CHICAGO � Laleh Bakhtiar had already spent two years working on an English translation of the Koran when she came upon Chapter 4, Verse 34.
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Ms. Bakhtiar spent three months translating a verse that addresses treatment of a rebellious woman.
She nearly dropped the project right then.
The hotly debated verse states that a rebellious woman should first be admonished, then abandoned in bed, and ultimately �beaten� � the most common translation for the Arabic word �daraba� � unless her behavior improves.
�I decided it either has to have a different meaning, or I can�t keep translating,� said Ms. Bakhtiar, an Iranian-American who adopted her father�s Islamic faith as an adult and had not dwelled on the verse before. �I couldn�t believe that God would sanction harming another human being except in war.�
Ms. Bakhtiar worked for five more years, with the translation to be published in April. But while she found a way through the problem, few verses in the Koran have generated as much debate, particularly as more Muslim women study their faith as an academic field.
�This verse became an issue of debate and controversy because of the ethics of the modern age, the universal notions of human rights,� said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian-born law professor and Islamic scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The leader of the North American branch of a mystical Islamic order, Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, said he had been questioned about the verse in places around the world where women were struggling for greater rights, but most of all by Westerners.
Women want to be free �from some of the extreme ideology of some Muslims,� the sheik said, after delivering a sermon on the verse recently in Oakland, Calif.
[In Germany last week, a judge citing the verse caused a public outcry after she rejected the request for a fast track divorce by a Moroccan-German woman because her husband beat her. The judge, removed from the case, had written that the Koran sanctioned physical abuse.]
There are at least 20 English translations of the Koran. �Daraba� has been translated as beat, hit, strike, scourge, chastise, flog, make an example of, spank, pet, tap and even seduce.
�Spank?� exclaimed Professor Abou El Fadl, who has concluded that the verse refers to a rare public legal procedure that ended before the 10th century. �That is really kinky. That is the author fantasizing too much.�
Ms. Bakhtiar, who is 68 and has a doctorate in educational psychology, set out to translate the Koran because she found the existing version inaccessible for Westerners. Many Jewish and Christian names, for example, have been Arabized, so Moses and Jesus appear in the English version of the Koran as Musa and Issa.
When she reached the problematic verse, Ms. Bakhtiar spent the next three months on �daraba.� She does not speak Arabic, but she learned to read the holy texts in Arabic while studying and working as a translator in Iran in the 1970s and �80s.
Her eureka moment came on roughly her 10th reading of the Arabic-English Lexicon by Edward William Lane, a 3,064-page volume from the 19th century, she said. Among the six pages of definitions for �daraba� was �to go away.�
�I said to myself, �Oh, God, that is what the prophet meant,� � said Ms. Bakhtiar, speaking in the offices of Kazi Publications in Chicago, a mail-order house for Islamic books that is publishing her translation. �When the prophet had difficulty with his wives, what did he do? He didn�t beat anybody, so why would any Muslim do what the prophet did not?�
She thinks the �beat� translation contradicts another verse, which states that if a woman wants a divorce, she should not be mistreated. Given the option of staying in the marriage and being beaten, or divorcing, women would obviously leave, she said.
There have been similar interpretations, but none have been incorporated into a translation. Debates over translations of the Koran � considered God�s eternal words � revolve around religious tradition and Arabic grammar. Critics fault Ms. Bakhtiar on both scores.
Ms. Bakhtiar said she expected opposition, not least because she is not an Islamic scholar. Men in the Muslim world, she said, will also oppose the idea of an American, especially a woman, reinterpreting the prevailing translation.
�They feel the onslaught of the West against their religious values, and they fear losing their whole suit of armor,� she said. �But women need to know that there is an alternative.�
Religious scholars outline several main threads in the translation of �daraba.�
Conservative scholars suggest the verse has to be taken at face value, with important reservations.
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