In that case I'm supporting your opinion

Submitted by Paul R. (Netherlands), Mar 29, 2008 at 00:39

Dear Bash,

I don't know whether Mr Wilders has actually read the whole of the Qur'an. I assume that he has read at least some of it (enough to see that it DOES indeed contain lots of inflammatory passages). I myself have actually managed to struggle through an English translation (Dawood, Penguin).

But I was responding to your assumption that someone who dislikes the Qur'an must either be a fool or dishonest. As to the fact that the Qur'an is this miraculously intact and unchanged text, many serious scholars disagree. But supposing those claims are correct, what of it? I can't help feeling that the Qur'an is singularly incoherent, muddled, aggressive, resentful (admittedly with occasional flashes of poetry - how can you NOT write them when your subject is God?).

Why should the claim that its text has been so faithfully preserved affect my opinion of the book? It's one of those silly propaganda manoeuvres that are only weakening the case for Mohammedanism. That the Qur'an is "scientific" is another one of them. That Mohammad is a prophet in the line of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus is yet another.

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