CHICAGO – Laleh Bakhtiar had spent two years working on an English translation of the Koran when she came upon Chapter 4, Verse 34. She nearly dropped the project right then.
The hotly debated verse states that a rebellious woman should first be admonished, then abandoned in bed, and ultimately “beaten,” the most common translation for the Arabic word daraba, unless her behavior improves.
“I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can’t keep translating,” said Bakhtiar, an Iranian-American who adopted her father’s Islamic faith as an adult and had not dwelled on the verse before. “I couldn’t believe that God would sanction harming another human being except in war.”
Few verses in the Koran have generated as much debate, particularly as more Muslim women study their faith as an academic field.
“This verse became an issue of debate and controversy because of the ethics of the modern age, the universal notions of human rights,” said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian-born law professor and Islamic scholar at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Bakhtiar’s “eureka” moment came on roughly her 10th reading of Edward William Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, a 3,064-page volume from the 19th century, she said. Among the six pages of definitions for daraba was “to go away.”
“I said to myself, `Oh, God, that is what the prophet meant,'” said Bakhtiar, speaking in the offices of Kazi Publications in Chicago, a mail-order house for Islamic books that is publishing her translation. “When the prophet had difficulty with his wives, what did he do? He didn’t beat anybody, so why would any Muslim do what the prophet did not?”
There have been similar interpretations, but none has been incorporated into a translation.
Critics suggest the verse has to be taken at face value, with important reservations. They consider that the Koran holds that force is an acceptable last resort to preserve important institutions, including marriages and nations.
“I am not apologetic about why the Koran says this,” said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic scholar who teaches at George Washington University.
Sheik Ali Gomaa, the Islamic scholar who serves as Egypt’s grand mufti, said verses in the Koran must be viewed through the prism of the era. “In our modern context, hitting one’s wife is totally inappropriate as society deems it hateful and it will only serve to sow more discord,” he said through a spokesman in an e-mail.
