I have been thinking since 10 pm last night when it finished what to make of the 2 hour long Channel 4 documentary last night The Qu’ran.
The TV last night columns in the on-line papers are no help.
At two hours it was also bottom-numbingly long, and I did wonder beforehand whether it might be excusable to take a 20-minute snooze somewhere in the middle, but I stayed awake and alert throughout, and congratulated whoever it was who decided to run the thing in a single go, and not in two or even three parts. In the age of the short attention span, that showed resolve, although I wonder how easy it was to sell advertising space: "Hello, would you like to take a 30-second spot in the middle of a two-hour documentary we're showing? It's called The Qur'an? Hello ... hello?"
Of course, even over two hours it is easier to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to explain the complexities of the Qur'an. Thomas did a fine job, concentrating on the apparent contradictions in "the most ideologically influential text in the world".
Apparently, it boils down to whether Islam is feeling threatened by the non-Islamic world. There is one interpretation of the Qur'an for peacetime, and another in times of war. Which doesn't bode too well for the rest of this century.
Still, Thomas made sure that the benevolent face of Islam, all too often overlooked in the West, got a fair showing. I was almost moved to tears by the manifest decency and tolerance of a fellow called Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, who questioned how people can claim that their god is somehow more valid than their neighbour's. "Who are we to say that one is better? You have your religion and I have mine." That seems like a creed worth believing in.
I think he must have been snoozing during the final half hour, as long after the 9pm watershed as narrative flow would permit, when the footage of the little girl undergoing FGM was shown.
It's perfect - a two-hour lesson in Islam for dummies. No, not for dummies, that's not fair; it's more Coles Notes. Remember Coles Notes? (Never used them) Those thin books with stripy covers that people used to help them through GCSE and A-level English Literature, in the days before you could do all your cheating on the internet? Well, this is Coles Notes for the Qur'an.
I feared a beautiful presentation, all calligraphy, melodious recitation and verses of peace. We got all that.
We got Tariq Ramadan (Of Oxford University – but not what college or role, but doesn’t “Oxford University” sound gooood!) and Timothy Winter of University of Cambridge School of Divinity although they didn’t tell us that in some circles he is really Abdul Hakim Murad.
Shots of Cairo during the funeral of Nasser in 1970; 7 million Egyptians on the street and nary a veil in sight. Today few women in Cairo dare set foot outside without at least a hijab, and many wear niqab.
We also got images of execution – the burkaed lady shot in the football stadium in Kabul, close ups of the chained and sandaled feet of young men hanging in Iran.
The little girl aged about 7 in (I would guess from the dress) Northern Nigeria screaming with sub titles.
“No, no, don’t tie me down, Mum she’s cutting me, she’s pulling my bits, no, no please no.” And then afterwards the girl being slapped “For making a fuss, it doesn’t hurt that much” My husband went white.
There was Patrick Sookhedeo and best of all an interview with Christopher Luxenburg, in shadow with his words interpreted into English by the same man who translated his work into English.
A clip of the suicide video of Mohammad Sidique Khan and the opinion that all he got for his trouble was a bunch of grapes.
Overall I think it was a worthwhile exercise.
The violence wasn’t whitewashed out. It was very much in evidence. The doctrine of abrogation was explained as was the origin of the Shia, their division with the Sunni and the presence later of the Sufis.
The presence of the peaceful verses gave hope but the treatment of women was given prominence, not always with comment.
Anthony Thomas credited the viewer with the intelligence to assess the evidence he amassed for ourselves.