forward thinking have gotten lost but I would have liked to read more stories of the social transitions. Perhaps Rana Safvi will write another book.
The book has several stories of women with self-determination and independent thinking such as Asma bint Abu Bakr. I was quite taken aback by the story of Zulaikha, where the protagonist’s passion for a younger, handsome servant is the theme. I was reminded of Irawati Karve’s Yugant, where she writes about Mahabharata from the women characters’ point of view, and Chitra Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, that is told in Draupadi’s voice. It is hard to read Tales From.. without often thinking about why it is crucial that we have more female narrators, modern day trobairitzes.
The book brought several personal delights for me, which I concede may be minor or unimportant for others. One of these was that I learnt how names of prophets and angels travel across various Abhrahamic religions. Another was to learn the etymological roots of certain words e.g. muhajir, meaning migrant, hijrat, meaning migration, and Hajj, the pilgrimage, all of which are related to the story of Hajira and her sacrifice.
One of the things that made the book easier to read is that the author chose not to write PBUH each time Prophet Mohammad’s name was invoked. I feel however the book would have been improved with the inclusion of an appendix with some kind of timeline to explain some of the key events in Islamic history, as well as an index with the names of the key characters in the stories so that the stories could be re-read, for instance, to create a fuller narrative of a specific character’s life.
Some sloppy editing, both grammatical and usage related, lets the book down. This was avoidable.
Star rating: 5 out of 5
Usefulness note: I would delight in gifting copies of the book to my curious atheist friends as well as to any others, who love reading stories culled and curated from books they may otherwise not stretch to reading.
https://shefaly-yogendra.com/creakingbookshelves/2017/05/21/tales-from-the-quran-and-hadith/
