Respecting the Qu'ran

Abuse of the Qu'ran -- did it take place? Being neither an eyewitness nor privy to closely held secrets, I cannot know the answer.

The strongest argument against the allegations is that made by Col. Blackner in the first of the quotes above, and Juan Cole echoes it, writing:

Of course, one can hardly take the word of jihadis reporting on the United States, which they hate and would be happy to defame.

However, as our second quote shows, the International Committee of the Red Cross says that they received credible reports of Quran desecration and brought the issue to the attention of the Pentagon, and that the reports ceased after the Pentagon issued guidelines against such abuse.

It seems unlikely that al-Qaida would cease defaming the US in a spectacularly successful way just because US authorities published a set of guidelines... In short, I'm inclined to suppose the reports were genuine.

Here we see one of several testimonies to abuse of the kind alleged, this one taken from a human rights report, juxtaposed with a vivid description of a US training in which US personnel were prepared for the conditions they might find if they were taken prisoner and subject to gross humiliation... the possibility being that someone who went through this kind of training might well have "recapitulated" it (mutatis mutandis) while serving at Guantanamo Bay.

Mohammed was a general as well as a prophet, and defensive warfare has an undoubted place in Islamic thought -- but not all religious violence is Islamic by any means, as this example of Buddhist monks rioting in Myanmar shows. Another nudge in the direction of subtlety in considering matters about which we may have a tendency towards reflex responses...

Again, much has been made of the fact that a number of people have died in riots resulting from the allegations, the obvious question being whether any book is sacred enough to warrant the deaths of human beings. Allegations of blasphemy against the Qu'ran are a serious business, as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie should already have told us. These two quotes remind us that blasphemy as a capital offense has its origins in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that Islam values even a single human life.

Finally, Chaplain Yee's powerpoint slide shows that efforts were made to defuse the potential for exactly the kinds of offensive behavior which were alleged (somewhat ironically, granted the accusations leveled against Yee himself), and the image of the late Pope kissing a Qu'ran illustrates what respect for the Qu'ran looks like in action.