Tackling the Quran

Last year I set out to read the New Testament from a Gideon pocket version that they were giving away at the Delaware State Fair.  Pacing four chapters a day, I got through it largely on or slightly ahead of my anticipated schedule.  It was very clear that reading this on my own in the absence of a teacher limited my comprehension or ability to select highlights, though the popularized segments seemed to appear early in the opening Gospel of Matthew.  By now I've read all the Old Testament, much of it as a similar initiative.  Torah had external guidance, though Prophets and Writings were read and paced similar to what I had done for the New Testament. For some of the Megillot I read a version that had commentary beneath the text.  Chronicles I and II remain to be read.

The Quran comes next.  I've embarked on this before but get hung up in Chapter 2, The Cow, which only really includes a small segment on the Biblical sacrifice of atonement, which I assume is the Red Heifer though not explicitly identified that way in the Quran text.  This chapter has 286 verses, the longest in the Book, followed by another of 200 verses on a founding family's statement of obligations.  That's each about the length of our longest double Torah portions, which manage to get publicly recited in a morning.  With a timer, I've finished that, proceeding to a slightly shorter discussion of the Quran's laws of women, which so far seem a little more equitable than what's in Torah.

Even in the early sections Muhammed targets the Jews of his day and his era largely for resistance to his message though with an element of respect for their adherence to their tradition.  He cites non-belief or remaining external to what he was trying to assemble, not for misconduct.  By then, the Jews worldwide were being marginalized, even condemned by the Christian church.  The early parts of the Quran seem to take the view that they deserved what they got, though a theme of the early chapters seems to be that Allah metes out just deserts to everyone.

There are a lot of chapters to go.  The Prophet seems to stack the longer ones at the beginning, perhaps hoping for a commitment to completion with the task becoming easier once the longer sections have been mastered.  Finishing those 286 verses of The Cow offered some real accomplishment.  Like the New Testament, the basic principles of Islam that reach universal familiarity to Westerners like me seem to be incorporated at the beginning.