Muslims Who Kill for the Qur'an Should Read it Instead

THE NEWS: Afghans are venting their rage after the U.S. military inadvertently sent some copies of the Qur'an to a pit to be burned. A handful of people have been killed in violence related to demonstrations over the incident.

THE PROVOCATION: I completely fail to understand how adherents of a religion that speaks so forcefully against idol worship - in this case, Islam - could act this way. It makes utterly no sense. Most Sunni Muslims even go so far as to prohibit the creation of images meant to depict Mohammad or other prophets, on the grounds that such images encourage idolatry.

The irony is that here are people who identify themselves as Muslims valuing an inanimate object ahead of human life. It's a book. Pages bound by leather or cardboard. Words on paper. And it's not as though it's the only copy. If one copy of the Qur'an is lost, there are millions of others readily available in scores of languages around the world. The catastrophic fire in Alexandria that destroyed a huge library of books that can never be replaced is infinitely more tragic than the loss of a single Qur'an. Those books were irreplaceable. The ideas they contained were silenced for eternity. Yet when a single copy of the Qur'an is accidentally destroyed, the words set forth on paper by Mohammad 14 centuries ago endure.

None of this should be taken to mean that the message of the Qur'an is somehow inconsequential. Quite the opposite. It's precisely because Muslims view the message as so important that any focus on the book itself is misplaced. In fact, any focus on the means of conveying that message inevitably diminishes the value of the message itself. Just as any focus on the image or person of Mohammad detracts from the message Muslims believe was delivered by their god through him.

(I would argue, in fact, that the Muslims were quite right to recognize the danger of idolatry. Christians, by contrast, began worshiping their founding prophet as a god - and in the process lost sight of the powerful message he sought to convey concerning love, sacrifice and spiritual renewal. But that's another story.)

The essence of idolatry is simple: It confuses the medium with the message, the image with the ineffable, the symbol with the substance. There's no inherent power in a book, whether it be the Qur'an, the Bible, the teachings of the Tao, a textbook or a medical manual. Want proof? Just give the book to someone who speaks another language, and you'll find out precisely how meaningless and inanimate it truly is.

This is not to say people should go around burning books. As a writer and editor, I would hardly be in favor of that. Nor am I counseling that anyone should go around destroying another person's scriptures. That, to me, is the height of disrespect. But to start killing people because a copy of a book has been destroyed displays a set of priorities that are grossly misplaced and out of step with any spiritual practice.

It also shows a profound lack of understanding concerning what's actually in the book. Take this injunction, for instance: "Do not kill a soul which Allah has made sacred except through the due process of law" (6:151). Certainly there's no due process of law involved in violent demonstrations. Then, there's this: "Whosoever kills a human being without [any reason like] manslaughter, or corruption on earth, it is as though he had killed all mankind" (5.32).

So let me get this straight: The very book people are killing to defend actually opposes homicide so vehemently that it equates the act with something worse than genocide. And therein lies the problem. People are defending a book without even knowing what's in it. Or, worse, while defying what's in it. That's ignorance and idolatry all rolled into one. When you don't know what's in a book, it truly is just an inanimate bundle of papers with meaningless characters scrawled on its pages.

To paraphrase words attributed to Jesus in another ancient tome: books were made for man, not man for books. Without human understanding to unlock the words on a given page, those words might as well be random scribbles drawn by a 2-year-old child. An intelligent mind produced those words, and only an intelligent mind can interpret them. Without understanding, they're the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it. In other words, they're entirely irrelevant.

It's too bad they're not more relevant to certain Muslims in Afghanistan. If they were, maybe a few more people would still be alive to hear them.