Many Americans jeered at reports that soldiers had deliberately mishandled and mistreated copies of the Qur'an in front of Muslim prisoners. They regarded Muslim reactions is trivial and ridiculous - after all, who cares if someone deliberately drops a Bible? Well, the Qur'an is not simply the 'Muslim bible' and Americans' reactions here betray a profound failure to understand Islam.

In The Qur'an: A User's Guide, Farid Esack writes:

This is the Qur’an. In the words of Cragg, “liturgically, it is the most rehearsed and recited of all the Scriptures. Islam takes its documentation more explicitly, more emphatically, than any other household worship. ... So held in veneration and custody, it is the most decisive of the world’s Scriptures in the regulation of law and life” (1988, 15).

No, it is not the “Bible of the Muslims”. While the Qur’an fulfills many of the functions in the lives of Muslims which the Bible does in the lives of Christians, it really represents to Muslims what Jesus Christ represents for devout Christians or the pre-existent Torah, the eternal law of God, for Jews. Similarly, the history of theological controversy around the nature of the Qur’an in early Islam, until “orthodoxy” finally “settled” on what is “true dogma”, is not unlike the early controversies in the Christian world about the nature of Jesus Christ and his relationship to the Father, which was finally settled — not that there was anything “final” about it nor “settled” — by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. [...]

For Muslims the Qur’an is alive and has a quasi-human personality. I have come across friends in India who do not change in their bedrooms in deference to and respect for the fact that “there is a copy of the Qur’an on the top shelf”. The Qur’an, Muslims believe, watches over us and will intercede with God for us on the Day of Judgment... [emphasis added]

Although this too is somewhat inaccurate, it’s at least a bit better to think of the Qur’an as closer to the equivalent of Jesus Christ for Muslims rather than the equivalent of the Bible for Muslims. The Qur’an, after all, is the word of God made manifest — not unlike how Jesus is supposed to be the word of God made flesh. How would Christians react if their captors mistreated images of Jesus in front of them? Or, more to the point, how would they react if their captors actually had Jesus and mistreated him in order to psychologically break down Christian prisoners?

Somehow, I doubt that Americans would react the same way as they did to reports of mistreatment of the Qur’an. Muslim beliefs about the Qur’an may appear superstitious to some, but they are certainly no more superstitious than how many Christians treat images of saints or crucifixes. I’ll bet if I went into the prison cell of a Catholic prisoner, tore a crucifix off the wall, threw it to the ground, spit on it, and stomped on it, I’d elicit some very harsh reactions — and not simply because I’m damaging someone’s property. Would it be OK if the crucifix were provided by the government and I were a government employee?

What’s worse about all this is not simply that Americans misunderstood, but that they didn’t even seem to care about what was going on. They greeted the reports of Muslim reactions with derision when they should have assumed that there must be something going on about Islam that they didn’t know and then tried to figure it out. The media certainly didn’t do its job by reporting on why Muslims would react so strongly. Why didn’t people care? Is it because it genuinely doesn’t matter to them why Muslims are harmed, just so long as nothing like this happens to Christians in America?

 

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