Islamist terrorists and right-wing, fundamentalist religious nuts (same difference) want to tell the world what the Quran says without ever having read the book. They’re counting on others not to read it either. Maybe that’s why it might be an intelligent act to read the words and make up your own mind.

Today, I bought another Quran.

I already have two of them. Translated by different people. They’re heavily underlined, highlighted, annotated (defaced some may say) just like my copies of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

I’ve studied them all in quests for understanding that have serves as the backbones of three novels — Daughter of God, Perfect Killer and an almost-completed (and so-far-untitled) work. That study has also helped me — a fairly heretical Protestant — to understand my own faith.

But why yet another Quran?

Because the same evil irrationality that has hijacked most of Islam outside of the United States has possessed Terry Jones — a Florida religious cleric — who says he wants to burn copies of the Quran.

I bought another Quran today as a preemptive strike against Jones’s sectarian bigotry. For, regardless of whether he ever sets match to a Quran, he has burned goodwill and torched the efforts of rational, earnest people who have made an effort to bridge the religious divide.

When the Quran I bought today arrives, I’ll donate it to a friend or a local church or synagogue and urge its careful reading. I will do this because a thoughtful reading of the Quran and the Jewish and Christian scriptures will reveal frighteningly similar tales of death, destruction, murder, mayhem and mutilation committed in the name of Allah, God, or Yahweh.

While today we hear most about the Quran’s admonitions to “slay the infidels wherever you will find them,” Islam has nothing close to a monopoly on scripturally sanctioned violence against people of differing faiths:  The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and Israelite extermination of Canaanites and others come to mind.

Read the rest.

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