This Will Not Sit Well With Islamists

To Islamists, any interpretation of the Koran that doesn't adhere to their view means that the interpreter is committing apostasy. That's exactly what the writers of this latest version of the Koran are going to have to deal with. Expect fatwas and death threats to start shortly.

A new English-language interpretation of the Muslim Holy book the Koran challenges the use of words that feminists say have been used to justify the abuse of Islamic women.

The new version, translated by an Iranian-American, will be published in April and comes after Muslim feminists from around the world gathered in New York last November and vowed to create the first women's council to interpret the Koran and make the religion more friendly toward women.

In the new book, Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar, a former lecturer on Islam at the University of Chicago, challenges the translation of the Arab word "idrib," traditionally translated as "beat," which feminists say has been used to justify abuse of women.

"Why choose to interpret the word as 'to beat' when it can also mean 'to go away'," she writes in the introduction to the new book.

Based on the way Islamists the world over have treated those who attempt to identify Islam as anything other than what is literally written in the Koran, you cannot expect any reinterpretation of the Koran to be allowed and those who are pushing this feminist version have to know this. While you can commend them for trying to reimagine the Koran without the misogyny, that view is so pervasive and an indelible part of the practices and theology of Islam that the safety of the authors may well be in doubt.

Bakhtiar writes in the book that she found a lack of internal consistency in previous English translations, and found little attention given to the woman's point of view.

There's good reason that little attention was given to the woman's point of view. That is the nature of Islam as it was written and taught over the generations. In many parts of the Islamic world, people are not taught skills beyond the ability to read and memorize the Koran. The misogynist views are passed down from generation to generation and we repeatedly see the fallout from this viewpoint as women are gangraped and those who perpetrate such crimes are incapable of receiving justice because Islamic law requires multiple witnesses to testify as to the existence of the rape and a woman's word does not count the same as that of a man's.

Girls are not given proper educations, and educators who try to teach girls the same skills as boys are often attacked and killed. Schools that teach girls have repeatedly come under attack - in one particularly gruesome instance, a girls school was firebombed and the Saudi religious police refused to open locked gates condemning the girls inside to burn to death because they were not wearing the proper garb.

So, while the need to reinterpret the Koran is definitely needed, those who attempt any such reinterpretation are going to be considered apostates and subject to the death penalty under Islamic law for their heretical views. It's a no win situation for Muslim women who are struggling to deal with the ongoing abuses that are justified by Koranic verse.