as the best commentary on itself” project, or my own experience of life on this planet to understand what the Qur’
n means when it mentions a “garden” or “fire.” I cannot speak of an unmediated encounter with the Qur’
n, because every word finds meaning through whatever stands between it and myself.
Orientalist scholars have sometimes treated the Qur’n, particularly its larger sras, as structurally incoherent, charging that the Qur’n throws clusters of verses together without regard for how they relate to each other. This assumption has been challenged with closer reads of specific sras, primarily in works by non-Muslim scholars aimed at making the Qur’n’s text more accessible for non-Muslim readers.10 For my project, I decided to start with the fifty-third sra, popularly titled al-Najm (“the Star”), because this sra offers some meat on the question of gendering divinity. During my ayahuasca visions, Allh appeared as what could be called the “divine feminine,” though the Qur’n refers to Allh exclusively with male pronouns and can be read as condemning anyone who conceptualizes divinity as feminine. The fifty-third sra contains some of the Qur’n’s most heated attacks on goddess worship, even dismissing the notion that angels could be female (it appears that the pre-Islamic goddesses were believed to be Allh’s daughters and/or angels). Belief in Allh having daughters is rejected as an insult to the divine, as the fifty-third sra notes that humans prefer sons. Amid the Qur’n’s androcentrism, what could it mean that the Qur’n’s divine “he” spoke to me as a woman? I also found the fifty-third sra compelling because it discusses what could be a direct encounter between Muammad and Allh, though most interpreters would avoid the troublesome theological implications and instead assert that Muammad had seen the angel Jibril (Gabriel). For its description of this meeting between the Prophet and a supernatural Somebody, the fifty-third sra might resonate with those of us who have traveled the entheogen road.
So I began to read, starting with the sra’s introduction, “Bismillhir Ramnir Ram”: “In the Name of God, Ramn, the Merciful.” People usually translate ar-Ramn as something like “compassionate” or “gracious,” but there’s reason to suggest that it’s actually a proper name that originated in southern Arabia and was associated with pre-Islamic monotheism there. In the Qur’n’s description of unbelievers in 25:60, it would seem that ar-Ra
