Silvia Orriols proposed a couple of weeks ago that the Quran be banned because, according to her, what is said in it is barbarism. Dictators, authoritarians, and fascists have that urge to burn and ban books, I don't know if it's because they've never read them or because they can't stand the fact that there are consciences that endure on supports as light as paper. Eternity on thin pages that are transmitted through the centuries. The sacred book of Muslims, taken from a literary point of view, is a most interesting work full of stories, imagination, and fantasy. The drawback is that so many millions of people throughout the centuries suffer from the quixotism that religious people call faith: confusing fiction with reality. In the Quran there are also very boring passages, and if it were an original aspiring to be published, any present-day editor with a minimum of professional judgment would grab scissors to remove superfluous repetitions, worn-out clichés, and other defects that the supposedly sacred text has. Some of its fragments are sublime, with rhythm and musicality, images of enormous beauty and lyricism. My favorite surah, which I still remember from the times I memorized it in the oratory that was on Ramada street in Vic, is the first one revealed to Muhammad when he took to going alone to the mountain. Or so the official history of Islam says. That the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him the first word that would serve to found a religion that today has more than a billion believers. Gabriel told him: Read! Thus, with such a categorical imperative. Something that surprised the future prophet because, according to the myth, he was completely illiterate, a merchant who traveled around Arabia and the Middle East buying and selling things but without any ability to decipher written letters. "Read!" the messenger angel repeated to him. "Read in the name of your Lord, who created you from a drop of blood," etc. In this, I confess that I have been very obedient to my parents' religion. If Gabriel had stopped at the beginning of the surah (Read, damn it, read!) I might still be a Muslim. But that being miraculously appeared out of nowhere kept returning with the ups and downs typical of someone who insists on writing a long book, sometimes more inspired and sometimes not so much.
Now, the Bible is not exactly lacking. As in the sacred book of Muslims, it also contains passages that incite violence and content that directly clashes with the democratic values we share and defend in this part of the world. Not to mention all the stories of rape, incest, murder, and extermination. If we compare the three Abrahamic religions from the perspective of the treatment of women, they are not original at all: one might say they copy each other. Should we also ban the Bible? Or can we not apply the same criterion because it is part of "our culture" as proclaimed by Alianza Catalana? Should we establish the law of retaliation, while we're at it?
Of course, the problem is never the texts, sacred or not, just as language and literature are not. The problem is making simplistic and literal readings of works that contain an infinity of contradictions, clinging to the pages of any volume considered divine and using them to legitimize rules and laws that castrate the freedom of others, that nullify people, so unique and different, and their autonomy emancipated from dominant authorities who do not understand coexistence except in Hegelian logic. The greatest danger is not reading but not reading. Or reading by skewing the meaning, which is still a very cowardly way to access the text. Almost a form of illiteracy.
