The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is being sued for assigning my book, Approaching the Qur'an: the Early Revelations, as required summer reading for first year students. The plaintiffs charge that UNC indoctrinates students with deceptive claims about the peaceful nature of Islam, violating the separation of church and state.

In fact, the book makes no general claims about Islam. It presents the Qur'anic passages most known to Muslims, first learned and most often memorized. It no more preaches Islam than the Bible selections used in required Western Civilization and humanities courses preach Judaism or Christianity. Terry Moffit of the Family Policy Network hadn't read the book before he launched his protest. Nor evidently had columnist William Buckley or chairman of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal William Bentley when they egregiously mischaracterized it. We look in sadness at politicians and zealouts in Egypt attacking universities for assigning books that they condemn without having read. Yet here we have the same syndrome: opinion makers pontificating on something they haven't seen and legislators in North Carolina threatening to fiscally cripple UNC, one the finest universities in the world, in retaliation for an assignment they didn't like. Societies that make their universities slaves to visceral reactions of politicians lose their intellectual vitality and decline.

Some equate understanding an Islamic text with softness on terrorism. But well before September 11 I had called for the overthrow of the criminal Taliban regime and warned of the danger posed by the extremist Wahhabi version of Islam being promoted in Saudi Arabia. The most prescient warnings came not from those anti-Islamic writers now being hailed as vindicated prophets, but from a Muslim, Ahmed Rashid, in his year-2000 book on the Taliban.

Behind the lawsuit is an old missionary claim that Islam is a religion of violence in contrast to Christianity, a religion of peace. In effect the plaintiffs are suing the Qur'an on behalf of the Bible. They cite verses that demand attacking the infidel -- case closed. However most Muslims interpret these in the context of early war between Muhammad's followers and their opponents. They no more expect to apply them to their contemporary non-Muslim friends and neighbors than most Christians and Jews consider themselves, like the Biblical Joshua, commanded by God to exterminate the infidels, man, woman, and child. Some Jews and Christians see themselves as new Joshuas just as some Muslims who portray the West itself as equivalent to those who attacked Muhammad and his followers and call for anti-Western jihad. Their interpretation resembles that of the plaintiffs. We can only locate the source of their ideology, funding, and appeal and learn how to counter it if we we avoid assuming all Muslims interpret Qur'an in the same way.

Family Policy Network spokesmen boast that Jesus never commanded his followers to kill the unbelievers, but to leave their punishment for the afterlife. But scriptures relate to violence in complex ways. The Inquisition was based on an argument that killing a heretic was more compassionate than allowing the heretic to lead many others to damnation. The same Gospel passages that have helped inspired acts of great compassion have have been used to justify persecution of Jews for a thousand years. The same Qur’an used by the Taliban to justify tyranny inspires Bosnian Muslims, themselves survivors of organized massacres and atrocities at the hand of Christian militias, to hold candlelight vigils in memory of victims of September 11. The same verses that inspired Gandhi are cited by the Hindu nationalists who carried out organized atrocities against Muslims last spring.

During the Cold War, revolutionaries against a government backed by one superpower received arms, financing, and military support from the other. The same groups now turn for help to religious militants. These questions, now of geopolitical urgency, must be approached seriously. Instead, Pat Robertson or spokesmen of the Family Policy Network wave passages out of context to suggest that the Qur'anic God commands its followers to slay unbelievers. They reflect the views of many who do not accept President Bush's declaration that our war is not with Islam. If a religion requires we be killed, how can it not be our enemy? How can we trust our Muslim neighbor or colleague, knowing that even behind gestures of friendship lie the intention to kill? Shall we allow Muslims into the police or armed forces? If we cannot know always tell them by name or appearance, shall we require them to wear some kind of sign? In Bosnia, similar reckless charges by bishops, priests, and politicians led some Christians to on defenseless Muslim neighbors, friends, or in-laws who used to come by at Easter to pay their respect and honor, to kill them and put survivors in concentration camps. Those Bosnian Muslims holding candles on September 11 distinguished between those Christians persecuted them in the name of Christianity and Christianity in general. They refused to lose their souls to a reflexive hatred of the religion in whose name it was carried out.

My book presents the passages that Muslims consider the earliest revelations to Muhammad, those with the most direct account of core theological ideas and literary themes. Similarly, college students are more likely to read Exodus in a Biblical selection for a Western civilization course than the gruesome accounts of slaughter in Joshua. Do such Biblical selections present a deceptively benign view of the Bible? Only if the selection is used to make generalized claims about the Bible as a whole. Discussion of Biblically grounded violence needs a basic acqaintance the Biblical passages most known and read by Christians and Jews. Similarly, any discussion of the peaceful or violent nature of the Qur'an will be more informed if based on prior acquaintance with those passages first learned and most recited by Muslims.

Joe Glover of the Family Policy Network mocks the notion we should learn about the core theological ideas of the Qur'an. He demands any read be focued on Islam and terrorism, a topic that already dominates bookstores shelves. His own reckless statements demonstrate the opposite. The topic of Islam and terrorism is far too inflammatory for unstructured summer reading. It needs a structured class with organized readings scriptural texts, statements of terrorists and the ideologues they follow and secondary works on terrorism, Islam, and religion.

The Qur'an has been extremely difficult for most Americans to approach; the written 'translations' in the bookstore are not what most Muslims consider to be the word of God or what they experience as the Qur'an. My book explains why that is the case and offers an entry into the Qur'an's core literary features and theological ideas. Such a reading could only encourage and strengthen further discussions of the specific topic of religion and terrorism.

Michael Sells

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