Religion and Tolerance

Last week, Newsweek printed allegations that U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran - setting off violent protests and calls for holy war against the U.S. that spread from Afghanistan across the Middle East.

Now, Newsweek is backing away from its original story, and editor Mark Whitaker has said, "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

Newsweek certainly deserves every bit of the grief that it is getting over this latest episode of shoddy journalism. But, it seems to me that a great deal of criticism ought to be reserved for those who led and participated in the protests - first, for failing to question the veracity of the allegations, and second, for failing to put them into proper perspective.

On the first point...ummm...it's Newsweek - enough said.

On the second point - the failure of protesters to put things into perspective - I thought that this column by TechCentralStation's Lee Harris was interesting. He said,

Yesterday that recently vanquished cliché, the Arab street, returned to remind us that there are some things that even the most enlightened Westerners don't get about Muslims -- their fanaticism about the Koran...

The Koran has always been the great stumbling block to any Western understanding of Islam. The Koran means so little to us, and so vastly much to them. We cannot, to be frank about it, comprehend their admiration, not to mention, their abject adoration of the Koran understood as a book. Compare it to Homer or the book of Genesis, or the Gospels, or the great Hindu epochs, and you will be bowled over by the difference. Thomas Carlyle once made the comment that only a high sense of duty could carry a Western reader from the first Surah to the last.

But it is not as a book that Muslims regard the Koran -- that is our first misconception. It is in itself a holy and sacred object, like the cross to the Christians or the American flag to the patriotic and red-blooded among us: you don't mess with it. It is not to be trampled on, or stuck in a toilet. It is the great visceral connector that makes all Muslims feel that there is a community between them.

That made me wonder how Christians might react to similar allegations of desecration of the Bible. To most Christians, a Bible is not valued so much for the book itself as for what it reveals. Its words are more important and hold more meaning when written on a heart than on a page.

In most "Christian" nations, including the United States, desecration or blasphemy would not even be punishable by a fine, much less be viewed as a cause for holy war. Since most of these nations guarantee religious freedom, the numerous religions and sects have had to learn to tolerate one another.

Granted, it took a long time to reach this stage - there were all those nasty little Inquisitions, Reformations, and Crusades along the way - but the outcome has proven far preferable to the alternative of violence and holy war that still finds its voice among radical Islamists in the Middle East.