There, for twelve-hundred years, has the voice of this Book,
at all moments, kept sounding through the ears and the hearts of so many
men. We hear of Mohammedan Doctors that had read it seventy-thousand
times!
Very curious: if one sought for "discrepancies of national taste," here
surely were the most eminent instance of that! We also can read the
Koran; our Translation of it, by Sale, is known to be a very fair one. I
must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome
confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness,
entanglement; most crude, incondite;--insupportable stupidity, in short!
Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.
We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses
of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It
is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it
than we. Mohammed's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as
it had been written-down at first promulgation; much of it, they say, on
shoulder-blades of mutton flung pell-mell into a chest; and they
published it, without any discoverable order as to time or
otherwise;--merely trying, as would seem, and this not very strictly, to
put the longest chapters first. The real beginning of it, in that way,
lies almost at the end: for the earliest portions were the shortest.
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