Like the King James Bible for Judaism and Christianity, the Holy Quran is for Islam a monument to luminous language in a spiritual setting. As a student of Arabic I study Quranic texts to strengthen my grasp of the language and gain inklings as to its culture. The venture has sparked a desire on my part to sample the scriptures of other faiths, such as the Book of Mormon, as well as writings that are foundational for Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and communities of belief I may not even be aware of.

The above prefaces my registering here an associative episode in my reading and contemplative life of the sort this blog is more or less built for. It’s unruly enough that I feel pressed to assert it’s devoid of irony. In a nutshell, the psychic blip I’m exercised by is this: Verse 3:78 of the Quran made me think of JD Vance.

Here’s my own English for the verse, as literal as I can make it: “And truly among them there is a group who contort their tongues with the Book so that you think it to be from the Book, and it is not from the Book, and they say it is from God, and it is not from God, and they speak the lie about God, and they know it.” (My emphasis. See note below.)

JD Vance said the following on September 15, 2024: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…”

There’s nothing objective about juxtaposing these two utterances as if one illuminated the other. What it does is document an intempestif belch from the parlous mass of associative gases which rotates in my particular cognitive firmament. Vance’s admission that he will make things up to get attention from the media is unsurprising on top of appalling. It’s an end stage in the metastisizing cancer that started with Trump’s “fake news,” advanced through Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” and now reaches toxic bloom in Vance’s “created stories.” They speak the lie… and they know it. Vance’s malignant fictions predict organ failure for the body politic in the mold of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

Note
I don’t pretend remotely to capture in my paraphrase the essential meaning of the verse from a theological, devotional or historical standpoint. I stick close to the words themselves, with respect and deference, to the end that I be able to parse their grammatical relationships and ascertain what they state in elemental fashion, and thus be informed and gain insight overall into the linguistic structures of this glorious corpus of expression which underpins the modern literary language to this very day. As a scholarly sidekick for my Quran reading I keep at hand the published Spanish translation of my mentor Julio Cortés: El Corán, Editora Nacional, Madrid, 1979. It figures among the translations into many languages listed at www.quran.com, and is useful for its notes as well as for its rendering of the text. Here is Cortés’s reading of verse 3:78: Algunos de ellos* trabucan* con sus lenguas la recitación de la Escritura para que creáis que está en la Escritura lo que no está en la Escritura, diciendo que viene de Dios, siendo así que no viene de Dios. Mienten contra Dios a sabiendas. 

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