On Islam, Q's and K's

As an American living in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and as someone who has studied a decent amount of things about or related to Islam and its politics, I feel compelled to bring this rather good NYTimes blog article called "The Meaning of the Koran" up. The article is written in reaction to the apparent wave of morons in America who think burning the Qur'an on 9/11 was/is a right, or even justified thing to do:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/the-meaning-of-the-koran/?src=me&ref=general

If you don't feel like reading it, the gist is basically that those morons in America who would burn the Qur'an out of either nationalistic or religious righteousness are just operating with the same willful tunnel vision that leads some morons of the Muslim faith to do horrible and violent things in the name their faith. The author also points out that the more liberal interpreters of any faith are also obscuring a full understanding of their subject matter. And finally, just as America's best President in history once pointed out (here's a clip of him doing it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1-ip47WYWc), every religious text has its failings, and to pretend the Qur'an is the only one that exhorts its followers toward violence is incredibly stupid.

There's really only thing I don't like about this article though, and it's the way he spells Qur'an. (Ima get a little bit arabic-snobby right now, so be ready.) Basically, there is no good reason to spell Qur'an with a K. Not putting the ' in the middle is ok because it represents a glottal stop, i.e. a letter we don't have any sort of equivalent for in English. (Plus I've always felt that ' is sort of an awkward key to hit on the keyboard.) But the K is just stupid. Fine, yes, some Europeans when they first came into contact with Muslims couldn't hear the semi-subtle difference between the Arabic letters "Kaff" and "Qaff" (like a K noise that hits toward the back of your throat instead of on the roof of your mouth), so when they were writing from what they heard, they wrote it out "Koran." But seriously man, that was the 7th century. We have a lot of bilingual speakers now. For god's sake we have google translate now. This is obviously a pet peeve of mine, and I wouldn't just expect every single one of you to know all of that as Arabic is still a pretty obscure language for us Americans. But why would this apparently well-educated and thoughtful scholar of Islam and the Middle East spell it with a K? Has he not even studied the letters of the alphabet in his supposed decades of study and teaching on this topic? Has he not seen it spelled multiple ways and thought to investigate which transliteration might be best? I don't get it.

All the same, this is a pretty good article in spite of this little thing and it makes me interested to see what other ideas he has about religion and such.

P.S. Two more posts coming today and tomorrow, promise.