This weekend, my husband and I went to the Sackler Gallery and visited an exhibition: The Art of the Qu’ran: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts.

Over the years, I have loved studying illuminated manuscripts—ornately rendered Bibles or musical scores from the Medieval and Renaissance eras.

To view this kind of artwork applied to the Qu’ran fascinated me. I’ve read the Qu’ran many times. I have hated seeing how Muslims are being increasingly profiled today in America and around the world. So when I read about this show in the Post, I was intellectually, creatively, and compassionately curious.

Visitors entering into the exhibit see this:

It is the opening of the Qu’ran (Sura al-Fatiha):

In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate! Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds. The Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate Master of the Day of Judgment. It is You we worship; it is You we ask for help. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.

I was struck by two things:

First, it reminded me that Arabic is written right to left, unlike most Western languages which are written left to right. What a profound difference in human perspective that makes! Remember that we as humans are dramatically affected by the imprinting of our personality in our youth. What can be more fundamental than the imprint of how we orient language, the most basic mechanism that humans use to communicate with one another.

I remember studying in biology that the brain’s hemispheres (right and left) are highly specialized, and that the muscles in each half of the body are controlled by the brain hemisphere on the opposite side. Specifically, the brain’s right hemisphere controls the muscles on the left side of the body, and the brain’s left hemisphere controls the muscle’s on the body’s right side.  Left brain functions are things like processing hearing and speech, carrying out logic and math, and recalling facts from memory. In contrast, the right brain governs facial recognition, visual imagery, spatial abilities, processing music, comparisons and context.

So what must it do to our very world view – and how we process the world – to read from birth from right to left instead of left to right? What muscles—and thus nerves—must get activated in our bodies differently from having the governing visual default rest on the right instead of on the left? What gifts and specialties would that predispose us to as human beings?

To show how profoundly different a perspective this would yield, westerners, please read this—from right to left. It is a paragraph you have already read above:

rebmemer I
s’niarb eht taht ygoloib ni gniyduts
thgir) serephsimeh
dna ,dezilaiceps ylhgih era (tfel dna
selcsum eht taht
dellortnoc era ydob eht fo flah hcae ni
eht yb
.edis etisoppo eht no erehpsimeh niarb
eht ,yllacificepS.
eht slortnoc erephsimeh thgir s’niarb
eht no selcsum
tfel s’niarb eht dna ,ydob eht fo edis tfel
erephsimeh
thgir s’ydob eht no selcsum eht slortnoc
niarb tfeL. edis
gnissecorp ekil sgniht era snoitcnuf
gniyrrac ,hceeps dna gniraeh
dna, htam dna cigol tuo
morf stcaf gnillacer
niarb thgir eht ,tsartnoc nI .yromem
laicaf snrevog
laitaps ,yregami lausiv ,noitingocer
gnissecorp ,seitiliba
.txetnoc dna snosirapmoc ,cisum

Notice if you feel any differently after reading that.

I suspect we are only scratching the surface of understanding the relative strengths created from such radically different orientations in the world. I can only imagine. I hope today’s neurobiologists are exploring this. I think it would help the people of the world to understand each other better.

At the exhibit, the second thing that struck me was this sentence: “Guide us to the straight path, the path of those You have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.”

…Who incur no anger. The Qu’ran specifically singles out—right in its opening text—the characteristic of incurring anger in others as a distinguishing factor among those who have fallen off the “straight path” of obedience to God.  In other words, if you piss others off, you must have fallen off God’s right path, buddy. You’re not living in peace and creating peace.

Pretty clear, isn’t it?

So to anyone who thinks that the terrorists fighting in the name of Allah around the world today are accurately representing Islam, think again. It’s simply not true. For proof, look no further than the first sixty words of the Qu’ran. People who wage war in the name of Islam are off on their own extremist jaunts—which is what human beings do if they perceive oneness and act in what they perceive to be the name of God before they become purified. Read in my website where I discuss the challenge this presents and the resulting problems if the challenge isn’t met correctly.

Spiritual leaders have been awakening to oneness for centuries, very often not understanding the importance of becoming purified before they act. Which is why wars have been waged in the name of religion (and, ahem, in the name of all religions) for centuries.

Not incidentally, guess what one of the core teachings of the Qu’ran is? Purification. So the world has much to learn from this illuminating manuscript.