The (Very) Holy Koran

Why this particular sacrilege? Why, in the foul context of Abu Ghraib and subsequent (confirmed) reports of female interrogators tormenting pious detainees with sexual come-ons, should Newsweek's item have helped trigger violence? The full answer involves Pakistani politics and flagging Afghan goodwill. But the short one concerns a religious force often mismeasured in the West: Islam's extreme reverence for the Koran and fury at its defilement.

Westerners often compare the Koran to the Bible, but as religion professors routinely explain, a closer Christian analogy is Christ himself, described in the opening of the Gospel of John as a divine expression ("In the beginning was the Word") subsequently made flesh. Like Christians regarding Christ, Muslims believe that the Koran was not created but has existed with God for all eternity. If "Jesus is God's revelation, and the meaning [to Christians] of that revelation unfolds in the events of his life as described in the Gospels," writes comparative religion expert F.E. Peters in his book The Monotheists, in Islam the Koran "is the revelation." To say, as Georgetown University Islam expert John Voll does, that Newsweek's account portrayed Americans "flushing God down the toilet" might seem extreme. But Voll suggests that a sense of the offense involved can be extrapolated from pious Christians' horror at artist Andres Serrano's 1987 Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix immersed in urine.

Koranic defilement is a recurring Islamic concern. The first recorded prefiguring of the alleged insult at Gitmo may have been in the 1200s when Mongols invading Baghdad were said to have used Koran pages as toilet paper. But as early as the 700s, notes UCLA Islamic-law expert Khaled Abou El Fadl, jurists commenced a centuries-long debate over the just punishment for spitting on it, impaling it or feeding it to goats.

According to Abou El Fadl, one party demanded death: "By the Lord, the crime ... makes the angels in the skies tremble with anger," wrote a 14th century judge. Another group wondered, "Can the word of God in its true form be insulted by the actions of mortals?" and humanely pleaded for leniency for idiots who might try. That tack won out, says Abou El Fadl, and for centuries the hard line was a shrinking minority. But it survived long enough to inform the Saudi Wahhabism that has more recently infected Afghanistan and Pakistan, precisely the locales where the recent demonstrations began and turned violent. --By David Van Biema